it doesn't mean anything until you make it mean something.
in other words, fuck around and find out.
it's hard to put this one into words, but bear with me.
in the magnus protocol, i believe that there is a continuous theme of needing to be known. ink5oul is a fantastic example. gwen did not compel them, ink5oul NEEDED their story to be told.
i honestly think this is the same for TMA. in many of those cases, the statement holders gave up those stories willingly, almost as if they needed to tell the story to achieve some kind of peace. it needed to mean something to somebody. jonathon sims did not compel most of those people, but instead acted as a vessel to consume their stories. he was not about compelling, but about consuming. there was a thirst for some kind of knowledge in him. he had to know, and that made him a perfect vessel for consumption. an archivist is really a glorified hoarder if you think about it. he's hoarding this information.
i personally don't think that the smirke categories matter at all. i don't think that's the point. i think the point is that they scared you and they meant something to you. the story was told, and you consumed it, and that gave it power. at the end of the day, the story was told. to categorize it is to take away meaning. if you think about it, a lot of the statements do not perfectly fit into one or even two categories. more often than not, you can assign 2-3 Fears to any one statement. and that takes away meaning, because categorizing it rationalizes it and takes away the fear.
OIAR employees are consumers. they, like us, are consuming the stories. some of the employees, like alice, stick it in a box and call it a day. others, like sam, ruminate and investigate (which ends up hurting people). i think that categorizing the stories takes away from the actual meaning, the actual point. i think that the OIAR's arbitrary categorization system is almost a critique of the smirke system and how we as an audience have latched onto it. it doesn't make sense. the stories don't fit into one category. alice says "nope, you have to pick ONE". i don't think there ARE categories, smirke or OIAR or otherwise. the only thing that matters is that you consumed it.
you can be alice or you can be sam. alice consumes the story and does not let it get to her. sam takes it and dwells on it and investigates it and gives it meaning and makes it real. sam found something in the institute because he looked for something. and because he found something, people got hurt.
and isn't that what we're doing? investigating. freeing this thing and letting it consume? when we consume, when we ask for more, people get hurt. all of these stories are about somebody in distress, and we feed on it. when we asked for a sequel, we were asking for more pain and more suffering.
i think we're sam and i think we're alice. sam consumes the conspiracy, and alice throws away the stories. because, let's face it, we aren't here for the grotesquely genius short horror story writing, we're here for the overarching plot. we categorize the story and put it in an arbitrary box, and we throw it away so we can focus on the conspiracy. the conspiracy that, if we feed into, hurts more people. maybe it hurts the characters we love.
i think that jonny and alex are enticing us with red herrings, with the promise of an overarching story (which we probably will get!), while also forcing us to listen to stories their friends wrote. we need to consume every bit of everything, and so jonny and alex use our attention to direct us to some really fantastic, lesser-known writers.
i also think that TMAGP is a critique on consumption. all of the statements, or at least most of them, are about wanting more, not being satisfied, or needing to be known.
this is pretty disjointed, and there are definitely some flaws in my line of reasoning, but i wanted to throw it out there. with all of this being said, i am still going to try to find an overarching plot because, let's face it, we are all jonathon sims.
Some other considerations that did not fit:
the entity in the newest episode identified itself as "an archivist" not "The Archivist". jonathon sims would refer to himself as The Archivist if it were him. this might be an archivist, or the leftovers of one, but it isn't Our archivist.
the OIAR as an organization doesn't actually know what it's doing, but it feels like there's something important about it and that's why it categorizes it. much like us. we think it's important so we consume it. but it might just be a damn good story
jmj is obviously jon, martin, and someone. i think it is jurgen, not jonah. jon, martin, and jonah are all avatars of the web in my opinion.
that being said, it is all the web and it always has been. jon was never an avatar of the eye. he was ALWAYS the web. it is all the web, and it still is
jon, martin, and jurgen are not trapped in the computer. they are remnants of themselves. this universe is controlled by the web, and since everything is connected, it knows that these 3 people are important but they aren't sure why, so they stuck their voices into something that is important. i don't think they are literally stuck in the computer as themselves, i think they're stuck in the computer horcrux style.
finally, shoutout to my father for the basis of a lot of these points. he knows what's up
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