#and also the fact that canon has semi-facilitated it by not really giving any of it’s female characters a whole lot to do?

[manthequin]

Not gonna lie the way some people talk about the female characters from PBB/LL makes me want to lay on the floor

[healieas]

levels of beholding feeding; aka, will this successfully feed me or the eye?; aka, there are actions that beholding avatars are likely to take that may not constitute life-sustaining feeding; aka, the illuminati food pyramid.

the post where i break down what i personally consider feeding the eye to entail, including things that fall under the eye’s “jurisdiction” ( remember that fears are malleable and bleed into each other, and the eye especially tends to overlap with everything else bc it is a gratuitous voyeuristic sack of fuck, but for the purposes of this post i am going to try to focus on what in and of itself is eye fear and if it overlaps well that’s just fun and sexy isn’t it ) but do not feed it, things that engender beholding behavior but are not in and of itself feeding, things that eye avatars need to do to maintain themselves, and things that make the eye sigh and go “ah yes that was great food.” also this does not detail beholding powers. i’m just talking about the food, man. the gifts the eye grants its avatars is another story.

first and foremost, what qualifies something as feeding the eye? how does the eye “eat”? if something falls under the following categories, it feeds the eye: fear of being watched, fear of being exposed, fear of being followed, or fear of having your secrets known to somebody else. if something falls under the following categories, it is eye-related behavior likely performed by avatars, but is not in and of itself “eye food”: pursuit of knowledge, especially at the cost of one’s own health or sanity. obviously the latter can enable the former if that pursuit of knowledge is at somebody else’s expense, but what separates the two categories for me is that, to keep the eye as an entity from spreading so thin to the point where anything can be construed as capital-b Beholding because it involves observation or information, is holding fast to the eye being a fear entity. i.e., something can technically be in the eye’s territory of knowledge, but it does not become eye-related unless there is an active element of horror. of course, what constitutes “horror” is subjective, but i think that narrows down the options and removes, say, doing a book report from beholding. tma has a tight thesis of beholding being the horror of watching something terrible and doing nothing to intervene, or the inherent evil of inaction when one is witnessing an atrocity. 

therefore i’m going to make my grading for eye food the following. ( note that like... there’s grey area in between each level where, by taking a lower level to an extreme, you could slide it up to the next, etc. )

level one: are you watching in an obtrusive way? i.e., is this something you should be seeing? are you an active participant? or are you eavesdropping. things that fall into this category include people watching, listening in on conversations, or reading private correspondence. this is the fear of being watched / known against one’s will at play, but only one person ( the avatar ) knows the secrets, so it’s low-level feeding. just hoarding secrets unto oneself gives the avatar what i’d consider a steady drip of water, necessary for life and remaining active, but after an extended period of time with just water, you’re going to want for food. 

something like following someone and making them feel watched as more than just a prickling on the neck for an extended period of time would probably start to actually feed the eye a bit, as was the case with the cursed mirror; someone with a constant and perhaps debilitating fear of being watched, facilitated by the actions of a beholding avatar, would advance to feeding the eye. 

institutionalized watching in an obtrusive way, i.e. the lack of privacy afforded to inmates in a place like millbank, ratchets up to full eye feeding. again, the longer and more intense the watching, the more intense the fear produced, the more likely it’s going to drift up into actual feeding territory. but as a casual action, it’s not sustainable.

level two: are you revealing to the person that you know their secrets? to distinguish this from the above category, i’m talking about the situation with elias and daisy / martin / melanie -- digging out someone’s secrets and then throwing them in their face, making them feel the despair of being peeled open for examination. what puts this at a lower level than mass exposure is the fact that it is probably only the beholding avatar who’s getting anything out of this. this is semi-solid food to the eye, like a gelatin or pudding or other soft hospital food. you can sustain yourself on it, but try to go for any extreme period of time just doing this and you’re probably going to suffer from malnutrition ( if you want to talk to me about malnutrition and how it actually works, aka you’re getting plenty of calories but not all of the components you need, and historic examples of mass malnutrition, we can totally do that; but i want to make it clear for those that might think malnutrition is just like starvation lite, it’s not -- you can be eating a ton of food every day and if you have no variety and if it lacks the proper nutrients, you’re still going to suffer the adverse effects; all this detail to say that’s what happens to an eye avatar who only feeds by privately exposing someone’s secrets to their face, a slow and conscious wasting ). 

constantly harassing someone about their secrets might make your diet a little more diverse, metaphorically, but this category really doesn’t have the same mobility as the previous one.

level three: are you making other people aware of the information you’ve gleaned? this is fear of exposure, where somebody is going to face the fallout and consequences of having something unsavory put on display for an audience. ( yes, this covers body image fears of people in the public eye, which is imo a flesh fear that the eye can also feed upon, but that’s an intense discussion for another post that needs to be handled with nuance. i only mention it to make it clear that like... it doesn’t even have to be something objectively horrid that’s exposed; if the person who is being put on display has a fear of being seen, that’s enough to put it in this category, because it is producing anxiety or discomfort. ) no need for bullet points! this gets more and more intense the wider the audience and the more people talk about it. this is solid beholding food with good nutrition! you could make a beholding career out of this! i’m certain that elias does some feeding by allowing students in to read the dirty laundry of named statement givers ( in addition to slurping the despair of visitors who aren’t going to be helped at all by the institute ). after all, statement givers frequently express fear of being pegged as “insane” or having experienced the denial, pity, or avoidance of their friends and family after their experiences. judgement cast upon vulnerability? eye food.

level four: taking a statement. this is sort of disconnected from the rest and may exist alongside them rather than above them, but canonically, reading and experiencing ( getting into character, allowing yourself to feel the presented emotions ) a statement feeds the eye. notice how jon works through tons of “statements” a week, documents gathered by the institute, but only reads one true statement a week on average. he “steps into the shoes” of the statement giver and re-experiences the terror, often while learning something about another entity and how it functions, increasing his own knowledge of the fear world. in my opinion, this is where we get into the eye simultaneously feeding on what’s offered and feeding on the avatar. jon is exhausted after reading a statement and needs to rest. multiple people state that it seems to take a lot out of him. he needs them to survive, but he also finds the experiences draining. this is a solid cooked meal, and the eye has the digestion of a snake, so if you get one of these a week? you’re good. 

level five: taking a statement directly from another subject, though? that’s just feeding. cutting out the middle man and the mental transportation of reading a literary piece ( or listening to a tape, or watching a recording ) means that you just get to feed off the person’s fear, because you are peeling them open and knowing them. this does relate a bit to level two, which is why i said it’s probably more of a horizontal relationship, but the difference for me is that you are forcing them to give an account of their encounter with a fear, thus accumulating knowledge of a lived experience and of the other deities, and you are making a person feel known and exposed, often ( in canon ) in a way that’s abrupt and uncalled for. willing statement-givers do not seem to have the same reactions as the poor people jon yoinks in public. taking statements seems to be compulsory for archivists in particular. whether or not it impacts administrators ( elias ) in the same way is hard to discern. maybe not, or maybe that’s solved by having the institute function the way it does, because all those statements are technically elias’s. ( i also have opinions on how elias feeds every single day but we’ll get to that later. the fear machine of the institute. ) this is good food. this is gourmet. this is why the eye stans jon. feeding just off of direct statements is going to cause your own power to skyrocket because you are eating so well.

there are probably more examples of ways to feed, and if people wanna shoot me ims or asks like “is this proper eye feeding?” i’d be happy to answer with my own takes on the situation ( because these are my own takes lol you do not need to live or die by this headcanon I Just Think My Theory Is Sound Enough For This Blog ). but now we’ll look at behaviors that may indicate a propensity for beholding, or that keep a beholding avatar in shape without feeding them; the exercise counterpart to a healthy diet. presented in bullet point form because these are not as in-depth as the above.

an inclination towards extensive research. not just looking up what you need for a book report and nothing more, we’re talking about going down a rabbit hole of research frequently out of a desire to know more. because this does not necessarily produce a fear response and does not necessarily deal with witnessing horror, it is not feeding ( i think about the idea of true crime beholding avatars and i get a little woozy because like... could it work and be canon compliant? certainly. is it therefore a valid take? it sure is. is it something i’m willing to get into? no, because it makes me personally uncomfortable sadly, because i feel some kinda way about the glamorization of serial killers and so on, and though i think an interest in true crime can be pursued tastefully, it’s so nuanced and so Not Me in particular that i just don’t want to get into it, even if i acknowledge that it’s something that probably exists in the tma universe because the tma universe is uncomfortable horror! )

being a nosy bitch. are you always involved in other people’s business, especially drama? do you subscribe to tea spill youtube channels? are you prepared to drop a hot tweet about something shady a celebrity did? ( THIS IS NOT A CRITIQUE OF OR COMMENTARY ON CALLOUT CULTURE INB4, PLEASE I BEG YOU. ) you have the beholding inclination to dig and reveal secrets! awesome!

a desire to organize and preserve information. i think often about this one because one of the things about the ceaseless watcher is that it knows but does not comprehend. it is not interested in understanding or exploring the nuance of what it observes, which is what makes it so horrific. it doesn’t care, the only thing it’s invested in is watching fear and accumulating knowledge so that it can “say” it has more information than anybody else. this, i think, is why beholding tends to center itself around academic institutions. the idea of gatekeeping knowledge, of an ivory tower, is so beholding-appropriate because if you think about the implications then yes, it’s bad. hoarding knowledge and not allowing other people to learn is not a good thing, and that’s why beholding is so very into it. HOWEVER, I AM ALSO DEEPLY INVESTED IN THE IDEA THAT THIS IS WHAT SEPARATES THE FEAR GOD BEHOLDING FROM ITS HUMAN AVATARS. because the avatars are painfully human! michael is proof enough of that i think! even if avatars consider themselves a different species, at the very least “formerly-human” categorically, they were humans and still have human flaws and inclinations. one of these, for beholding avatars, is organization. it’s putting the puzzle pieces together ( unless you’re bad at it, i’m so sorry jon you’re really trying and i love you, but in this case i think that has more to do with jon’s tendency to shoot himself in the foot / put himself at a disadvantage because he is afraid than a beholding-wide thing ), because the human brain usually wants to understand things. it wants to draw meaning from things. even elias, probably the least human of the beholding avatars we see, has to organize the information he has and put separate stories together to form a larger picture, because functioning in the human world just necessitates doing that! you want to stop another ritual? you can’t just gather different pieces of information and not relate them to each other, you have to categorize them and draw conclusions. and, imo, this is what separates the human world from the post-apocalyptic world. the post-apocalyptic world does not require analysis or organization, it can simply be; that is reality as warped and controlled by the fear gods.

there’s probably more to this but i have talked so much, i think that’s enough for now. anyways i care so much about beholding and how it functions and this is actually my least academic bullshitty piece on it, so yay for that. usually i’m all “voyeurism and The Gaze and how it functions in society and especially media!” but today? today we just talk about good eats.