#but that image of recursion forever thus making it explode

[rowanthestrange]

Fear.

I get it now, the mirror fucks it up because it itself is a mirror. A mirror of the fear a person has of it, therefore the mirror would cause recursion: mirroring itself forever and it would explode.

So it had to do a big bang attack straight off the bat to create initial fear, but then what it would want? You don’t want to be big and obvious because that’s not actually scary, that’s a threat you can fight, to create the most fear you have to be as light a touch as possible. Just a flicker. Just a whisper.

It’s just Fear, like literally just Fear, the god of Fear, Fear consumed poor Aliss the cook, no skills, no baby, saw everyone die, had to kill her friend. That’s why she’s all Who Turned Out The Lights, Fear consumed her, ate her, like the Vashta Nerada. She’s a husk of Fear.

It might literally just be ambient to the planet, maybe it is the radiation.

And oh how it must have hated being in a reflective-diamond tourist trap - designed, quite probably by the Doctor themselves sometime in the future or a past lifecycle, to be the antithesis of Fear. The universe’s most beautiful Spa resort.

And maybe this was the plan: it had to slowly pare them down to one incredibly frightened individual in order to take over them (like in Midnight) building and building and building and building until it could take a permanent hold in her mind and- Wait. Wait for the inevitable other people to come. No sign of needing to eat, this cook that makes us question the food situation, just that she stayed sat there in the middle of a room, cus she’s already gone.

So what next? You build bigger, right? Well now you see, you don’t want to get too crazy with it like last time - you want to be Big but you also want to get off the planet to spread further. Cus what’s the goal of being Big? Fear breeds. And so by the time they’ve figured out the mirror thing, maybe because it’s an imperfect mirror or maybe because it’s big enough that it can’t be fully destroyed while what remains of the host(s) is still alive and ‘afraid’, it doesn’t get recursioned to death. Cus they’re still afraid, terrified as they run.

If the Fear is ambient, even if it can be stopped in one form, if it got Big enough then the scars are there carrying remnant. And Fear as a concept is ultimately unkillable just able to be made small. But they’re not making it small.

There’s a look of anger in Aliss’s eyes as the Doctor starts to laugh, confidently, because that is the antithesis of Fear. Thus a monstrous form must chase him, bring it back to him. And everyone else is still afraid.

And when it’s just the four of them they’re still afraid enough to coalesce the fear and build and build and build so by the end of even just a few minutes boom you’ve potentially now got another one. Cus Belief makes things real, and Fear is the purest manifestation of that.

And now what’s happened? Not only are you carrying potentially multiple sources of Fear on the ship, not only are there people leaving to tell other people to spread the Fear…

The Doctor told them to nuke the planet. Make sure everyone knows how dangerous it is.

That planet is now going to be a breeding ground for Fear for eons to come and they are the ones who will make sure of it.