#now the least Popular entity when asking about people's preferences was the lonely

[jaeheewillalwaysbemyfav]

Obey Me x The Magnus Archives: Avatar MC (Asmodeus/Corruption, 5/7)

The “Cursed TMAxObey Me crossover” continues! It’s basically what it says on the tin: what if the settings of the horror anthology podcast The Magnus Archives and the goofy dramedy demon dating sim Obey Me were merged in some way?

This is Not the sexy/kink kind of corruption! TMA’s Corruption, aka The Crawling Rot, is about filth, decay, disease, and insects! (And unhealthy/toxic love/relationships) Basically anything on the “disgust-fear” side of horror. If I did my job right, you’re going to want to take a shower after reading this.

For those unfamiliar with tma but intending on reading this anyway, I would like to warn you that this series is going to be horror-based, and include potentially disturbing content. Specific content warnings will be provided at the beginning of each fic, and some may be more upsetting than others. Please use your discretion when deciding which parts to read, if any. I can only warn you, I am not responsible if you decide to read and are upset by what you see.

Additional Warning, No Seriously Guys: To no tma fans’ surprise, this is the section I’m most worried about. The Corruption is a very specific intersection of fear, disgust, love, lust, and trauma that can be upsetting on multiple levels. It’s also unintentionally become Extra Spicy because, well… we’re in a pandemic. So reader discretion is Absolutely Mega Advised.

Anyway.... buge :)

Content Warnings: Horror, implied bad end, pests/vermin, insects, rot, mold, unsanitary behaviour, illness/fever, noncon/dubcon touching, bad caretaker

Lucifer (X), Mammon (X), Leviathan (X), Satan (X), Asmodeus (You are here), Beelzebub (X), Belphegor (X)

It starts with pests. 

A simple series of nuisances, at first. Vermin keep getting into the House of Lamentation, picking at food, nibbling on clothes and degrading furnishings, leaving behind all sorts of mess. So the brothers set out traps, inspect the windows and foundation, and up their cleaning routines. Asmo’s room is spotless, as always, but he turns his floor into a minefield of hexes, just in case.

Then the food starts to turn on its own. Even with the pests (mostly) under control, they can’t seem to stop any perishable goods from spoiling within a couple of days, regardless of their expiration date. It’s one of the few times Beel’s insatiable appetite is more of a blessing than a curse. Asmo laments the loss of fresh produce, but settles for frozen. Even if he obsessively picks through it before preparing any meals.

But then the rot creeps into the brothers’ personal belongings. Satan loses an entire wing of his personal library to mildew, Levi’s tank gets contaminated with a nasty strain of aquatic mold, and Belphegor whines at the loss of his favourite blanket to an eclipse of moths. Asmo checks and triple checks his cosmetics to make sure they’re sealed and stored in a safe, dry place, but nearly faints upon discovering the clutch of eggs something had laid in his foundation. He bins all his products and scrubs his skin until it turns red.

Thankfully, MC doesn’t seem to mind all that much. Asmo would almost respect their resolve, if he hadn’t seen them once pick the mold off of a piece of fruit before eating it without a care in the world. Doesn’t that kind of thing get humans sick? 

Nonetheless, they’re quite sympathetic to the distress Asmo is in, even offering him some of their own makeup to use, but he took one look at the jaundiced creams in their bag and politely declined, citing a concern about different skin types.

Why does his skin itch so much lately?

Demons don’t get sick. It takes a lot for one, especially a high ranking demon, to truly feel under the weather. Asmodeus, especially, never gets sick.

But lately…

Maybe it’s the stress. Maybe it’s because everything around him seems to be falling into ruin and decay.

Asmo doesn’t feel well. He holds out as long as he can, but it doesn’t take a master detective to figure out that he’s seriously ill. Nausea, fever, cold sweats, fatigue, dizziness… After Asmo is nearly knocked unconscious by the force of his own sneeze, Lucifer puts his foot down. He’s forced into bedrest.

Luckily, he has MC to take care of him. They’re very eager too, rarely leaving his side. He would find it more comforting if not for their… habits.

As they stroke through his matted hair and place a cold compress on his forehead, he can’t help but notice that their hands feel… normal. That’s impossible, he’s burning up, shouldn’t they be much cooler than him? Are they…?

Gentle touches glide down his body, across flushed and sweat-slick skin, tracing small circles around the scars left by Asmo’s frantic nails. As they pass over an inflamed cut (when did it become infected? He could have sworn he was cleaning them…), Asmo can’t help but shudder as he feels tendrils of something taking root in him as they go.

[radchaai-latte]

This isn’t really a “theory”, in the sense that I think it’s a direction the show is actually going to take things, and I’m sure someone’s brought it up at some point before, but there’s a thought that keeps recurring to me, basically ever since 134.

(Since I have yet to do a full relisten, and I listened to most of the episodes for the first time while at work, it’s very possible that something’s come up that makes all of this moot, even for a crack idea, and I just missed it...)

134 is when we learned that the End and the Web have never (to Peter’s knowledge) attempted a ritual.  According to Peter, both have a preference for the world the way it is in canon because it doesn’t matter to the End (so long as whatever world exists has entities capable of fearing their own death) and because the Web likes being able to manipulate things the way they are.

But that leads me to a question... if it’s possible for entities to choose not to have their followers attempt a ritual, why would the Beholding want its own ritual to go down?  Because a lot of the fears of the Beholding require at least some, if not all, of the other powers in order to function at optimal capacity.  

(More under the cut because this got a bit long...)

Maybe I’m missing something, but the fear of being watched/having your secrets exposed is not usually motivated out of, well, the fear of being seen, full stop.  Because some people are scared of their secrets being revealed because they believe it will make their loved ones shun them (Lonely) or because they believe they could be used to manipulate them (Web), maybe they’re afraid of being tracked down for some reason (Hunt), etc.  

Moreover, if the Beholding is the infinite drive to know more, regardless of the cost to oneself, what world could be better for that than the one that exists in canon right now?  There’s so much unknown to explore and catalogue, and so many dangers and things to be afraid of in the process.  Having things like the Dark, the Stranger, and the Vast is beneficial to the Beholding because they inherently cannot be fully known, and, thus, must be eternally quested after at great personal risk.

Not to mention the fact that the Eye apparently literally feeds off of the experiences the other powers enact on people.  That makes sense if it’s also the fear of something watching you suffer for its own amusement, but it doesn’t explain what the Beholding would get out of its ritual that it doesn’t currently have.

And, I absolutely do not trust that the Web has no interest in its ritual.  Unlike the End, which, as Peter points out, gets everybody eventually, the Web has to at least do some work for its prey.  It could definitely get something out of a world where people were more easily manipulated or had more to fear from manipulation (and spiders) or whatever would happen if its ritual were completed.  

And, in all honesty, Peter isn’t the most reliable narrator in regards to anything the Web.  He’s an avatar of the Lonely.  What does he really know?  He assumes that the Web hasn’t attempted a ritual because it likes the world as-is, but assuming anything about a power that is blatantly associated with manipulation seems like just about the worst plan anybody could possibly have.

So, alright.  Maybe the Web doesn’t have a ritual it intends to enact, or maybe it does and it’s just keeping it on the down low so no nosey Archivists step in and blow it up.  Makes sense.

This is where my brain gets over excited and goes a little off the rails, because I can’t stop thinking about the connections between the Archives and the Web.

There have been a lot of theories about the recorders being Web-aligned, rather than Beholding-aligned.  Jon’s first encounter with the fears was in relation to the Web.  Martin loves spiders to the point that Web!Martin is a popular fandom idea.  Jon carries a web lighter.  The table that housed the NotThem (and was therefore, by proxy, protecting the archival staff from it) was of the Web.  There are a number of theories about Jon having to collect a scar/experience from every power in order to bring about the Watcher’s Crown, and the Web seems to be playing both sides of that fight... although, by (seemingly) brining the Flesh to the Institute, it did lead to Jon losing a pair of ribs to Jared, so who knows what that really means.

(Not to mention, Gertrude mentioned being able to recommend a statement-giver the name of a good psychologist and now Melanie is seeing someone in that capacity who certainly wants to use a recorder, and Annabelle Cane was a psych student, I think, or at least was aware enough of psych experiments, as a student, to participate in a rather frightening and long-term one... it’s all very coincidental, if it’s not directly connected.)

Basically, for the Beholding’s seat of power, there’s a lot of Web stuff going on.  Like, down in the coffin, it was the Buried and only the Buried, as far as we saw.  But the Archives have lots of Web stuff and, unlike when other powers attack the place, nobody seems particularly interested in even trying to kick the spiders out.

And, you know who an archive would be really good for?  Someone who needs/wants a record of past information in order to use it for future gain.  Say, in order to manipulate someone.

Elias’ demonstrated powers include seeing things remotely (which he uses... to manipulate people) and implanting experiential memories into people’s heads (which he uses...... to manipulate people).  Jon’s demonstrated powers are having “weird” body parts (whatever that means), manifesting tapes (maybe), and pulling information out of people’s heads, sometimes so hard it kills them (which he generally doesn’t do on purpose but, one very notable time when he did, he immediately used the information he got out of it for blackmail).  All I’m saying is, their powers definitely make sense for the concept of being able to “watch” and “know” the world, and strike fear with those abilities, but... they also make sense in terms of being extremely useful as methods of working out exactly how to make someone do as you tell/blackmail/ask them to.

We currently believe that there are fifteen fears, because Smirke came up with a list of fourteen and we’ve added the Extinction to that.  But when Gerry talks about it, he talks in terms of colours.  Why isn’t pink a shade of red, when pale blue is just another shade of blue?  Which mirrors what Leitner said about all of them being part of something incomprehensibly large, like a human sticking multiple appendages into an ant hive.  So Smirke labeled the fears where he thought the labels ought to go, and everybody goes along with it because it’s handy, but just because Smirke saw distinctions doesn’t mean that those distinctions necessarily exist on a cosmic level.

Before we had that list, there were ideas about the things that became known as the Web being the “active” component of the Beholding.  The things that went out and used the Beholding’s knowledge.

The fear of having your secrets revealed and turned against you.

And, what better trick?  Convince the entire world that your entire fear is, in fact, two smaller ones.  One that draws all the attention by being the annoying nerd who can’t stop asking questions (the Beholding) and the other that hangs out in the shadows, carefully pulling all the threads so everything works out just right (the Web).  Why bother informing an Archivist who is more comfortable with the limits of the Beholding than they might be with the Web (Jon, possibly also Gertrude) that the distinction between those powers isn’t real at all? 

(Though if the Web and the Beholding were one and the same, that could lead to a really fun payoff for Jared having Jon’s rib, where Jared turns up again, and it’s Jon who uses the fact that a part of him is inside the Boneturner to puppet him in some way.)

Also, the other, dumber reason that I keep thinking about this is because the Watcher’s Crown just makes me think of some sort of crown of eyes, and there are real life spiders with eyes arranged like that (a couple pictures of the peacock spider are in the link below-- I didn’t want to just add images to the post on the off chance that someone somehow made it through my ramblings to this point and didn’t want to be surprised with a sudden closeup of a spider). https://geyserofawesome.com/post/125967598482/peacock-spiders-are-awesome-creatures-theyre

tldr: I have a crack theory that I can’t stop thinking about which basically amounts to “the Beholding is fake news made up by the Web”.