so uh.. dog parallels huh

(also my friend said one of lady mowbray's dogs is daisy and they are right)

Y'all I think I figured out the tmagp categories

and it's literally the easiest Occam's Razor type shit ever.

Shoutout to @void--crow for being very normal about this with me and talking it through. They came up with like half of the theory.

Ok so we were chatting in DMs about how this episode was another CAT1RB and how the case brought up rejection letters from an institute. So I was wondering if all the CAT1RBs were institute rejects. And we looked through and that made some sense for some but not for others.

So Fitz brought up the idea of "well what if it's (CAT1, we disregarded rank for now) a person with powers?" And we went through and yeah. All the CAT1s are centered around people.

And then we were talking about the constant theme of supernatural objects. There seem to be a lot here. More than there were in TMA. And we noticed that those all seem to be category 3.

Well then we were like "what's category 2? Like afflictions? Things happening to people?"

No. It's way simpler than that.

Y'all it's nouns. Person. Place. Thing.

It genuinely shakes me that it took us this long to figure it out. It's been staring us in the face the whole time.

Most of TMAGP fandom: oh this is so fun, I wonder when does Georgie show up, is it Web-Coded? Sam/Celia or Celia/Alice, maybe Alice/Sam/Celia polycule??

Me, having too much coffee and unsupervised access to alchemy books: The agents of fear in this universe are trying to bring forth "the age of Antichrist", a concept spoken of in 14th century Franciscan Spirituals writing that urged alchemy to develop in an attempt to stop it, and they want to do that by blending all the fears together in a "perfect ratio" using the pieces of entities that got transported here from previous universe, thus bringing back the Primal Fear all The Entities came from in TMA universe. They want to access Freddie since he's based on medieval Islamic alchemical textbook called "The Book of Balances" by Jābir ibn Ḥayyān that cross references different metals in attempt to find the ratio for gold, this is also related to what Magnus Institute in this universe was doing, either looking for literal Antichrist child, possible alchemists to develop the field or looking for Messiah who was also mentioned in alchemical writings as an allegory for a Philosopher's Stone, also Alice/Sam/Celia polycule??

I'm going to be keeping an eye on this.

A theory:

Category: What caused this incident?

Category 1: Direct interference from the OIAR or one of its affiliates. (Bonzo, Needles, the person who reanimated Arthur Winstead)

Category 2: The location where it happened was marked. (Guy who turned into a tree, the charity shop, the liminal architecture)

Category 3: The victim walked into it on their own. (Violinist, dice guy, finance app guy)

Rank: What was the result of this incident?

Rank A: Net positive. There will be a price to pay. (RedCanary is the only A)

Rank B: Net negative. There is a benefit to reap. (Bonzo, Needles, dice guy, finance app guy, horror movie guy...)

Rank C: Net neutral. This incident balanced itself. (Guy that turned into a tree, violinist, charity shop)

Combined categories have more than one cause. RedCanary (23) went to a marked location, and chose to investigate the symbols they found. Gordon (23) chose to investigate the corpse, but was also affected by the cliffside location.

Combined ranks balance differently depending on whose perspective you take. Harriet (BC) was terrified of her reanimated husband, but Arthur had a balanced experience between being reanimated and losing parts of himself. Daria (BC) had a negative experience with Ink5oul, but balanced their own cost/benefit relationship with the tattoo. RedCanary (AB) had nothing but negatives after going to the Institute... but something else benefited from it.

-

Two notes:

1) Both dice guy and finance app guy successfully balanced their experiences as long as they rode the catastrophe curve between loss and profit. It was only when they tried to break the cycle that the final (deadly) negative blow came. This contrasts with the violinist, who reaped the benefits and paid the price willingly into old age.

2) The trailer with Sam's job interview was marked as Category 1, Rank B.

I am unwell

I know we've fully graduated from the idea that there's any hard and fast barriers between the fears but it's interesting to me that Mr. Bonzo seems to blatantly flout traditional categorization:

In his original appearance in Saturday Night is specifically a BURIED statement, with the dungeon motif, the "you've been berried" gag, and Nigel Dickerson's life being swallowed up by Bonzo's fame until he's trapped living with his own monstrous creation.

There's also a flavor of STRANGER involved, both with Bonzo's general clownish weirdness, the mascot-suited killer, and Gwen's revulsion that the "suit" is made out of skin. I think it's more than reasonable for an avatar to channel two distinct but intersecting flavors of fear, or take elements from another as we've seen with Mike Crewe

However, the second episode Getting Off was distinctly SLAUGHTER flavoured: the music, gore and dismemberment, helplessness infront of violence, all elements that were mostly absent from the original statement ( though I could accept an argument for the crewmembers getting injured wearing the suit and the eventual serial killer). Unless the victims are still alive inside mashed up inside Bonzo's belly, he didn't inflict the sort of fear that we'd expect from a BURIED or STRANGER avatar, and thus wasn't feeding those entities.

What this hints to me is that the entities of the Protocol world are less territorial than the ones back in Archives, less concerned with staking out particular victims and harvesting their particular kinds of fear as a means of accruing power. What this means for greater entity/avatar level territorial diplomacy like we saw in TMA I have no idea, but it speaks of a very different world state/way how the entities work.