#tma rambles

[anbuuu]

Now I'm going to say this and if I get hate, I don't care. Gertrude is a bad person. I don't care if you view her as like less bad than Mary Keay or even Jonah Magnus, she's still a bad person. She still thought sacrificing three of her assistants was worth it. She still turned a purposeful blind eye to a lot of the things Emma Harvey did. Furthermore, she did not give two shits about Gerry until Eric held information over her head.

Now don't get me wrong, a very large part of TMA is that nothing is black or white, there's nuance. The characters in TMA are very nuanced, and Gertrude is as well. However, I think to excuse all of her bad actions because she's not "as bad" as others is ignorant. But also this is a fictional piece of media, and maybe I'm taking things too seriously so take all my rambles with a grain of salt. /lh

[vie-of-the-void]

rip tim stoker you would have loved mewing

[underratedgrapeju1ce]

this episode is so agonizingly human. this is like one of the only times jon actually expresses his feelings openly, and even though they argue, martin still treats him like a person. this doesnt feel like martin "talking at" jon, or vice versa. it doesn't feel like elias gaslighting him or basira and melanie invalidating his feelings. it feels like a couple having an argument, albeit a very intense one.

its so. gut-wrenchingly mundane, in the midst of so much supernatural insanity. its one of my favorite episodes

[shadow-the-crow]

The Distortion didn’t like Michael as a who.

I mean, it says itself that it doesn’t want to be Michael. But the who and what thing actually brings us farther than that. It shows us his whole arc.

We all know the quote "i am not a who, archivist, i am a what." When i first heard it, i thought: Makes sense, it’s an inhuman creature, not a person, it just can’t have enough identity to be a who. Like it says itself.

But in Michael’s statement, it talks about having your who torn from your what, and replaced with another who. So it actually did have a who before becoming Michael. And it even admits that Michael also was a who, a who that became part of its being.

I think… it could just never accept being Michael. As it said, Michael Shelley was a constant reminder of its failure – the embodiment of it. The Distortion was forced to become the embodiment of its failure. To think with its mind. Of course it could never accept that. Imagine how horrible that must be – despising your own mind. (I think some people can relate to that, actually. I’m sorry if you can. I can.)

So it tried to disassociate itself completely from being Michael. To pretend it was only a what. I mean, we see that it’s comfortable with it/its pronouns as Michael, but not as Helen. As Michael, it embraced its inhumanity – not because it wasn’t comfortable with being a person in general, but with being that specific person it was forced to become. A person whose mind wasn’t made for the Spiral. Its failure incarnate.

But just before the Distortion in its Michael form dies, he ends his statement with "that is who i am". WHO. (thanks @totheidiot for pointing that out to me ^^) Michael finally got to talk about everything he had to endure. For the first time, he said the cruel truths out loud: How much it always hated being Michael Shelley. He told Jon everything, which also forced him to face the truth himself. And i think facing it finally allowed him to accept it. Accepting how shitty something is is the first step towards learning to live with it and maybe even learning not to hate it.

He could finally accept his mind. His who. Every part of himself.

And not even two minutes later, he died.

(Of course, the Distortion itself didn’t die. But its current state of existence died. It finally accepted its who, only to get it painfully torn from its what again.)

Because he got too lost in his who. Talking to Jon allowed him to be more human. But the cruel world he lived in doesn't reward humanity. It exploits the weakness that comes with it.

[thesharktist]

Imagine Vanessa giving Jon a statement about what her father has done and the spirits in the animatronics because who else would believe her? Who else could she turn to? Some institute across the Atlantic that takes and looks into accounts of the deeply unsettling. Imagine Sasha and/or Tim and/or Martin checking out the pizzeria, Imagine

Art coming later today hopefully

[alightcaseofohno]

I love the idea that Robert Smirke had fourteen friends to represent the Fears. That would make him the fifteenth, the extinction, and honestly, that makes a lot of sense regarding who he was as a character.

Trying to control and balance everything to the point that it becomes destructive and makes everything worse.

Also, based on the timeline, that means that Hezekiah Wakely could have been part of his group.

[rowanraven08]

Unsolicited tma rant no one asked for:

I’ve been thinking a bit about exactly what makes me like the Magnus archives so much, cause I’m not really into horror anthology. Yeah, it’s a good aspect of the genre, but it’s never really caught my interest that much. And I consider myself a fan of horror, but I don’t actually like that many horror movies that much. I like it as a genre, and watching video essays about it, about how different horror affects us, that sort of thing. Horror doesn’t even make me scared usually. I’ll flinch at jump scares of course, but it’s pretty rare that I’m watching a horror movie and be genuinely afraid of the murderer or demon or whatever’s on screen.

Tma even took me a while to get into. I started it maybe in October or November? And it took me until January to get even a dozen episodes in. It was good, but I was really just waiting until it got to the good bits that made everyone love it so much. I knew there was some sort of meta plot, and had a cannon gay ship, that was all I knew when I started, and the reason I kept on with it. I hate to say it, but if I didn’t know even that, I don’t think I would have listened to more than a couple episodes, because short self contained stories isn’t what I’m interested in. Especially when there’s a magic Latin book and a coffin with knocking (I thought it would be a vampire or something) or some weird thing luring people into alleys to kill them. I took those early episodes to be generic devil worship sort of horror, that the weird details were added in just to add to the spook. That’s something that tends to bother me with horror movies, when there’s all this dark magic just for the sake of dark magic, and ends with this big question or realization that can’t be solved. And I do understand ending movies with something the audience can’t understand, because the mystery and strangeness can add to the horror. But I really dislike this, I’m all cool with hard or impossible to understand endings, don’t get me wrong, but when there’s no way to theorize, no dots to start connecting, I find that really frustrating. A good example (I can’t find what movie it is, so if someone know lmk) is a movie with the classic family moves into large old house, creepy basement, with satanic sort of imagery. I did actually like most of it, the stairs to the basement were normal, until there was a ball knocked down them when the light was off, and you could hear it keep going far longer than the actual staircase was. That these stairs kept going for who knows how long when the light is off. What I didn’t like was the end, where we got to see what was at the bottom of these endless stairs, and there’s long lines of people in this void, just standing there. But there was no explanation for this, no way to start theorizing as to what this could be, why it happens.

This is what I thought TMA was gonna be. Each episode never really ended with an explanation, or a way to theorize (early on) and I thought it would stay that way. I remember in January I was finally listening to more on a plane ride, and got to ep22, Martin’s statement about Jane Prentiss. It wasn’t even this specific episode that got me interested, not fully. I did like the worms, description of Jane prentiss, all that but it was when I kinda realized there was something to theorize about, that there was actually something going on behind the scenes. And it kept me listening. It was a bit frustrating how slow the season seemed to go, because I wanted to know what the worms were about, and I admit I rushed through a few episodes, again, thinking they were just filler short stories to break apart the real meat of it. The episode I think that really sealed the deal was strange music, specifically the bit between Sasha and Jon, I wasn’t too interested in creepy clown dolls, but that silly little debate over how to pronounce calliope was honestly charming. Like “oh, these characters aren’t gonna be overdramatized horror movies characters, at least not too much.” Once I got to the season 1 finale I was obsessed and basically finished the rest in two or three weeks (I listened to the last 120 episode in a single week).

And good lord Jonny I am SO SORRY I DOUBTED YOU. Because none of it was creepy books or creepy dolls or weird coffins for the hell of it, you weren’t actually left with no idea of what the ending meant. You just had to listen to Jon as he because paranoid and pulled out the red string, pulling all the pieces together for you until we finally got the big picture. I never once expected the fears, or avatars, or that Robert smirk was anything but a weird architecture, that Jonah Magnus was anything but a stuffy old man who founded the institute. And that’s why I think I love TMA so much, is there really is a big satisfying pay out as a listener, I didn’t even put the dots together myself and it’s still gratifying. The slow realization that these episodes aren’t just horror for the sake of horror, they have a reason, an explanation, and it still manages to keep a level of mystery and unknowability that makes you just always want to know more. Re-listening has been genuinely so fun, because especially with later episodes I’m able to connect those dots, and see the full picture as it unravels. The thing in the dark alley wasn’t targeting smokers to be spooky, it was a monster collecting victims to use in a ritual, and that addiction is part of the web.

So yeah, that was probably really redundant, but I just really love that slow reveal, all the little bits you can connect, and theories you can make. Jonathan Sims forgive me for ever doubting your writing, I see now you’re a genius, please give me your brain, I need it for my own creativity. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

[fancy-fangs]

I just had a thought and I've never seen this talked about before.

In TMA there's the funny moment haha martin wasn't the one getting Jon out of his coma but what if he did. Hear me out:

We know Jon fed off of fear in that coma, it was the one thing keeping him "alive" in that moment. Fear was the one thing that gave him enough strength to keep fighting. And yes from his past experience and connection to the eye he has enough fear to feed from

BUT

you cannot tell me that martin coming every day for weeks, scared that he lost all of them now, scared that he'll never talk to Jon again, scared that he'll have to watch another funeral so soon, didn't do anything there. You cannot tell me that wasn't a good amount of fear there that Jon got to feed on.