I love a good fwb steddie fic where one of them thinks they’re dating and one of them thinks it’s just casual but I could also get behind a fwb steddie fic where they both think it’s casual and there’s zero misunderstanding between them but then they realize it’s been like five years, they live together, they have a cat together, they kiss and go out together, and they both just look at each other like????? Wait are we dating???? When did we start dating????? And they’re idiots but they’re in love your honor

Concept: Gareth gets annoyed at Eddie’s patronizing ‘Gare-Bear’ nickname, and enlists Steve to start calling Eddie ‘Eddie Bear’ when he’s being a bitch and Eddie promptly dies about it

Kind of baffled by the posts saying peoples tmagp theories are ‘too tma heavy’ for people only listening to protocol, especially people saying Jon and Martin or Jonah would be too much because you can listen to protocol without tma. But…. You guys know they can just make new episodes describing that lore… right? Like, you learned about it somehow… in a podcast episode perhaps. So it’s not really a stretch for this podcast to… to have a podcast episode about it. Like, you think a story called the Magnus Protocol won’t have any lore about Jonah MAGNUS in it??? I’m not saying Jon and Martin are actually going to pop out as physical or even sentient beings but if they did, they could literally just say ‘your world is in danger, we know from experience’ and that’s it. It can connect to tma without being dependent on the listeners knowledge of tma, I don’t see how that’s ’too much’ for new listeners

I haven’t seen anyone talk about this yet (though I’m sure someone has) but I’m obsessing over the ‘viability as subject’, ‘viability as agent’, and ‘viability as catalyst’ categories

To me it sounds like the magnus institute is specifically researching avatars and their rituals

Viability as Subject = Use as a Test Subject

Viability as Agent = Likeliness to be an Avatar

Viability as Catalyst = Potential to Start a Ritual

For the dice roller, viability as a subject is none because he died. His likeliness to become an avatar is LOW because he was in the early stages of becoming an avatar, so he’s unlikely to wake up as a full avatar after death. And the viability as a catalyst is medium possibly because of the power of the dice. A further example could be Jon, if Elias had been assessing him with this list I could see all the items being marked ‘high’

This goes really well with my original theory that the reason Chester and Norris are reading these specific statements is because they either are 1) TOLD by an avatar or someone becoming an avatar, or 2) involve an already existing avatar (or in this universe, an Agent)

Furthermore, the protocol sounds like the institutes reaction to anything that gets a high rating on their three check marks. It’s their job to shut down any potential rituals or avatars. In TMA, maybe the team stopping The Unknowing could be considered the same as the ‘magnus protocol’ in this universe.

If any of this speculation is correct, it brings up some VERY INTERESTING questions about when the magnus institute figured all this out, who figured it out and if the children they were experimenting on were potential avatars they were assessing or potential soldiers they were testing

Every time AO3 tells me I’ve already left kudos it’s an affront to everything I stand for

Honestly I don’t think the tmagp statements are much different than the tma statements! Everyone keeps saying how they’re so much more mixed with the fears we know, that they’re harder to categorize, or that you *cant* categorize them because we don’t even know if they’re fears

While it’s true we don’t know how the fears have potentially changed, I think people are honestly forgetting how *unclear* a LOT of TMA statements were categorically. In my first two listens, I had to look episodes up a lot just to see which fears they belonged to because I couldn’t tell.

Take the most current episode (tmagp 8), everyone’s saying that oh it’s the lonely but also the stranger but also kind of spiral but also but also but also ‘oh wow it’s so weird that tmagp fears are jumbled up more!’…. But… they’re not though? TMA episode 48 (Lost in the Crowd) is categorized as a lonely statement, but it involves the statement giver being lured in by a crowd she thinks is talking but turns out not to be words, she can’t make out the faces on all the people and their clothes are different versions of the same things and she’s getting nearly crushed by the crowd

If that episode was recorded tomorrow, everyone speculating would say ‘oh it’s the lonely but also the stranger but also the buried but also but also but also’. It’s virtually the SAME situation. I think people are genuinely forgetting that episodes have always had a little bit of other fears thrown in sometimes. Majority of tmagps statements have had very clear references to one specific fear and maybe a hand wiggle in there for a couple of them. But again… that’s exactly the same as a lot of TMA!

Obviously they’ll probably be categorized differently in this world in the end, but just because my name could be Jessica in a different universe that doesn’t mean we aren’t technically the same person

My roommate: I like that Zeus is full business attire and Poseidon is like-

Me: casual khakis?

My roommate: Margaritaville

All this discourse about what Gerry should look like is honestly just pissing me off a little. Everyone is screaming at each other ‘he’s goth, he’s still goth!’ And ‘he’s NOT goth, he’s a metalhead!’

Bruh what’s the fucking issue?? He wears black and had a leather trench coat, he dies his hair black, we saw him rep a metal band tee once, he could literally be goth and also listen to metal why is anyone arguing about this????

I’m sorry but what’s the point of being alternative if you’re forcing people into a little box that doesn’t ever overlap with anything ever

I get sick about fics where the ship is so desperate for each other they could stare into each others eyes for hours and dream about melting into one person

The only things on my dash today are OFMD rants about heartbreak and different ships… and the miraculous ladybug goth AU special

The Magnus Protocol first thoughts:

1. It’s digital!!!! The records are digital!!!!!! I love that, I also love that more modern digital forms still don’t work (uploading phone images) and the tmagp team are using ancient computers lol

2. They can quit!!!!!! They’re allowed to quit!!!!! I wonder if that will change?

3. Sam has history with the Magnus Institute? 👀

4. Jon and Martins voices 😭😭😭 “it started about a year ago” like when we got our ‘statement continues’ announcement? I’m assuming our little computer guys are… having a little dinner? A little snacky snack? A little treat? Possibly to heal themselves and come back to life 👀👀

5. THREE voices???? Who? WHO? I’m guessing Elias? I’d say maybe Gertrude but she died years before the portal opened so I’m not sure how that would work, plus Alice nicknamed them Augustus and Elias was the third person in the panopticon when the fears left

6. The soundscaping is AMAZING! The electronic sounds when the incidents are first being read slowly turning more and more human sounding until the end of the reading when they go back to being robotic, I’m OBSESSED

7. I think Alice would be hyped to find out Norris and Chester are lovers, that just seems like something she’d be excited about because it’s so unhinged. Imagine naming your random computer glitch voices and then finding out they’re actually gay for each other, I’d sob

8. I love the new fear representations so far, the tattooist in ep2 I’m gonna be thinking about for weeks

9. Can Gwen tell me wtf the difference is between zombies and reanimated corpses? Because I’m pretty sure a reanimated corpse is the literal definition of Zombie, I’m on Alice’s side in this feud

10. KEEP DIGGING SAM. KEEP TRYING TO DECODE THE SYSTEM. DONT LET THEM BULLY YOU OUT OF IT!!!!!!! I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong 👀

I’ve spent the entire day reading a steddie fic I don’t think I’ll ever recover from, it’s a core memory, I don’t even know what to do with myself now

Okay but hear me out.

What if Steve was really into astrology? What if Steve really likes stars and constellations?

His parents left him alone a lot as a kid, in a big, dark, empty house, and instead of turning on lights and radios to pretend he isn’t alone he goes outside to look at the stars. Next to the woods in Hawkins, Indiana the stars are bright and clear and he sees patterns in them like the W he sees in the winter, or the three stars in a row that are really bright.

He checks out books from the library on the weekends to learn what they are, what they mean.

The W is Cassiopeia, a beautiful and vain queen who angered the gods with her narcissism and was tied to a chair in the sky. The three stars are the belt of Orion, an angry hunter who drank until dangerous and hunted even a goddess, killed by a scorpion and preserved in the stars.

They kind of remind him of his parents. A selfish queen and an angry hunter. His parents leave for months on end but these constellations are trapped in the sky, right in his backyard. Some nights he goes out and talks to them, as if his parents are the ones trapped here with him. Sometimes he just watches, feels their presence like people, and feels just a little bit less alone.

He doesn’t tell anyone. Tommy would think it was stupid and he doesn’t really talk about himself to anyone else. No one really knows him, what he likes or what he does with himself all alone in his giant house. The stars know. Orion and Cassiopeia. They know everything about him, and he knows everything about them, and sometimes that makes him feel better.

When he can’t see them, it’s like his parents have left all over again and he’s even more alone than before, but he still watches the stars. He waits for them to come back, he waits for his parents.

Years later, after everything with the Upsidedown, with El, and Vecna, he and Eddie are still awake in Steve’s dark house. Neither are able to sleep because of the nightmares, but Eddie tells Steve his moles look like constellations and Steve feels a little bit closer to the stars. Feels less lonely than he has in a very long time.

Sorry I am so very emotional about these boys

I know this is a super unpopular opinion, especially in the ships I follow/write for, but I genuinely don’t think Steve/Nancy would be a back step in their character development and I absolutely don’t think the hints at it in s4 “came out of nowhere”

There’s nothing wrong with two people being bad for each other and then growing as people separately, and then being better fit for each other due to that growth they made on their own

S1 Steve was so concerned with appearances and his fathers approval that he never took the time to worry about other people, didn’t care to help nancy or worry about how she was handling barb

He grew from that, he acknowledged his bad actions and genuinely improved himself as a person. He’s no longer concerned about those appearances, only cares about keeping the party safe, and involves himself in Nancys plans immediately. He’s there for her, he wants to help, he puts faith in other people now

Nancy didn’t want to be stifled, she didn’t want to be put on the back burner or belittled and while s1 Jonathan was the support she was looking for, once they got together he was more concerned about his future and his opportunities, he disregarded her worries and ideas and theories and Nancy has learned to push herself forward even if it’s by herself (but we see that she’s way happier when people do support her, she’s just not afraid of them *not* supporting her anymore)

Genuinely I think their characters have grown in a way that makes them more compatible now than they were s1, and that’s not a bad thing

Do I obviously wish something else would happen ship-wise? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean their character development is ruined or their relationship “came out of nowhere”

Do you think that when Suzanne Collins was writing tbosas she was giggling and kicking her legs and twirling her hair because I would have been

You ever read a line you wrote and you’re like fuck, did I do that? I said that? Damn okay, alright, maybe I’m pretty good at this