GOD I love how uncomfortable TMA can really make you feel, the moment you engage with the text in any serious way. It’s so well done.
I’m on S5 in my re-listen and I just got through MAG 166, Worms, which. Is definitely one of the ones in S5 that stuck with me the most. It’s so visceral about the suffering of the victims, but that’s not the part that makes me shudder.
No, for me the really scary part is at the end when Martin is waiting for Jon. After he hangs up on Annabelle’s cryptic bullshit, he hears a muffled howl of agony from underneath him, and flippantly says “God, I know, right?” (In reference to Annabelle being annoying).
Someone is being tortured and he makes a joke out of their cry.
Sure it makes sense for him to be a bit desensitized, but when his last conversation with Jon had him encouraging him to lean into the Archive powers despite Jon’s discomfort… I dunno, I find the tonal dissonance of that one-liner very unnerving.
Martin outspokenly finds many things about the apocalypse to be justifiably bad, scary, uncomfortable. Even though he’s insulated from the worst of it, even though he doesn’t have to fully experience each Fear Domain the way Jon does, his tangential brushes with them are still unpleasant for him. He raises a fuss about it in the trench, and in the sick village, despite being assured that he’s safe. He can’t bear to listen to Jon vomit up the horrors. He dislikes the nonsensical dream logic and grumbles about it at every opportunity. He’s far from comfortable with the state of the world (or not-world, as it were.)
But these things are uncomfortable to him because they directly affect him. When confronted with the audible evidence of someone else’s suffering, he’s flippant. Nonchalant. Apparently uncaring.
Someone nearby is being tortured. And he answers them with a jokey little one-liner.
Far be it from me to begrudge a man his small entertainments, and it’s not like he can do anything to help. Feeling bad for them won’t change their circumstances. Nothing he does will change their circumstances, except for continuing on the path to the Panopticon which he’s already walking. He’s already helping in the only way he can.
But the lack of empathy in him is such a stark reminder of how drastically the events of the past few years have changed him. In S2 he was overflowing with compassion for everyone else around him even at the cost of his own wellbeing. He was a doormat, sure, but all the way through S3 he still did his best to be kind and helpful to others. He didn’t always succeed, but you could tell he was still trying even after everyone around him had given up. He clung to his optimism.
All of that is stripped from him now. He’s pendulum-swung as far to the opposite side of the spectrum as one can get while still having any semblance of a moral compass. Empathy for strangers isn’t something he can afford anymore. The Lonely hollowed out that part of him. That’s horrifying. That’s sad. And it makes terribly perfect narrative sense.
TMA is a piece of literature that haunts you with its own tragedy at every corner, and I love it. I love it. Almost every detail serves to reinforce the story. No narrative space is wasted, not even the negative spaces. (Don’t even get me started on all the heavy lifting those missing scenes and indirect implications do). I could write whole literary articles about everything that makes TMA so good. God, what a masterpiece. JONNY SIMS AND ALEX NEWALL YOU ABSOLUTE MADLADS!!!
