If all the characters in TMA, as well as those in TMAGP, are bisexual, according to Alex and Jonathan Sims himself, they are all the worst kind of bisexuals for me. Think abt the least worst kind of bisexual that was currently vilified on Twitter: that's them. That's my headcanon.
You're telling me there's multiple types of bisexuals?
Am I the only one who remembers that Annabelle explicitly said that The Web took Jon's voice (and those he walked with)?
I mean, that's the basis for why I personally think that Augustus isn't Jonah's voice. She said it was about their voices, and Jonah's wasn't on those tapes. But I also acknowledge that this is a sequel, and sequels often include minor retcons.
And tbh, Annabelle was an avatar of lies and manipulation. It is frankly astonishing how much we as a fandom - myself included - take her words at face value, as legit lore about how the TMA world works.
Even if I didn't live on the coast, where walruses are known to live - I still think someone using magic to teleport a walrus to my door is more likely than someone using magic to talk to me, because *I* would absolutely teleport a walrus to someone's door just to fuck with them
You are absolutely correct that if it was possible to magically teleport walruses to people's doors to fuck with them, that would be a fairly common occurrence.
Consider, though: if walrus teleportation was possible, we would expect to observe it a lot, because walrus teleportation is so desirable as a way of fucking with people. The observed rate of walrus teleportation being so different from the expected rate of walrus teleportation is in itself evidence against the existence of walrus teleportation.
In contrast, if fairies were real, we wouldn't expect to see much evidence of them. The difference between what we observe in reality and what we would expect to observe if fairies were real is very small.
Encountering a fairy and encountering a teleported walrus would both rewrite my understanding of the universe, but only the walrus would leave me scratching my head, asking "How the hell did I miss that?"
Please say more about aspirated medial stops, I was talking with my brother in law the other day about how we (Californians) don't say t's in the middle of words and I'm really curious about why that is and if this is a universal thing in all accents of English now
Disclaimer: I do have a Bachelor's in linguistics, but I got it more than a decade ago so it is possible that some of the information in this post will be misremembered or out of date.
tl;dr
Knowing how to pronounce t in different locations in different dialects is a nightmare. Old-fashioned British Received Pronunciation pronounced t in the middle of words, but there's a UK language drift called T-glottalization in which ts except at the start of words are often being replaced with glottal stops? It's really obvious in lower-status dialects but it's been creeping into RP as well.
American English usually does a weird muscle flex called a "flap" or a "tap" that's something like a really short d, or a single roll of a rolled r. I think there are some UK dialects that use this tap as well.
I belieeeeeve that Indian English usually pronounces word-medial ts, but I haven't run an actual analysis on the applicable coworkers' speech because that'd be kind of creepy?
No idea about Australia or New Zealand.
As far as I know, there's no special reason why these particular drifts are happening. Linguistic drift and accent shifts are just something that happens with living languages. If anything, we have immensely slowed the natural process of language change through the invention and widespread teaching of standardized writing.
Glossary
Sorry, I tried doing this without a glossary but I kept having to do weird info cul-de-sacs to explain myself. I've ordered them according to approximately when they'll come up?
lol I failed so hard at this, about halfway through the post I started using words without putting them in the glossary first and man idk I've been working on this post for 4 hours now and I don't want to go back through and put definitions for some of this shit, sorry
Phoneme - A single language sound, as it is stored in your brain. Represented with slashes around it, e.g. /t/.
Phone - A language sound as it actually comes out of your mouth. Represented with square brackets around it, e.g. [t].
Phonology - The study of speech sounds, from internal representation to external expression, but not including the study of how they are physically created in the mouth (that's phonetics). Not to be confused with phrenology, the racist pseudoscience of head shape.
Word - Can have a few different meanings in a linguistic context. In this post, will usually refer to either a lexeme or a phonological word. You should be able to tell from the context.
Phonological Word - What you probably think of when you think of a "word." A unit of speech that you could naturally pause on either side of, but could not naturally pause inside.
Lexeme/Semantic Word - A single phonological word and its attached meaning; or, phrase of multiple phonological words, which holds a meaning which is different than the sum of its parts. For example, "Carry the bucket" is not a single lexeme; but "Kick the bucket" is.
Voiced/Voiceless - A sound is voiced if you use your vocal cords to make it, and voiceless if you don't.
Stop - Also called a plosive. A stop is a kind of consonant you make by stopping all air flow. The stops English uses are p, b, t, d, k, g, and the glottal stop.
Aspiration - A puff of air following a sound, usually a voiceless stop. In phonetic notation, it is indicated by a superscript h following the consonant, like [pʰ].
IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet. A standard set of symbols based on the Roman alphabet and used to refer to roughly the same sounds regardless of language.
Glottal stop - A stop which is performed not by your tongue, as in most stops, but by your vocal cords. Think of the word "Uh-oh" - the way you completely stop airflow after the "Uh" instead of just letting it flow into the "oh." That's a glottal stop.
Praat - An audio analysis program tailored specifically for viewing waveforms of speech sounds.
INFODUMP TIME
So the thing about saying words is that the ideas of sounds that you have in your head ("phonemes") don't translate one-to-one to the sounds that come out of your mouth ("phones"); and the ways that these sounds get modified vary between different dialects.
Please keep in mind that when you try to speak slowly or clearly, the sounds that you make change. Linguists are primarily interested in natural speech patterns, not what we do when we're trying to enunciate.
Tater-Tot
Let's take the lexeme tater-tot, because it's the first word I can think of that has all 3 of the major weird things that /t/ does that vary by dialect.
Let's start with the word-initial t. Phonologically there are actually two word-initial t's in tater-tot, the one at the beginning of 'tater,' and the one at the beginning of 'tot.' This is because "tater-tot" is two phonological words despite being one semantic word.
In American and British English, we aspirate our word-initial voiceless stops if they're immediately followed by a vowel, which means we pronounce /p/, /t/, and /k/ as [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ] respectively if they're the first sound in a word (and immediately followed by a vowel). This means we add in a little puff of air following the consonant if it's the first sound in the word. In Indian English, they don't do this - a word-initial /t/ is pronounced [t], without the extra puff of air. To American & British English speakers it can almost sound like they're saying [d], because we're not used to hearing a word-initial /t/ without aspiration.
Next we've got a word-medial t, the second t of "tater." Here, Indian and British RP English speakers pronounce it as a plain [t], with no aspiration. American English speakers pronounce it as what's called a tap or a flap, which is sort of like a half-formed [d] but is actually more like a single roll of a rolled r - and so its IPA symbol is [ɾ]. And many less prestigious British dialects, including Cockney and I believe Scouse, replace it with a glottal stop, with IPA symbol [ʔ].
And our final t is the word-final t of tot. This is a tricky one to peel apart. English generally doesn't release word-final stops - that is, you put your tongue in the correct place to stop airflow to create the stop, but you never actually move your tongue out of the way to "release" the airflow you stopped. So the easy read on the word-final t's pronunciation is that it's [t̚], an unreleased t. However, in many dialects and situations /t/ is replaced with or co-articulated with a glottal stop - for example, after an [n] or an [m], /t/ is almost always pronounced as [ʔ] in English. But unreleased stops after an oral vowel are difficult to tell apart, and if the tongue is in t position while the glottis cuts off airflow - I genuinely don't know.
Tuck/Stuck
These are good for a comparison between an aspirated [tʰ] and an unaspirated [t]. In American English, tuck is [tʰʌk] and stuck is [stʌk].
Truck
American English does weird things with syllable-initial /tr/.
I want to introduce you to the "sh" symbol, ʃ. ʃ is a voiceless postalveolar fricative, which means it's created by air rushing through a narrow space when your tongue is behind the alveolar ridge. Incidentally, when you move your tongue from [t] position to [ɹ̠] position (ɹ̠ being the symbol for the version of non-rolled r that most English dialects use), it will naturally create the ʃ sound as it moves.
We have a special letter combination to the phonemic /tʃ/ in English. It's "ch". As in "change."
You almost certainly pronounce "truck" as [tʃɹ̠ʌk] "chruck" and just don't notice.
So what's going on with Martin?
So first off, Jonny is probably wrong about how the Archivist says "Martin." Complete deletion of the r in that position is standard in RP. I haven't fed The Magnus Archives into Praat or anything, so it's possible he's letting a hint of a rhotic accent bleed in to the Archivist's RP - but I really doubt it.
This isn't unusual! It's very common for people's internal concept of what sounds they mean to make, to get in the way of them accurately identifying what sounds they're actually making. No one thinks they've ever said "chruck" until you point it out to them.
I would probably transcribe the Archivist saying "Martin" as [mɑ:tɪn].
Jonny's attempt at saying "Martin" in an American accent was something more like [mɑ˞ɹ̠tʰɪn]. He did a good job of rhoticizing the vowel, but in his focus on the r completely messed up the second syllable.
I'd transcribe my own pronunciation of "Martin" as something like [mɑ˞ɹ̠ʔn]. It's been my observation that t-glottalization in American English is especially common when adjacent to nasals - and if there's one thing American English likes, it's syllabifying liquids in word-final syllables.
OK I've run out of steam now
This was fun. Sorry about the declining quality of explanation. Please feel free to ask more if you dare to reignite the flames of infodump
Your favorite tma character? Your favorite episode? And your favorite ship? I'm just curious...
Thanks for asking!
1. My favorite character is Michael Shelley, in continuity with Michael the Distortion.
For all that we make fun of Gertrude's assistant turnover, for a good 20 years, there were no personnel changes in the Archives. It was Gertrude, Emma, Sarah, and Michael. And when Gertrude decided to sacrifice him, he trusted her, he went without hesitation. Because his found family was a lie, two manipulators and users puppeting their younger colleagues for their own ends.
Michael became a monster not through any fault, but through trusting too much, and wanting too badly to be helpful. In the face of the madness that consumed his childhood friend Ryan - the initial trauma that set him down the road to paranormal investigation in the first place - he chose to help, and he chose to trust Gertrude.
And then as Michael, what pushes Michael to act so out of step with the Distortion that it must be replaced? Not merely his grudge against the Archivist, but the knowledge that the Unknowing will be using his skin. Michael Shelley is still trying to prevent rituals and save the world, even as a monster. He doesn't want anyone to "win." He frames it as pitting sides against each other for fun, but ultimately what he's actually doing is disrupting rituals. He intervenes to give tips for defeating the ritual of the Corruption. He gives aid to the Archivist against creatures of the Stranger, until the Archivist is about to become part of the Stranger's ritual - at which point he decides it's time to kill him. And he had been planning to kill the Archivist eventually, to try to prevent the Eye from winning too.
Also creepy knife hands, and Luke Booys's holy crap he actually laughs like that that's his real laugh.
2. I need to do a relisten before I can say for sure; but if I had to choose one now, I think maybe Jane Prentiss's statement in season 1, the one with "There is a wasps' nest in my attic"? Jonny goes all in on the voice acting for that one, on top of the writing humanizing the season villain in a way that turns her from a monster into a chilling depiction of what the worms might do not only to our heroes' bodies, but to their minds.
3. JonMartin. I'm a basic bitch. I like TimSasha too, but we didn't really get to know Sasha well enough for me to be properly invested in any ship involving her.
LonelyEyes is a lot of fun to meme about, but I don't exactly ship it.
you are the silt verses mutual with The Good Takes :D
☺️ I have good takes apparently!
I am but a simple podcast listener. I hear podcast about crab god, I obsess about podcast with crab god, I go out of my way to find all you can eat crab, I offer my flesh for my fiance's teeth.
What trope/cliché annoys you the most in books/fanfiction?
So this trope does occur in some written works, but my best examples for it are actually from long-running sci fi TV shows.
The Magical Pregnancy. Honestly, most tropes and cliches revolving around pregnancy are just profoundly cringe-inducing, but the Magical Pregnancy really takes the cake.
A character, often one previously defined by their practicality, either magically becomes pregnant or has their existing pregnancy interfered with in some way. Being pregnant Changes Them, softens out their edges, makes them So Protective Of Baby, You Guys. If the pregnancy was unintentional, they won't even think of trying to get an abortion.
The pregnant character is now hunted by people who want the baby delivered into their hands for some kind of power boost. They usually end up kidnapping the pregnant character in time for them to give birth. The birth may be either remarkably painless or remarkably traumatic; in either case the baby is whisked away to become a Creepy Magical Child, growing to Not Boring age practically overnight. There are no lasting consequences to the Formerly Pregnant Parent except that their personality and role in the story is now primarily defined by them being the Mother* of the Magical Child, with a weird, often-psychic bond often existing between the two even if the Creepy Magical Child was stolen away at birth.
Examples from popular media:
Twilight
Dr Who revival
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate SG-1
Dune (arguably)
* I was going to keep this gender neutral, but nah, the role is extremely feminine-coded even if the character in question is transmasc. Which of course I've only ever seen done in fanfic, because transmasc representation in published media? Pffff.
