Archiver

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

Like, they were suffering, for sure, but was that their worst fear? Did it become their worst fear over time? Did they think they were getting 'saved' from it, either through death or somehow being let out, just to be tossed into their actual worst fear? One they didn't even know they had?

And like; I'm pretty sure it was mentioned that those fear areas, like the coffin or I think the Vast place too, don't allow people to die normally, because they're the literal, tangible Fear. So...

do they age, still?

Was Fiona [and everyone else] stuck there for years, and then to the next great fear, just to escape and die? Or not die but be so much older than when they entered? Or not escape at all. And be placed back where they were, dragged through the rift to the next universe (the tmagp universe?) to suffer more? If they never left, could they tell? If they did experience a different domain for a while, how would that leave them feeling?

What about people who were being eaten? By the Distortion (Helen!!) or one of the Stranger's minions or literally anything. Did they just get thrown in that Avatar or Fear's domain? What if that wasn't their greatest fear? Did they escape one hell for another? Did they get live after the fears left? Do they consider themselves lucky in what happened because of that? Obviously what happened was bad; but if it didn't; they'd be dead. Are the people who know them slightly greatful for it, just because that person was still alive? If that person hurt them, do they hate it more?

ALSO! What happened to the avatars when the connection to their patron was severed? Annabelle said most would just lose their power, but Jon, had he still been just the Archivist (we don't know how being the pupil affected that, thought that was probably still a part of the plan), would have become what he thought of himself (a monster????) and she, and presumably Avatars closer to her level of connection to their Fear(?), would either die or follow the Fears.

Jonny d'capod

Crabbot Brian

Raphaella la crab

Crab Rasputina

Ashes O'crustacean

The toy crab

Crabpowder Tim

Marius Von crab

Ivy crabandria

The stranger is associated strongly with impermanence of the self, disability, the uncanny, and the ostracized. The core of it centers around the unknown but it also has strong ties to change.

Breekon and Hope changing jobs to suit the needs of the fears, the not!Them changing those it takes in both form and memory, changing names, changing faces, flexible identity.

Taxidermy goes against this narrative. The main purpose for taxidermy from what I've gathered is education and preservation. Taking the time to care for a specimen in order to make it as lifelike as possible solely to keep it around for years after the taxidermists passing. Whether as a trophy or a relic the focus is on preserving the memory of what the creature was. It captures the individual in a permanent moment in time to have some element of it's story told for generations to come.

It's the preservation that doesn't make sense with the stranger. Even poorly done or inaccurate taxidermy still has the goal of preservation at it's core. Heck, even fur or skin rugs or animal-based clothing has some element of keeping context of the original. Real leather jacket, sheep wool hat from wherever, rug created from the kill of a previous hunting trip. For as much as these things are devoid of the original self, the lingering concepts of their creation are preserved to be taken again. Sound familiar?

Think back to the way Sebastian Adekoya describes books in MAG17. "There's plenty of scope for mutation and corruption between your mind and that of the listener, but that doesn't change the essence of what language is [...] There are written texts that have outlived the civilisations that created them. Imagine, thoughts hundreds, thousands of years old, preserved and ready to be taken again. Corrupted or translated perhaps, by a culture that does not understand them but still, ideas that have outlived by lifetimes the mind that first conceived them."

Taxidermy seems to fit that to a T. Even the portion regarding manipulation and false replication fits better for a connection to the eye more so than the stranger.

And what other things do we associate taxidermy with? The eyes. Ok yes they're glassy and uncanny but the feeling of being watched is something mentioned several times in regards to the taxidermy shop. MAG54: "hundreds of glassy, dead eyes starting at me from all directions [...] Every manner and type of dead skin surrounded me, frozen in uncanny stillness, as though they were trapped in a world where time has simply stopped [...] Their eyes had never been alive, and they all seemed to stare in my direction". Obviously that's written very much to focus on the stranger and I fully accept that the concepts surrounding taxedermy's uncanny results can incite discomfort. But the focus isn't the unknown. It's the fact that these creatures are removed from their original context to communicate some warped idea of what they used to be.

MAG96:

"I really don't want to be interrogating her where all those... a-animals can see us." -Archivist (I'm unsure why he's concerned here)

"What was stored here?" -Archivist

"Books, relics, but nothing since the skin." - Sarah Baldwin

"the oldest piece of taxidermy in the world" -Archivist (in reference to the gorilla skin)

The ties between the stranger and taxidermy are tangential. But the ties between the eye and taxidermy are direct. Besides it's not like the eye is above keeping physical reminders of people. Note the bones of Barnabas Bennett that "you can still find in [Elias's] office if you know where to look". And Jon's keeping of Jane Prentiss's ashes. And his keeping of his rib.

And we know the eye still has influence over non-literal depictions of eyes. MAG154: "James could watch us from any eye, even an illustration." - Eric Delano (deceased)