TV Tropes is designed to cause Awakenings
Ever notice how if you read TVTropes for too long, everything around you seems more...tropey? That's because you've started Awakening through a Mystery Play. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable. Characters Who Are Awakened
- Phil from Groundhog Day: The whole movie was an Acanthus Awakening.
- There's a Acanthus legacy called the Awakening Gambit that is meant to force awakenings through time loops, so maybe there's a mage trying to help him along.
- Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Batshit insane Moros serial killer. Probably one of the Mad.
- All the magical characters from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Balthazar and Dave are probably Obrimos, given their control over Prime and Forces. Horvath is arguably a good example of a Tremere Lich.
- The film As Above, So Below is a near perfect example of a Moros or Mastigos Awakening. It even involves crossing the Abyss.
- John Wick shows just how scary an Acanthus with some dots in Fate in the Adamantine Arrow can be.
- The Ninth Gate. Sleeper occultists fight over a grimoire, unaware that they hired an Awakening Mastigos to find it for them.
- James from Silent Hill 2 Awakens as a Moros over the course of the game. If he lives in the ending, he probably goes off to become a Mage, hence why he disappears over the next few days.
- Walter Sullivan from Silent Hill 4 is a Ghost Mage as described in the antagonist section, probably a Mastigos Scelestus given his mastery over Space to make pocket dimensions and control minds.
- Lo Wang from Shadow Warrior. He becomes a truly badass Thyrsus, focused on kung-fu and Life magic. He even travels to the Shadow several times and has a demon familiar.
- Tien from Ong-Bak. Another badass Thyrsus.
- Ruben Victoriano/Ruvik from The Evil Within is a near perfect example of a Mad Mastigos. Warping minds and controlling space? Fears and goetic demons manifesting? Check and check.
- Doctor Strange. He's an Obrimos Archmage with high dots in Prime, Forces, Mind, Matter, and given how bizarrely lucky he is, probably Fate. Dormammu is an Exarch, possibly banished to some weird Temenos Realm. Baron Mordo is probably an Obrimos as well, but with more dots in death and probably of the Scelestus Legacy, since he usually ends up being some demon's bitch.
- Add Time to the list of Strange's high level Arcana, as of the movie.
- Dave and John awaken over the course of the book/movie as either Acanthus or Moros. Soy Sauce is some kind of drug that triggers Awakenings.
- Charlie Sheen is an Acanthus with some knowledge of Mind, and he's been Obfuscating Insanity in the hopes that he can become memetic enough to reach Critical Meme Mass, in a scheme to awaken the entire planet.
- The song Spirit by the band Ghost describes a Mastigos Awakening, brought on when the nameless protagonist drank so much absinthe that they passed out. The last two lines of the song imply that the protagonist might go on to become a Banisher.
- Stanley in The Stanley Parable seems to be in the process of a Mastigos awakening, which is presented by the narrator trying to force him to pick his own way and Stanley deliberately choosing a different path to give some semblance of free will. The narrator himself by contrast shows a lot of traits of an Acanthus, deliberately guiding Stanley to the intended path that he has set up for him, and does not like it when that story path is broken by Stanley veering off in directions he did not intend for him to go in. As such, the game presents perfectly one of the key conflicts between Mastigos and Acanthus, the idea of free will versus fate.
There was no Atlantis
- Until Archmages retconned it into existence. And because they couldn't agree on how it was, it's history is so fractured and contradicting. And its language makes no sense, because none of them knew lingustics.
- On top of that, initially there was no Exarchs - just a bunch of arrogant reality warpers (e. g. freshly ascended Archmages), who broke the universe while playing tug-of-war with it, thus creating the Abyss, shat the brick and in a fit of Never My Fault made up a story about evil dark lords whom they bravely fought to pin the blame. Being reality warpers, they actually brought them into existence, complete with equal powers, enough to resist being retconned back into nothing, AND with actual organization to back them up, instead of Archmages' carnival of pride/kindergarten squabble. Upon witnessing this they shat another brick and loosely banded together for survival and teaching some reinforcements, bringing the game's current status into existence.
Thaumaturgy and Awakening draw on the same powers
- Inscribing one's name upon the Watchtower is described as being the very first spell a mage ever casts. But it is having one's name upon the Watchtower(and thus sympathy with a particular Realm Supernal) that makes one a mage. Ergo, sleepers(or at least sleepwalkers) are capable of at least some, limited feats of magic, under the proper circumstances. Thaumaturgy(detailed in the second chapter of the supplement "Second Sight") is the limited magic that some sleepwalkers can preform. Presumably, they are one and the same. I theorize that the human soul innately possess minor magical abilities from which a thaumaturge draws his power, and it is that power that a perspective mage uses to inscribe his name.
The Alternate Genres are the Result of Aponeia
The various alternate genres described in the Chronicler's Guide were the result of various Aponeia(as described in Imperial Mysteries) accidentally produced by archmages. The archmasters in question(or their various rivals) later undid this, returning the Fallen World to its current state. Second Edition is the result of an Ascension
One Archmage or another Ascended via one method or another, and either one of the Omens they Exalted or a side effect of their Ascension caused the various changes to history and magic that happened during the change between editions. The Atlantis (or What-was-Before) is now in Abyss
Considering that Exarchs seem to destroy all possible versions/realities of it or it was destroyed during first mage war and clearly doesn't exist in all reality, this realm is the only place. The Abyss is just the biggest Paradox ever
Paradox existed before the Fall but was weaker then. When the Exarchs cast whatever spell allowed them to enter the Supernal, they scored a quadrillion successes on their Paradox dice and permanently broke reality. To imagine how it works think of a wound. If a wound isn't treated it's easy to tear it further and make it worse. The Abyss acts as a wound in reality, weakening the structure of the universe and making it easier to damage further which is what has caused Paradox to become so much stronger since Atlantis fell.- The Guardians of the Veil 'do' theorize that each Paradox makes the Abyss stronger and gives it more access to reality thus making Paradoxes stronger and more common, so hypothetically one really, really, really big one back in or at the end of The Time Before might explain why its so dangerous these days, assuming cumulative damage isn't enough.
