aaaaaa yes all good thoughts! see a lot of my thoughts re: the stranger had more to do with how it seemed too material and reliant on physical stuff. the spiral had a literal endless maze, but also had people's lives falling to delusion. the web had literal spiders, but also had the concept of control and all that. so even if you aren't scared of the more obvious manifestations, you still have the chance to be disturbed by the more abstract ideas.
but the stranger (as delightful as its monsters are, i love nikola and breekon and hope etc etc, they just don't feel as clever) relies so heavily on the idea that the listener MUST be scared of dolls or taxidermy or automatons, meanwhile i love all those things! and ive had plenty of nightmares involving the uncanny valley or identity, and concepts like the mandela catalogue scare the shit out of me. but tma never seemed to get to the core of why that stuff is freaky, just "hey wouldn't be fucked up if this happened?"
and like you said, they didn't seem to put much care into why a person would worship the stranger, which is strange (ha) to me because the options feel so obvious? i've met plenty of people who are so concerned with maintaining appearances (not in the Flesh way, in the social way) that they construct false identities and roles to play for themselves, and that seems fitting. idk! something !!
and they could've played with what identity Means more - in a story where so many characters are struggling with the line between humans and monsters, it would've been interesting to have manifestations of the stranger where you're left wondering if the spooky entity is actually a person or not (whether that be through not trusting the statement giver to be a reliable narrator, or through the question of What Is A Person? itself)
idk im sort of rambling jfc i didnt mean for this ask to be so long sorry but yes woo there r my thoughts i do not have many tma friends so i am deprived of enrichment
but tma never seemed to get to the core of why that stuff is freaky, just “hey wouldn’t be fucked up if this happened?”
YES!! i think a great example of how this falls flat is the desolation, actually! because all of the follower’s of the people’s church of the divine host are made of wax
they are no longer human, their physical being is made of boiling, moldable wax
that seems like it should be a stranger thing, right? they’re literally wax works, the unknowing took place in a waxwork museum and the dancers were all waxworks
but the difference is exactly what you’ve just said. the desolation’s followers actually aren’t scary because they’re made of wax. them being made of wax is so far down the list of why they’re scary i literally forget that it’s true most of the time. whereas:
the waxworks at the museum are just scary… because they’re waxworks. weird ones tho.
(as delightful as its monsters are, i love nikola and breekon and hope etc etc, they just don’t feel as clever)
this is really really it!! the stranger’s monsters just don’t feel as clever
i really like your idea about someone worshiping the stranger because they’re so image obsessed!! i would love to hear more about that. i think that would make a very interesting acolyte.
also i was thinking about this last night and i think part of what makes the stranger feel so vast (ha) and disorganized is that fear of the unknown is a fundamental building block of every single one of the fears
the whole point of all the entities is that they take things that are pretty innocuous (wasp nests, ant infestations, garden spiders, tall buildings, stairwells, hallways, security cameras) and turn them into something vile
the characteristic of “the unkown” or “the unfamiliar” is impossible to localize under one entity
also, understandably it took a while to establish all the mechanics of like what a ritual is, how it can be stopped, why people would want it to happen, etc
but it took the gang two full seasons and several major character deaths to stop the unknowing, while the black sun was solved off screen between episodes
and like yes of course like gertrude would be better at finding and stopping rituals because she has 50 years of experience! and yes it gets easier to find and stop rituals as you keep going. but the balance of the story pacing just feels weird, y'know?
this isn’t the only time that i feel like tma does a massive amount of build up for a whole lot of nothing but it’s up there
