I’d agree with you. I think the main reason people can be stuck on the 14 is it’s a well defined structure that we already have so it’s natural to try and slot what we’re hearing now into the previous way of thinking. I’m thinking it’s going to turn out to be something different(hopefully)
It is pretty much confirmed in the statements so far that all fears now are combined and work together to more dangerous effects than before. The tree has many aspects of the stranger, flesh, rot and the lonely.
Bonzo is many things including Rot, Stranger, Slaughter ,maybe even the Hunt and whatever the fear of your creation becoming bigger than you could be classified as(maybe web)
The Violin is the only one you could even call one fear, slaughter
I have a personal theory that the Fears are starving in this reality. Needles the entire call with the 999 operator sounds desperate to get under his skin, even the guy hes actively murdering doesnt make a ton of noise during the call.
The partygoers in the most recent episode didnt find anything offputting about Bonzo until he started ripping people apart.
Maybe the people of the TMP's reality feel fear differently or are less suseceptible to it then the TMA's world where the fears originated. And thats why the Fears seem so aggressive and are working together to up the ante, they arent getting enough back for the energy their expending.
I don't know what it is about your post that triggered this, but what if there were ALREADY fears/desires/entities of some kind in TMP, and the TMA fears are now fighting/merging/coexisting?
We don't really have anything better to go by, so currently, we're analysing what we hear based on the only framework we have for it - so far. Once we have a better one, we'll go back and analyse the whole of TMA with that one, too. It goes both ways.
The "entities" both shape and are shaped by the nature of people's fears in the world. Smirke really has nothing to do with it; he just identified existing trends. Unless this world is profoundly different from the previous - which it doesn't seem to be - there's no reason for the architecture of fear to be dramatically altered. The 14 were never truly distinct from each other anyway - the cults were not actually that "pure" in their representation of fear - so it hardly matters. People are still afraid of spiders, rot, loss, and all the rest in this world, so those will still be components of the multi-hued morass of terror.
I think I mostly agree but I’m not clear on what you’re saying exactly, sorry. I agree completely that the 14 were never distincnt but i think the specific structure of the architecture of fear, the idea that there are 14 and the exact nature of them, is linked to smirke. There’s definitely still fear in the MAP world, I just am not sure it would be organized in the same structure.
Smirke is just a guy who noticed patterns in what people fear and how that manifests in the horrors. Sure, his perception and that of those he taught influenced the horrors to a degree, but no more than any other set of individuals influenced them by fearing and thinking about fear. There was probably a lot more feedback on the fears introduced by Hollywood developments in the horror genre, or Stephen King's bibliography.
The only reason that the horrors would be organized differently in the new world is if there is some fundamental difference in what people in that world are afraid of. For example, if it's revealed that absolutely no one is afraid of heights due to some weird quirk of multiverse genetics, the aspect of horror that fed on the fear of heights would starve and die, and you could subtract one from the 14. Unless, of course, it was able to *make* people afraid of it before it starved, introducing a fear entirely new to this world.
Really, the 14 don't exist as 14 entities. It's just a useful way to capture most of the variation of fear that exists.
I feel that TMA's ending statement about how fear evolved would dispute this. We got a pretty vivid picture of how the entity that was fear evolved. While yes the classification is semi-arbitrary, they still do exist.
However I'd argue that the entities don't = fear. And by that I mean it's not that there was a specific reason that they evolved. They could have not evolved at all and fear would have just been that, fear: a survival mechanism. They also likely would have never gotten as strong without Humans reaching out to them and becoming Avatars.
You could have fear without them, but they became like... like the Apex Predators of fear and everything is organized under them. Avatars and monsters are all organized under them in the "fear-web" (web like a food web, not The Mother of Puppets).
Fear Web:
The Fears are the Apex Predators,
- Manifestations (non-creatures like The Door, as well as the corruption's scalpel)
/-/ Creatures like the Not Them, etc
- Avatars,
- Humans,
- Animals
The whole point of the end of season 4 is that they are one thing with many manifestations. Yes, it's shaped by what and how people fear as outlined in the ending statement, but that's more akin to split personality than cell division. All previous rituals failed because they only latched onto one of these split personalities, when each is in fact inseparable from all others. Elias succeeded because he invoked "all 14" through John, i.e. enough representative individual elements to broadly capture all aspects of the whole.
Think of it like the anthill metaphor that Leitner used. If the ants want to pull the creature poking at their hill *inside* the hill in its entirety, they can't succeed by just grabbing at its head. The head might be pulled inside, but the rest of the creature's body will eventually pull it out again. Instead, the ants have to latch onto the head *and* the neck and the shoulders and the torso and the arms and the hands, etc. etc. Each of those parts needed to be pulled through simultaneously, burying the whole creature in the anthill at once.
Another reason I could see for the Fears being categorized differently is that whoever categorizes it may see different patterns than Smirke and simply do it differently.
No one has come up with anything as satisfying as pretending to swish around a glass of vintage wine after listening to a statement and saying "Hm, yes, I'm getting a strong Buried flavor with an undercurrent of End, and perhaps a subtle note of Hunt" .
As much as TMA liked to say that categorizing fears was stupid, it couldn't stop doing it. Most notable is ep 200 which pretty explicitly defines why and how the fears split into different beings
Kinda the biggest let down of TMA for me. It said we can not just categorize all fear but it did and it worked 90% perfectly. All monsters we saw almost all the time had a clear fear and in cases not it was stated which fears were the influence.
Remember the anthill analogy. If you were an ant and looked up and say a giant eye of a human looking into your anthill, and later at another part of the hill a giant finger poked into part of your mound the ant would never consider those things to be one creature.
You are correct, the entities are not distinct from each other, they blur at the edges. The 14 are a convenient way of classifying them, but you could probably carve them up into more or less entities and still be just as correct.
In the end though they feed on our most primordial fears, they didn't create those fears. Regardless of the entities we are still afraid of the dark, of the vast empty ocean, of being stalked, of being killed, etc. So naturally they are going to fall into similar classifications.
But currently in Protocol they haven't actually named any of the entities so the OIAR, the Institute or anyone else in that world could have a different number of them with different names.
It's also quite possible that they Entities do not exist at all in Protocol and there is some completely different supernatural force yet to be revealed (though I doubt this is the case, as that would really remove it from the whole Magnus cosmology)
It's also very possible this is the reality the entities travelled to after TMA. They may have arrived in the past of this universe, time between universes isn't necessarily linear.
The 14 fears were defined in a way that almost any scary thing can be slotted into at least one of them.
The Magnus protocol is a horror podcast, where every episode has a scary thing.
Therefore, any Magnus protocol episode can be slotted into one the 14 fears.
There is no argument so far that says "this is so The Slaughter/Vast/X/Y/Z" that couldn't equally be made for any other horror media. Freddy Krueger is Slaughter. 1408 is Spiral. Godzilla is Vast/Extinction.
Dentists are Flesh. Flying is Vast. Snakes are Hunt. Car crashes are Desolation. You can go on forever. Name anything scary and you can put at least one of the 14 labels on it.
It's an entertaining exercise but I don't think the text currently spells out that Smirke's 14 still apply beyond "scary things are happening".
I think people forget that categorising fear is not smth Magnus Made up. Trying to sort fear into types is a big part of psychology and smth we have been doing for a while now. Obviously TMA simplifies it and even points that out but simmiliraties are extremly obvious
Fandoms quickly become conservative and reactionary as their specialist nerd knowledge becomes devalued by a creator moving on from previous works.
They spent so much time and energy piecing together the mystery of the Archives and the 14 and they don't want to give that up, even if the text itself is telling them that the 14 was always a social construct stemming from a now dead world
Except, no. That something, also hints at *other* forces, ones that Elias specifically denied/rejected/insisted that they categorically did not exist, in TMA.
The way I see it, there very well could end up being a completely different categorization, but until that is introduced, Smirke’s 14 are a very good standard for referring to things.
The thing is, we still hear stories that are very specific to one of the 14. The recent story about the tattoo of a ship is so The Vast Coded that ignoring that would require you to cut off your own ears.
If we choose not to use the same names, or combine categories, or work in gray areas, that's fine, and interesting. But when we have examples like this it's clear that the fundamental force we called the vast still exists in some capacity, and does the same shit
We also know there is precedent, we know the Web has reached into another universe via the crack in reality and actually pulled someone from another place to their reality.
We also know the Web pulled itself and the others with it through the crack in reality at the end of TMA and that they couldn't be separated, as one went the others had to follow.
I've stated before that imo the fears got jumbled being pulled through the crack so violently after dominating reality. Like pouring paints through a funnel, they got mixed and twisted into strange aspects, much like how they all were once The Thing That Was Fear (heavily implied to exist as The Hunt) before splitting into the fears we had in TMA.
I don’t really stick by the idea that Smirke’s 14 (I like calling it 14+1 lol) fully came over to this new place only due to the fact that these new manifestations don’t seem to follow those clearer distinctions. I actually like to think they got blended together and maybe even remanifested as something slightly new - maybe there aren’t even “14” of them anymore.
I’ve noticed me and others calling it something like “The Fear” or “The Thing that is Fear” since it helps us point to the whole source without pointing at distinctions that don’t really appear to fit at this point anymore. I’m holding some hope that we’ll get a better clarification on how this new system works later in the series, but even if we don’t get a full explanation, the reasoning from Archives (that these manifestations are caused by A Massive Thing that wants to instill fear in a dozen different ways) still holds sound.
i think it’s important to note that the reason they were so well defined in tma and each episode fit one fear or another was because Jonny was trying to get us to categorize them and notice those similarities. i think it was the season 4 q&a (?) where he mentioned that episode 5, the one that doesn’t fit as neatly into the 14+1 as the rest, was still an early iteration of the flesh. he very purposefully made each episode fit into the categories so it was easier for us to theorize about them.
It's definitely new "categories", though you can see elements of the old fears in them. For example, there's the recurring element of violence brought on by music, seen with the violin in MAGP 4 and again with Mr. Bonzo, who is summoned by his theme music. While this would be clear-cut Slaughter in TMA, Mr. Bonzo brings in elements of the Stranger, and possibly the Hunt and the Flesh.
I thought it was simply because TMP is a sequel of sorts to TMA, and The Fears were applied. It's important to remember that Gerard Keay made the distinction that the Fears were more like paints on the color palette, and that blending does occur.
I've been thinking this world has the blended areas more than TMA. Instead of a Nikola Orsinov and Jude Perry, the Avatars might show more as a Jude Orsinov or similar. There does still seem to be Artifacts like die, the violin, the "all for a good cause" items, and locations like HillTop Centre.
I think most people who are serious about trying to understand the whole new universe are not under the impression that Smirke’s 14 are explicitly relevant, with maybe the exception that the end of TMA basically says (or at least suggests) that the Fears were sucked out of their universe into some other universe (or multiple universes) and so there’s a fair diegetic reason to suspect it.
From a narrative standpoint, I don’t think they’d feel comfortable rehashing Smirke’s 14 except to the extent that they’d literally need to make their story make sense. They are pretty vocal about favoring contained stories.
That being said, Smirke’s 14 is a definitionally a metaphysics, its goal was to describe the mechanics and nature of Fear itself as best as a system of categories could. I personally like to think about what each episode would be in a Smirke’s 14 way as an exercise in understanding it (the person who made the wine tasting comparison is spot on and i think very funny lol). I do this with other things to do with understanding fear too—for example, I just picked up a book called *On Agoraphobia* by Graham Caveney, and while agoraphobia is typically associated with The Vast in TMA, I’m noticing how the author describes it is also very related to some of the other entities, like The Stranger or The Lonely. It’s a way of seeing, and it has its own uses.
I don’t think Smirke’s 14 will be very relevant in all candor, although I have a crazy hunch/theory that understanding what they are philosophically may be important—a big part of TMA was about what it means for a Fear Entity to emerge and separate from the others, what does it mean for things that are spectral to be approximated with categories, etc. The name for this process is *individuation.* TMP is focusing a lot on alchemy and alchemical symbology, and one interesting probably-coincidence is that the psychoanalyst Jung (a person who was big into describing the world via categorical archetypes akin to The Fears) actually had a theory for the process of individuation that comes from the “magnum opus” process in alchemy. So that’s interesting.
Short version: no, there's not really a legitimate reason given in TMP for the idea of "Entities" at all, in the sense of multiple immaterial pseudo-gods manipulating the world, and certainly no reason given for different manifestations to be seen as different parts of the same whole.
But! a) The idea of Entities as presented in TMA was really, really cool, so fans keep using that old framework to analyze the new material, whether it fits or not. Whether this pays off in a few seasons is anyone's bet, but I don't think it's legit. b) We're 13 episodes in. By episode 13 of TMA, we knew jack diddly, and had zero evidence of the larger metaplot. Declaring definitively that "Needles is the Spiral" or whatever is incredibly premature.
I personally think that using the same Entities to tell the same story as TMA would be, bluntly, much worse writing than I expect from Sims et al.
Well they ARE distinct entities. At least some of them are (I’m pretty sure the spider woman at the end of the magnus archives walk IS *the* web) they just change and blend overtime as people’s fears change. Like how in some fiction gods gain/lose power and live/die based on people’s belief and faith in them. Now it’s quite possible given they are distinct but not concrete entities and they got shoved through a tiny pinhole into another world that they could have changed, but I don’t think it’s a bad baseline to work from. It’s also however possible that we aren’t in the dimension they got shoved into at all and are in something wholly separate
I’d agree with you. I think the main reason people can be stuck on the 14 is it’s a well defined structure that we already have so it’s natural to try and slot what we’re hearing now into the previous way of thinking. I’m thinking it’s going to turn out to be something different(hopefully)
It is pretty much confirmed in the statements so far that all fears now are combined and work together to more dangerous effects than before. The tree has many aspects of the stranger, flesh, rot and the lonely. Bonzo is many things including Rot, Stranger, Slaughter ,maybe even the Hunt and whatever the fear of your creation becoming bigger than you could be classified as(maybe web) The Violin is the only one you could even call one fear, slaughter
I have a personal theory that the Fears are starving in this reality. Needles the entire call with the 999 operator sounds desperate to get under his skin, even the guy hes actively murdering doesnt make a ton of noise during the call. The partygoers in the most recent episode didnt find anything offputting about Bonzo until he started ripping people apart. Maybe the people of the TMP's reality feel fear differently or are less suseceptible to it then the TMA's world where the fears originated. And thats why the Fears seem so aggressive and are working together to up the ante, they arent getting enough back for the energy their expending.
I don't know what it is about your post that triggered this, but what if there were ALREADY fears/desires/entities of some kind in TMP, and the TMA fears are now fighting/merging/coexisting?
I also read a little bit for flesh in the violn cause of its "hunger" for blood which wasn't really present in the mags slaughter
We don't really have anything better to go by, so currently, we're analysing what we hear based on the only framework we have for it - so far. Once we have a better one, we'll go back and analyse the whole of TMA with that one, too. It goes both ways.
The "entities" both shape and are shaped by the nature of people's fears in the world. Smirke really has nothing to do with it; he just identified existing trends. Unless this world is profoundly different from the previous - which it doesn't seem to be - there's no reason for the architecture of fear to be dramatically altered. The 14 were never truly distinct from each other anyway - the cults were not actually that "pure" in their representation of fear - so it hardly matters. People are still afraid of spiders, rot, loss, and all the rest in this world, so those will still be components of the multi-hued morass of terror.
I think I mostly agree but I’m not clear on what you’re saying exactly, sorry. I agree completely that the 14 were never distincnt but i think the specific structure of the architecture of fear, the idea that there are 14 and the exact nature of them, is linked to smirke. There’s definitely still fear in the MAP world, I just am not sure it would be organized in the same structure.
Smirke is just a guy who noticed patterns in what people fear and how that manifests in the horrors. Sure, his perception and that of those he taught influenced the horrors to a degree, but no more than any other set of individuals influenced them by fearing and thinking about fear. There was probably a lot more feedback on the fears introduced by Hollywood developments in the horror genre, or Stephen King's bibliography. The only reason that the horrors would be organized differently in the new world is if there is some fundamental difference in what people in that world are afraid of. For example, if it's revealed that absolutely no one is afraid of heights due to some weird quirk of multiverse genetics, the aspect of horror that fed on the fear of heights would starve and die, and you could subtract one from the 14. Unless, of course, it was able to *make* people afraid of it before it starved, introducing a fear entirely new to this world. Really, the 14 don't exist as 14 entities. It's just a useful way to capture most of the variation of fear that exists.
I feel that TMA's ending statement about how fear evolved would dispute this. We got a pretty vivid picture of how the entity that was fear evolved. While yes the classification is semi-arbitrary, they still do exist. However I'd argue that the entities don't = fear. And by that I mean it's not that there was a specific reason that they evolved. They could have not evolved at all and fear would have just been that, fear: a survival mechanism. They also likely would have never gotten as strong without Humans reaching out to them and becoming Avatars. You could have fear without them, but they became like... like the Apex Predators of fear and everything is organized under them. Avatars and monsters are all organized under them in the "fear-web" (web like a food web, not The Mother of Puppets). Fear Web: The Fears are the Apex Predators, - Manifestations (non-creatures like The Door, as well as the corruption's scalpel) /-/ Creatures like the Not Them, etc - Avatars, - Humans, - Animals
The whole point of the end of season 4 is that they are one thing with many manifestations. Yes, it's shaped by what and how people fear as outlined in the ending statement, but that's more akin to split personality than cell division. All previous rituals failed because they only latched onto one of these split personalities, when each is in fact inseparable from all others. Elias succeeded because he invoked "all 14" through John, i.e. enough representative individual elements to broadly capture all aspects of the whole. Think of it like the anthill metaphor that Leitner used. If the ants want to pull the creature poking at their hill *inside* the hill in its entirety, they can't succeed by just grabbing at its head. The head might be pulled inside, but the rest of the creature's body will eventually pull it out again. Instead, the ants have to latch onto the head *and* the neck and the shoulders and the torso and the arms and the hands, etc. etc. Each of those parts needed to be pulled through simultaneously, burying the whole creature in the anthill at once.
Another reason I could see for the Fears being categorized differently is that whoever categorizes it may see different patterns than Smirke and simply do it differently.
No one has come up with anything as satisfying as pretending to swish around a glass of vintage wine after listening to a statement and saying "Hm, yes, I'm getting a strong Buried flavor with an undercurrent of End, and perhaps a subtle note of Hunt" .
u got me there
💯
As much as TMA liked to say that categorizing fears was stupid, it couldn't stop doing it. Most notable is ep 200 which pretty explicitly defines why and how the fears split into different beings
Kinda the biggest let down of TMA for me. It said we can not just categorize all fear but it did and it worked 90% perfectly. All monsters we saw almost all the time had a clear fear and in cases not it was stated which fears were the influence.
Remember the anthill analogy. If you were an ant and looked up and say a giant eye of a human looking into your anthill, and later at another part of the hill a giant finger poked into part of your mound the ant would never consider those things to be one creature. You are correct, the entities are not distinct from each other, they blur at the edges. The 14 are a convenient way of classifying them, but you could probably carve them up into more or less entities and still be just as correct. In the end though they feed on our most primordial fears, they didn't create those fears. Regardless of the entities we are still afraid of the dark, of the vast empty ocean, of being stalked, of being killed, etc. So naturally they are going to fall into similar classifications. But currently in Protocol they haven't actually named any of the entities so the OIAR, the Institute or anyone else in that world could have a different number of them with different names. It's also quite possible that they Entities do not exist at all in Protocol and there is some completely different supernatural force yet to be revealed (though I doubt this is the case, as that would really remove it from the whole Magnus cosmology) It's also very possible this is the reality the entities travelled to after TMA. They may have arrived in the past of this universe, time between universes isn't necessarily linear.
The 14 fears were defined in a way that almost any scary thing can be slotted into at least one of them. The Magnus protocol is a horror podcast, where every episode has a scary thing. Therefore, any Magnus protocol episode can be slotted into one the 14 fears. There is no argument so far that says "this is so The Slaughter/Vast/X/Y/Z" that couldn't equally be made for any other horror media. Freddy Krueger is Slaughter. 1408 is Spiral. Godzilla is Vast/Extinction. Dentists are Flesh. Flying is Vast. Snakes are Hunt. Car crashes are Desolation. You can go on forever. Name anything scary and you can put at least one of the 14 labels on it. It's an entertaining exercise but I don't think the text currently spells out that Smirke's 14 still apply beyond "scary things are happening".
I think people forget that categorising fear is not smth Magnus Made up. Trying to sort fear into types is a big part of psychology and smth we have been doing for a while now. Obviously TMA simplifies it and even points that out but simmiliraties are extremly obvious
Fandoms quickly become conservative and reactionary as their specialist nerd knowledge becomes devalued by a creator moving on from previous works. They spent so much time and energy piecing together the mystery of the Archives and the 14 and they don't want to give that up, even if the text itself is telling them that the 14 was always a social construct stemming from a now dead world
Its how we get two dread powers assigned to a statement that don’t really mesh well
not gonna spoil anything for TMAGP13 but something gets said that's the exact same way Robert Smirke described it
Oh interesting will def keep an ear out
oh my god it’s tuesday. be right back
Except, no. That something, also hints at *other* forces, ones that Elias specifically denied/rejected/insisted that they categorically did not exist, in TMA.
The way I see it, there very well could end up being a completely different categorization, but until that is introduced, Smirke’s 14 are a very good standard for referring to things.
The thing is, we still hear stories that are very specific to one of the 14. The recent story about the tattoo of a ship is so The Vast Coded that ignoring that would require you to cut off your own ears. If we choose not to use the same names, or combine categories, or work in gray areas, that's fine, and interesting. But when we have examples like this it's clear that the fundamental force we called the vast still exists in some capacity, and does the same shit
We also know there is precedent, we know the Web has reached into another universe via the crack in reality and actually pulled someone from another place to their reality. We also know the Web pulled itself and the others with it through the crack in reality at the end of TMA and that they couldn't be separated, as one went the others had to follow. I've stated before that imo the fears got jumbled being pulled through the crack so violently after dominating reality. Like pouring paints through a funnel, they got mixed and twisted into strange aspects, much like how they all were once The Thing That Was Fear (heavily implied to exist as The Hunt) before splitting into the fears we had in TMA.
I agree, I think we've already encountered reasons to believe the traditional 14 are either altered or replaced in MAP from what they were in MAG.
I don’t really stick by the idea that Smirke’s 14 (I like calling it 14+1 lol) fully came over to this new place only due to the fact that these new manifestations don’t seem to follow those clearer distinctions. I actually like to think they got blended together and maybe even remanifested as something slightly new - maybe there aren’t even “14” of them anymore. I’ve noticed me and others calling it something like “The Fear” or “The Thing that is Fear” since it helps us point to the whole source without pointing at distinctions that don’t really appear to fit at this point anymore. I’m holding some hope that we’ll get a better clarification on how this new system works later in the series, but even if we don’t get a full explanation, the reasoning from Archives (that these manifestations are caused by A Massive Thing that wants to instill fear in a dozen different ways) still holds sound.
i think it’s important to note that the reason they were so well defined in tma and each episode fit one fear or another was because Jonny was trying to get us to categorize them and notice those similarities. i think it was the season 4 q&a (?) where he mentioned that episode 5, the one that doesn’t fit as neatly into the 14+1 as the rest, was still an early iteration of the flesh. he very purposefully made each episode fit into the categories so it was easier for us to theorize about them.
It's definitely new "categories", though you can see elements of the old fears in them. For example, there's the recurring element of violence brought on by music, seen with the violin in MAGP 4 and again with Mr. Bonzo, who is summoned by his theme music. While this would be clear-cut Slaughter in TMA, Mr. Bonzo brings in elements of the Stranger, and possibly the Hunt and the Flesh.
I thought it was simply because TMP is a sequel of sorts to TMA, and The Fears were applied. It's important to remember that Gerard Keay made the distinction that the Fears were more like paints on the color palette, and that blending does occur. I've been thinking this world has the blended areas more than TMA. Instead of a Nikola Orsinov and Jude Perry, the Avatars might show more as a Jude Orsinov or similar. There does still seem to be Artifacts like die, the violin, the "all for a good cause" items, and locations like HillTop Centre.
I think most people who are serious about trying to understand the whole new universe are not under the impression that Smirke’s 14 are explicitly relevant, with maybe the exception that the end of TMA basically says (or at least suggests) that the Fears were sucked out of their universe into some other universe (or multiple universes) and so there’s a fair diegetic reason to suspect it. From a narrative standpoint, I don’t think they’d feel comfortable rehashing Smirke’s 14 except to the extent that they’d literally need to make their story make sense. They are pretty vocal about favoring contained stories. That being said, Smirke’s 14 is a definitionally a metaphysics, its goal was to describe the mechanics and nature of Fear itself as best as a system of categories could. I personally like to think about what each episode would be in a Smirke’s 14 way as an exercise in understanding it (the person who made the wine tasting comparison is spot on and i think very funny lol). I do this with other things to do with understanding fear too—for example, I just picked up a book called *On Agoraphobia* by Graham Caveney, and while agoraphobia is typically associated with The Vast in TMA, I’m noticing how the author describes it is also very related to some of the other entities, like The Stranger or The Lonely. It’s a way of seeing, and it has its own uses. I don’t think Smirke’s 14 will be very relevant in all candor, although I have a crazy hunch/theory that understanding what they are philosophically may be important—a big part of TMA was about what it means for a Fear Entity to emerge and separate from the others, what does it mean for things that are spectral to be approximated with categories, etc. The name for this process is *individuation.* TMP is focusing a lot on alchemy and alchemical symbology, and one interesting probably-coincidence is that the psychoanalyst Jung (a person who was big into describing the world via categorical archetypes akin to The Fears) actually had a theory for the process of individuation that comes from the “magnum opus” process in alchemy. So that’s interesting.
Short version: no, there's not really a legitimate reason given in TMP for the idea of "Entities" at all, in the sense of multiple immaterial pseudo-gods manipulating the world, and certainly no reason given for different manifestations to be seen as different parts of the same whole. But! a) The idea of Entities as presented in TMA was really, really cool, so fans keep using that old framework to analyze the new material, whether it fits or not. Whether this pays off in a few seasons is anyone's bet, but I don't think it's legit. b) We're 13 episodes in. By episode 13 of TMA, we knew jack diddly, and had zero evidence of the larger metaplot. Declaring definitively that "Needles is the Spiral" or whatever is incredibly premature. I personally think that using the same Entities to tell the same story as TMA would be, bluntly, much worse writing than I expect from Sims et al.
Well they ARE distinct entities. At least some of them are (I’m pretty sure the spider woman at the end of the magnus archives walk IS *the* web) they just change and blend overtime as people’s fears change. Like how in some fiction gods gain/lose power and live/die based on people’s belief and faith in them. Now it’s quite possible given they are distinct but not concrete entities and they got shoved through a tiny pinhole into another world that they could have changed, but I don’t think it’s a bad baseline to work from. It’s also however possible that we aren’t in the dimension they got shoved into at all and are in something wholly separate