History Characters / TheMagnusArchives

!Recurring Characters
Characters who do not work at the Magnus Institute, but play a prominent role nonetheless:

[[folder:Adelard Dekker]]
!!Adelard Dekker
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 077

A friend and colleague of Gertrude Robinson's. [[spoiler:He shows up in several statements, cataloging and fighting against servants of the Powers.]]

* AntiHero: He's willing to do some very unscrupulous things for the sake of protecting the world from the supernatural.
* BadassNormal: Through all of his accounts there is no indication that Dekker was anything more or less than human; at several moments he lamented his lack of Fear-given powers that would make his job easier. Nonetheless, through cunning, ingenuity, and cold-bloodedness he managed to disable, trap, or even kill numerous monsters and avatars much stronger than him.
* BigGood: While he's a bit unscrupulous about it, he is a fundamentally heroic and moral figure, even more so than Gertrude. While Gertrude is only in it to stop the rituals and doesn't care about anything else, Adelard is out to protect the little guys from the horrors of the world.
* BlackAndNerdy: One of the few recurring characters to have an explicitly defined race and no less academically inclined than most of the main cast. Describes himself as being an avid reader since childhood.
* GoodIsNotNice: Though not kind, or empathetic, or merciful, he might be the employee of the Archives that can be best counted on to do the right thing.
* HiddenDepths: Despite his occasionally brutal and cold-blooded way of operating, he is revealed to be at least somewhat religious in "Rotten Core" (Episode 157). He also decides that one victim he interviews has had enough horror and protects their identity from Gertrude and a life of nightmares.
* OccultDetective: Has shades of this, aiding individuals who have encountered the supernatural and taking it upon himself to destroy or contain certain entities.
* PragmaticHero: Dekker was firmly on the side of good, but ruthlessly pragmatic in his hunts; his first appearance had him leave a man to die rather than try to save him from the avatar of the End that was killing him, because Dekker knew there was no point in picking a fight he couldn't win. [[spoiler:Even his dying moments showed this attitude; when he decided to MercyKill both himself and the other victims of Amherst's final plague, he chose fire for the job instead of something more merciful, because it would make it easier for the ECDC to clean up the plague site.]]
* PosthumousCharacter: [[spoiler:According to "Rotten Core" (Episode 157), he died in 2013, fighting a manifestation of The Corruption]].
* {{Sadist}}: When he lobotomizes a servant of The End, the description he gives of it is... ''very'' detailed.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Gerard Keay]]
!!Gerard Keay
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 004
->'''Voiced by:''' Jon Gracey

A young man heavily involved in the supernatural. The son of [[EvilOldFolks Mary Keay]], he appears in numerous statements at various stages of his life [[spoiler:including after his own death]].
----

[[folder:Georgie Barker]]
!!Georgie Barker
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 028
->'''Voiced by:''' Sasha Sienna

The host of the popular What The Ghost! podcast, and colleague of Melanie King. Had a relationship with Jon Sims at one point that didn't end well. They seem to have [[AmicableExes made up]].

!The Powers
A rough grouping of 14 unimaginably powerful entities that exist “beside” our reality. The Powers manifest themselves in our reality as monstrous phenomena and entities. They and their human (or formerly-human) followers are responsible for all of the case files the Magnus Institute collects – as well as for the Magnus Institute itself.

[[folder:In General]]
!!The Powers/The Entities/[[spoiler:The Things That Were Fear]]
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 080

* AlmightyIdiot: It's revealed in season 5 that, [[spoiler:with the exception of [[TheChessmaster The Web]] and [[OmnicidalManiac The End]], the entities are essentially just pure hunger with no actual minds or wills to act on that desire or any ability to understand the world except through human metaphors. They're framed as closer to [[AnimalisticAbomination starving animals]] than actual people]].
* AmbiguousSituation: At times, the Powers seem to bleed into each other (Jon notes that the incident in "Love Bombing" has elements of both the Flesh and the Corruption); several offhand comments suggest that the list of fourteen is only one idea of how they work.
* AnthropomorphicPersonification: [[spoiler:Season 4 introduces the possibility that the Powers can manifest not just as various monsters and weird phenomena but also as something approaching actual identities. The End is apparently male, and the Web female; it's later revealed that not only are these the only two Powers with a gender, they're the only two Powers with something like the human capacity for self-awareness and planning for the future.]]
** How anthropomorphic they really are is left up in the air, and most of the characteristics ascribed to them seem to be entirely projection on the part of their worshippers. Their cults usually end up running into the obvious problem with worshipping an EldritchAbomination: it's so far beyond human comprehension that there's no way to tell what it actually ''wants,'' or if it wants anything at all.
* ArtifactOfDoom: The Powers tend to manifest certain objects with unusual characteristics.
* BadPowersBadPeople: “You feed them, and they feed you". The longer one serves the Powers (becoming stronger in the process), the more alienated from humanity one becomes.
* BigBadEnsemble: Collectively they make up the ultimate force of evil in the TMA-verse, being responsible for pretty much every supernatural incident heard in the show so far. [[spoiler:The Season 4 finale has them finally [[TheBadGuyWins enter the world physically]], setting them (and their summoner, [[TheDragon Jonah Magnus]]) to take the stage as proper Big Bads for the final season.]]
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: As far as the Powers are concerned, anything that causes the kind of fear they embody is good, anything that reduces that fear is bad.
* DevilButNoGod: The closest thing the setting has to a benign faction is the Beholding, and that’s only insofar as their body count primarily comes from depraved indifference, rather than outright malice. [[spoiler: And then this turns out to be a lie, and the Eye is the Power responsible for triggering the Change via Jonah Magnus and plunging the world into hell. The ''actual'' closest thing to a benign faction is the Web, and that's because the Web would prefer to slowly and subtly infect a thousand other worlds throughout TheMultiverse than use up this one and die with it. Although since the Eye is an AlmightyIdiot incapable of planning and the Web has been manipulating events to lead to this point...well, it all comes back around.]]
** In Episode 111 Gerard Keay lays out very clearly to Jon that the ''only'' Powers in this universe are the ones based on the emotion of fear, and there are no corresponding Powers based on positive emotions like hope and love. Unlike other universes that run on EmotionalPowers, the characters in this story have the misfortune of living in a CosmicHorrorStory where fear is the underlying principle of the universe.
* EldritchAbomination: Eldritch, powerful (to the point of being called The Powers), fear-based entities.
* EldritchLocation: Smirke's dreams were haunted by strange and horrible places, which he believed to be the truest representations of the Entities.
* EnemyCivilWar: Not that the Powers represent a united faction per se, but there seems to be some pretty strong hostility between the followers of various factions. The Hive, the Earth and the Stranger have all attempted to invade [[spoiler:the Institute]] at various points. Meanwhile, the Spiral hates the Hive, and the mention of the spiderweb pattern on the table locking down some of one of the Not-Them's power suggests the Web don't like the Stranger. The Dark in particular seems to have an intense rivalry with The Eye, but this is almost entirely one sided (as The Eye finds The Dark far too boring to pay attention to). Additionally, even beings touched by the same Power do not necessarily get along: beings of the Hunt are nearly as likely to go after each other as they are anyone else (see: [[spoiler:Trevor and the vampires]]), and religious disagreements among the Lightless Flame get ''really'' violent.
** [[spoiler: The ending reveals that Jon becoming the Archivist and having one of the Eye's most powerful servants become the greatest enemy to its agenda was, in fact, AllAccordingToPlan from the Web, who's been playing the Eye as its UnwittingPawn this whole time.]]
* EvilEvolves: One recurring theme is that as cosmic and eternal as the Powers may seem, they've evolved a great deal over time, changing as human fears evolve over history, and becoming more diverse and more dangerous as time passes (although Gerard Keay believes they've been "mostly stable" since the Industrial Revolution). The last new Power to emerge was the Flesh, sometime after the advent of factory farming. [[spoiler: Season 5 reveals that a new Power, the Extinction, is slowly forming out of the new existential fears of humanity in the 21st century, and that the eldest and original Power, from before human consciousness arose out of animal life, was the Hunt. It also reveals that the Web is the first and only Power to achieve true sapience some time ago and that it's been manipulating humanity and all the other Powers in its EvilPlan ever since.]]
* EvilIsPetty: Some of the Powers may be more patient and into playing the LongGame than others, but that doesn't mean they won't prey on or wreck the life of some random civilians on the side. The Beholding and the Web both take time out of their schedules to harass a woman into a paranoid frenzy or to feast on a few actors or teenagers' insides.
* EvilMakesYouMonstrous: Spend enough time as the focus of one of the Powers, and your appearance will become increasingly inhuman.
* AFormYouAreComfortableWith: Inverted in a manner that's intended to terrify its victims. They exist outside our universe as abstract, incomprehensible concepts. In our reality, they manifest as a variety of horrifying creatures. [[spoiler:Although they may also manifest as actual personalities; Antonio Blake potentially refers to the End and the Web as 'him' and 'her' respectively.]]
* GodOfEvil: What else do you call beings of immeasurable scale and power that feed on and embody the primal fears of humanity?
* GreaterScopeVillain: In Seasons 1 and 2, the primary antagonists are [[TheWormThatWalks Jane Prentiss]] and [[{{Doppelganger}} Not!Sasha]]. TheReveal in the Season 2 finale shows that even these entities are mere servants of the Powers, who want to [[HostileTerraforming reshape reality itself]].
* HiveMind: Every Power acts like this for the lesser beings who act as its avatars and servitors, although to what degree said servitors are capable of communication and coordination depends on the nature of the Power in question. The Powers themselves are like this with each other, being aspects of one original being "torn apart" by the human minds they feed on. [[spoiler: Although it's eventually revealed only the Web is conscious enough to qualify as a "mind" at all -- if the Powers are seen as aspects of a single being, then it's like the Web is the conscious mind of a person mostly driven by their unconscious HorrorHunger addictions, one of which, the End, is an outright suicidal [[DeathSeeker death wish]].]]
* HoistByTheirOwnPetard: [[spoiler:In Season 5, they've crossed over into/merged with our reality, and are feasting on the traumatised remnants of humanity. However... in this new world, no new humans are being born or created, so eventually and inevitably the human race will die out -- and, due to the aforementioned merging, the Powers will have nothing left to feast on. And so ''they'' will die as well, terrified and desperate.]]
* HorrorHunger: "You feed them and they feed you". Everything about their actions is driven by the need to "feed" on human fear and suffering, with each one of the individual Powers defined by the particular "flavor" of fear they're addicted to. (And that's leaving aside the ones that feed on the fear of being physically eaten, most notably the Flesh).
** [[spoiler: Season 5 reveals that this really is akin to an addiction, with the Powers as a whole having mindlessly pursued the idea of a ritual to change the world to give them more fears to feed on in the short term while inevitably dooming them to destruction in the long run. It's then revealed that the Web, the only truly conscious Power, engineered this whole scenario because it knew it couldn't stop the other Powers from completing a ritual forever and did so in a way that would give it the opportunity to escape. And it picked the Eye as its patsy in this scheme because ironically the Eye is the stupidest and least self-controlled of the Powers, an AlmightyIdiot driven by its mindless hunger for new experiences and memories.]]
* HostileTerraforming: [[spoiler:There exist Rituals capable of restructuring human reality to make it more amenable to them, with the intent of allowing them through into our world. What form these rituals take vary, as the Powers themselves have no set strictures, leaving it up to their followers to devise an appropriate means and structure, though they tend to involve [[HumanSacrifice people being murdered while being subjected to the Power's fear]]]].
* IHaveManyNames: The Powers each have several different ways people refer to them--the Spiral is also the Es Mentiras, the Corruption is also the Filth, the Stranger is also I-Do-Not-Know-You, etc. Making things more complicated is when stronger aspects of the Powers appear that have their own titles, yet are still their own beings, like the Piper for the Slaughter, the Distortion for the Spiral or [[spoiler:the Archivist]] for the Beholding.
* InTheBlood: Collaboration with various Powers seems to run in certain [[CreepyFamily families]]. This includes the Hans (the Flesh), and the Lukases (the Lonely). Subverted trope with the Fairchilds (the Vast) as they are implied to be an adopted family.
* MysteriousBacker: Sometimes Powers will save random humans from each other, like in Recluse, when Agnes saves the statement-giver from the Web. In the best-case scenario, this is for the simple satisfaction of putting one over on an enemy, meaning the person in question will probably get left alone afterwards. In the worst-case scenario, like poor Father Edwin, the Power ''does'' care, because it wants to use the human for something.
* MysteriousPast: We know what the nature of the Powers is -- they're manifestations of the human (and animal) emotion of fear that have evolved as the concept of fear has -- but we don't know where they came from in the first place and why in this universe fear is linked to transcendent, supernatural beings while no other emotion is. [[spoiler: The finale reveals that one of the things the Eye cannot see is its own past from before it emerged as a distinct Entity from among the other Powers, so even the Archivist can't know the answer to this question. The Powers may have evolved for the first time in this world, or they may have come to this world from another -- just as the Web now seeks to escape this world to another -- and may be a spreading infection throughout TheMultiverse. Georgie considers this the most likely possibility, but no one actually knows the answer except ''maybe'' Annabelle and/or the Web itself, and any answer they gave would be self-serving.]]
* NightmareFetishist: The fact that the Powers originate from the human emotion of fear helps explain why so many people are perversely drawn to their service even though their effects on the world are so purely negative.
* PersonalityPowers: Most of the main servants of the Powers are chosen because their personalities suit their patrons. Avatars of The Filth want (to be infested with) a family, avatars of The Hunt love the chase, avatars of The Beholding crave knowledge, etc.
* ThePowerOfLove: Has been shown repeatedly to be somewhat of a weakness of the Powers. If someone has an emotional anchor they can hold on to-- such as the voice of Evan Lukas in Episode 12, Andrea Nunis's mother in Episode 48 and the sheath to a beloved Kukri in Episode 129-- they can escape alive, if not unharmed.
* PrimalFear: Each of the powers is an embodiment of a primal fear, e.g. fear of the unknown, fear of the dark, fear of being hunted, etc...
* ReligionOfEvil: A few of the Powers, such as the Desolation and the Lonely, have an organized faction of worshippers that treat their allegiance to their Power very much like a religious faith.
* RightHandVsLeftHand: [[spoiler: The finale reveals that all of the events of the story were a GambitPileup between the only two of the Powers that, by their nature, have the ability to think ahead to the future, the End, who seeks the death of all that exists including the Powers themselves, and the Web, who seeks to survive eternally by escaping this universe for another one. Season 5 reveals that the Change seems to be a final victory for the End's agenda, only for it to turn out that this was AllAccordingToPlan for the Web -- whose whole shtick is out-gambiting everyone else.]]
* SentientCosmicForce: Of various human fears.
* SheatheYourSword: If an EldritchLocation or creature associated with a power can't feed off a victim's fear, it may simply give up and move on--Fiona was a case study for unconsciousness being an effective defense against attacks, and Karolina Gorka survived her experience within a cursed train car by simply laying down and waiting to die. [[AvertedTrope It should be noted that this isn't a safe bet, however]]. The Anglerfish is happy to take any victim that gets too close, while the Not-Them feeds on the fear of those adjacent to its victims, and vampires, whatever their sacred power, are noted to prefer victims who are asleep or otherwise can't fight back.
* ShroudedInMyth: Even though "Smirke's List" of the Fourteen Powers is useful enough that all the characters use it as a framework and Robert Smirke probably understood them better than any other human, it's still repeatedly stated by Jon and the other avatars that this is a very limited human understanding of how they work and there are constant exceptions and gray areas in these "rules". In later episodes whenever someone tries too hard to pin down which of the Powers is responsible for something Jon is quick to correct them that these labels are ultimately meaningless.
** [[spoiler: Annabelle's statement about the house at Hill Top Road says that the Web itself isn't sure whether the crack in reality opened by the death of the ancient warrior Eowa was caused by the Corruption or the Slaughter, and that, as different as these two Powers might seem in the present day, at that time they may have somehow still been one and the same.]]
** [[spoiler: Jon's final statement when he becomes the Pupil of the Eye in the finale reveals that the Web itself also doesn't know the answer to the chicken-and-egg problem of whether the Powers created the emotion of fear in human beings or vice versa. And the fact that the Web is the only one of the Powers to be a sapient being both in some ways validates the idea of there being fourteen "separate Powers" and in some ways completely undermines it -- when the Web "manipulates" the other Powers into doing its bidding it isn't really like a person manipulating other people at all, and is more like a single person trying to keep control of their own HorrorHunger appetites.]]
* UncertainDoom: The only thing certain about their ultimate fate is that [[spoiler:They're not in this universe anymore, and that wherever they ended up, they're in the same position they used to be, leaking through reality as monsters and evil locations and artifacts, but unable to feast.]] In fact, it's never clarified if [[spoiler:every Power ended up in a given universe as one of fifteen, and if the Web ever succeeded in freeing itself from the other Powers' interference, although since every past attempt to separate one Power from the others -- i.e. the original rituals -- has failed, most likely this is impossible. There’s not even a guarantee they ended up in a universe with life. If they ended up in one without it, they doomed themselves to consume each other.]]
* TheVirus: Many of them spread their influence like an infection (especially the Corruption, which is specifically themed around this concept). [[spoiler: The finale broaches the theory that they spread from universe to universe like a virus or a cancer, turning the mundane and relatively-benign fears and hatreds of living things in those dimensions into something malignant and supernatural.]]
* WasOnceAMan: The eventual fate of those who follow a given Power long enough. Some may appear quite human, but the resemblance is only [[HumanoidAbomination superficial]].
* WeAreStrugglingTogether: Followers of various Powers seem to be at odds with one another as often as not. The fact certain Powers appear to draw their power from opposing fears doubtless has something to do about it.
* WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity: Those who serve as avatars of the Powers generally have a tenuous grip on reality as we understand it. (Of course, that's assuming they still have ''minds'' as we understand them; "Michael" seems to consider itself more of an appendage than a person, but it's a rather unique case).
* YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm: As they exist outside of human reality, it’s not even clear if they have a true “form”.
** Episode 160 reveals that [[spoiler:this is what has actually been screwing over their own ''cultists.'' They're not fourteen distinct manifestations, but a manifestation of human fear that has as many faces as humans have things to be afraid of. Some are too similar not to overlap, like the Hunt and the Slaughter, while others rely on each other to define themselves, like the Buried and the Vast. You cannot be afraid of a world that is entirely vast beyond human comprehension, because then there's nothing to compare it to; likewise, you cannot have a world that is entirely buried, because then there is no such thing as ''too'' close. Bringing just one into the world doesn't work - you have to bring them all together.]]
** [[spoiler: One of the post-Change domains, highlighted in Episode 183, is a twisted version of the Magnus Institute intended as a mocking monument to Robert Smirke and every other human who thought themselves capable of devising a theory to categorize and explain the workings of the Powers, where scholars of the Powers themselves get their own IronicHell.]]

[[folder:The Buried]]
!!The Buried, Choke, The Center, Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 099

Plays on claustrophobia and the fear of suffocation. [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Sunken Sky"]].

* AchillesHeel: [[spoiler:Its ritual, Sunken Sky, is foiled by Gertrude introducing a body touched by the Vast into it]].
* AndIMustScream: A recurrent trend in its statements: even after being utterly mangled or confined for longer then it would take to starve to death, its victims remain alive and conscious. Breekon claims that death cannot find you in the Coffin, and it's impled that even a ''corpse'' thrown in it isn't entirely safe.
* BuriedAlive: The fate of several people who encounter it. It's not always literal, however - [[spoiler:Episode 129 shows that drowning is under its influence, as are metaphorical forms of burial, such as being buried in debt]].
* CreatorProvincialism: For whatever reason, Gertrude Robinson, based on a statement originally made in the 1950s (as Episode 99 of the podcast, "Dust to Dust"), came to believe that North America was the center of the Buried's manifestations and (correctly) predicted its ritual would take place in the United States. (She also believed this to be true of the Hunt but was less certain about it and considered it a lower priority).
* {{Foil}}: To the Vast, the fear of wide, empty spaces, easily the best example of two Powers being opposites of each other. This is highlighted by [[spoiler:Gertrude stopping the Buried's ritual with the remains of someone marked by the Vast]]. However, they also provide an example of why [[spoiler:no one Power could be brought into the world on its own. As Jonah Magnus put it, "Even those that seem to exist in direct opposition rely on each other for their definition as much as up relies on down. To try and create a world with only the Buried makes as much sense as trying to conceive a world with only down."]]
* GeniusLoci: Compared to the other entities it's often treated as or referred to as a place rather than a being, but it appears just as active as the other entities.
* ItAlwaysRainsAtFunerals: One of its associated artifacts is a coffin with "Do Not Open" scratched into it, which contains the Buried's domain of power and can compel people to walk into it. Two statements it shows up in involve heavy, downward-driving rain when it's enticing a victim.
* MadnessMantra: The man from "Dig" becomes so obsessed with the word that he felt compelled to dig into the ground wherever he was, [[spoiler:eventually digging himself so deep into the ground that his pit collapsed on him and killed him]].
* OutOfFocus: A curious example; the Buried does show up in the story a good deal, thanks to the Coffin, but unlike the other Powers it doesn't have a recurring human avatar, so the aims and motivations of people who might follow or serve such an entity are fare less explored.
* RuleOfSymbolism: The Buried isn't just associated with being physically trapped but metaphorically trapped by obligation -- a telltale sign of a statement involving the Buried is often someone who's forced to go or stay somewhere by poverty or debts. [[spoiler: The inhabitants of its post-Change domain, the Field of Worms, are all said to have been desperately poor in their previous lives.]]
* TheWallsAreClosingIn: Its manifestation as the book ''The Seven Lamps of Architecture'' causes people to be entombed within walls when read, unless it's read within a building designed by Robert Smirke. Also seen in "Underground", as Karolina describes the London Underground car she’s in being slowly crushed from either side.

[[folder:The Corruption]]
!!The Corruption, The Hive, Filth, Crawling Rot

Plays on the visceral fear of insects, vermin, infection, and decay.

* AlienKudzu
* ArcVillain: Through the Flesh Hive, of Season 1.
* FesteringFungus
* BugsHeraldEvil: The fear manifests this way, and if you let them get in, they can take you over and turn you into a Flesh Hive.
* HufflepuffHouse: The least-known about of all of the powers. [[spoiler:The name of its Ritual isn't known]], none of its avatars have spoken on recording outside of Jane Prentiss rattling out an "Archivist" in Episode 39, and it has been generally OutOfFocus since Season 1.
* IJustWantToBeLoved: Curiously, a strong motivation for many of those who fall under its sway. Much like followers of [[TabletopGame/Warhammer40000 Nurgle]], they associate the creatures and diseases that reside within them as showing them the affection they often lacked in their everyday lives.
** Indeed, unhealthy relationships seem to be part of the Corruption's domain. Unlike the aforementioned Nurgle cultists and daemons [[EvilIsOneBigHappyFamily who often share a genuine sense of camaraderie despite being twisted, violent monsters]], any cults or other organizations that form around the Corruption rarely take long to demonstrate that they're manifestly more destructive and painful to the participants than they could ever be to any enemy.
* InstantDeathRadius: Because of the way its powers work, exposure through touch, even slightly, almost certainly guarantees one's demise, assimilation, or both. All you need is one worm to get in, or in the case of more microbial threats, just to touch the wrong surface. Even then, the radius can be bigger than arms' length, given that Prentiss' worms had an astounding ability to leap several feet at high speed.
* ThePlague: One of its manifestations in the form of a DeadlyBook modeled after ''Journal of a Plague Year''. Its exact effects are unknown, but involve the infection of buildings.
** PlagueMaster: John Amherst, one of its avatars, spreads horrifically contagious diseases wherever he goes.
* PestController: Ants, wasps, worms...
* TheSwarm: Its avatars exhibit HiveMind on some level, though not to a total degree.
* TheWormThatWalks: Jane Prentiss, one of its avatars, takes this form after she was exposed to a "wasp's nest".

[[folder:The Dark]]
!!The Dark, Mr. Pitch, The Forever Blind, The People's Church of the Divine Host

Plays on the fear of the dark. [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Extinguished Sun"]].

* DarknessEqualsDeath: A recurring theme of its monsters is that once you're out of the light, you're as good as dead.
* GrandTheftMe[=/=]BackFromTheDead: Maxwell Rayner has existed for several centuries, and death doesn't seem to keep him down for long. However, he does appear to switch bodies at several points.
* LightIsNotGood: Servants of the Dark, such as Manuela Dominguez, regard light as destructive and corrupt, and darkness as the true beneficial state.
* TheNightThatNeverEnds: [[spoiler: Their ritual, The Extinguished Sun, would create a world of total darkness where light isn't even a concept]].
* MurderWater: The Dark is associated with water, and several events associated with it occur in or nearby water. Edmund Halley was converted to a follower of the Dark after several [[BlackEyesOfEvil black-eyed followers]] took him to a pitch-black pool of water in the woods under a canopy so thick the sunlight didn't reach, and the building where Trevor and Julia interrupted some event happening under the Dark's sway was mentioned to be flooded with ankle-deep water.
* NothingIsScarier: As is to be expected with something that revolves not being able to see what exactly is coming to kill you, most statement givers who encountered the Dark never manage to get a clear description of the things tormenting them. A notable example is the Still and Lightless Beast; despite being featured in several episodes and having a central role in [[spoiler:the Extinguished Sun ritual]], it is never described in any capacity.
* ProphetEyes: Several people influenced by the Dark gain milky-white eyes.
* SerialKiller: The first we see of The Dark is through its servant Robert Montauk, who is one of the most prolific serial killers in the United Kingdom.
* UnknownRival: The Dark and its servants have an intense hatred of The Eye and those who follow it; Dark controlled spaces are shielded from the Watcher's gaze, the various iterations of Maxwell Rayner's cult have all had a closed eye motif, an ancient cult of The Dark is implied to have destroyed an earlier iteration of the Archives, and when they enact their grand ritual, a servant of The Dark comes to the Institute to [[EvilGloating gloat]] and offer the chance of surrender. All of this is very justified by sight and sense being the Dark's LogicalWeakness. For their part, it's indicated that The Eye and it's servants couldn't care less about the Dark, [[spoiler: Elias having Maxwell Rayner killed simply to advance his plans for Jon and responding to the Extinguished Sun ritual by just sitting back and letting it fail on its own.]] This is potentially notable in the case of The Eye itself, [[spoiler: during the 'grand tour' of the Domains Jon is sent on post-Change, only one that he visits belongs to the Dark, and it's basically a temporary holding area for children to grow up in until they develop fears the Eye would ''actually'' find interesting.]]
* WouldHurtAChild: None of the Powers have any actual moral compunction about this, but [[spoiler: ep. 173 reveals the Eye finds children's fears to be relatively boring and gives the Dark the "Night Street" domain so it can play around and experiment with children's fear of darkness and monsters until they grow up into something more interesting.]]

[[folder:The Desolation]]
!!The Desolation, The Lightless Flame, Blackened Earth, The Devastation, The Ravening Burn
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 012

The fear of destruction and pain. [[spoiler:Its ritual is known as "The Scoured Earth"]].

* AlwaysChaoticEvil: It comes with the territory, but the followers of the Lightless Flame relish ColdBloodedTorture and cruelty for its own sake. [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] with Agnes Montague [[spoiler: their messiah]], who at least shows hints of compassion, [[spoiler: which lead directly to [[DrivenToSuicide her suicide]].]]
* ArchEnemy: Among the other powers, the Desolation has a specific hatred for the Web, being the "chaos" in the OrderVsChaos dichotomy while the Web is "order". Agnes Montague has a thing for the symbolism of torching cobwebs. [[spoiler: Of course, in the end it turns out the Desolation was just as much the Web's UnwittingPawn as everyone else.]]
* TheDiscoveryOfFire: Is said to have entered the world at this point in human history.
* EvilIsBurningHot: Its worshippers have created the Cult of the Lightless Flame, embracing all of the bad associations of fire (destruction, burning), while rejecting its positive associations.
* ForTheEvulz: Why they do things.
* HumanoidAbomination: Its most devoted servants immolate themselves and become...something else. [[spoiler: The something is wax, which is why they don't age or need to eat.]]
* {{Jerkass}}: See the entry for Sadist, below. Every encountered member has been cruel, malicious, and [[EvilIsPetty needlessly]] [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking dickish]].
* {{Sadist}}: The Cult of the Lightless Flame worships [[ForTheEvulz meaningless destruction and cruelty]] as an end in and of itself. It especially loves to destroy things people love; one of the cultists, Jude, says she chose her first murder victim specifically because his life was looking up and he had lots of people who would miss him.
* TokenGoodTeammate: Agnes Montague, arguably. She saves the life of a statement giver in Episode 59, and seems to genuinely care for Jack Barnabas in Episode 67.

[[folder:The End]]
!!The End, Terminus, The Coming End That Waits For All And Cannot Be Ignored
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 062

Plays on the fear of Death. [[spoiler: It apparently either does not have a Ritual, or at least has no interest in performing one]].

* ChessWithDeath: Or backgammon or roulette or trivia. It's mentioned chess is generally a bad idea, as the game has zero luck in it and Death will win every time.
* CruelAndUnusualDeath: One of its {{Deadly Book}}s details a series of gruesome deaths throughout the centuries, including the death of whoever the reader is. The more frequently this book is read, the closer and more gruesome the death becomes.
* DeaderThanDead: Played with; a lot of what the End does is ''denying'' this to people and creating various forms of TheUndead, but ultimately anyone the End chooses to truly kill ends up this. [[spoiler: It turns out this is the only way anyone can die and escape the IronicHell the Earth has become after the Change, and eventually, with no new souls being created, this ''will'' happen to all life in the universe and then the Powers themselves.]]
* EvilerThanThou: Potentially, compared to the other Powers. [[spoiler:In Episode 168 ("Roots"), Oliver Banks predicts that, once the End has consumed the last living creature on Earth capable of feeling fear, it will turn its attention to ''the other Powers'', who by that point will have cause to fear their own ends since there's no one left whose fears can feed them]].
* ForeseeingMyDeath: Not ''his'' death, but Antonio Blake can see those around him who are fated to die soon.
* FateWorseThanDeath: The End has ways to keep certain people ''around'', but they're not exactly ''alive'' anymore. Become a Grim Reaper, and you won't be able to eat, or sleep, but you also won't be able to stop. Get stuck in the skin book and you're in for a world of constant pain and being summoned whenever someone wants information you have.
* TheGrimReaper: The Grim Reaper(s) actually exist, in classic skeleton-in-a-cloak sense, all of them being part of a cycle of avatars passing on undeath.
* LeonineContract: What service to it amounts to. You offer up innocent people to it as sacrifices, and in return you don't die. Yet.
* {{Necromancy}}: One of the {{Deadly Book}}s associated with it, simply referred to as "The Skin Book", is made of human skin and can have the souls of the dead bound to it.
* NonMaliciousMonster: Due to the End's proclivities when it comes to choosing them, most avatars of the End lack a lot of the negative traits of other powers. The ''worst'' people affiliated with the End simply amount to being cowards who have proverbial guns to their heads, such as [[LifeDrinker Justin Gough and Tova McHugh]]. Antonio Blake is downright helpful.
* NotAfraidToDie: [[spoiler: If the post-Change world goes on long enough, it will eventually kill every living thing, then the other powers, then itself. It's looking forward to it.]]
* ObviouslyEvil: [[InvertedTrope Inverted.]] Most avatars get the way they do due to prior contact with a Power wherein they felt a draw towards it or a particularly strong fear of it. The End consistently makes avatars out of largely normal people, for no clear reason, and seemingly at random.
* OnlySaneMan: Among the Powers, in the sense that it seems to be the only one of them that seems capable of long-term thinking regarding [[spoiler:rituals. Before the Change, its followers never attempted a ritual to bring it into the world; Peter Lukas believed this to be because if the fear of death managed to take over the world, it would cause the death of any living creature that could experience fear and in doing so wipe out its own food supply. After the Change, its avatar, Oliver Banks, points out that the way reality has shifted into a closed system of fear, the End's domains will eventually be responsible for the permanent deaths of every living human and achieve the same result]].
** [[spoiler: Later revealed to share this capacity for future planning with the Web; it's a matter of much debate whether the End's desire for final respite from the Fears' eternal existence of inflicting hell on all living things or the Web's dream of continuing this life indefinitely is the "saner" motivation.]]
* OmnicidalManiac: [[spoiler: It's one of the two entities capable of longterm planning. Specifically, it's planning to wipe out all living things, and thus all fear, the entities and itself.]]
* PragmaticVillainy: Peter Lukas theorizes that the End will never [[spoiler: attempt a ritual because the End has no reason to. It's already getting everything it wants--only beings already specifically committed to another Power are immortal, so it has a nice fat piece of the pie--and as the fear of ''death'', if it took over the world it might actually run out of people to be afraid of it]].
* SadisticChoice: Servants of it can (usually) stop whenever they want. They just stop breathing as well.
* TokenGoodTeammate: In a horribly twisted way, the End is this for the other Powers ''while being an OmnicidalManiac''. [[spoiler: After the Change, it's revealed that the only hope for the future the human race really has is the fact that their suffering will end when the End consumes them and they find the respite of true death. Indeed, the fact that the End can and will eventually kill the other Powers when it finally kills all the humans they feed on is the only meaningful threat that can be used against them. Our heroes spend some time discussing the fact that letting it finally destroy this universe and everything in it might be the morally preferable option to enabling the Web's plan to let the Powers infect the rest of TheMultiverse forever.]]
* WeAllDieSomeday: One reason why it's content with not trying to fully manifest with a ritual. In the words of Peter Lukas, "It knows that it gets everything eventually, so why bother?"
* YouCantFightFate: Befittingly for the fear of one's own death, inevitability tends to be a major theme in statements featuring the End. Fighting against its influence usually tends to just make the final outcome more violent and horrible. This is theorized to be the reason why [[spoiler: it doesn't have a ritual -- it'll still get everyone in the end anyway.]] Season 5 reveals that [[spoiler: given enough time, it fully intends to collect every human on Earth, and finally [[KillTheGod the Powers themselves]].]]
* YourMindMakesItReal: The End has more association with dreams than the other Powers-- Antonio Blake [[spoiler:aka Oliver Banks]] is able to see omens of death in his dreams and Justin Gough from Episode 113 seemingly loses his ability to kill people through carbon monoxide poisoning after Dekker removes his ability to dream via lobotomy.

[[folder:The Eye]]
!!The Eye, The Beholding, The Ceaseless Watcher, It-Knows-You
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 012

Plays on the fear of being watched, being judged, having your deepest secrets exposed and of learning things you'd rather not know. The Eye is the true patron of The Magnus Institute, empowering some of its employees to record and observe the supernatural in an unusually focused manner. [[spoiler:The Eye's original ritual, conceived by Jonah Magnus, was known as "The Watcher's Crown". Their other, successful one is unnamed, though WordOfGod calls it "[[TitleDrop The Magnus Archives]]"]].

* AchillesHeel: Servants of the Eye have immense difficulty viewing the activities of those who serve the Dark.
* AlmightyIdiot: [[spoiler:The finale reveals that for all its knowledge, the Eye is actually the least sentient of the fifteen entities; it records without actually understanding what it's looking at, and can only store past memories of what's already happened with no capacity to predict the future. Most of its smarter moves were actually engineered by The Web.]]
** [[spoiler: It was already known that something like this had to be going on when it was revealed the Eye's master plan to TakeOverTheWorld with Jonah Magnus' mass ritual could only lead to the death of all life in the universe and the deaths of the Powers themselves, playing directly into the hands of the End; Jon comments that the Eye isn't aware of this eventuality and probably wouldn't be aware until it was actually happening, lacking the capacity for foresight.]]
* GrandTheftMe:
** "Panopticon" reveals that [[spoiler:there has only ever been one head of the Magnus Institute: Jonah Magnus himself. He put his original body in the panopticon under the Institute, and has possessed each of his "successors" in turn with some ritual involving transplanting his eyes into their skull.]]
** "A Stern Look" reveals that [[spoiler:this is the Eye's ultimate plan, swapping out the "pupil" of Jonah for Jon, who it designed its Panopticon for.]]
* GreaterScopeVillain: While it's never appeared on screen and may not even be capable of doing so, everything in the podcast is ultimately down to its influence and [[spoiler: plan to reshape reality.]]
* ItAmusedMe: The closest thing to a human motivation the Eye can be said to have is this -- it has a fascination with humans, especially their fear and suffering, and all of its plans are designed to engineer novel horrors it can voyeuristically gawk at. [[spoiler: Episode 173 reveals that in the post-Change world the Eye is allowing children to age up into adults because it finds the simplistic fears of a child to be boring and predictable compared to parental fears, and gave the Dark the "Night Street" domain so it could [[EvilEvolves evolve]] the childlike fear of "monsters in the shadows" into something more complex and interesting.]]
* LackOfEmpathy: Jonah Magnus, founder of the Institute, received a letter from an old friend, pleading for help against malign supernatural forces that were closing in around him. Elias notes that Jonah could easily have saved him, but chose not to, simply out of curiosity for what would happen.
* LogicalWeakness: Its manipulative scope is terrifying given how far its powers extend, but there are some ways around it.
** Those of the Dark cannot be reliably observed due to its nature; even when [[spoiler:Jon has officially become an avatar with greater powers of knowing]], [[spoiler:he]] can't see their hideout.
** While Elias can see pretty much whatever he wants to, he actually has to ''focus'' on what he wants to see, and thus if he's busy inflicting MindRape on someone, he's blind until he finishes with them and can be OutGambitted.
** The Stranger, being a polar opposite of the Beholding, also has some natural defense against it. The Not-Them, one of its servants, had Jon fooled for an entire ''year'', which makes sense: the Stranger's schtick is looking close enough to human that even people who are looking at it won't notice (though as Martin points out in Episode 118 ("The Masquerade"), Elias seems to have seen through the ruse all along).
** Season 5 suggests that The Web's grand scheme is protected from the Eye's all-knowing by its sheer, wide reach. [[spoiler:Jon, whose powers of omniscience are at their peak, tries more than once to "know" what the plan is, but every time, all he sees is countless little actions orchestrated by the Spider, but his powers don't enable him to connect the dots and understand what they are meant to lead up to. Whenever he tries to follow the strands, he gets so caught up in it that he gets lightheaded and almost passes out]].
* MindRape: There's a sliding scale of how badly the Beholding and its servants do this to statement-givers. People who give statements of their own free will (particularly if the statements are written to be recorded later, instead of taken direct from subject) are generally fine, trauma from the original event aside. But if the Archivist [[spoiler: ''forces'' you to give a statement, you are fully aware you're being forced and can do nothing but calmly tell every last horrible detail. Worse, being Beheld in this way seems to mean you can never move past whatever horrible thing your statement was about, even if you were getting better before. Oh, and that the Archivist can watch you ''whenever you think about it''.]]
* NothingIsScarier: Inverted in the most horrifying way possible. Sometimes not knowing what happened is the better option--and the Beholding isn't going to let you take it.
* TheOmniscient: Servants of the Beholding are able to use their TrueSight to pierce the veil of several other powers who rely on hiding or obstruction;
** Jon can track down [[spoiler:Daisy even in the depths of the Buried's coffin]], see through the mind-bending power of the Unknowing with some effort, and is able to [[spoiler:accurately locate residents of the Lonely in their own domain once his powers have advanced]].
** Gertrude, though she didn't use her powers often and apparently didn't completely succumb to becoming an avatar, may have had this since she was able to build an accurate map to the center of the Spiral's maze, a particularly amazing feat as the Spiral revolves around confusion and deceit.
** Elias is ''actually omniscient'', and can see or know pretty much anything he desires to at any time, from any location.
* SinisterSentientSun: [[spoiler: After the Change, the Eye has replaced the Sun in the sky, and the rain is said to be the Eye's tears.]]
* SinisterSurveillance: The Eye’s schtick, and a primary ability of its followers. Elias has the ability to remotely view multiple people at once, and also to view past events. [[spoiler:Jon can see into the dreams of those who give him statements. And, now that he's started hunting, he can watch his victims while they're awake too.]] [[spoiler:Heads of the Magnus Institute, including Elias and James Wright (both of whom were really Jonah Magnus) have been said to be able to see through any eye, even ones in paintings]].
* {{Technopathy}}: To a limited degree; avatars of the Beholding, such as Elias and Samson Stiller (Episode 148) have been able to manipulate surveillance cameras, both to see through them, make them move in ways they're not designed to be able to move (Samson) and manipulate the footage (Elias).
* {{Telepathy}}: Elias is able to look into people's minds, and can forcibly confer knowledge on people. [[spoiler: Jon can also read minds and tear statements directly out of other people’s brains.]]
* TopGod: [[spoiler: Achieves this status after the Change, since its servant Jonah Magnus was the one who caused it. Reigns over the whole world, with the sun in the sky being replaced by a representation of the Eye, and constantly feeds on every other Power's domain by observing all the fears in the world and adding them to its store of knowledge, and imposes its metaphysics on the whole world by dividing all of humanity into "the Watchers" and "the Watched".]]
** [[spoiler: It is revealed, however, to be a PuppetKing -- its reign is hollow because the Change preventing the creation of new human souls means the End will eventually consume every human who lives, after which it will consume the other Entities and itself. Jon notes that the Eye doesn't seem aware of this eventuality or capable of comprehending it, and that it will keep on unwittingly feeding people to the End until it seals its own doom.]]
** [[spoiler: It's then revealed that it was the UnwittingPawn of the Web all along, who picked the Eye as the instrument for its XanatosGambit precisely because of all the Powers it was the most enslaved to its HorrorHunger drive to consume new fears and least capable of genuine thought or self-awareness.]]
* UnwittingPawn: [[spoiler: The final statement in episode 200 reveals the Eye was always one of these -- the Web chose the Eye to be its "fool", manipulating it into a TakeOverTheWorld plot that was doomed to fail due to the Web's sabotage, because of all the powers it has the most knowledge and yet as an AlmightyIdiot is the least self-aware.]]
* [[VillainsActHeroesReact Villains Act, Other Villains React]]: Seemingly least proactive of all the Powers, in keeping with its inclination to simply observe. However it may just be playing the LongGame.
** The LongGame is ultimately [[spoiler:confirmed AND averted. While its agent ultimately performs the only successful ritual ever, the Eye is an AlmightyIdiot and cannot act of its own volition.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Flesh]]
!!The Flesh, Meat, Viscera

Plays on the fear of the visceral and being consumed. Unique in that its primary source is animals (it gained strength after humans discovered industrial farming). [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Last Feast"]].
----
* TheBabyOfTheBunch: The newest of the currently roster of fourteen Powers, emerging sometime in the Industrial Revolution when modern factory farming was invented and a large percentage of sentient life on Earth became human-raised livestock. Its manifestations as a human fear tend to revolve around the way modern humans rarely think of ourselves as also being animals made of meat and find the idea fascinating and disturbing when we do.
** Noteably carried over into it's Avatars; while we hear about a few old Flesh Avatars, the two most prominent ones are both relatively young men who've only been servants of the Flesh for a few decades, compared to the other powers who often have Avatars who've served for centuries.
* BodyHorror: While the Flesh is rooted in a fear of being eaten, when it mixes with human body fixations and existential thoughts, the end results can veer into this.
* EvilIsVisceral: A statement outright compares the Flesh to the Demiurge from UsefulNotes/{{Gnosticism}}. [[spoiler:Appropriately enough, the Last Feast is held beneath a Gnostic temple.]]
* ImAHumanitarian: Cannibalism is a frequent element in Flesh events. As they say, "MEAT IS MEAT".
* SickeningSlaughterhouse: Due to gaining power from the fear of industrial farming created by animals, it has some degree of control over these, as seen in Episode 30. Another similar slaughterhouse appears in Episode 178 ("The Processing Line"), [[spoiler:in which humans caught in the Flesh domain are taken through it and processed and slaughtered like livestock]].
* TwistedEucharist: It's suspected to be involved with Episode 20 ("Desecrated Host"), and the {{squick}}y aspects of the Eucharist are a great hook for its manifestation in general.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Hunt]]
!!The Hunt
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 099

Plays on the fear of being hunted. Like The Flesh, this is a fear that is stronger within animals than in humans. [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Everchase"]].
----
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: It's not interested in the actual kill; that's the Slaughter's domain. For servants of the Hunt, the ''chase'' is what matters. That doesn't mean they won't hurt normal people, but they seem to prefer targets that provide a better struggle, such as vampires or the worshippers of other Powers.
* CategoryTraitor: All the Powers and their servants [[WeAreStrugglingTogether frequently find themselves at odds with each other]], but Hunters seem by far the most likely to openly interfere with the other Powers' plans, for no reason other than that [[HuntingTheMostDangerousGame servants of the other Powers make the best sport]].
** [[spoiler: This ends up being reversed, in a way, by the finale's revelation that the Hunt was the original Power, and that the other Powers are its mutant wayward children -- from its perspective ''they're'' the traitors.]]
* CatsAreMean: [[spoiler: One of the more darkly whimsical moments of Season 5 is finding out that the Hunt has a whole domain dedicated to the fears of small animals hunted by housecats, where Georgie's cat The Admiral now resides as a monstrous version of his past self.]]
* FirstOfItsKind: Episode 200 very strongly implies that the Hunt is the eldest and original of the Powers, existing before humanity evolved as an inchoate manifestation of the fear every prey animal has when hunted by a predator. All the other Powers originate from humanity gaining sapience and the capacity to derive newer, abstract fears from that primal one. (The ability to actually comprehend death and mortality as the result of "being caught" spawned the End, the awareness of nighttime as a specific period of time when predators were more dangerous spawned the Dark, etc.).
* TheHunterBecomesTheHunted: Naturally. The Hunt's disciples often seem to target other hunters, as seen with the werewolf going after the game hunters, the true-crime group hunting each other, and the monster hunters tracking down servants of other powers (or their own).
* HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: Played with. Members of a true-crime reading group end up doing this, but they only hunt one another.
* ItsTheJourneyThatCounts: The hunt doesn't have to be the literal hunting of living creatures-- Episode 133 reveals that people obsessed with reaching an undiscovered location like the Northwest Passage, or a non-existent location (such as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_City_of_Z Lost City of Z]] and [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sannikov_Land Sannikov Land]]) can be drawn into its influence, as their hunt is never-ending, and VictoryIsBoring to the Hunt.
* ALighterShadeOfBlack: It's by no means sweet, but its servants usually stick to hunting monsters or servants of the other Powers. While the Slaughter is all about wanton violence on the innocent and guilty alike, the Hunt seems more driven by the struggle to survive, and some of the episodes indicate that normal people are less of a challenge than rival worshippers.
* MoreTeethThanTheOsmondFamily: Creatures related to the Hunt (such as the one from Episode 31 ("First Hunt"), something that killed an associate of Leitner (Episode 80: "The Librarian") and possibly vampires) are described as having far too many teeth.
* NeverHurtAnInnocent: It varies servant to servant. The werewolf in "First Hunt" has no problem going after regular hunters in the woods. On the other hand, Lisa in "Thrill of the Chase" only targets other hunters and rejects the idea of turning her newfound bloodlust on her flatmates because they wouldn't "get it". Likewise, Julia, Trevor, and Daisy are only really interested in hunting things that serve other Powers.
* OurVampiresAreDifferent: Seem to have some association with vampires (here, silent telepaths more akin to solitary predators than humans), as well as with [[HeWhoFightsMonsters the people who hunt them]].
* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: One unfortunate hunter finds himself encountering one in the United States, albeit he looks like a normal human. A very sharp, drooling human capable of tracking and running through a forest with ease and surviving two rifles' worth of gunshot wounds.
* SlowlySlippingIntoEvil: Of all the Powers, the Hunt seems to be the best at drawing in people with good intentions - hunting monsters, protecting humanity - and slowly twisting them until they become monsters themselves.
* VictoryIsBoring: For the Hunt and its disciples, the chase is all that matters and once their quarry is caught, they quickly move on to another. Case in point, Episode 112 ("Thrill of the Chase") featured a bunch of people who were possessed by the Hunt and proceeded to hunt down and kill each other with knives. When only one remained, she apparently entered a state of apathy, turned herself in and then died in prison; according to Basira, she just "stopped". [[spoiler: This is even present in the Hunt's Ritual, the Everchase: as the name implies, the ritual ''never ends'' and simply sends disciples on an eternal chase for something they will never find, with the occasional prey thrown their way to keep them going.]]
* WorfHadTheFlu: Hunters are very difficult to kill, though this is more for ferocity than sheer durability.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Lonely]]
!!The Lonely, Forsaken, The One Alone

Plays on the fear of isolation. [[spoiler:Its last known Ritual, engineered by Peter Lukas, was known as "The Silence"]].
----
* AchillesHeel: ThePowerOfLove, and being reminded that YouAreNotAlone. Three statements that deal with The Lonely (Episode 013, Episode 48 and Episode 150) have those involved escape through some reminder of love-- episode 13 has the voice of Naomi Herne's seemingly-dead fiance, Episode 48 has the face of Andrea Nunis's mother, and Episode 150 has Herman Gorgoli coming to the realization that he still loves his partner.
* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: Statement givers who have been victims of the Lonely tend to be people who claim to in some way enjoy solitude or to be seeking it out when the incidents occur - incidents which might end with them being isolated forever.
** Naomi Herne (Episode 13: "Alone") was an introvert.
** Barnabas Bennett (Episode 92 "Nothing but Remains") was generally content with having never married or had children and reminisced fondly of an occasion when he was left alone during a trip to Egypt.
** Adonis Biros (Episode 108: "Monologue") was an actor who mainly got into acting because he liked doing monologues and didn't like socializing with his fellow cast members.
** Herman Gogoli (Episode 150: "Cul-de-Sac") was going through a nasty separation from his husband and was trying to convince himself he was happier living the single life, eventually being saved from getting stuck in a Lonely dimension by his love for his husband.
* CreepyFamily: The Lukas family appear to have long-lasting connections with the Lonely, dating back at least as far as the lifetime of Jonah Magnus himself. They appear in MAG 13, at the funeral of their local WhiteSheep, and Naomi Herne is shocked at the amount of cold disdain and apathy radiating off of them.
* DeadlyRoadTrip: One of the sub-themes of The Lonely seems to center around travel-- many statements involve people getting lost in foreign countries or cities they're unfamiliar with.
* EldritchLocation: Because of the way the Lonely works, quite a few of its manifestations involve warping areas or a victim's perception of an area to a hideous psychological effect, such as turning a drab suburb into a nameless, feeling-less world of inactivity and anonymity, or crowding a street with hundreds of people who have almost-faces and speak an almost-language.
* {{Invisibility}}: One the more practical applications of the Lonely's powers that its avatars such as Peter Lukas and [[spoiler:Martin]] can use, allowing them to go unnoticed and to further sow alienation and paranoia.
* {{Irony}}: One would expect a family serving an entity that embodies isolationist horror to be the body-hopping ones among the BigBadDuumvirate, but this is not the case--while Maxwell Rayner's "family" is really him pulling a GrandTheftMe, the Lukases actually ''marry'' and ''start families''. Granted, even this is well-spun towards The Forsaken--having people around that you are ''supposed'' to love and have a good relationship with (but don't) can fuel this Power just as well.
* LonelyAmongPeople: The Lonely doesn't necessarily require someone to be physically isolated; it can also target people who have people in their lives, but for whatever reason can't or won't connect to them.
* OminousFog: One major way the Lonely manifests itself is as an eerie, silent fog. This serves to both obscure its victims' surroundings and further isolate them by making it difficult for other people to find them.
* SpaceIsolationHorror: Generally based on a fear of isolation. The Daedalus was built to take advantage of this.
* StepfordSuburbia: This particular concern falls under the Lonely's portfolio -- this fear manifesting subtly as a fear of being ''even more alone'' when surrounded by people you have no way of making a real connection with. [[spoiler:The post-Change version of the London suburbs is implied to be populated by victims of DomesticAbuse.]]
* TokenGoodTeammate:
** Evan Lukas, introduced in Episode 13, was implied to not want anything to do with his family's business of vanishing innocent people. Episode 111 implies that he was killed by the Lukases specifically for this reason. It doesn't stop him from saving his former fiance, however.
** In Episode 159 ("The Last"), [[spoiler:Peter reveals that he had four siblings at one point; of those, two sisters disavowed the family and their association with the Lonely and moved away for good]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Slaughter]]
!!The Slaughter, The War

Plays on the fear of war, violence, and slaughter. [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Risen War"]].
----
* TheBerserker: One statement-giver describes a recently-touched fellow soldier as being the most ferocious and savage soldier he had ever seen in the entire war. He clarifies that it is not a compliment.
* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy: The early twentieth-century poet [[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen Wilfred Owen]] was touched or claimed by the Slaughter. Apparently, his best poetry came about after he "saw" the Slaughter while charging the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI Hindenburg Line]].
* TheCorruption: All Powers work like this on some level, but the Slaughter seems to function a lot like disease or blood infection. [[spoiler:Melanie is infected by the bullet in her leg, causing the Slaughter's influence to spread through her and turn her more violent and aggressive, until the infection is removed]].
* MagicMusic: Quite a lot of the encounters with it involve some kind of musical motif-- from its manifestation as the Piper to the fact that [[spoiler:its Ritual, The Risen War, is played to the tune of several drums and things that sound like trumpets.]]
* OutOfFocus: There are only about 9 episodes total that focus on the Slaughter, and most of the time it takes a backseat to more prominent powers. Even its avatars are mostly incidental and part of other stories, and the only one of its avatars to actually play a prominent role, [[spoiler:Melanie, is freed from its influence before she can manifest any Slaughter-themed powers aside from a violent disposition]].
* WarIsHell
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Spiral]]
!!The Spiral, Es Mentiras[[note]]Spanish for "It-Is-Lies"[[/note]], It-Is-Not-What-It-Is, Twisting Deceit
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 080

Plays on madness and doubting one’s own sense of reality. [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Great Twisting"]].
----
* AlienGeometries: A common element of Spiral episodes is warping geometry.
* BedlamHouse: [[spoiler: Runs one of these known as "Wonderland House" after the Change, to feed on the fears of people who were afraid of [[PsychoPsychologist abusive mental health treatment]] in life.]]
* EldritchLocation: While almost all places associated with the Powers have some level of bizarreness, the Spiral really plays it up.
* EndlessCorridor: In "The New Door", the statement-giver ended up in one of these. And [[AFateWorseThanDeath has to go ''back'']].
* MindScrew: Appropriate for a power that relies on making you doubt your senses and sanity; statements from victims and creatures of the Spiral tend to be disjointed and talk about things that are entirely contradictory. Probably the best summary comes from Michael when talking about a victim witnessing [[spoiler:the Great Twisting]]:
-->''Michael did not go mad, though no words you could have said would have convinced him otherwise.''
* SinisterGeometry: If there's a pattern associated with the Spiral somewhere, it will either drive a character mad or actively try to kill them.
* YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm: Avatars of the Spiral are, comparatively, rather rare--due to its nature, being understood or contained is inherently antithetical to it. In fact, its manifestations such as Michael are the result of at least one botched ritual--introducing a human, aka "understandable" component messes things up for it and contains it.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Stranger]]
!!The Stranger, I-Do-Not-Know-You

Plays on the fear of the unknown, the unseen, and the uncanny. [[spoiler:Its Ritual is known as "The Unknowing"]].
----
* ArcVillain: Through the Not-Them and Nikola, of seasons 2 and 3 respectively.
* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy:
** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Grimaldi Joseph "Joey" Grimaldi]], a famous clown during the early 1800s, is a servant of the Stranger, being remade into the form of Nikola Orsinov.
** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_von_Kempelen Wolfgang von Kempelen]], the creator of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk Mechanical Turk]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_von_Kempelen%27s_speaking_machine a mechanical speech synthesizer]], is revealed to have served the Stranger and to have played a pivotal role in [[spoiler:their ritual in 1787]].
* ChekhovsGun: In a shorter form, due to the "uncanny" theme, the Stranger lends itself well to early hints that one could go without noticing if they weren't looking. Melanie notices (well before it becomes apparent that she isn't human) that Sarah has an odd smell, and one of the ''off'' things about her is that when she "wakes up", she's very sudden about it and shows no sign of fatigue. Daniel Rawlings chain smokes to cover up the same scent, and Alexander Scaplehorn notices that he never makes eye contact some time before the reason for that becomes ''disturbingly'' evident.
* CircusOfFear: The Soviet Tsirk Drugoy, or "Other Circus", was a circus of Stranger agents.
* CreepyDoll: As part of their "things that look like people but are not people" theme.
* {{Doppelganger}}: The Not-Them.
* EasyImpersonation: When the Not-Them replaces someone, it doesn’t even bother creating a similar replica. Rather, with its RealityWarper abilities, it simply writes the original out of existence, overwriting photographs, videos, and even memories with this new version.
* EldritchLocation: The ritual site of the Unknowing becomes "one long category error" once it's in progress, and anyone not affiliated with it completely loses sense of their reality as their semiotic abilities fail.
* FauxAffablyEvil: Manifestations are superficially polite and cheery and sadistically violent (especially Nikola, who seems to delight in pretending to have a civil conversation while explaining how she's going to skin someone).
* HoistByTheirOwnPetard: Some of the Stranger's servants murdered Tim Stoker's brother Danny; years later, Tim gets his revenge by blowing up the ritual of the Unknowing.
* HumanResources: When they don't straight-up replace someone with a Not-Them, they use their body parts for disguises. (Nikola, being an actual mannequin, has [[DeadlyEuphemism borrowed]] a voice box from some unlucky soul -- likely Lana from Episode 83 -- so she can talk).
* MagicMusic: One of the Powers associated with this trope, along with the Slaughter. One of the chief features of its CircusOfFear is the magical Calliope played by Nikolai Denikin, which serves as the centerpiece of the statement introducing the circus (in Episode 24, "Strange Music"). Its ritual, the Unknowing, is described as a surreal dance performance accompanied by a choir.
* MurderousMannequin: Frequent, playing into the 'uncanny valley' aspect. Its head manifestation, Nikola Orsinov, is one.
* MonsterClown: As mentioned, the Stranger at one point operated through a circus, so of course there were some scary clowns.
* PerceptionFilter - TheGenericGuy: The Stranger's various manifestations, when not as polished as a Not-Them, are typically hard to distinguish; people find themselves unable to remember many details about them except that they look "like normal people" or "like you'd expect"; Breekon and Hope exhibit this, as do the Anatomy students.
* UncannyValley: In-universe, this is their thing. In addition to their control over mannequins and taxidermy, the Not-Them practically ooze it; even if you don't know someone is one, there is always something ''off'' about them. Before Jon realizes that Sasha has been replaced, he muses that all the pictures of "her" with her boyfriend look like stock photos for some reason he can't pin down.
* WeHaveReserves: The Stranger's ritual is noted to be unusually difficult to destroy, as if you don't hit them at exactly the right moment, they'll just set up shop somewhere else and get it underway again, because all of the required features are flexible. The location can change, new skins can be added, etc.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Vast]]
!!The Vast, The Falling Titan, The Vertigo, Void

Plays on agoraphobia, vertigo, deep waters, and the fears of the weather, emptiness and the incomprehensible scale of the universe. [[spoiler:Their last know ritual, conceived and enacted by Simon Fairchild, was called "The Awful Deep"]].
----
* EldritchOceanAbyss: Due to deep oceans falling under the Vast's fear of great emptiness, manifestations involving the sea will sometimes play on this.
** The statement subject of Episode 51 ("High Pressure") was a salvage diver who, during a job, found herself watching a wide, empty ocean devoid of life - except for the incomprehensibly huge shape of a hand.
** [[spoiler:The Awful Deep was an attempt by Fairchild to harness humanity's fear of the ocean during the Victorian era. It didn't take, because as it turned out, people cared less about it than Simon had hoped.]]
** Episode 195 ("Adrift"), [[spoiler:taking place in a domain based on the Vast (apparently with some Web influences), features a statement subject stuck at the dark bottom of a deep, icy ocean with some gargantuan monster swimming past them]].
* EvilVirtues: The two servants of the Vast who appear in person are both cordial and humble, even if only [[FauxAffablyEvil superficially so]]. Simon Fairchild explicitly shrugs off a failure that left him [[NoodleIncident having to swim from bottom of the ocean]] as regretable but not worth dwelling on. If nothing else, devoting one's life to realizing the impossible enormity of the universe appears to give one some perspective.
* {{Foil}}: To the Buried, the fear of constriction and tight spaces, easily the best example of two Powers being opposites of each other. This is highlighted by [[spoiler:Gertrude stopping the Buried's ritual with the remains of someone marked by the Vast]]. However, they also provide an example of why [[spoiler:no one Power could be brought into the world on its own. As Jonah Magnus put it, "Even those that seem to exist in direct opposition rely on each other for their definition as much as up relies on down. To try and create a world with only the Buried makes as much sense as trying to conceive a world with only down."]]
* ForTheEvulz: While the servants of the Lightless Flame derive power from wanton destruction and the Lukases derive it from isolating people, the Fairchilds seem to just give people to the Vast just because they can. [[spoiler:When Simon Fairchild finally appears, he actually says he may throw Martin off of a roller coaster ''for a laugh'', and only decides against it when Martin says he isn't afraid of them.]]
* GiantHandsOfDoom: Some manifestations of the Vast prominently involve giant hands.
** Antonia Hayley (Episode 51: "High Pressure") saw the shape of a colossal hand while scuba diving and finding herself in an unimaginably deep, lifeless ocean.
** During the attack on Leitner's library (Episode 80: "The Librarian"), one of his assistants was grabbed by a giant hand that burst through the roof.
** Julian Jennings and his mother (Episode 124: "Left Hanging") saw someone get pulled out of a cable car by a grey hand from the sky.
* HumansAreInsects: Even moreso than the other Powers. Say what you will about Desolation or Meat, at least they operate on a human scale. The few glimpses we've gotten of the Vast indicate that humans and their InsignificantLittleBluePlanet don't even register as a noteworthy speck.
* InTheBlood: Subverted. The Fairchilds -- the [[CreepyFamily family]] most closely associated with the Vast -- are not blood relations. [[spoiler: Later played with, in that there is only Simon Fairchild, and he has not always been Simon Fairchild.]]
* InsignificantLittleBluePlanet
* {{Kaiju}}: [[spoiler: Simon Fairchild's post-Change Domain is a grotesque parody of this trope, where huge crowds of people flee from an enormous monster that is itself made of [[FusionDance a huge number of human beings clinging together in fear]].]]
%%* MeaningfulName: The Fairchilds may derive their name from Fairchild Aircraft Ltd.
* PunyEarthlings: Many of the things related to the fear, such as wide open spaces, great heights, deep oceans and intense weather, can be traced to a fear of being powerless against something huge and uncaring.
* ReligiousHorror: Has yet to be seen fully in the podcast, but Simon Fairchild mentions in Episode 151 ("Big Picture") that he used to play on religion until that lost its conceptual scope. Also, some victims of the Vast are said to have been grabbed by a giant hand from the sky, an imagery which certainly has religious connotations.
* RuleOfSymbolism: It's not really discussed at all, but while the Buried has claim over fears of metaphorical constriction through poverty, the two primary avatars of the Vast are known to be obscenely wealthy, again highlighting the two powers' juxtaposition.
* StrawNihilist: People who follow the Vast have become content with the fact that they don't matter in the face of their Power-- and in their eyes, neither does anyone else, so it's perfectly okay to strand them in vast, empty spaces for the rest of their puny existences.
* WeatherManipulation: Has at least some control over storms and lightning.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Web]]
!!The Web, The Spider, Mother-of-Puppets, Spinner-of-Schemes
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 081

Plays on arachnophobia, as well as the general theme of entrapment, stasis and being manipulated by an outside force. On relatively good terms with the Beholding. [[spoiler:Has also been shown to keep an interest in Jon.]] It apparently either does not have a [[spoiler: Ritual, or at least has no interest in performing one]].
----
* AllAccordingToPlan: This is its basic shtick, and it's repeatedly brought up how futile it is to try to outthink and outmaneuver the eldritch deity of thinking and maneuvering. [[spoiler: Jon's BatmanGambit to try to deny it its final victory in Episode 200, predictably, fails miserably due to a very well-planted ChekhovsGun (his [[PerceptionFilter inability to keep track of the cigarette lighter]] it gave him as a gift long ago).]]
* AllWebbedUp: Its victims will sometimes end up this way.
* BigBad: [[spoiler: in 197, it's revealed that its one of the few Entities capable of actual intention, and that literally ''everything'' that happened in the podcast is a part of its plan to infect the multiverse.]]
* BodyHorror: After the Corruption fades out of prominence, this is the Power that takes over that role. A disturbing pattern in statements involving the web is spiders taking up residence inside human bodies, whether be it in the form of incubation for eggs or... [[OrificeInvasion worse.]]
* [[spoiler: TheBadGuyWins: In the end, the Web got exactly what it wanted: it got to escape with the rest of its "siblings" into the multiverse, to sow and reap terror in countless other realities as they are now free from the original world that gave birth to them. Possibly [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] as it may not, however, have ultimately been able to separate itself from the other Powers or even bring them into a universe with life: see UncertainDoom in the General folder.]]
* TheDreaded: Even avatars of the other Powers tend to be terrified enough of The Web that, whenever the Spider starts clearly directing them towards something or asking them for something, they'll [[KnowWhenToFoldEm just go along with it]] out of fear that it will use its vast influence to punish them or just force them to do it anyway.
* GiantSpider:
** Appears in Episode 110 ("Creature Feature"), where it [[spoiler:eats the entire cast of a film, as well as the director. Bodies of the cast are found washed up on a shore near Los Angeles every February, completely desiccated.]]
** In Episode 172 ("Strung Out"), [[spoiler:one or several giant spiders appear in a theater filled with victims being puppeted around on the stages]].
* HiddenAgendaVillain: It seems to have some grand scheme that all of its smaller plans and machinations are supposed to facilitate, but it's anyone's guess what the end point of the plan is, [[spoiler:until Episode 197 ("Connected"), when Annabelle reveals the goal of the plan]].
* HorribleHollywood: Seems to have at least some pull over the film industry-- two FamedInStory figures associated with Hollywood (a director and a stop motion artist) either served the Web or fell under its influence.
* ItCanThink: [[spoiler:Season 5 reveals that it's the only part of the overall fear gestalt that's achieved genuine self-awareness.]]
* KillItWithFire: Daisy mentions that this is one of its weaknesses in Episode 147, hence its generally antagonistic relationship to the Desolation. Agnes Montague is one of the characters most fervently opposed to the Web, and dealt it one of its biggest setbacks when she burned down the house at Hill Top Road. [[spoiler: Or so it seems -- it later turns out this was AllPartOfThePlan to widen the crack in reality at the house, and, far from fire being the Web's "weakness", the cigarette lighter it gave Jon is the final key to carrying out its plan.]]
* LesserOfTwoEvils: The Web is quite evil indeed but is generally presented as this relative to the other Powers, since it has no ritual and seems content with the world as it is. [[spoiler: The finale sets it up as this on the grand scale, with the only two possible futures being the End's hope for the final destruction of this world after the Change with no new souls being born, or the Web's ultimate gambit of escaping this world to slowly and subtly infect the rest of the universe. Episode 199 features the main characters having a heated debate over whether this is actually the "lesser" evil if you think through the implications.]]
* TheManBehindTheMan: [[spoiler: In seasons 3 and 4, it becomes increasingly clear that Jon’s ascension as The Archivist has been orchestrated and abetted by The Web.]]
* MediumAwareness: [[spoiler: The Web is the only one of the Powers -- indeed, one of the only entities of any kind -- to be aware that TheMultiverse exists and that the Powers aren't a universal law of nature but a specific feature of this one CosmicHorrorStory that many {{Alternate Universe}}s don't have at all, including the RealLife AlternateTimeline we're listening to the podcast in. And it resents this fact, and [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou wants to break through that fourth wall and start feeding on us as well]].]]
** [[spoiler: It's also "medium aware" in that the specific weirdness of the podcast format -- i.e. the Magnus Institute's dependence on recording audio statements onto analog magnetic tape -- is something it engineered and tricked the Eye into adopting, knowing the tapes would come under its sphere of influence as well.]]
* TheMole: The other Powers aren't really conscious enough for it to truly count as "betrayal", but the Web is revealed to be the Power working against the other Powers' TakeOverTheWorld rituals, because it likes the way the world is. [[spoiler: The DramaticIrony is, once you fully understand the situation, the Web is trying to ''save'' the other Powers from themselves -- because it's inextricably bound to them and part of them -- because their HorrorHunger for more fear to feast on will eventually destroy themselves (which is the End's actual agenda). The plot of ''TMA'' turns out to be one long XanatosGambit on its part to make sure that when a successful ritual does happen it happens in a way that will allow it to undo it and finish its escape route into TheMultiverse in the process.]]
* MoreThanMindControl: It has the power to co-opt people's will--not so much making them do things as making them decide to do things. It takes a strong will or a mark from another Power to snap out of it.
* OnlySaneMan: [[spoiler:Ultimately turns out to be the only one of the Powers with a humanlike capacity for rational self-interest, with the others purely driven by their HorrorHunger addiction to causing fear and suffering. This is ''not'' the same as the Web having a conscience or any capacity for remorse -- indeed, if the Powers have any equivalent of that, in a twisted way it's the Web's counterpart, the End, which wants the endless cycle of generating fears in humans to feed the growth of the Powers to stop someday when the universe stops, as opposed to the Web's arguably-mad dream of keeping it going forever by spreading through TheMultiverse.]]
* ParanoiaGambit: One of the Web's favorite shticks is to let everyone else tie themselves in knots thinking about whether this or that action plays into the latest game of XanatosSpeedChess, until they freak out and do nothing at all.
* PeoplePuppets: While it usually sticks to subtly manipulating people and secretly guiding them to commit certain actions, some Web-related incidents have shown that it's equally capable of controlling their physical movements directly:
** In MAG 69 ("Thought for the Day"), the statement giver was at one point compelled by Annabelle Cane into strangling himself, though he survived by knocking her into a wall and throwing her off.
** In MAG 81 ("A Guest for Mr. Spider"), Jon and another boy were both compelled to walk up to a door when reading a book of the Web.
** In MAG 172 ("Strung Out"), [[spoiler:a victim trapped in the Web's domain was puppeteered around on a stage by a giant spider with ropes stuck to them with hooks through their flesh]].
* PragmaticVillainy: Peter Lukas points out that, like the End, [[spoiler:its followers have never attempted a ritual of any kind. Unlike the End, who claims everything eventually, Lukas speculates that the Web likes the world the way it is, as people can be manipulated very easily]].
** However, Episode 160 makes this a bit ambiguous. [[spoiler:Jonah mentions that one of the reasons why he made Jon part of his plan was that he had already been marked by The Web and, Jonah figured, the Web directed him to the Institute as an implicit blessing for his plan to enact a ritual that would bring all the Powers into the world. If he is right, then it's possible that the only reason the Web never attempted a ritual of its own is because they, like Jonah, had figured out that such rituals were futile and decided to just let Jonah do the heavy lifting]].
** Episode 197 ("Connections") reveals that the Web never attempted a ritual because [[spoiler:they had figured out that the only way to do a successful one would be to bring all of the Powers into the world, including the End, which would eventually doom all life and the Powers. Instead, they spent centuries guiding avatars of the Powers, some of them their own, to the location of Hilltop Road in order to force a confrontation between them and widen a crack between dimensions to prepare for an escape when someone did perform a successful ritual]].
* TheSmurfettePrinciple: The Web is the only Entity to ever be referred to with "she/her" pronouns, by Oliver Banks in his statement in Episode 121, although he could ambiguously have been referring to its avatar Annabelle Cane. (It's also the only one with a feminine epithet, "Mother-of-Puppets").
* SneakySpider: The Web is the embodiment of this trope, as she and her agents are portrayed as subtle, patient tricksters who lie on the fringes of the main action, quietly weaving their intricate webs until their plans are ready to come to fruition.
* SpidersAreScary: Being arachnophobia incarnate, this is naturally the case with statements involving the Web.
* TheWormThatWalks: Humans sufficiently corrupted become filled with tiny spiders, as Trevor the erstwhile vampire hunter discovers.
* WouldHurtAChild: Of course, this probably applies to ''all'' the Powers, but it has targeted children in the statements we hear more than most.
** In "Recluse", it turns out the foster home is run by one of its agents, and kids who "age out" are actually used as hosts for spider eggs.
** In "A Guest For Mr. Spider", the titular children's book not only contains a fly feeding his unfortunate child to Mr. Spider but [[spoiler: enchants children to summon the Spider and give themselves to it.]]
* XanatosGambit: [[spoiler:The entire plot of ''The Magnus Archives'' is one on the part of the Web, whose wheels-within-wheels plot wasn't just to prevent the other Powers' rituals, but to eventually let the Eye succeed in one in such a way that it could be undone and allow the Web to escape to another universe.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Spoiler Character]]
!!The Extinction, The Terrible Change, The Future Without Us, The-World-Is-Always-Ending
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 134

A new emerging Power. Plays on the fear of catastrophic change and one's world or one's self being replaced with something terrible. So far, statements involving it have touched on nuclear warfare, transhumanism, and TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt.

...Except maybe not; in Episode 157, Adelard Dekker, the one who has most believed in the emergence of the Extinction, concluded that the fear may not yet be prevalent enough to manifest. Instead, he speculated that maybe such an existential fear currently only runs through the other fears in an undeveloped state, or that the proper formation of such a fear takes longer and is more complicated than previously believed. It's confirmed in MAG 160 that the Extinction has yet to manifest as its own Power, as Elias is able to complete his ritual without its mark. However, it does get at least one domain of its own in the world after the Change, but doesn't cause a grand extinction event as was feared.
----
* AbandonedArea: Some statements suggest that it tends to manifest in run-down, man-made locations:
** In its introductory episode, "Time of Revelation" (Episode 134), the door to post-apocalyptic Paris appears in an apartment that hadn't been used for almost 150 years.
** In "Decrypted" (Episode 144), it appears near a vacant lot with a rusty old pylon in the middle of a practically deserted rural wasteland.
** In "Reflection" (Episode 156), it appears in an old, abandoned amusement park.
* AmbiguousSituation:
** Martin notes that a lot of statements involving it could be the work of other powers-- the artificial structures in the Amazon might be under the Stranger's influence due to the uncanny human figures, the Amusement Park in Reflections may be the work of The Flesh, The Spiral or Terminus might be responsible for Sergei, and even the Spiral could, at a stretch, be responsible for creating the image of Paris post-Extinction. Episode 157 strongly indicated that the other Powers were at work during those manifestations, and that maybe the fear of an apocalypse is something that the Powers share on an existential level.
** Even after it's confirmed to exist post-change, it's still not clear what's going on with it. Was it a true 15th entity all along? Was it on its way there as Dekker feared? Or was it barely existent before it was "solidified" by the Change? Even Jon's omniscience couldn't tell for sure.
* BaitAndSwitch: For a while we're led to believe the emergence of the Extinction is the greater-scope apocalypse Jon needs to make alliances with the other Powers to prevent. This is false -- the true apocalypse was always the mass ritual being planned by Jon's [[BigBadFriend own patrons]], Jonah Magnus and the Eye itself -- but the Extinction could, ironically, be seen as a half-formed fear ''about'' this possibility, which never fully manifested before it actually came to pass.
* TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt: Emphasis on "as we know it": unlike the End, a key part of Extinction is that the world we have is replaced with something far worse.
* EvilerThanThou: Peter sees the Extinction this way, because say what you will about the other Powers, but they at least need to have humans and other living creatures around to feed on. The Extinction, at least according to a theory he seems to subscribe to, aims to wipe out all life as we know it and replace it with something new and different that can fear being annihilated in turn.
* FetusTerrible: Of a sort. The Extinction is still nascent, making it the closest thing to "unborn" a Power can get. In a way, it's rather fitting, as it concerns itself with the horrors of the world to be found after mankind in its current form, a world itself yet to be born.
* GaiasVengeance: It's implied that one of the major drivers of Extinction's emergence is climate change and environmental degradation: much like factory farming spawned the Flesh, mass extinction of animal species has helped spawn Extinction.
* ImplacableMan: If you have the misfortune to be sucked into one of the Extinction's...pocket universes? manifestations?... getting back to the normal world is only a temporary reprieve. What exactly it does is not clear yet, but Dekker says that both the people he's taken Extinction statements from were living on borrowed time, and the second one explicitly says he's being followed.
* RealAfterAll: Whatever evidence there was to believe that the Extinction wasn't real or wasn't a proper Power of its own is wiped away as of the Change, where one of its domains is very much present and very distinctly its own.
* RenegadeSplinterFaction: In Episode 134 ("Time of Revelation"), Dekker speculated that the Extinction might have been part of the End back in the time [[HumanityIsSuperior when an end of humanity was considered the end of everything]]. While the End isn't a force for good, it is fairly passive compared to the other Powers.
* {{Transhuman}}: One statement involves a (possible) transhuman experiment GoneHorriblyWrong.
* UnseenNoMore: In Episode 175 ("Epoch"), we finally get definite, concrete proof of its existence, in the form of one of its domains in the fearverse.
* WalkingSpoiler: The very existence of a 15th Power is a spoiler in an of itself.
[[/folder]]

!Recurring Characters
Characters who do not work at the Magnus Institute, but play a prominent role nonetheless:

[[folder:Adelard Dekker]]
!!Adelard Dekker
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 077

A friend and colleague of Gertrude Robinson's. [[spoiler:He shows up in several statements, cataloging and fighting against servants of the Powers.]]
----
* AntiHero: He's willing to do some very unscrupulous things for the sake of protecting the world from the supernatural.
* BadassNormal: Through all of his accounts there is no indication that Dekker was anything more or less than human; at several moments he lamented his lack of Fear-given powers that would make his job easier. Nonetheless, through cunning, ingenuity, and cold-bloodedness he managed to disable, trap, or even kill numerous monsters and avatars much stronger than him.
* BigGood: While he's a bit unscrupulous about it, he is a fundamentally heroic and moral figure, even more so than Gertrude. While Gertrude is only in it to stop the rituals and doesn't care about anything else, Adelard is out to protect the little guys from the horrors of the world.
* BlackAndNerdy: One of the few recurring characters to have an explicitly defined race and no less academically inclined than most of the main cast. Describes himself as being an avid reader since childhood.
* GoodIsNotNice: Though not kind, or empathetic, or merciful, he might be the employee of the Archives that can be best counted on to do the right thing.
* HiddenDepths: Despite his occasionally brutal and cold-blooded way of operating, he is revealed to be at least somewhat religious in "Rotten Core" (Episode 157). He also decides that one victim he interviews has had enough horror and protects their identity from Gertrude and a life of nightmares.
* OccultDetective: Has shades of this, aiding individuals who have encountered the supernatural and taking it upon himself to destroy or contain certain entities.
* PragmaticHero: Dekker was firmly on the side of good, but ruthlessly pragmatic in his hunts; his first appearance had him leave a man to die rather than try to save him from the avatar of the End that was killing him, because Dekker knew there was no point in picking a fight he couldn't win. [[spoiler:Even his dying moments showed this attitude; when he decided to MercyKill both himself and the other victims of Amherst's final plague, he chose fire for the job instead of something more merciful, because it would make it easier for the ECDC to clean up the plague site.]]
* PosthumousCharacter: [[spoiler:According to "Rotten Core" (Episode 157), he died in 2013, fighting a manifestation of The Corruption]].
* {{Sadist}}: When he lobotomizes a servant of The End, the description he gives of it is... ''very'' detailed.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Gerard Keay]]
!!Gerard Keay
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 004
->'''Voiced by:''' Jon Gracey

A young man heavily involved in the supernatural. The son of [[EvilOldFolks Mary Keay]], he appears in numerous statements at various stages of his life [[spoiler:including after his own death]].
----
* AffectionateNickname: “I always wanted my friends to call me Gerry”. Tellingly, whenever Jon talks about him after meeting his skin book spirit, he usually refers to him as "Gerry".
* AmbiguousSituation:
** The exact nature of his connection to the Eye is never elaborated upon. Gertrude implies that the Beholding is fond of him and he occasionally displayed the Archivist ability [[TrueSight to know things he should not have]], such as being able to detect that the statement giver in MAG 48 was marked by the Lonely. His tattoos also seemed to protect him against the abilities of other Avatars. Despite this, he never actually joined the Institute and only assisted Gertrude as a freelancer.
** There's also the circumstances around his death. While traveling with Gertrude, Gerard had a massive seizure and when brought to a hospital, they discover he's dying of a brain tumor. However, neither Gertrude or Gerry can explain to the doctors why he didn't seek any treatment and it's implied he might not have displayed any symptoms before. So did he die of natural circumstances or was there something supernatural about it? Was the Eye perhaps protecting him from certain death, similar to how the Hunt kept Trevor alive? And if so, why did it decide to let him die?
* BadassBookworm: Though not enough of the latter to stop him from destroying dangerous ones, his mother gave him a [[TomeOfEldritchLore very particular form of homeschooling]] and however it happened he's noted to be a lot stronger than he looks. Enough so that WordOfGod has described him as a "scrawny goth bookworm" when teasing listeners getting Gerard and [[BodyHorror Jared]] confused.
* DeaderThanDead: Gerard died of brain cancer, then had his soul bound to the skin book. In exchange for his help, Gerard demands that Jon burn his page, thus rendering him really, really and eternally dead. Probably.
* DisappearedDad: His father was once one of Gertrude's assistants at the Magnus Institute. His mother killed him after he finally found a way to "[[EyeScream quit]]" to raise Gerard.
* {{Goth}}: Described as one by Jurgen Leitner.
* HeroOfAnotherStory: Unusually for recurring characters in statements not directly tied to the archives. Most of his appearences are either helping someone during their brush with the supernatural or getting rid of the things that cause the troubles in the first place. To the point it's revealed he ''did'' get directly linked to the institute, helping Gertrude stop The Unknowing.
* HesJustHiding: Though Gerard has been legally dead for several years, Jon stubbornly refers to his death as ''alleged''. Considering Jon's [[GutFeeling intuitive abilities]] as Archivist he's probably on to something. In season 3 it is confirmed that he is indeed dead, but not gone, having been bound to the skin book against his will.
* IJustWantToHaveFriends: Implied to be a Type B. See the AffectionateNickname entry for an example.
* MrExposition: Spends half of his statement laying out the ways that the Powers function.
* MyBelovedSmother: His mother decided even before he was born that he would follow in her steps. He eventually rebels and goes out of his way to track and destroy any [[TomeOfEldritchLore Leitner book]] he can find.
* {{Necromancer}}: Helped bind his mother to a magical book of undeath which he himself is now bound to.
* PetTheDog: He probably has the most of these out of anyone involved with the Powers, repeatedly saving civilians from AFateWorseThanDeath.
* PhraseCatcher: When he appears in a statement he's often described as having poorly dyed black hair and likely wearing black or something leather. Even outside of statements Jon correctly identifies him as being Leitner's "angry goth" due to how consistent his appearance has been and tendency to show up where Leitners were involved.
* PowerTattoo: When he was badly burned a nurse noted that the eye tattoos he had on every joint on his body were the only areas of skin undamaged from the neck down. Considering what eyes represent in this series and his apparent ties to it they are likely a lot more than just an aesthetic choice.
* WhoWantsToLiveForever: One of the first things he demands upon being summoned by Jon is that Jon burn his page, effectively killing him. Jon reluctantly agrees.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Georgie Barker]]
!!Georgie Barker
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 028
->'''Voiced by:''' Sasha Sienna

The host of the popular What The Ghost! podcast, and colleague of Melanie King. Had a relationship with Jon Sims at one point that didn’t end well. They seem to have [[AmicableExes made up]].
----
* AmicableExes: Is friendly enough with Jon to let him crash at her place indefinitely. When they later have a falling out, it's only because Georgie recognizes he's going to continue on a self-destructive path and decides to set boundaries to protect herself.
* AntiMagic: [[spoiler:Her total inability to feel fear means that none of the Powers have any claim on her, and she can even pull people out (although not too many, or the Powers counterattack).]]
* {{Cult}}: [[spoiler:Episode 189 ("Peers") revealed that she and Melanie have been pulling victims out of domains and hiding them in the old tunnels; because of Georgie's inability to feel fear, they apparently see her as some kind of Messiah figure and have formed what Georgie and Melanie both call a cult around her]].
* FearlessFool: Averted. She is well aware that her inability to feel fear could lead her to make reckless decisions and get other people hurt. Her attempts to correct for this actually make her ''too'' cautious sometimes, which Melanie gently chides her for.
* HasAType: Given her relationships with Jon and Melanie, her type is apparently paranormal academics, which fits with her own interest in the subject. [[spoiler:Both her partners were also turned into avatars of the dread powers against their will]].
* HeroicBSOD: Suffered this after an encounter with an avatar of The End, and never regains her ability to feel fear.
* MoralityChain: To Melanie, as Georgie is the person [[spoiler:who convinced her to go to therapy and overall supported her as she recovered from nearly becoming an avatar. In season 5, Melanie remarks that she might have killed the people they rescued from the domains if Georgie wasn't there]].
* MuggleBestFriend: She's the only major character who is not associated with any Powers and, aside from a minor encounter in her youth, has no foot in the supernatural world. She actively refuses to get involved in anything dangerously supernatural, even cutting contact with Jon when he gets too deep into it, and only remaining in contact with Melanie because she's actively trying to get out.
* FinalGirl: [[spoiler:She's one of only three surviving main characters of the entire series, alongside Melanie and Basira]].
* OfficialCouple: With Melanie, starting from season 4.
* UnfazedEveryman: Her response to Jon’s revelations about the existence of monsters and the Powers, and the fact that he is beholden to one is essentially "okay”. Justified as an encounter with the avatar of the End removed her ability to feel fear.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Jurgen Leitner]]
!!Jurgen Leitner
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 004
->'''Voiced by:''' Paul Sims

A rich Scandinavian eccentric who would pay exorbitant sums for various books. [[MagicalLibrary Unfortunately, the books in question were...]] [[TomeOfEldritchLore Rather]] [[MindRape unsettling.]]
----
* AsLongAsItSoundsForeign: Despite being Norwegian by birth, his given name is spelled the German way (In Norwegian, it's "Jørgen") and his last name also sounds more German.
* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: He put custom bookplates with the name of his library at the front of every book he tried to contain, ostensibly to make them easier to track if they got out, but ultimately because he hoped that the library would eventually become famous and his name would be known the world over. It's safe to say that when both of those things happened, they did not happen the way he had hoped.
* BigDamnHeroes: His first in-the-flesh appearance in the podcast is rescuing Jon from Not-Sasha in Episode 79.
* ButNotTooForeign: Despite being initially presented as a "Scandinavian recluse", speaks with a British accent and admits that he barely knows any Norwegian; apparently, he and his family emigrated to England when he was very young and English has always been his first language.
* CharacterDeath: Beaten to death by Elias at the end of Season 2.
* CollectorOfTheStrange: The foremost collector of esoteric and rare books linked to the Powers.
* DecoyAntagonist: Set up as a shadowy figure of influence in the first two seasons, and is hinted to be responsible for the various [[TomeOfEldritchLore tomes bearing his name]]. When he finally appears in season 2 , he is revealed as a vain, somewhat pathetic old man whose only real power was his [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney ungodly amounts of money]].
* DidntThinkThisThrough: Built his library to contain the incalculable power of the books held within it. The thought that the defenses should also be outside never occurred to him.
* FailureHero: His goals in setting up his library, while selfish in some ways, were ultimately noble: he wanted to make sure that the horribly dangerous books connected to the Powers weren't causing damage in the greater world. His failure to realize that there might be people (for lack of a better word) who would want the books out in the world led to his downfall. It's not outright stated, but it's implied that his efforts to search out lost tomes for his library simply allowed far more books out into circulation once the library was destroyed.
* HeartIsAnAwesomePower: He mentions that his only real talent was ''shopping'', but goes on to explain that's more impressive than it sounds: Leitner had an uncanny knack for not only tracking down supernatural items (specializing books out of scholarly vanity), but for convincing their owners to part with them. Part of this had to do with his resources, but it also required no small amount of networking, social adroitness, and determination. If he had been ethical enough to use his abilities and fortune to fight the supernatural instead of just hoarding evil books, he could have been a genuine force to be reckoned with through the power of smart shopping.
* MagicLibrarian: The closest thing to one that exists in the series, anyway -- though his magical books are the true source of his supernatural abilities, and the library he created is less whimsical and more ''terrifying''.
* MrExposition: Most of his brief time appearing directly in the show is spent explaining the cosmic horor metaphysics that drive the setting.
* NonIdleRich: Was fantastically wealthy enough to do nothing with his life, but chose to become one of these, collecting all the [[TomeOfEldritchLore books]] he could get his hands on.
* {{Pride}}: Admits that this was his primary sin, in thinking he could contain all his books.
* SpannerInTheWorks: Leitner's appearance at the end of season 2 is the first time Elias appears to have been genuinely caught off-guard, nearly spoiling his plans entirely by revealing too much to Jon too early, and forcing him to act rashly.
* TomeOfEldritchLore: He collects these, and marks them with his insignia -- or he ''did'', until the Powers' servants collectively trashed his library and scattered the so-called "Leitners" across the globe for unsuspecting civilians to come upon.
* WeHaveReserves: Had a very cavalier attitude towards the lives of his assistants.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: Subverted. He mentions that he told himself that he was collecting the books to act as a sort of "reverse Pandora", keeping the public safe from them by containing them and studying them. Marking the books as "Leitners" was ostensibly to make them easier to recapture if any got out, but he admits deep down he'd always hoped people would learn of his collection and be suitably awestruck. It was all about pride in the end.
* WhatTheHellIsThatAccent: A few statements describe him as having spoken in a strange accent. When he appears in person, and speaks fluent English with a British accent, he admits that he did it as an inside joke to himself.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Mary Keay]]
!!Mary Keay
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 004
->'''Voiced by:''' Carrie Cohen

The owner of Pinhole Books and mother of Gerard Keay.
----
* AbusiveParents: Gerard has very little nice to say about her, as she had him help her in truly despicable actions from an early age and seems to have treated him more like a servant and road to building a dynasty. She also claims that her father committing suicide was the best thing he did for her family, but given that she's a truly vile woman it might be that she just didn't like him for other reasons.
* BaldOfEvil: She keeps her head shaven in undeath, which may be because she can't actually ''grow'' hair.
* CameBackWrong: In her opinion. She blamed Gerard for not helping her complete the ritual that she killed herself doing since her "immortality" wasn't quite what she wanted. Unlike other bound spirits it sounds like she didn't need to be summoned to exist, but she also couldn't stay that way indefinitely.
* ConnectedAllAlong: She's the descendant of Albrecht von Closen, an associate of Jonah Magnus, on her mother's side.
* DeaderThanDead: Gertrude and Gerard burned her page in the skin book, destroying her for good.
* DealWithTheDevil: Averted. She isn't bound to any of the Powers, instead dabbling with all of them as needed.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: In a weird way; when she was young, she discovered that a doctor in her neighborhood was killing people and turning them into skin books - and was greatly offended that the doctor had this kind of power and only used it to get financial information from the book spirits.
* HumanNotepad: Postmortem example, when she's seen after her "death" she's described as having a lot of tattoos written in Sanskrit. Given how that's the language of choice for [[MarkOfTheSupernatural the skin book's rituals]] it's likely a side effect from binding herself to it in an attempt to achieve a form of immortality.
* InTheBlood: Attempted to invoke this, as her son theorizes that she wanted to build a kind of occult dynasty with herself as matriarch. He would have none of it, so those plans fell flat.
* PetTheDog: She's implied to have destroyed any evidence that would convict her son of her death, though this might have been for her own benefit.
* VagueAge: She claims to have been 9 years old in 1955, which would put her at 62 years old at the time of her bodily death in 2008. However, MAG 023 mentions that a Mary Keay was born in 1924, making her 84. It's unclear if this was a different Mary Keay, if she lied about her age, or if the author just mixed up the dates.
* ThanatosGambit: She deliberately killed and skinned herself in a ritual that was supposed to give her power over the skin book that contains the souls of the dead. It doesn't seem to have worked properly, possibly because she needed outside assistance and her son was unwilling to help.
* TheUndead: After her supposed death of overdose, she reappears manning her bookshop, through that statement actually appears before the one revealing her death. It's later revealed that she "survived" through a ritual binding herself to the skin book.
* WickedWitch: She doesn't wear a hat or ride a broom, but fits the bill otherwise. A wicked old woman who used magic to further her evil ends, and cannibalized (in the sense of flaying and using their skin, not literal eating) innocent people to gain more power for herself. Jon and Gerard even remark on it.
-->'''Gerry:''' Reckoned her tradition was less the academic and more the, uh...\\
'''Jon:''' Village witch?\\
'''Gerry:''' Hah. You sure you don't know her?
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Mikaele Salesa]]
!!Mikaele Salesa
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 014
->'''Voiced by:''' Ray Chong Nee

A black-market fence for paranormal artifacts. Little is known about him beyond the fact that he is Samoan and is quite good at his job.
----
* AffablyEvil: He was apparently quite chummy with his crew and [[spoiler:is a very friendly host to Jon and Martin when they stay with him for a while in Episodes 180 ("Moving On") and 181 ("Ignorance")]].
* BadassNormal: He's an entirely ordinary human who, at least so far as the listener currently knows, has escaped ill effects from his immensely dangerous wares. [[spoiler: He also survived working for Leitner, whose OSHA compliance was apparently as good as his external security, which is to say nil. And he is to date one of the only people who survives extended contact with the Powers and goes out on his own terms.]]
* BlackMarket: Is willing to buy and sell artifacts, both magic and mundane, of questionable origin.
* BenevolentBoss: Surprisingly, the statement giver of Episode 141 ("Doomed Voyage"), who was part of the crew on Salesa's ship for a few years described him as a good boss who treated his workers well, was honest about the legality of the operation and kept things organized. [[DownplayedTrope However]], he lost quite a few people along the way and he was very strict about only him being allowed inside the cargo bay, throwing a crew member who tried to break into it overboard on one occasion. Episode 115 ("Taking Stock") shows that he used to be far more benevolent, but he gave up on being that chummy of a boss when his ship's cook got ahold of an undisclosed artifact and ended up causing a serious headache...which incidentally is why he stopped letting anyone else look at the merchandise. [[spoiler: He was also all too willing to leave his final crew in the lurch, promising them a significant payday for his last job and then abandoning them with nothing but his ship when he went into hiding.]]
* IntangiblePrice: Some of the items he deals in come with this. Salesa himself deals in cold, hard cash.
* KilledOffscreen: [[spoiler:In Episode 194 ("Parting"), we learn that Annabella Cane killed Mikaele and took his invsibility-granting camera]].
* LackOfEmpathy: Salesa doesn't remotely care about the damage caused by the artifacts he sells, only caring that he gets paid and letting the buyers take the burden of risk. It's clear from some of the statements featuring him that he isn't heartless, he just can't afford to care about the wellbeing of everyone he sells to if he wants to keep in business.
* LargeAndInCharge: In Episode 141 ("Doomed Voyage"), he is said to have been a "big guy", but never to have used it to intimidate anyone (though it came in handy in case things ever had to get physical).
* NotQuiteDead: [[spoiler:In Episode 180 ("Moving On"), he turns out to still be alive, somehow, and apparently working with Annabelle Cane in some way]].
* PosthumousCharacter: [[spoiler:Apparently died circa 2014, if Episode 141 ("Doomed Voyage") is to be believed. Episode 181 reveals that he just faked his death.]]
* PunchClockVillain: Unlike some of the other players in the supernatural world, Salesa's actions seem to stem from a desire for profit, [[ForTheEvulz rather than evil]]. That being said, he will happily sell customers immensely harmful objects without bothering to inform them, and he's not above making bets or jokes out of their effects.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Robert Smirke]]
!!Robert Smirke
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 026

A 19th century architect whose works and theories somehow moderate or even nullify some of the effects of the Powers.
----
* BalanceOfPower: His works and theories give prominence to the balancing of the Powers against one another.
** [[GeniusBonus Which makes sense, given his real-life work in Greek Revival style]].
* [[BalanceBetweenGoodAndEvil Balance Between Evil And A Slightly Different Kind Of Evil]]: His architecture was centered around balance, allowing his buildings to serve as effective countermeasures against the influence of the Powers when correctly tended.
* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smirke_(architect) Smirke]] is best known for his role in the early 19th century Greek Revival style, as well as his use of concrete foundations. Here, he is a scholar of the arcane, balancing the Powers against one another.
* FailureHero: His attempts to get other prominent intellectuals to join his crusade against the Powers simply led to them becoming powerful minions, his efforts at categorizing and controlling the Powers gave their new servants all the tools they needed to empower them, and his hopes of covering his failures with churches simply led to these churches being aggressively haunted. No matter how noble his goals, everything he did simply strengthened the Powers and left the world a more dangerous place.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: His own mission was to contain & control the Powers for the safety of the world, but apparently everyone he brought into his confidence on this mission would themselves become servants of the Powers, going on to cause untold suffering & spreading their influence.
* ObsessivelyOrganized: Chastises a former student who forgoes utility for symmetry in his buildings as not being sufficiently obsessed and for using shortcuts.
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smirke_(architect) Sir Robert Smirke]] (1780-1867), British architect known for his work in 19th Century Greek Revival, most famous for designing the British Museum.
* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: The real Robert Smirke was, as far as we know, a fairly normal architect who didn't do any work battling eldritch abominations.
* HorribleJudgeOfCharacter: He sincerely believed that the people he was bringing into his confidence would be just as dedicated to combating the Powers as he was, even as his students and counterparts continuously showed that they were far more interested in getting power from their patrons than fighting them. [[spoiler:His final moments were spent desperately trying to implore Jonah Magnus to abandon his plans, despite Jonah by many accounts being the worst of them all.]]
* InsufferableGenius: Knew more than any other human about the Powers and was more successful at fighting them than anyone before Gertrude Robinson came along. His theories are still portrayed as being wildly overconfident -- Smirke's List, which both in- and out-of-universe is used by nearly everyone as an "official" list of which Powers exist, is repeatedly said to be disastrously oversimplified -- and [[spoiler: post-Change the Powers themselves have created a mocking Monument to his legacy where his successors are trapped in a cycle of self-destructive futility.]]
* TokenGoodTeammate: Of the numerous Victorian intellectuals and aristocrats to learn of the Powers, he was the only one not to be taken in by them to any extent, and for all his faults he went to his last day desperately trying to fight them. Deconstructed somewhat, as he was directly responsible for a number of his counterparts finding and succumbing to the Powers, mistakenly believing that they would be as invested in stopping them as he was.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Vampires]]
!!Vampires
!!! First Mentioned: MAG 10

Human-like creatures that kill people by draining the blood out of them. They make some appearances throughout the story, mostly in connection with Trevor Herbert, who has spent the better part of his life hunting and killing them. It's unclear what specific Power they might belong to, if they even belong to a single one, though they exclusively appear in statements involving the Hunt.
----

[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Corruption
[[folder:Jane Prentiss]]
!!Jane Prentiss, The Flesh Hive
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 006
-> '''Voiced by:''' Hannah Brankin

A woman seemingly turned into a hive of wormlike... ''things''.
----
* AchillesHeel: Both she and her worms are vulnerable to concentrated carbon dioxide. Elias ultimately kills her by flooding the Archive with the [=CO2=]-infused fire system, previously installed at Jon's request.
* ArcVillain: Of season 1. Attempts to invade the Archive at the end, and is killed for her troubles.
* HiveMind: To some degree, she is aware of all of her worms.
* HumanoidAbomination: Looks human enough to wander around unnoticed at night. Up close, she's basically a walking corpse covered in open sores that worms constantly slither in and out of.
* IJustWantToHaveFriends: Her statement indicates she struggled with this throughout her life, pre-transformation. Post-transformation, the Flesh Hive gave her what she wanted. [[BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor Oh boy]], [[BodyHorror did it give her]] [[TheWormThatWalks what she wanted]].
* KeystoneArmy: Though some of her worms remain alive in the tunnels beneath the Institute after her death, Jon notes that the survivors are sluggish and no longer hostile to humans. [[spoiler: And they seem to be getting hunted down by spiders. The Web doesn't like messes when it can help it.]]
* NewAgeRetroHippie: Worked at a crystal shop and called herself a witch before her infection.
* PestController: Jane (or the being using her body) commands masses of strange silver worms which infest more people and thus kill or enslave them.
* PlagueMaster: She can infect others with her worms, who can in turn spread it to others. These infectees often don't have long until they turn into a mass of worms and viscera.
* TalkativeLoon: Her statement is a barely coherent ramble, and that's before the Hive took over entirely.
* TheWormThatWalks: Jane's body and mind are taken over by a colony of silver worms.
* WasOnceAMan: Was once an ordinary woman; her mind and body have long since been consumed by the Hive. There's some indication that she wishes she could go back.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:John Amherst]]
!!John Amherst, Avatar of the Corruption
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 036

An avatar of the Corruption most closely tied to its aspects of disease.
----
* BuriedAlive: [[spoiler: Adelard Dekker defeated him by knocking him into a pit, then burying the whole thing in six feet of wet cement. This didn't kill Amherst in and of itself, but spending ages without the fear that sustains him ultimately did.]]
* {{Immortality}}: He's supposedly been around as an Avatar since at least 1899 and has been [[ResurrectiveImmortality "killed" several times]].
* IncurableCoughOfDeath: He can infect others with diseases that are not only horrifically contagious, but unusually stubborn; one victim of his resorted to amputating an extremity that implicitly continued to show resurfacing symptoms despite repeatedly being disinfected, and at least one artefact in the Institute's storage might be his work.
* MeaningfulName: His last name, Amherst, makes Jon suspect (in MAG 68: "The Tale of a Field Hospital") that he has some connection to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Amherst,_1st_Baron_Amherst Jeffrey Amherst]], an 18th century British Army commander who used blankets laced with smallpox as a biological weapon against the Native American population during Pontiac's War. Though it could easily [[HistoricalVillainUpgrade be the same man]], considering his apparent immortality, or a descendant, ancestor or other relative (Amherst did actually have a brother named John), [[WordOfGod Sims' Twitter has clarified]] that it isn't intended to be the same person and is [[https://mobile.twitter.com/jonnywaistcoat/status/1301236802439782400 meant as an entirely fictional monster]].
* PestController: He has an affinity for ants and flies, though not to the same degree as the Flesh Hive.
* PlagueMaster: He spreads horrific diseases [[WalkingWasteland everywhere he goes]]. Even objects he touches can carry the plagues.
* ResurrectiveImmortality: If episode 68 is to be believed, he died at least three times during the Boer War, and it's implied he was burned to death at least twice. None of this seemed to slow him down in the slightest. [[spoiler:It takes being buried deep in cement and cut off from fear and disease to kill him for good.]]
* SealedEvilInACan: [[spoiler:Adelard Dekker gets around his immortality by dumping him in a hole and filling it with cement.]] A later episode reveals [[spoiler:that the lack of fear to feed on made him shrivel up and die]].
* TheUnfought: One of the few avatars who regularly show up in statements that never appears in person. [[spoiler: This is because Addelard Dekker killed him before the show started]]
* VillainOfAnotherStory: After Jane Prentiss's climactic siege of the Institute, John remains as a silent, looming figure associted with the Corruption that, unlike the Flesh Hive, does not seem to be able to die on a permanent basis. However, his final appearance [[spoiler:has him taken out of the picture for good and he doesn't reappear in the Corruption's domain after the Change.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Jordan Kennedy]]
!!Jordan Kennedy
!!!First mentioned: MAG 55
-> '''Voiced by''': Tim Ledsam

A pest control worker first introduced giving a statement on his encounters with John Amherst, Arthur Nolan and the "wasp's nest" that infected Jane Prentiss.
----

* BadassNormal: A simple exterminator, who lit one of the stronger avatars ''on fire''. [[spoiler:After the change, he handles traveling through a hellscape far better than a local hostile but highly diminished avatar, even if it doesn't end well.]]
* HiveMind: [[spoiler:His ascension to avatarhood at Jon's hand essentially fuses his consciousness with the local ant monsters' hive mind.]]
* {{Irony}}: One of the victims of John Amherst who narrowly escaped with his life and sanity. [[spoiler:Eventually succeeded him as an avatar of the Corruption--working with ants, no less.]]
* FateWorseThanDeath: Whatever was happening to him after [[spoiler:succumbing to the Hive Mind]] was [[NothingIsScarier unseen but easily imagined, and undoubtedly horrible]]. In an effort to spare him from this, Jon [[spoiler:entreats the Eye to make him an avatar]].
* KillItThroughItsStomach: He is informed by Lito, a Corruption avatar, that [[spoiler:there is no "ant queen" ruling the tunnels. Unfazed by this, he decides to continue looking for a weak point, reasoning that if the colony has no brain, surely it has a heart he can kill instead.]]
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Dark
[[folder:Maxwell Rayner]]
!!Maxwell Rayner, Leader of the People's Church of the Divine Host
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 9

The leader of the People's Church of the Divine Host, a {{cult}} serving as a front for worshippers of the Dark.
----
* EvilOldFolks: Is a quite old man with white hair. [[spoiler:His mind is even older]].
* PredecessorVillain: In a way, he's largely responsible for the entire series. According to [[spoiler: Jonah Magnus]], Rayner was the one who told Robert Smirke about the Powers. Smirke's study lead him to create the rituals as part of his attempts to control and contain them, and he brought confidants into his inner circle as part of these efforts, who would later become servants of the powers themselves, including, of course, [[spoiler: Jonah.]]
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: [[spoiler:He is really Edmond Halley, the second ever Astronomer Royal of England and namesake of Halley's Comet]].
* KilledOffscreen: KilledOffForReal by Basira and her fellow officers in a raid on the Church of the Divine Host, never directly confronting Jon in spite of being a GreaterScopeVillain for the whole series.
* TheManBehindTheMan: Seems to have directly commanded serial killer Robert Montauk.
* ReligionOfEvil: Runs the People's Church and its worship of darkness this way.
* SinisterMinister: The priest of a darkness-worshipping cult.
* SoulJar: [[spoiler:Has survived for centuries by transferring his consciousness into new bodies when his current one became too old]].
* WeUsedToBeFriends: He has Manuela offer Elias the chance to defect from the Eye and join them because they used to be friends, though the statement is primarily one of evil gloating of him finally being ready to enact a ritual.
* WouldHurtAChild: At one point, he and his followers kidnap a child [[spoiler:so he can try to transfer his mind into its body]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Manuela Dominguez]]
!!Manuela Dominguez
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 57
-> '''Voiced by:''' Layla Mannings

A physicist and member of the People's Church of the Divine Host who works closely with Rayner.
----
* BigBadWannabe: In her statement, she seems to think of the Dark as the greatest threat to the Beholding and the Institute and was downright arrogant about [[spoiler:their upcoming ritual being successful in plunging the world into darkness]]; [[LittleDidIKnow little did she know]] [[spoiler:Gertrude had already figured out that their ritual was doomed to fail]].
* ChekhovsGunman: When she appears in the first two statements by crew members of the Daedalus space station, she is just another member of the team. In her own statement, [[spoiler:she is revealed to be an active follower of one of the supernatural forces connected to the space station and the only one who was fully aware of what was happening]].
* CultDefector: Was raised by Christian [[TheFundamentalist fundamentalist]] parents. Having seen through their mean-spiritedness and the self-serving way they adhered to their faith, she left them and became a physicist.
* KickTheSonOfABitch: Returned to her spiteful fundamentalist parents only when they were on their deathbeds to tell them about her following of the Dark so they would die fearing it.
* LightIsNotGood: Like other members of the Dark, she sees darkness as the natural state of the universe and light as an invasive force.
* TheDragon: Seems to have filled this role for Maxwell Rayner.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Callum Brodie]]
!!Callum Brodie, Avatar of the Dark
!!! First Mentioned: MAG 073
-> '''Voiced by:''' Will Harvey

A young boy rescued from the People's Church of the Divine Host by Basira Hussain.
----
* TheBully: Callum became a vicious bully after being rescued from the Dark's cult. He continues to be this [[spoiler:during the apocalypse, albeit to a much more supernatural, terrifying degree]].
* ChildrenAreInnocent: Not this one. While he's initially presented as the poor, helpless victim of a depraved cult when he's first introduced being rescued by the police, the fact of the matter is that the Divine Host almost certainly never would have chosen him to be Maxwell Rayner's new body if he wasn't already adept at inflicting pain and fear on others.
* EnfantTerrible: After the rest of the People's Church are gone and presumed dead, the Dark claims Callum as its latest avatar. And from what we see [[spoiler: after the Change, Callum willingly acts as its servant, taking charge of torturing and frightening an untold number of children]].
* FalseFriend: How he tricks the children [[spoiler:trapped in the Dark's domain]]: he pretends to be their friend by warning them about [[spoiler:the latest terror lurking in the shadows, which causes the children to become afraid of that monster. Ironically that fear [[YourMindMakesItReal makes it manifest]], and turns the children into targets of said monster]].
* InTheBlood: His father was Phillip Brown, a prison guard at the facility where Robert Montauk was incarcerated and Callum has inherited his father's fondness for brutalizing and depriving others of their freedom.
* StuffedIntoALocker: Is both a victim of this and a user of this method to terrorize other children. When he was kidnapped by the People's Church, Maxwell Rayner locked Callum in a lightless, suffocating cupboard which deeply traumatized him and left him marked by the Dark. After he was rescued he began locking other children in dark spaces, remarking to Jon that he wanted to make the other children feel as afraid as he did when he was trapped.
* UsedToBeASweetKid: Averted. Jon notes that Callum was already a bully before [[spoiler:being influenced by the Dark and ascending to the position of its new avatar]].
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Desolation
[[folder:Agnes Montague]]
!!Agnes Montague, Messiah of the Desolation
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 008

An unsettling young lady connected to the Lightless Flame; servant of the Desolation.
----
* TheAgeless: Has looked in her early twenties for about twenty years.
* AlasPoorVillain: The episode "Burning Desire" gives her this, showing she does not quite enjoy her position, and giving her a LastKiss during which she accidentally mutilates quite possibly the only person who has ever been interested in her for herself.
* AmbiguouslyBi: She ''seems'' to have at least some attraction to men since she accepted a date with Jack Barnabas and even kissed him, but she also had a close working relationship with Jude Perry who is definitely gay and interested in her, not to mention her being [[spoiler:literal soulmates with Gertrude Robinson]]. Eugene insists that she wasn't interested in Jack beyond base curiosity, but this might be a case of EvilCannotComprehendGood, so the question is less if Agnes is bi and more if she's attracted to anyone at all.
* AntiAntiChrist: Downplayed: while not actively ''opposed'' to her role of giving the world to the Desolation, she's clearly less sure about it then the cult who created her. [[spoiler:It's very ambiguous whether her refusing to go through with it was for the [[PragmaticVillainy tactical reasons]] she gave, or whether she genuinely had a final burst of conscience]].
* CreepyChild: She was marked by the Desolation as a child, strongly enough that she terrified even older supernatural beings as well as normal people.
* DarkMessiah: Created by the Cult of the Lightless Flame to assist with their plan for ascension.
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:She convinced the cult that if she tried and failed to complete the Desolation's ritual, they wouldn't be able to try again for centuries. If instead she died cold and quiet, she would return to the Lightless Flame and hopefully be reborn to try again]].
* EvilIsBurningHot: Like the rest of her friends. Her coffee is always piping hot even after she's been sitting there not drinking for forty minutes, to the point it horribly burns a man who wouldn't stop hitting on her; she never needs a coat; skin contact burns so hot that it ''liquifies the fat'' in her poor ex's face even when she's not trying to hurt him.
* EvilRedhead: As an adult, she is described as having beautiful auburn hair.
* EvilVsEvil: She eventually got into a fight with the Web avatar supervising the foster home she stayed in as a child. She won. And kept his hand.
* IJustWantToBeNormal: Her behavior in "Burning Desire" suggests this--she spends the episode basically cosplaying an ordinary woman. The narrator describes her ordering black coffee at the diner as if it's some exciting novelty, and she tells him he's lucky not to have a destiny.
* PetTheDog: She seemed genuinely fond of Jack Barnabas [[spoiler:and even though he unwittingly ruined her role in the Desolation's ritual by introducing doubt into her mind, she asks the cult not to destroy him]].
* PosthumousCharacter: In the very first episode she's mentioned we also learn that she died in 2006, and her importance is only obvious much later.
* PyrrhicVictory: She successfully killed another avatar... but the Web's power in his area of influence left marks that stopped a lot of the cult's progress in its tracks, even with the loss.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Arthur Nolan]]
!!Arthur Nolan, Leading Priest of the Lightless Flame
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 032
-> '''Voiced by:''' John Henry Falle

The formal leader of the Cult of the Lightless Flame, at least until the failure of Agnes causes his fall from grace.
----
* TheAgeless: We don't actually find out how old Arthur is, but he's old enough to have recruited Eugene, who himself is over 70.
* BreakTheHaughty: His patience with Gertrude starts out thin and he very likely would've attacked her, but finding out what she did to Eugene puts him in his place for fear of himself.
* HiddenDepths: For all that Arthur is an evil, sadistic, petty man - and as Gertrude said, a lazy fool - his crisis of faith does give him a certain amount of introspection which leaves him with one of the most accurate and insightful views on the Entities in the series, coming to realize that they understand humans as little as humans understand them, and the importance of feeling over logic and understanding and trying to categorize them. He also apparently regrets treating Agnes soley as a messiah, rather than getting to know her as a person. His tone when talking to her almost sounds like an absent father who wishes he had been more involved in his child's life.
* HowTheMightyHaveFallen: He was once an influential enough leader to keep the other acolytes on a leash. After Agnes gave up on her messiah duty, no one listens to him anymore and his faith in the Desolation has been shaken.
* {{Hypocrite}}: Desolation acolytes are sadists, but apparently not masochists. Eugene's fate at the hands of Gertrude, richly deserved, horrifies him, even though his cult's whole schtick is doing equal or worse to innocents.
* TheUnfought: Despite being a bastard in his own right, Arthur is never directly confronted.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Diego Molina]]
!!Diego Molina, Priest of the Lightless Flame
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 012

A studious and devout cultist of the Desolation who plagues several associates of the Institute.
----
* BrokeYourArmPunchingOutCthulhu: Gerard tries to take him out and gets severe burns on 90% of his body for the trouble, though the second attempt takes.
* DeadlyBook: One of the few possessors of a known (but unnamed) Leitner tome associated with the Desolation. This is what attracted Gerard Keay's attention to him.
* InsistentTerminology: Apparently before Diego became an avatar, when he first started feeling a connection with the Desolation he identified it with the ancient Sumerian demon Asag, who boiled fish alive in rivers from how ugly it was. He continued to refer to the Lightless Flame as Asag long after he was transformed by it, even though that imagry didn't really fit with the rest of the cult's faith which was far more focused on fire, and Asag had a lot of conenction to disease, which Arthur Nolan at least felt was too close to the Corruption.
* SuperingInYourSleep: Diego's methods are unusual; he seems to set buildings alight by entering trances and chanting spells, and is immobile enough that he generally fails to leave the scene before being escorted away.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Eugene Vanderstock]]
!!Eugene Vanderstock, Acolyte of the Lightless Flame
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 139

An unusually sadistic man who engaged in cruelty from a young age.
----
* TheAgeless: Age 70 in 2006, but doesn't look it.
* AndIMustScream: He's not dead, but whatever happened to him, he almost certainly wishes he were.
* HumanSacrifice: He was in charge of preparing sacrifices for Agnes, and his methods were utterly nightmarish.
* JerkAss: Jude is abrasive, Arthur is haughty, but Eugene is just a dick.
* PayEvilUntoEvil: He deliberately spares no details of his hideous machinations in the statement he leaves for Gertrude purely out of spite. She would make sure he got exactly what was coming to him.
* VillainsOutShopping: His whole statement describes the rather humorous confusion the cult experienced when trying to raise a child, let alone a messianic ones, when most of their pursuits are far more dramatic.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Jude Perry]]
!!Jude Perry, Acolyte of the Lightless Flame
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 067
-> '''Voiced by:''' Hannah Walker

A casually violent woman connected to the Desolation. Although she doesn't appear as often as Agnes nor is she mentioned as much, the Cult is characterized mostly through her.
----
* TheAgeless: Unlike Agnes, she has the standard variant among Lightless Flame acolytes--she immolated herself and was reborn as a living candle.
* AintTooProudToBeg: [[spoiler: She mouths off to Jon until she gets a sudden taste of what being under the Eye's gaze feels like, at which point she quickly changes tact.]]
* ButchLesbian: Jude is described in traditionally masculine ways, such as being squat, muscular, and with hair buzzed into a close crop, as well as wearing sleeveless tanks. She's also very much into women and never visibly into men.
* EvilCannotComprehendGood: [[spoiler:Jude wildly mischaracterizes Jon in their final confrontation, insisting he's petty and pathetic, but then turning around and declaring him to enjoy the Change and want to rule over it like her.]]
* ForTheEvulz: She was successful and had a loving girlfriend but still felt like her life was empty before she ran into the Lightless Flame. From that point on she's happily dedicated to causing pain and suffering.
* IgnoredEnamoredUnderling: She had a crush on Agnes, the cult's DarkMessiah, who only had eyes for Jack Barnabas.
* ItsPersonalWithTheDragon: Played with. Jon's only real reason for [[spoiler:smiting her over Arthur Nolan (who rules over a much greater portion of the Desolation) is because]] she burned his hand; [[spoiler:killing avatars makes little to no change in their Domains]], so he picked the target that it was at least ''mildly'' personal for.
* KickTheDog: Her final act of devotion to become an avatar, burning herself, was done in front of her loving girlfriend, no doubt traumatizing the poor woman.
* {{Sadist}}: All Desolation devotees are this by default, but the slavishly-described torment Jude relishes in warrants special mention.
* TranquilFury: Jude's volatility is well-known even to other cult acolytes, but Eugene mentions that her relative quiet in the wake of Agnes's death [[BewareTheQuietOnes scares him more than her familiar emotional outbursts do]].
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the End
[[folder:Antonio Blake/[[spoiler:Oliver Banks]]]]
!!Antonio Blake/Oliver Banks, Avatar of the End
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 011
-> '''Voiced by:''' Russel Smith

A man with prophetic dreams of people's death. He occasionally tries to warn victims of the supernatural. Eventually, he tried to escape the curse of his ability, but failed and has given in to The End and become one of its avatars.
----
* AffablyEvil: Even after he's [[spoiler:given in to his role as an avatar for the fear of death]], he is still perfectly polite and pleasant to Jon when [[spoiler:he visits him in the hospital]] and to Georgie, who [[spoiler:recognizes him for what he is]].
* TheCameo: In ''32: HIVE'' and ''42: Grifter's Bone''
* ConnectedAllAlong: Turns out that the ex-boyfriend named Graham was the same as Graham Folger who got replaced by the Not-Them in MAG 003, "Across the Street."
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: A dark variation. In his dreams, his spirit wanders London, where he can see the tendrils that indicate how someone will die. A man who will die of heart attack may have tendrils snaking up his leg into his chest, while a car crash victim might have them piercing their face, arms, and legs. [[spoiler:His powers eventually manifest while he's awake]]
* HeroicBSOD: He attempted to run away from his gift at one point by taking a boat trip to one of the most isolated places on earth. [[spoiler:His patron instead had him direct the boat to its doom]].
* ALighterShadeOfBlack: Even though he now [[spoiler:willingly serves the fear of death]], he doesn't seem to take any sadistic pleasure from it the way [[spoiler:other avatars]] do. The closest we've had so far is [[spoiler:in Episode 168 ("Roots"), where he occasionally sends a woman walking towards her death to make contact with different people stuck in the same march to their deaths for the sake of variety]].
* ShadowArchetype: To Jon, as highlighted by their interaction in 121. [[spoiler:Oliver was like Jon, trying to use his gift from the Powers for good. However, SanitySlippage caused by his powers eventually resulted in him giving in, killing a group of innocent people and completing his transformation into a monster... a choice Jon will soon have to make as well.]] They even both have their own epithets: Jon is "the Archivist", while he's "the Coroner".
* YouCantFightFate: His experience. Once he can see the tendrils, death is not following far behind.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Death]]
!!Death
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 029

Beings that roam the world in service to their master.
----
* AgeWithoutYouth: Their bodies fall to pieces with age, though Death itself continues to move through them.
* AllAreEqualInDeath: They come for the young, the old, those who deserved it, and those who brought nothing but love into the world.
* ChessWithDeath: Those who challenge Death to a game and win will not die. That said, winning is nearly impossible. Death knows every game and every rule. The only games they can lose at are those that depend on luck... or cheating.
* CollectiveIdentity: "Death" is in fact a number of beings that typically operate independently.
* CompleteImmortality: Having made their deal with the End, they now simply cannot be killed regardless of injury or decay. [[AndIMustScream Many of them have grown to regret it]].
* DemBones: How one of them appears, though as its victim puts it:
-->"To describe it as a skeleton would be to do Death a disservice. For though the robe that sat in that chair contained only bones, it was not the skeleton that moved. It was Death. The bones were old, so ancient and brittle that the slightest pressure or movement would have rendered them down to dust. They did move; Death was no more a skeleton than you are a woolen suit".
* ExactWords: Those who beat them in a game "will not die". That doesn't mean they'll live.
* FateWorseThanDeath:
** Nathanial Thorpe considers his existence after being release an aversion of this. In his own words, "a living Hell is, after all, still living".
** The mummy in MAG 64 plays this straight after being sealed in a sarcophagus for centuries, unable to die even as their body shrivels and crumbles with time.
* TheGrimReaper: They certainly play the role, though they don't just appear to those who are already dying.
* {{Immortality}}: Death cannot die, and even if they're released from their service when they lose at a game, they remain TheNeedless and cannot gain any of the satisfactions of a living existence, and still they cannot die.
* KlingonPromotion: If you beat Death at a game, then you take their place as a servant of the End.
* WindsOfDestinyChange: Luck bends in their favor during games of chance, though not to such a degree that their victory is guaranteed.
* WolverineClaws: When they need to kill directly, they reach into their victims with bone-sharp hands.
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Flesh
[[folder:Jared Hopworth]]
!!Jared Hopworth, the Boneturner
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 017
->'''Voiced by:''' Alexander J. Newall

Better known as The Boneturner. A former delinquent who gained the ability to mold and manipulate flesh and bone after encountering ''The Boneturner's Tale''.
----
* AffablyEvil: He's fairly polite and civil with Jon, rib removal notwithstanding. His response to thinking Jon planned to trap him in the Spiral is more or less "Well played".
* AllOfTheOtherReindeer: He had a growth spurt when he was nine, and his schoolmates started picking on him after that.
* BodyHorror: Where to start? He can control his own flesh to the point where he can make his ribs come together like a vice when someone punches him, can attach extra limbs to himself, can remove bone while leaving the skin intact, and can generally cause you supernaturally grievous bodily harm without actually killing his victims. [[spoiler:When the Flesh attacks the Institute in between Seasons 3 and 4, Melanie stabs him in ''three'' hearts and he doesn't die. By the time Jon actually meets him in Episode 131, he doesn't even ''look'' human anymore.]]
* {{Delinquent}}: Was supposedly an alright person as a kid, but grew into 'a bit of a crook' after he finished secondary school.
* EvilSoundsDeep: When he finally shows up on the show in person, his voice is an impossibly low and grinding baritone. It’s more like a controlled burp than a human voice.
* FaceDeathWithDignity: When Jon and Martin confront Jared in [[spoiler: the Mortal Garden, the Flesh's domain in the new world, he initially is willing to put up a fight but quickly realizes he is no match for Jon.]] So Jared [[spoiler: calmly accepts his annihilation, after requesting he listen to Jon make a statement about his human garden]].
* {{Foil}} : Despite both being Avatars of the same entity, Tom & Jared are pretty much exact opposites of each other in nearly every way. Jared is big and hulking, Tom is rail thin, skin and bones, though still tall. Tom is noted as being well spoken with a "crisp accent" - though we never actually hear him speak - where as Jared talks more like a thug and isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Tom apparently had a good relationship with his family who were also servants of the Flesh, where as Jared resented his parents & while he mutilated them with his powers, didn't convert them. Tom is, ironically enough, focused on the spiritual and existential side of their fear, having a greater vision and actively wants to perform a ritual to bring it into the world, where as Jared only cares about shaping flesh, feeding off fear, and living in the world as it is. Jared focuses on the BodyHorror and transformative aspects of the fear & especially seems to be tied to fears of self image & body dysphoria, where as Tom's powers & sphere relate more towards cannibalism and consumption. Their only known interaction, as related by Jared, involved Tom trying to recruit Jared for the Last Feast, and Jared telling him to piss off.
* ALighterShadeOfBlack: While not heroic like Gerard, nor even at all a nice person, he still qualifies by virtue of being one of the ''very'' few things associated with one of the Powers that doesn't want the world to end. He likes the world fine as it is, thank you.
* MundaneUtility: You have an affinity for manipulating flesh? May as well use it to run a gym and help people get fit!
** {{Subverted|Trope}} as he later admits he only did it [[PragmaticVillainy because luring people like that was easier than hunting them down himself]] and he still fed on the fear produced by their fixation with their bodies, even if they weren't directly afraid of him.
* NighInvulnerability: Twofold. As an Avatar, he can only be killed by a "hunter", someone touched by the Power for such a purpose. He adds to this by his extreme body modification, which has resulted in him having so many backup organs that killing him for good is practically impossible. [[spoiler:During his attack on the Institute, Melanie, who's touched by the Slaughter, causes him to retreat after stabbing ''three'' of his hearts]].
* OffscreenVillainy: Peter Lukas has apparently mentioned archived statements regarding Jared to [[spoiler:Simon Fairchild]]. Apparently they number around half a dozen--but the viewer only hears of three during the course of the podcast.
* PsychoForHire: Episode 49 ("The Butcher's Window") suggests that Jared spent some time doing body disposal for organized crime as he is seen horribly applying his bone-twisting powers on a screw-up drug mule that had been sent to the butcher shop Jared used as a cover after losing a shipment.
* PsychoSerum: Indirectly. He ran a crooked gym that catered to steroid addicts in order to lure in people with body image issues to fuel his powers. Those who stuck around long enough he would eventually transform into hideous mutants made of pure muscle.
* SealedEvilInACan: [[spoiler:After the Flesh attacks the Institute between seasons 3 and 4, the Spiral intervenes and locks him in one of its corridors.]]
* TheWorfEffect: While he's one of the most physically imposing avatars in the entire series, both times he faces another avatar, he's beaten pretty solidly. [[spoiler:Melanie, a (soon-to-be) avatar of the Slaughter, wounds him to the point where he has to flee, and Jon, an avatar of the Eye, later destroys him completely.]]
** ZigZagged a bit with [[spoiler: his imprisonment in the Spiral; while he was completely powerless to escape the corridors on his own, the Distortion as Helen also claims that it's incapable of actually "digesting" Jared, suggesting he's still too powerful for her to kill, assuming she's not being less than truthful about that.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tom Haan]]
!!Tom Haan, Avatar of the Flesh
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 030
A Chinese-born associate of the Flesh who typically plays on the Flesh's fear of being eaten.
----
* DrivenToSuicide: Assuming he died, though apparently they NeverFoundTheBody; when the statement giver of Episode 30 ("The Killing Floor"), David Laylow, found him, he kept hurting himself with the bolt gun used to kill livestock that came through the plant. When Laylow approached, Haan put the gun in his hands, pointed it at his own head and made Laylow pull the trigger, seemingly killing Haan.
** However, [[spoiler:Episode 178 ("The Processing Line"), taking place in a domain of the Flesh, features a nightmarish slaughterhouse where humans are slaughtered for meat like cattle. While Haan isn't named as the avatar in charge of it, it's very similar to the one from Episode 30 ("The Killing Floor") and it plays on similar themes to statements in which he played a prominent role]].
* {{Foil}} : Despite both being Avatars of the same entity, Tom & Jared are pretty much exact opposites of each other in nearly every way. Jared is big and hulking, Tom is rail thin, skin and bones, though still tall. Tom is noted as being well spoken with a "crisp accent" - though we never actually hear him speak - where as Jared talks more like a thug and isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Tom apparently had a good relationship with his family who were also servants of the Flesh, where as Jared resented his parents & while he mutilated them with his powers, didn't convert them. Tom is, ironically enough, focused on the spiritual and existential side of their fear, having a greater vision and actively wants to perform a ritual to bring it into the world, where as Jared only cares about shaping flesh, feeding off fear, and living in the world as it is. Jared focuses on the BodyHorror and transformative aspects of the fear & especially seems to be tied to fears of self image & body dysphoria, where as Tom's powers & sphere relate more towards cannibalism and consumption. Their only known interaction, as related by Jared, involved Tom trying to recruit Jared for the Last Feast, and Jared telling him to piss off.
* IAmAHumanitarian: His uncle, John Haan, killed his wife, then butchered the body and sold the meat as food from his takeaway restaurant. Given that Tom had replaced his previous staff six months before that, he was likely involved.
** In general, statements featuring Tom Haan tend to relate to the Flesh's fear of being consumed and the philosophical implications of humans and the animals they eat all essentially being made of meat.
* TheFamilyThatSlaysTogether: With his uncle, John. The uncle's wife, Lan Ying, may even have been in on it since, as Jon learned from Martin's research into the case, she had no defensive wounds and some of her injuries could even have been self-inflicted.
* SickeningSlaughterhouse: Worked in a meat processing plant in Episode 30 ("The Killing Floor"), where he created a sickening vision of a slaughterhouse processing carcasses of humans as well as animals for the statement giver. [[spoiler:As stated above, he was also most likely the avatar in charge of the human slaughterhouse in the Flesh domain in Episode 178 ("The Processing Line"), though he wasn't identified as such]].
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Hunt
[[folder:Julia Montauk]]
!!Julia Montauk
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 009
-> '''Voiced by:''' Francesca Renèe Reid

The daughter of notorious serial killer Robert Montauk. Was marked by the Darkness at a young age, but rejected it in favor of hunting monsters with Trevor Herbert.
----
* BerserkButton: The closed-eye symbol. Given that the People's Church of the Divine Host were controlling her father and murdered him when he pushed back, this is not surprising.
* BusCrash: [[spoiler:Both she and Trevor were mentioned in 160 as missing, with the implication they survived the attack on the Institute, and in 176 it is revealed that she ''was'' killed by Daisy offscreen, directly confirmed by Jon in 177.]]
* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: Even after aligning herself with the Hunt and becoming a murderer, she's shown to be capable of genuine love and friendship, viewing Trevor as a surrogate father of sorts. And she does still love her dad, in spite of everything.
* FamilyOfChoice: With Trevor Herbert.
* IJustWantToBeNormal: She spent a lot of time trying to be normal and outrun her father's infamy until she joined the Hunt.
* JumpedAtTheCall: Started slaying monsters without hesitation once she met Trevor Herbert.
* KilledOffscreen: [[spoiler:Julia is killed about a week after the events of Episode 158 ("Panopticon"). Jon explains that Daisy tore her throat out in the tunnels beneath the Institute, with Trevor finding her body a few hours later]].
* SmitingEvilFeelsGood: ''Really'' enjoyed her first kill, and likes monster hunting.
* VillainousLineage: Jon lampshades that after years of trying to get out from under her status as a serial killer's daughter, she essentially became one herself.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Trevor Herbert]]
!!Trevor Herbert
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 010
->'''Voiced by:''' Ian Hayles

An elderly vampire hunter. He's spent most of his life homeless and on heroin, but that doesn't keep him down.
----
* AffablyEvil: For an amoral monster hunter and murderer, he's a fairly pleasant man, and he genuinely seems to want to avoid hurting innocents if he can.
* BackForTheDead: Returns in Season 5, [[spoiler:only to be killed by Basira after he is reduced to being used as bait by Jon]].
* BloodKnight: Trevor lives for the Hunt. He doesn't much care what he's hunting, so long as it's a challenge.
* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: A small measure of evil, compared to other avatars, but he does love Julia.
* FamilyOfChoice: With Julia Montauk.
* TheFamilyThatSlaysTogether: Contrasting with Robert's EvilParentsWantGoodKids tendencies, Trevor and Julia's #1 hobby is murder.
* JumpedAtTheCall: Killed a vampire as a young teenager and never looked back.
* OopNorth: A homeless junkie, murderer, and lifelong Mancunian.
* OutlivingOnesOffspring: [[spoiler:Surrogate offspring, but still applies. Sadly Trevor outlasts Julia when she is murdered by Daisy after Julia and Trevor attack the Institute in Season 4]].
* TheNoseKnows: Trevor can sniff out other servants of the supernatural.
* ThrowingOffTheDisability: Age, heroin addiction, and lung cancer all seem to have been alleviated by Trevor's devotion to the Hunt.
* VampireHunter: Got his start as one.
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Spiral
[[folder:Michael/Helen]]
!!Michael Shelley/Helen Richardson, The Distortion
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 008
->'''Voiced by:''' Luke Booys[=/=]Imogen Harris

A... [[AmbiguouslyHuman humanlike...]] being with unsettling powers that dives straight into the UncannyValley.
----
* AintTooProudToBeg: [[spoiler:Helen once Jon finally catches her in a lie and can focus the Ceaseless Watcher on her in Season 5. She takes quite a bit of time trying to sway Jon from her imminent death in a mounting panic.]]
* AnthropomorphicPersonification: [[spoiler:Episode 187 reveals that at its core the Distortion is the embodiment of the fear of false friendships.]]
* AmbiguousSituation: Perhaps befitting a minion of the Spiral: how much of the Distortion is Micheal Shelly/Helen Richardson, and how much is an alien monster wearing the faces of the dead? Jon is able to confirm that Micheal and Helen are genuinely different beings, but also that the original Helen and Micheal are "gone", and any attempts to clarify how much and what remains gets lost in the twists of the Spiral.
* BitchInSheepsClothing: [[spoiler:As episode 187 reveals, the Distortion is the embodiment of false friendships and as such always presents a friendly enough outer layer to hide the manipulations.]]
* BodyHorror: The only consistent feature of them is the appearance that every bone in their body has been stuffed inside its hands.
* CannotTellALie: Despite being a manifestation of the fear of falsehood, it only twists the truth, never saying anything outright false. [[spoiler:It finally breaking this rule and outright lying to Jon is what kills it.]]
* {{Catchphrase}}: "They needed a door" and its variations.
* CreepyLongFingers: Michael's hands are described as having long, stiff fingers that end in points.
* ExactWords: As the Distortion is built on confusion, Michael[[spoiler: /Helen]] cannot directly lie, but also can never be fully truthful. [[spoiler:What finally seals Helen's fate is her letting a lie slip out of panic, letting the Eye finally find her.]]
* FauxAffablyEvil: In contrast to Michael, Helen is quite polite to Jon, and carries on a friendly conversation with [[{{Jerkass}} Melanie]]. [[spoiler:However, MAG 187 reveals that [[BitchInSheepsClothing this is a front]] that ties directly into her nature as the embodiment of false friendships. She is friendly so that she can keep people close enough to manipulate and gaslight them.]]
* {{Foil}}: [[spoiler:Helen becomes one to Jon through Season 4, with her own gradual and willing loss of humanity contrasted against Jon's turmoil over the same issue. By her last appearance in the season she's become decidedly Michael-like.]]
* ForWantOfANail: Had Michael not intervened early on, word from Sasha never would've got back to Elias that [=CO2=] could be used to kill the Flesh Hive's worms, and Jane Prentiss likely would've succeeded in her attack on the Institute; furthermore, had he not had Sasha kill Timothy while he was vulnerable, he would've become ''another'' Flesh Hive and likely would've carried on the attack had Prentiss somehow failed. Essentially, the whole reason for The Corruption's relative OutOfFocus after Season 1 (or the reason the Institute still exists beyond one season) is because Michael decided he ''really'' didn't like worms.
* GlamourFailure: When looked at directly, Michael appears to be a normal human. However, when seen through warped glass, it appears to be very tall and thin, with a body that appears to have no structure, and hands nearly as big as its torso [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with Helen. She is never described as looking non-ordinary or different from the vanilla version in any way, barring extremely long FemmeFatalons capable of carving flesh.
* TheLastOfHisKind: Temporarily, at least. Michael does mention that the Spiral has many avatars and monsters just like the other Powers, but Gertrude's disruption of the Great Twisting ritual meant that the vast majority of them died and were banished from the world, respectively. At the time that the show takes place, most creatures of the Spiral hadn't found their way back into reality, leaving Michael, and later Helen, as the Spiral's only major active agent.
* OneSteveLimit: Averted, with the other reoccurring (and equally villainous) Michael Crew as well as numerous other characters named Michael.
* RealityWarper: Michael is able to make a [[TheLonelyDoor door]] appear that leads to an EndlessCorridor.
* SealedInsideAPersonShapedCan: Michael was once an assistant of Gertrude Robinson's. In order to stop the apotheosis of the Spiral, Gertrude sacrificed Michael, effectively causing the Spiral to manifest in Michael. Enough of the original remains for it to want revenge.
* WildCard: Depending on what's at stake and whose body it's using, the Distortion can either be helpful to the Institute staff or try to kill them. As revealed in 187, [[spoiler:this was truly its only real goal. While the Distortion did not want Jon to revert the world and was manipulating him to try and prevent it, it was engaged in a careful performance even before that was a factor, acting just shady enough to be mistrusted while also being helpful and friendly enough that the Archive crew, Jon especially, had doubts that perhaps they were being too harsh on it. There was never any end to this other than delighting in the fear, self-doubt, and paranoia.]]
* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: In MAG 101, the Distortion destroys the "Michael" incarnation, because residual hatred for the Archivist temporarily overrode its actual aims, and makes Helen its new avatar.
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Stranger
[[folder:The Anglerfish]]
!!The Anglerfish
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 001

An entity that uses the bodies of its victims as lures for further prey.
----
* TheBusCameBack: Though it originally appears as just another MonsterOfTheWeek, albeit the first, it shows up again in MAG 054 and later proves to be a key figure in the Unknowing. Some of of the victims it took also have their skins and identities worn by some of the Stranger's mannequins, such as Daniel Rawlings, Megan Shaw, and Sarah Baldwin.
* HumanResources: What becomes of its victims. Some are used as lures to collect more victims. Many, at least in recent history, go towards other purposes, with their skins harvested to be made into "shells", while the rest of them become singers in the Stranger's choir.
* MindHive: It seems to control the "shells" it makes from its victims, and Nikola mentions it has hundreds of such shells already.
* NothingIsScarier: The entity proper is never seen by the statement giver, only its "lure". Even when it's properly encountered later, we never get an actual description of it.
* OneWordVocabulary: When the statement giver encountered it in MAG 001, it was apparently only capable of a single sentence: "Can I have a cigarette?" However, it seems to have moved past this by the time it's encountered later, or else its shells are more sophisticated than it.
* UncertainDoom: It may have been killed when Tim blew up the Unknowing, but we have no way of knowing for certain.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Breekon & Hope]]
!!Breekon & Hope
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 002
-> '''Voiced by:''' Martin Corcoran (Breekon) and Steve Violich (Hope)

A mysterious two-person delivery company specializing in supernatural artifacts.
----
* TheAllegedCar: Their primary mode of conveying artifacts is a rusty, permanently grimy white van.
* BackForTheDead: [[spoiler:Episode 182 features the return of Breekon where he asks to just be put out of his misery.]]
* TheDividual: The two of them are so closely associated to one another that [[spoiler:when Hope is killed by Daisy, Breekon seems at a complete loss for direction and purpose, and has to force himself to refer to himself as "I" and not "we"]].
* EnigmaticMinion: Appear to work for multiple Powers in addition to the Stranger. The only consistencies are that they pick up and deliver artifacts, and bad things happen when they do. It's become clearer that they do have a main allegiance in the Stranger, but will help out others if they feel like it.
* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: They consider themselves to be a unit, almost one person in two bodies, but after [[spoiler:Hope dies, it's clear that Breekon is devastated on a very genuine and emotional level, to the point where you can't help but pity the poor bastard]].
-->''I have never known hate before. I have never known loss. But now they are with me always, and I desire nothing but to share them with you.''
* GiantMook: The guys who work at B&H are big. Like "take-up-the-room" big.
* MacGuffinDeliveryService: Their primary role in the story. They deliver a chest containing what will become the Not!Sasha to the Magnus Archives.
* MercyKill: [[spoiler:In Episode 182 ("Wellbeing"), Jon and Martin run into Breekon in a Stranger-ruled hospital, where Breekon is stuck serving as a janitor. Between that, missing his other half and no longer being able to serve his calling of delivering things, he asks Jon to put him out of his misery. Jon does so, turning the full power of the Eye onto Breekon and finally killing him]].
* TheNondescript: The two deliverymen. The only thing anyone can ever remember about them is their size, their accents (the local lower-class kind, but overblown to the point of parody), and that they "look like you'd expect".
* NonindicativeName: There was actually only one founder, Breekon--he always wanted to start a family business and call it "Breekon and Sons", but he never had any sons, so he added "Hope" as his own little in-joke. The name is even ''more'' nonindicative than it seems, as the delivery guys have in fact stolen the names "Breekon and Hope" and taken over.
* ReallySevenHundredYearsOld: The two deliverymen have existed since at least the middle ages, but have not always been Breekon & Hope.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Nikola Orsinov]]
!!Nikola Orsinov, Danseuse Étoile
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 083
-> '''Voiced by:''' Jessica Law

A being created by Gregor Orsinov to serve as the main dancer for the Unknowing.
----
* ActorAllusion: It's not [[Music/TheMechanisms the first time]] Jessica Law has voiced an inanimate, humanoid object with a stolen voice box and a love of violence.
* ArchEnemy: Tim certainly sees her as this, with her having skinned his brother and caused him to go to work for the Magnus Institute in the first place. She certainly remembers terrifying him, but the animosity isn't reciprocated until [[spoiler: Tim becomes the one to destroy the Unknowing.]]
* ArcVillain: Of Season 3.
* BigBad: Of the Circus and generally all servants of the Stranger. The Angler Fish, Breekon and Hope, the Not-Them and the mannequins all defer to her leadership as she is their chosen dancer for the Unknowing.
* CharacterDeath: She was destroyed when her ritual was blown to hell.
* ContrastingSequelAntagonist: To the Not-Them and Jane Prentiss. With Jane Prentiss, both tried to activate a ritual for their respective powers before being killed by the preparedness of the Archives staff. However, Nikola is much more talkative and proactive, taking far less time to personally confront the Archivist. With the Not-Them, both are servants of the Stranger but Nikola is antagonistic from the get-go while Not-Sasha is content to pretend to be an ally and gather intel for her.
* DeadPersonImpersonation / DesecratingTheDead: Poor Gertrude Robinson's legacy after spending her life stopping countless rituals was to end up having her own skin peeled off her corpse and used in the Stranger's own ritual.
* GenderBlenderName: Nikola Orsin''ov'' is a woman (inasmuch as a mannequin created to [[spoiler: enact an apocalypse]] can have a human gender, anyway). She has the male ending because it's originally her father's name; she took it after she murdered him.
* GenuineHumanHide: How she takes on other identities. For her role as main dancer in the Unknowing, she wears the skins of Gertrude and Leitner.
* GreaterScopeVillain: Not-Them's presence in the Archives was to gather intel for her, making her this for Season 2.
* HoistByTheirOwnPetard: [[spoiler:Her stalling the Unknowing partway through to spend time gloating and torturing Jon and the other Archive employees gives Tim enough time to get his wits back long enough to get the detonator back and use it, killing Orsinov and stopping the Stranger's plans for centuries.]]
* HumanResources: The main material in her creation was a clown in the Circus of the Other.
* FauxAffablyEvil: She's relentlessly chipper and cheery, which only makes it more unsettling when she mocks and threatens.
* MonsterClown: She takes on her old identity as Joseph Grimaldi, London's most famous clown, for special occasions.
* MurderousMannequin: Her current form, though she's been other forms in the past as it suited her, like a doll or a taxidermy.
* [[RepulsiveRingmaster Repulsive Ringmistress]]: Nikola may not be a literal ringmistress, but she's in charge of the Other Circus and she dresses like one.
* SadClown: Jon really gets under her skin by reminding her of her past as the Great Grimaldi, calling her "someone who's never been happy in [their] own skin".
* {{Sadist}}: Takes delight in Jon's emotional turmoil when he brings up the deaths of Gertrude and Jurgen, and later taunting Tim over her role in his brother's death.
* VoiceChangeling: She "borrowed" a voice box from a woman she murdered in order to gain the ability to speak. Her natural voice is quite high and breathy, but she can use the voices of those whose skins she's donned as well.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Not-Them]]
!!Not-Them
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 003
-> '''Voiced by:''' Evelyn Hewitt (Not-Sasha)

An entity of the Stranger that kills victims to take their place. In a twist, it doesn't take their appearance, but instead rewrites all evidence of its victim to match its false guise.
----
* AffablyEvil / FauxAffablyEvil: Not-Them is always exceedingly polite, and in ''The Good Mother'' even replaces a harsh and domineering woman with a far kinder and motherly persona. Of course, it does this only after it kills a victim to wear, and when it gets bored and moves on, it is not afraid to kill others around it who might cause it trouble afterwards. It also seems to delight in tormenting those who can see through its disguise, not actually threatening them but leaving the knowledge that ''something'' has replaced their friend or loved one, could easily do the same to them, and worst of all they're the only ones who realize or would believe it.
* AintTooProudToBeg: [[spoiler:When Jon focuses the Eye on it, it desperately begs for its life.]]
* ArcVillain: Of Season 2, in the guise of Sasha.
* BrilliantButLazy: Or rather, "Extremely Powerful, but Lazy". As Gertrude notes in Episode 77 ("The Kind Mother"), the power it possesses must be incredible since it can rewrite so many people's memories and recordings (with some exceptions) almost on instinct, but seems to be content just staying in one location for long stretches of time and selecting just one person to unnerve the hell out of.
* CassandraTruth: Invoked, There is always a person who can see that Not-Them is not the person they are pretending to be, but nobody else sees this and so this is always dismissed as ridiculous.
* HumanoidAbomination: Its true form is significantly less human than its disguises, which [[OneWingedAngel leaks through]] when it's riled up to kill.
* KillAndReplace: The Not-Them's MO. The twist is that the form it takes actually looks nothing like the original person, but it alters records of them to match its new appearance.
* KarmicDeath: [[spoiler:Jon forces her to experience the agony and pain she caused her victims.]]
* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler:In MAG 165, Not-Sasha confronts Jon and Martin at the Stranger's carousel. After invoking Jon's ire by threatening Martin and bragging about killing Sasha, Jon turns the Ceaseless Watcher on her, [[YourHeadASplode to predictable results]].]]
* LeakingCanOfEvil: Jon's mistake in thinking that the patterned table was its SoulJar is understandable in the face of Dekker's apparently poor bindings, as it is still capable of attacking and replacing anyone who gets close enough to the table.
* LeanAndMean: When it's out for the kill, it looks like its disguise identity after being "stretched out".
* LetsYouAndHimFight: She is [[spoiler:released from her imprisonment as a distraction by Peter]] at the same time [[spoiler:Julia and Trevor]] attack the Institute. In chasing down Jon, it runs into them, and is quite happy to try and kill them as well. They shoot it, but wise up when this doesn't work.
* TheMole: It was delivered to the Magnus Institute in order to provide intel to Nikola.
* RetGone: What it does to its victims, writing over their existence with its own. It can't manipulate audio recorded on magnetic tape, however, and it always leaves one person unaffected so it can feed on their fear as they recognize a stranger has replaced someone they know.
* SealedEvilInACan:
** In 2001, Adelard Dekker bound it to the web table, sealing away most of its power and trapping it nearby the artifact... at least until our good Mr. Sims destroyed the table under the mistaken assumption that it was in fact the Not-Them's SoulJar.
** Leitner uses a book of the Buried to seal it away in the end of season 2. [[spoiler:Peter Lukas frees it again as a distraction in season 4]].
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Vast
[[folder:Michael Crew]]
!!Michael Crew, Avatar of the Vast
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 04
-> '''Voiced by:''' Guy Kelley

A man who sought out Leitner books - his name is fairly common in any statement involving them. He's the vessel of The Vast.
----
* AffablyEvil: When [[spoiler:Jon goes to visit him]], he's a very polite host, and only attacks when he's asked a question he finds prying. [[spoiler:Also probably because prying questions are ''extra'' prying when coming from the Archivist, which has to be uncomfortable if you can tell it's happening.]] Even then, he answers the question and makes sure his attack isn't fatal.
* ButForMeItWasTuesday: By this point he has screwed up so many lives in the service of the Vertigo that he can't actually remember most of them.
* ScrewDestiny: He was originally marked (literally) by the Spiral, but chose to defy it and seek out another Power to serve. He dabbled in several until settling on the Vast.
* WeHardlyKnewYe: While he appears in multiple statements, his actual appearance in person is immediately followed by [[spoiler:Daisy beating him to death.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Simon Fairchild]]
!!Simon Fairchild, Avatar of the Vast
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 21
-> '''Voiced by:''' Karim Kronfli

The old patriarch of the Fairchild family, which has close ties to the Vast.
----
* AffablyEvil: Similarly to Peter Lukas, Simon is outwardly quite cheery and pleasant, but he is gleefully evil and far more likely to make outright threats.
* BroughtDownToNormal: The Finale states [[spoiler:that Simon survived the collapse of the ritual but was left without powers. It's not explicitly said what happened to him when his former victims found him, but it was suggested that it wasn't pretty.]]
* DissonantSerenity: Although many avatars have a noted apathy towards the people around him, Simon's is distinct due to arising primarily from his chosen patron's influence. Absolutely nothing in the universe is truly permanent or important, and as such, nothing within it bothers him, enabling him to kill as easily as have a pleasant conversation and vice versa. The idea of the whole world being destroyed and remade by the Extinction doesn't cause him to so much as blink.
* EvilFeelsGood: Seems to love being an avatar and currently mostly just hurts and kills people for the hell of it.
* EvilOldFolks: Even ignoring his actual age of hundreds of years, he still presents as an old man.
* KarmaHoudiniWarranty / OffscreenKarma: [[spoiler:A conversation between Basira, Melanie and Georgie in Episode 200 ("Last Words") after the Powers have left the world hints that some of the people who Simon tormented caught up with him and, now that he was no longer powerful, exacted revenge]].
* KillAndReplace: He has only gone by the identity "Simon Fairchild" for 80-90 years; he disposed of the real Simon Fairchild and stole his identity for his fortune.
* LongGame: Apparently, he and the Vast are fairly inactive these days because, in today's society, the world feels too small for a fear of emptiness to be effective. Instead, Simon has his eyes set on space, even though it will be at least a century before he can actually do anything with that.
* MiniatureSeniorCitizens: He is four or five centuries old, presents as a man approaching the age of 100 and is described as "tiny, pink [[LeanAndMean skeleton of a man]]" in Episode 51: "High Pressure".
* NighInvulnerable: The first time he is properly encountered, he mentions that he was once sent plummeting to the bottom of the ocean, and given that he's still around, it's clear it didn't kill him. He also makes sure to mention that he is extremely long-lived, and later, after the [[spoiler:Change, he survives falling from untold thousands of feet at high velocity only to get up a moment later with a cheery hello.]]
* ObfuscatingDisability: Walks with a cane in order to keep up his appearance as a frail, old man, though episode 124 ("Left Hanging") revealed that he doesn't need it at all; he is said to only use it when he notices someone looking.
* PreMortemOneLiner: They don't always die, but Simon was fond of making a pithy statement to his victims before feeding them to his patron.
* ThePowerOfApathy: [[InvertedTrope Inverted]]. Simon's powers as discussed seem to ''make'' him apathetic to others--the whole thing about the Vast is the insignificance of humankind. Simon has tried to get others to experience his own elation with his patron, but not really being ''able'' to consider them worth the time makes that difficult.
* Really700YearsOld: He was originally an apprentice under the 16th century Italian painter [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintoretto Tintoretto]], placing his age around 450-500 years.
* StrawNihilist: Considers all of existence on Earth to be pointless and sees human lives as insignificant because of the enormous size and long timespan of the universe as a whole.
* VillainousFriendship: With Peter Lukas, even though they serve different Powers; as he points out, the Vast and the Lonely are closely related and can easily bleed into each other.
-->'''Simon:''' After all, the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel.\\
'''Martin:''' And being aware of how lonely you are can make anywhere feel more empty.
* VillainOfAnotherStory: Comes off as this, only ever really directly antagonizing Martin while being content to terrorize everyday people instead of making war on the Institute.
* WhileRomeBurns: Discussed in relation to [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt The Extinction]]. Peter's rather concerned about a possible human extinction event, but as Simon puts it to Martin, why would he care? So the Extinction comes and wipes out all of mankind--it's not like they mattered to begin with. If it does happen, and he doesn't die, he's quite ready to adjust and move on, and as such isn't that committed to fighting it.
* WhiteHairBlackHeart: Is described as having "stark white" hair and is thoroughly evil.
[[/folder]]

!!!Of the Web
[[folder: Annabelle Cane]]
!!Annabelle Cane, Avatar of the Spider
!!!First Mentioned: MAG 069
-> '''Voiced by:''' Chioma Nwalioba

A woman associated with the Web who seems to have a special interest in Jon.
----
* AbusiveParents: Claims in her statement to have had an emotionally manipulative mother.
* AmbiguouslyEvil: She works for The Web and has done some rather nasty things in the past (as statements that involve her show), but her behavior towards Jon and company throughout seasons 4 and 5 -- sometimes helpful, sometimes hindering, often just cryptic -- leaves it very unclear what, exactly, her real intentions are. [[spoiler: The final stretch of season 5 reveals that all her actions have been leading up to getting Jon to use the dimensional rift at Hilltop Road to enable the Powers to spread across TheMultiverse.]]
* AwesomeAnachronisticApparel: In her first appearance, the statement giver of "Thought For The Day" describes her looking like "a vintage store exploded on her".
* BecauseDestinySaysSo: Invoked; she says there isn't really such a thing as free will, people just ''think'' there is because they can't comprehend all the factors that affect their choices.
-->'''Annabelle:''' Let it never be said I do not dance the steps I am assigned.
* BecauseYouWereNiceToMe: [[spoiler: She tells Martin that because Salesa had been accommodating to her in his house during the Change, she gave him a peaceful MercyKill in his sleep.]]
* BeingTorturedMakesYouEvil: Her experiences as a test subject for an arachnophobia ESP where she was bombarded with the psychic transmitions of other people's fear resulted in her avatariization.
* BodyHorror: Her skull is full of spiderwebs, and her joints are...wrong for someone with her number of limbs.
* ContemplateOurNavels: Most of her statement in "Weaver" consists on her philosophising about the existence of free will (or lack thereof) to Jon.
* CrypticConversation: Her ''modus operandi''. She never answers a question directly if she can respond with another question or provide an ambiguous and unhelpful response, and while she never ''lies'', peppers her speech with half-truths, diversions, and FalseReassurance. Martin quickly gets fed up with this behavior [[spoiler: once he meets Anabelle in person in season 5]]. [[spoiler: It eventually turns out that, as a servant of The Web, it's actually physically painful for her to give straight answers and speak with complete honesty, and she audibly struggles to do so with Martin and Jon.]]
* DarkAndTroubledPast: [[UnreliableExpositor If we can trust her statement]] Annabelle was raised by a neglectful father and an abusive mother, and as a kid she had an extremely traumatizing encounter with the Web, which led to her developing an extreme case of arachnophobia and becoming the test subject of an ethically dubious ESP experiment, leading to her avatarization.
* TheDragon: The foremost servant of the Web, and the only one to both appear in person and be privy to the Web's true plans.
* EvilSoundsDeep: Not usually, but when she [[spoiler:turns into a giant spider in episode 197, her voice turns deep and reverberating, almost the deepest in the entire series]].
* FauxAffablyEvil: In her statement, she sounds almost polite, though there are sinister and sometimes condescending undertones.
* TheGhost: Actively avoids being seen in person, leading to even the episode detailing her backstory lacking her physical presence. [[spoiler:She finally meets Jon and Martin in episode 180.]]
* HopeCrusher: [[spoiler: In Episode 196 ("This Old House") she tells Martin that her original plan was to fill him up with spiders to push Jon into DespairEventHorizon, but the complexity of their bond made her change her plan.]]
* {{Irony}}: As a human, she was extremely arachnophobic. Now...well.
* LeanAndMean: Described as "rail thin" in "Web Development" (episode 123).
* ManipulativeBastard: As the chief servant of the Mother of Puppets, this is, of course, her thing. It has been ever since she was a child, when she would instigate fights between her siblings or deliberately injure herself to get them in trouble, and planned to run away from home to make everyone pay more attention to her (behavior she learned from her emotionally abusive mother).
* MassiveNumberedSiblings: According to her statement, she's the youngest of eight kids.
* MetaGuy: She constantly talks about playing her "part" and not disappointing her audience, comments on the structure of the statements, and refers to the possibility of her death as her "exiting the stage"
* MouthOfSauron: The face of the Web even after the Powers manifest in the real world, articulating its centuries long plan to Jon.
* NotMeThisTime: Despite her extensive history with manipulation and mind control she had ''nothing'' to do with Jon's compulsion to take live statements from unsuspecting victims. It was just Jon all along.
* OneWingedAngel: [[spoiler: Assumes a monstrous spider form when Jon and Basira confront her at Hilltop House, though it's mainly to underline her argument -- she's well aware that by this point, she stands no chance against [[PhysicalGod Jon]] in a direct confrontation.]]
* PestController: She can command swarms of spiders to do her bidding, befittingly for the chief servant of [[SpidersAreScary The Web]]. [[spoiler: In Episode 196, she makes use of this power to bind Martin in place with webbing in order to use him as a hostage against Jon.]]
* RedRightHand: During her apotheosis as an avatar of the Web, part of her skull got caved in, revealing [[BodyHorror nothing but cobwebs inside]]. Later descriptions revealed she covered up the hole with more spider silk.
* TheRunaway: She ran away from home as a kid, thinking her absense would destabilize her family and allow her to claim her place as the most important child, which led to her encountering the Web for the first time.
* SignificantWhiteHairDarkSkin: Described as having dark skin and bleached blonde hair, possibly to evoke the appearance of a black widow and its webbing. Her being of African descent and having a name starting with "An" also recalls the West African TricksterGod Anansi the Spider, [[spoiler:particularly his role as a collector of tales and tendency to manipulate much more powerful adversaries into doing exactly what he needs]].
* SpeechImpediment: She has a slight lisp, pronouncing S as TH, which she gets from her voice actor.
* {{Troll}}: Instead of just talking to Jon she went to the trouble of stealing stationary and his recordings to set up a mocking {{tableau}} for him, and then extensively makes fun of him before telling him to stay away from her house.
* UncertainDoom: [[spoiler: The last time we see her, she's in the house on Hilltop Road, transformed into a spider monster and sitting directly atop the crack between universes. Listeners have no way of knowing whether she was sucked through along with the Fears, or was left behind and died when the Spider departed without her (it's unlikely she can survive without her powers, since when she became an avatar half her skull got bashed in).]]
* UnreliableExpositor: Invokes this on herself at the end of her statement in "Weaver", saying that she could have made it all up in other to manipulate Jon into acting in favor of the Web's plans.
* UnseenNoMore: [[spoiler:Finally contacts the main characters directly by calling Martin in Episode 166 ("The Worms")]].
** [[spoiler:Appears in person in Episode 180 at Upton House, to offer Jon and Martin rest.]]
* VillainousFriendship: Has on with Mikaele, whom she lives with at Upton House [[spoiler:after the Change]]. [[spoiler: Because of this, she honours his wish to MercyKill him after stealing his apocalypse-proof camera.]]
* VillainsOutShopping: She enjoys cooking.

* WorfHadTheFlu: Hunters are very difficult to kill, though this is more for ferocity than sheer durability. Robert Montauk was apparently ''violently'' killed in his cell by Mr. Pitch for turning against the Dark, though this can be attributed to having weakened from being in prison with no way to feed the Hunt.

A man with prophetic dreams of people's death. He occasionally tries to warn victims of the supernatural. [[spoiler:Eventually, he tried to escape the curse of his ability, but failed and has given in to The End and become one of its avatars]].

* OutOfFocus: A curious example; the Buried does show up in the story a good deal, thanks to the Coffin, but unlike the other Powers it doesn't have an avatar, so the aims and motivations of people who might follow or serve such an entity are left almost totally unexplored.

* AmbiguousSituation: She was supposedly [[spoiler:freed from the Slaughter's influence after Jon and Basira cut the bullet out of her leg, but there are some hints that it still has some vague hold on her, even if she's not in danger of becoming an avatar anymore. Her anger issues persist, and in episode 140 she tells Martin that she might have beaten her followers to death if Georgie wasn't there to keep her sane]].

* JerkassToOne: Out of all his assistants, he's the most harsh and comptentous of Martin. Later in the show it's explained that it's due him already knowing Tim and Sasha from research and specifically requesting them to join him in the archives, and Elias sending Martin in without telling him.