#God i just love the humanity of TMA it's so important to me

[the-magpie-archives]

One of the weirdest things I love about TMA is how embarrassing it all is. Like, romanticism is fun sometimes, but embarrassment equally so.

If you've ever meaningfully interacted with the supernatural, you know that shit can be awkward. If you've ever had an office job, you know how embarrassing it can be! Pretty much if you've ever experienced any form of life, you know how embarrassing a day of existence is.

And my god Jon's life is embarrassing! He can't stop getting kidnapped, he doesn't have any friends, he can't even get his job done due to infinite supernatural interruptions. That's really embarrassing.

He's an adult who effectively has to relive being a child because he's thrust into a world that no longer makes sense, and that vulnerability is so real!

But Jon's not the only one who's going through embarrassing stuff, oh no! Martin is hopelessly in love with his cruel boss who barely looks at him; Tim and Sasha hooked up only for Sasha to break it off against Tim's wishes; and hell, Melanie literally got laughed off of YouTube and BECAME A MEME.

These people are going through awful, otherworldly terrors, but not once is it ignored that they must still suffer through painstakingly awkward everyday moments too.

I suppose it comes down to realism. Understanding that the supernatural can become just another part of life in an annoying way, and letting the characters be normal fumbling people makes it hit so much closer to home.

I think all this is why The Magnus Archives is popular not only as horror, but as an explanation of human relationships; the everyday realism is so deeply entwined with the otherworldly but both exist in their own right. And this in itself is realistic, as how far away is horror from your daily life, really? And how different is fear to embarrassment?

[just-some-guy-joust]

im stubborn and i like talking here's the reasons i put every character i did in side a into the tourney. I'll do side b later cause i gotta go to bed soon

important first note, quite a few of my decisions were because i was trying to get women in here and it was getting desperate because i had to cut out a lot of women for only being "just some guy" because they were written by a misogynist that made her sit on the sidelines and cheer for the male leads. The Woman Situation Is Always So Fucking Dire.

anyways on to the actual contestants im gonna start with the characters that have been causing the most people to start up shit about them not being just some guy

barry bluejeans (taz balance): 2 submissions, personal bias. i think a lot of people are misunderstanding what this tournament is tbh. this isnt about the "normal" characters, tho normalcy does play a factor in it. this is about dudes who are just some guy. there is a difference. barry is a dnd npc who wears blue jeans in a fantasy world and he loves his wife. yes he is a lich. yes he is involved in the main plot. he's also just chillin. like if the plot didn't happen the way it did barry would be playing sudoku or crosswords. he'd be an average man in a very fantasy world. he is so average and human its funny. he is just some guy

tommy (hlvrai): 1 submission, personal bias. his just some guy energy is so there. he gets a propeller hat that does nothing when all of his crew is getting cool guns and upgrades. his life goal is to go home and take his dog for a walk. he gets a chuck e cheese birthday party. he sounds like he's going to burst into tears at any moment. compared to the rest of the crew, tommy is comedically just some guy

ulala (persona 2): 1 submission, description swayed me. it described the list of characters in persona 2 and ulala was just "your roommate that wanted to go to a party". that's hilarious. also i was getting fucking desperate for women that didn't suck ass as i stated above

apollo (ace attorney): 2 submissions, personal bias, descriptions swayed me. yall the submissions for him were so fucking funny. he's just a lawyer. he just wants to do his job but he lives in the ace attorney universe so everything is fucked all the time. he would've been a normal lawyer if he hadn't met phoenix wright. he's just chillin.

ok now here's every other character

sasha james (tma): 1 submission, friend bias, good description. i asked r if i should put her in because they know tma and they said yes. submission described her as loving to organize and avoided many monsters by being just some guy.

reigen arataka (mp100): 2 submissions. i thought it'd be funny and i was right. he is also just a normal man pretending he's not and he refuses to give up the bit he 100% deserves to be here

joy (underworld office): 1 submission, friend bias. the mc is going through wild ghost related problems and she's just going . hey man. you good??? r's sister submitted her and im not letting her down dude she's awesome

junpei (zero escape): 3 submissions, personal bias. he is literally the only character who has no connection to the larger mystery he's just there because he loves 1 girl. he's PAINFULLY and VITALLY just a dude. i need him

horse (centaurworld): 1 submission. i thought it'd be really funny to include just a horse. her name is horse. thats fucking awesome dude

phone guy (fnaf): 2 submissions. he was the only character from fnaf that got more than 1 submission and there were like 9 fnaf submissions i kinda felt bad tbh. he was also the best example of just some guy out of all the fnaf submissions

gordon freeman (hlvrai): 1 submission. he is a guy playing a video game. he is the straight man to the rest of the crews antics and by god he plays his role well

joshua gillespie (tma): 4 submissions, friend bias, hilarious descriptions. he avoids getting killed because he's so good at following instructions despite him clearly supposed to be dying here. they said don't open the coffin so he didn't. simply don't tuesday

namari (dungeon meshi): 1 submission, personal bias. i like her c: she's pretty level headed compared to like. everyone else in laios's crew. she seems like somebody i could just be friends with and hang out with

shez (fire emblem): 3 submissions, hilarious descriptions. i might try getting into fire emblem because of this. ok so they got murdered in a previous game off screen and now they're the playable character of a new game in a new timeline and they're fucking everything up because they're just supposed to be some guy? thats so fucking funny holy shit i want to know more

henry stickmin (henry stickmin): 1 submission. henry stickmin. like idk i dont feel like i gotta explain this one he's a stickman

stanley (tsp): guaranteed entry

whole (chonny jash): 1 submission, friend bias. tbh i saw him and went oh fuck yeah thats the thing my friends like and then i put him in there. i dont actually know enough about chonny jash to say anything on this but i fully trust the submitter knew what they were doing

larry (pokemon): guaranteed entry

luke carder (inscryption): 1 submission, friend bias, good description. he is just a normal youtuber in the lore of the game. he fucking love card game. good for him man good for him

leorio (hxh): 3 submissions, friend bias, good descriptions. idk a lot about hxh but the descriptions of him compared to the other main characters was pretty convincing

barry the quokka (sonic): guaranteed entry

april o'neil (tmnt): 1 submission, friend bias. absolutely normal girl that just happens to be the one that found the turtles and become their friend

tsuzuru (a3!): 3 submissions, friend bias. descriptions definitely made him feel like a good fit. he's so good at being just some guy i actually thought he was a different character and was shocked when i went to grab images for the tourney and he wasnt the guy i thought he was. which is really funny. like who the fuck is he then. this didn't change my opinion or anything it was just so good

matt (woe.begone): 1 submission. woe.begone fans have ALWAYS been kind to me so they got some mod bias sprinkled in. i dont know what this guys deal is but in the dbtn tourney the guy who got in there had a giant fucking list of things that are happening to him all the time and apparently thats just what woe.begone is like so i believe it when told matt is normal in comparison. everything else is so batshit wild I Just Believe You

gilear (fantasy high): 2 submissions. he seems to be just a dad. wasn't going to get in at first tbh just for personal reasons but i was running out of characters that i felt actually fit the tournament well so ultimately he got in

emmet (lego movie): 4 submissions. honestly with the number of submissions we got, 4 submissions was basically a guaranteed entry. and emmet's whole story is about being just some guy

stahl (fire emblem): 1 submission, hilarious description. fire emblem fans are so funny. what do you mean he can only be perfectly average because everyone else improves/gets worse with him to keep him perfectly average. what the fuck. thats so good

doug (wolf359): 2 entries. i dont know jack shit about wolf359 and honestly the submissions didn't tell me a lot but it was enough to figure he qualifies and i was running out of characters that felt good for the tourney. i trust you wolf359 fans

jack townsend (tales from the gas station): 1 submission, good description. he works at an evil gas station and the description gave me no follow up on what an evil gas station is which is awesome. apparently the horrors are constantly happening and he's just kinda staring at them. he's not paid enough for this

frisk (undertale): guaranteed entry

brian pasternack (yuppie psycho): 1 submission. im gonna be super honest with you here. i dont remember. i know he qualifies but i have 0 thoughts about him. maybe thats a good thing in this tourney. he's an average office worker who has now been tasked with killing The Witch.

trevor (american arcadia): 4 submissions, personal bias, good descriptions. dude i fucking love american arcadia it's so fucking good what a nightmare. he's so normal they were going to kill him for not being entertaining enough

[croziers-compass]

Summary Notes of Terror Camp 2023 (9.12.23)

(A small summary of notes and references I took during Terror Camp Day One)

Erasure of Sailors of Colour in Arctic Exploration!!! Needs to be explored much more. JEAMS Fitz-James Fitzjames - w'ont put his apostrophes in the back of words. Capitalising Letters where you would Not usually capitalise them is like Italics. it is Emphasis in speech when written.

These jokes are getting Auld. (If you know you know)

Most things were phonetically written.

WOAHOO!!! - James Thompson

Relic? Or Artefact?

Semiophore - Objects regarded in a given community as carries of meaning.

Walpole is a little fucked in opinion. (imo)

Dundy was awful at spelling. Worse than Goodsir.

Capitalists should really look into Thomas Holloway

Everyone knows and loves Snarfin' On Them Ribs Saturday Man Proposes, God Disposes

Lady Jane was offended.

Hudson Bay Speedrun - Let Curiosity be your Compass

James Knight does not girlboss but he thinks he does.

A Ship Called The Whalebone Roald was both an asshole but good at what he did.

The Raft of the Medusa - We knew where that was going.

Johnathan Miles is a Horse Girl

Foreshadowing of the Cannibalism and Mutiny

HOOSH

History is a Panopticon They were just people... (Also a Note. I am worried that a lot of the fandom thinks that the concept of a Panopticon originates from TMA and that it was a TMA reference. It was not. I am wondering now if the TMA listeners know who Jeremy Bentham is.)

Cultural Understandings

IceBound Not Down - I did not take a lot of notes on Professor Hester Blum's panel. I was far too invested to write and when it was over I realised I had not made any notes. She was incredible. I loved her narratives very much. I would love to get her book. It is on my list! You would have had to have been there. It was wonderful. Not News: Dan Simmons is a wee fuckboy. We have established this a lot. He also establishes this for us. (?) Umlaqtalik - There is a boat there.

Imperialism is a disease.

How to read Ethically!

Some of my Notes from the Panel with Paul Ready and Nive Nielsen:

"You can hear a smile in a recording" - Nive Nielsen

Paul "I am not an expert on Anything" Ready

He is so very attached to Goodsir. Goodsir is very much a part of him. Hearing him talk about how integrated Goodsir is to himself was wonderful.

"I think we need more Goodsirs in the world."

Nive and her impressive education on the importance of indigenous representation and how that impacted her. How her voice as not only an actor but an Indigenous Actor was taken with such respect and was given the space to allow for respectful and creative extrapolation on the Set.

A small Note in my book that says: Oh goodness me he is hideously beautiful. I cannot stand how beautiful he really is. Oh my goodness.

"Nothing is good or bad. Just the potential to be." - Nive Nielsen - Terror Camp 2023

Nive: All Humans are good at picking up sincerity.

Goodsir would have hated Hickey.

"Ah. Would you look at that. Dead with my ass carved up." - Paul Ready

Nive: You cannot kill people or let people die because everything is connected and you do not know how that will effect your future. You have to depend on each other. So when there was conflict you had to solve it with as little violence as possible.

A very Important Book Nive Nielsen had spoken about!

You can get a copy on Thriftbooks of "Give Me My Father's Body" by Kenn Harper Here

I had an incredible amount of fun during this event. I am so excited for tomorrow. What notes you are seeing here are just references to part of the panels and some side comments I had made between all of my other more detailed notes. There was so much to be had and so much that we saw and heard. The speakers were incredible and each individual was incredibly dedicated to their impressive Art and Passion. It truly showed. As Nive said: You can hear a smile in a recording". I feel as if this applies to every one of the speakers and all of the panels we had the pleasure to enjoy today.

I have more detailed notes in my journal which, of course, you can see I scrawled a lot in. I had amassed about seven whole pages worth in that time. So to type them all would be just simple a task I cannot do. But I am open to discussions regarding how everything was if you did not get to attend it! Also Terror Camp has a wonderful setup available for you to explore the other avenues that they have presented on their website. So please do go check that you if you are interested! I cannot wait to do this tomorrow with my fellow Shipmates. Thank you so much for everyone that put together @terrorcamp. I am quite excited for tomorrow!

With much love and saltwater kisses,

Second Leftenant in heart and spirit,

-Wilbur E. F. C.

[magicaldreamfox1]

for @kissporsche

"Have you never wanted to be free? To live? To do something other than consume and feed?"

"The stranger on the train does not want. It only feeds. It exists because its God exists."

"Gods are not permanent. Anyone can want."

"I am not anyone."

–

Or: The Stranger!Pete learns how to be someone.

a quick tma guide if u haven't listened to the podcast but still wanna read the fic is under the cut!

quick guide to relevant tma facts

the universe:

the magnus archives universe is the same as ours except fear entities exist in the world. they exist because fear exists and fear feeds them.

the fear entities:

there are 14 of them, feel free to read up on them here

the only relevant ones for this fic are

the stranger: the fear of the unknown, the uncanny, the unfamiliar, the creeping sense that something is not right

the desolation (also called the lightless flame): the fear of pain, loss, burning, and destruction, especially with a senseless cause

the eye (also called the beholding, the ceaseless watcher): the fear of being watched, exposed, followed, having secrets exposed // important context: in the fic pete references being looked at by the eye which is a reference to the main character of tma killing an avatar of the stranger by making the eye look at it – which kills them because the stranger is about anonymity etc

the buried: referenced in the fic by their alias "forever deep below creation"

the vast: referenced in the fic as "the awful deep"

fear avatars:

the fears cannot affect the world directly, so they have avatars to do it for them.

avatars are manifestations of the fears, kind of like servants, which spread terror and feed their fear entity. they also have special powers depending on their entity.

there are avatars who were previously humans who decided to worship a fear entity (or were simply chosen to). and there are avatars which were always avatars (which is what pete is in this fic).

agnes montague:

vegas is inspired by a character named agnes montague.

agnes was the messiah of the desolation – born by burning the mother. throughout her life she was subject of many odd stories and encounters; her special powers include just being really hot to the touch like if u touch her as a human that's a third degree burn.

agnes loved being human and living as a human; there is an arc in the podcast where she has a cute, short little romance with a human man by just sitting in a coffeeshop together (which the setting of the fic references) and then going on one date where at the end agnes kisses him (and yes she does burn him pretty badly) and then is led to her death by the followers of the desolation. rip agnes.

all the lore about turning human is made up by me <3 the podcast is a tragedy nobody's turning human and having a good time </3

anyway i think that's all u need to know!

if u are unsure abt anything feel free to send me an ask!

[hartenlust]

reading gods worst article on tma (Narrating the (Queer) Gothic in the Podcast The Magnus Archives, Maria Juko) and its so bad that its funny. btw this got published in a book (Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality, edited by sarah faber and kerstin-anja münderlein, 2024) and I can only assume the editors didn't listen to tma themselves because good lord what are these takes. come with me as I read this mess

strong start when it claims the entities seek to torture and destroy humanity. patently untrue. we know they have some sentience, but the focus on humanity does a disservice to gerry explicitly saying "you think people are so special its only our fear that counts?". also "destroy". how are you going to get fear if the entirety of humanity is destroyed. we know what the entities wanted (or at least what the web wanted) it is explicitly stated in mag 200. it says so right there so explicitly that I find it impressive if Juko missed it.

calls the beholding the antagonist? if you want to call Any fear the antagonist id go for the web, but even then, antagonist is not the role id ascribe to a lovecraftian entity

"with the podcast’s final season set in a world dominated by the Eye that Jon et al. ultimately overcome to save the world" / "The world comes to depend on [jonmartins] relationship, with the two of them becoming queer heroes." save the world??? heroes?

4. stupidly funny implications. interesting citation for georgie but that's not important right now. the point is the fight against evil and the reading alleging tma says being queer will get you Heroic Powers. Juko's forgetting about the queer characters that get Evil Powers (all of them. all of the powers are evil. that's the point.) did the archivist utilize ace and bi power when he became the lynchpin of the apocalypse and tortured strangers

5. "As a case in point, inclusivity starts at the level of casting: female police officer Basira Hussain is voiced by Frank Voss, who uses they/them pronouns." very true but idk. frank voss and jonny sims are just pals, ill allow Some implications from this but the author is using it to imply more intentional focus on inclusivity then I think jonny was doing

6. "First, the podcast’s main character, the asexual biromantic Jon, is bestowed with supernatural powers, challenging not just heterosexual but all sexual norms of society." BESTOWED? stop using the word bestowed here oh my God. he is not a superhero!! did Juko listen to the entirety of tma without any moral grayness happening here??? also ?? jons bestowed supernatural powers are in no way related to his asexuality & biromanticism??

7. christ. this isnt a bad tma take but it is reminding me why I wanted to quit my literature analysis bachelor

8. did jon utilize ace and bi power when he betrayed martin. did martin utilize gay power when he stabbed jon. jesus christ what do you mean humanity's salvation. the apocalypse isnt fixed at the end by the power of love.

9. i guess? if you felt like it? tma really isn't a queer narrative in my option but I guess?? you could read it like that. if you wanted to. I'm unsure if you should though because these people are deeply unwell

10. "And particularly in the first seasons, Jon and his colleagues often fail to control the evil entities, losing for example colleague Tim at the end of the second season, which leads to a rift between some of the Institute’s members" yeah because truly they were thriving before that. they were the bestest of friends before tim died. they all held hands and danced in circles

11. unsure how much longer i can take this. this isn't the X-Men

12. "[Jon] could be defined as an asexual biromantic who uses his love for Martin as a form of power to save the world." no he couldn't. next

13. "With this in mind, Jon’s exploration of the Archives becomes a metaphor for accepting his (a)sexuality." HUH. NO IT ISNT? jons asexuality isn't relevant narratively At All. go home.

14. for the love of god can anyone hear me. its so dark in here. were the beholding and jonah magnus asexuality allies when they helped jon become an avatar. the sentence after this calls jon the hero of the narrative again btw. patently untrue

15. "Only by accepting his power can Jon save the world." jon didn't save the world.

Juko discusses melanie & georgie but her takes on them are pretty normal and decent in my opinion. if anyone wants a pdf of this horror let me know & ill send it. I'm so annoyed I'm considering writing an email about this. btw it called jonmartin "enemies to lovers" trope and also said their relationship "starts heteronormative and changes to a more equal footing, whilst retaining heteronormative elements". about the gay couple.

to conclude: I don't know which podcast juko listened to about a heroic narrative about queer love that saves the world, but its not the magnus archives. did you know that the eye is an asexuality ally?

[oaxleaf]

mag 159 - the last

there is so much to be said about this episode. i love it. i went insane over it the first time. but at risk of being overly repetitive of other's people points, i'll try to focus on some other things lol

the lonely is, from my perspective at least, unique in that it's the entity that seems to both be easiest to escape and easiest to fall into. unlike many others, which paint up horrific and surrealistic scenarios, the lonely mostly feeds itself on the mundane basis of the very widespread loneliness people already experience without interferance. which honestly makes the attempted ritual a bit ridiculous, because it's already something that's so common. aren't there statstics literally saying that huge swaths (like, a quarter or something) of young adults literally have no close friends? though i guess the whole thing is about intention. it's not like it would've worked anyways

still, the upside, i guess, is that just a single genuine human connection is enough to pull someone out. it really feels like that sometimes. peter goes on about how a bit of influence of the eyes is importance for the function of the lonely, but at the same time being truly seen for who you are is what so many lonely people crave. and by god if 'i see you' doesn't tear me up just a little bit

i think the role that love plays in tma is complicated. it's not really a saviour, or plays a role all that different from any other emotion. i wouldn't make the argument that it's any type of central theme of the show. but it's still so interesting, because it does very much serve as a motivation. it doesn't fix anything, really, but it encourages someone to keep on going. it's a driving force, one that, like all forces, at times cause harm. but for now, it has the power to bring somebody back from isolation

[linktoo]

MAG S4

oogfh here comes the concerns

I have lots of thoughts about S4 but all in all I DID enjoy it. I really did. But I also think this was the season that really exposed the prevalent writing flaws that tma had in general. 

I think first of all with S4 is that it was much harder to get through all of a sudden compared to S3’s brisk pace - there wasn’t enough levity. Not enough humour, and I can't stress how important the humour is in this damn story. I needed a giggle every ep even when it was dramatic and serious. And it made it emotionally difficult. (I know that's the point.)

I think I understand what particularly bothers me about S4 and honestly a prevalent problem in tma in general and it has to do with the fact it gets a little stale when people are so venomously angry for no reason. There is a lot of misdirected anger that was directed towards Jon - and I’m not just saying that as the audience just gets to see Jon as the most sympathetic. I like the conflict more when it's people struggling to understand and failing. Jon's a pretty good example because he's figuring out the best way to care but also succumbing to his own issues and faults. and I think the other characters don't get that same sort of treatment (Tim, Basira, Melanie, etc). And I get the audience wants to root for Jon, I really do. but the complaints make a lot of sense to me because it doesn't feel like anyone's trying to figure out the root issue and just stay angry all the time. people can be withdrawn for more complicated reasons. even with the Lonely/Ghost bullet very obviously affecting everyone it just feels. less human I guess. you can be resentful but there should be a push and pull tug, not "Everyone Hate Jon" party (especially when Elias was much more brutal in S3). There's more nuance to that and the podcast often fails to give them enough space to try. I think the closest they get to it is Melanie’s conflicting feelings, all of her trust being destroyed for her life to be saved. That was fun. I liked that. 

Other than that though, the plot beats are really good. REALLY GOOD. I think about the ocean door metaphor a lot because OF COURSE I DO it’s absolutely devastating that this analogy is explained to basira, who then never actually applies his explanation to anything useful. 

And now it’s time to accept that Jon's use of powers no matter how important it is to "the story" is traumatizing innocent people... it's hard to accept but as an audience you seriously have to fucking understand why no one trusts him at the institute even though he's nice. Also EXCELLENT use of a statement that wasn't compelled but also very comprehensive. That voice acting was incredible. it's MARTIN taking that statement it's already hard for us (rooting for Jon) I can't even imagine being in his position wanting to protect Jon over and over and over with his own life and hearing THIS. He has to actively hope Jon made this horrible decision because otherwise the only other option is that Jon is completely gone, and it's so upsetting,

Also I absolutely need Melanie/Georgie fics of them falling in love at the Institute. the implied emotions and feelings of that whole thing with JON, GEORGIE’S SUPERNATURAL EX BEING THE CENTER OF IT ALL. before they were decidedly going to live together like WHAT

And then the ending to S4. God what a culmination of everything we learned about, finally the payoff we’ve all been looking forward to. I know Jonny and Alex said it was really hard to nail the Jon and Martin dynamic because they have SO FEW INTERACTIONS in S4, and I like to imagine it really helped with their care in terms of writing them. Martin really shows the work he’s been planning in order to save Jon. Jon’s final mark is him willingly going to save Martin, no matter what. Elias’s wager being entirely based on his realization of the lengths they’d go for each other. “I see you” what a powerful way to reclaim a running motif, a twisted phrase in this story. The “hello Jon” statement. Seriously this was so fucking awesome and a great payoff for a bit of a bit of an unsteady, but jampacked season. I honestly saw S4 in its entirety and thought “yeah. You know what? S5, no matter what happens, I can trust the creators to at least create something satisfying and awesome at the end, they can stick the landing.” And that continued to be my confident assumption starting S5 (Spoilers. I regret believing that.)

==

[Masterlist] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

(talk to me!! send asks if you have any!)

[vissercomplex]

jonny sure said gay fucking rights huh

[misnomera]

On racial stereotyping of the Haans in TMA...

Right so as someone who is ethnically Chinese I have NO FUCKING clue how I didn’t notice this more distinctly in my initial binge of tma (going too fast and not paying closer attention to character names and descriptions, probably) but the Haan family storyline is, all horror elements aside, pretty fucked up in terms of racial representation re: stereotyping. This got long as hell, but please please please take a moment to read through if you’ve got time for it. thanks.

To start off, the Haans are one of the few characters in tma with an explicitly specified race and ethnicity—Chinese—and pretty much the only explicitly Chinese characters in tma, other than the mostly unimportant librarian (Zhang Xiaoling) from Beijing. But like, Haan isn’t even a properly Chinese surname, at least not in the way that it’s spelled in canon (it should be Han, one a. A quick google search tells me that Haan as a surname has...Dutch origins??).

Of course, that could be chalked up to shoddy anglicization processes within family histories, which certainly isn’t uncommon with immigrant families, so I’m not going to dwell on names too much (although I also find it interesting that John Haan’s name is so specifically and weirdly anglicized that he changed his own surname?? Hun Yung to John Haan is a very big leap of a name change and frankly not very believable. ANYWAY, this is not that important. I don’t expect Jonny, a white Englishman, to come up with perfectly unquestionable non-Cho-Chang-like Chinese names, though it certainly would be nice. Moving on).

What really bothers me about the Haans is how they almost exclusively and explicitly play into negative Chinese immigrant stereotypes. I don’t even feel like I need to say it because it’s like...it’s literally Right There, folks. John Haan (in ep 72) owns and operates a sketchy takeout restaurant. They’re all avatars of the Flesh—and John Haan is Specifically horrific and terrifying because he cooked his wife’s human meat and fed it to his unknowing customers. Does that remind you of any stereotypes which accuse Chinese people of consuming societally unacceptable and ethically questionable things like dog/cat/bat meat (which, if it’s not already crystal fucking clear, we don’t. do that.), which in turn characterize us as horrible unfeeling monsters? John Haan’s characterization feeds (haha, badum tss) directly into this harmful stereotype that have caused very real pain for Chinese people and East Asians in general. 

And Jonny does nothing to address that from within his writing (and not out of it either). And, speaking on a more meta level, Jonny could’ve easily had these flesh avatars be individuals of any race (like, what’s Jared Hopworth’s ethnicity? Do we know? No? Well then). Conversely, he could’ve easily, easily had a Chinese person be an avatar of any other entity. So why did he have to chose specifically the Flesh?

(This is a rhetorical question. You know why. Racial stereotyping and invoking a fear of the other in an attempt to enhance horror, babey~)

On Tom Haan’s side, Jonny seems weirdly intent on having other characters repeatedly comment on his accent (or rather, lack thereof) in relation to his race. Think about how, in ep 30 (killing floor), the fact that Tom Haan had spoken a line to the statement giver in “perfect English” was an emphasized beat in that statement, and a beat that was supposed to be “chilling” and meant to signify to us that something was, quote-unquote, “not right” with Tom Haan. Implicitly, that’s saying that it was unexpected, not “normal”, and in this case even eerie, for someone who looks Chinese to have spoken in fluid, unbroken English. Mind you, the line itself was perfectly scary on its own (“you cannot stop the slaughter by closing the door”), so why did Jonny feel the need to note the accent in which it was spoken in? Why did Jonny HAVE to have that statement giver note, that he initially “wasn’t even sure how much English [Haan] spoke”? 

This happens again in episode 72 with a Chinese man (and again, his ethnicity is Explicitly Noted) who we assume is also Tom Haan. This one is rather ironically funny and kind of painfully self aware, because the statement giver expresses surprise at Haan’s “crisp RP accent” and then immediately “felt bad about making the assumption that he couldn’t speak English,” and subsequently admitted that thought was “low-key racist.” Like, from a writing perspective, this entire passage is roundabout, pointless, and says absolutely nothing helpful to enhance the horror genre experience for listeners (instead it just sounded like some sort of half-assed excuse so Jonny or other listeners could say “look! We’ve addressed the racism!” You didn’t. It just made me vaguely uncomfortable). And again, having other people comment on our accents/lack thereof while assuming we are foreign is a Very Real microaggression that east asians face on the daily. If Jonny needed some filler sentences for pacing he could’ve written about Literally anything else. So why point out, yet again, that the crazy murderous man was foreign and Chinese? 

At this point, you might say, right, but yknow, it was just that the statement givers were kind of racist! It happens! Yeah sure, ok, that’s a passable in-universe explanation for descriptions of Tom Haan (though not John Haan, mind you), but the statement givers are fake made up people, and statement’s still written by Jonny, who absolutely has all the power to write overt discrimination out of his stories. And he does! Think about just how many minor (and major!!) characters are so, so carefully written as completely aracial, and do not have their ethnicity implicated at all in whatever horrors they may or may not be committing. Think about how many lgbtq+ characters have given statements, and have been in statements, without having faced direct forms of discrimination, or portrayed as embodying blatant stereotypes in their stories (though lgbtq+ rep in tma certainly has their own issues that I won’t go into here). Jonny can clearly write characters this way, and he can do it well. So why, why, am I being constantly, repeatedly reminded in-text of the fact that the Haans are East Asian, that they’re from China, that they’re Chinese immigrants, that they’re second-generation British Chinese or whatever the fuck, and that they’re also horrifying conduits for blood, gore, and general fucked-up-ness? It’s absolutely not something that is Needed for the stories to be an effective piece of horror; the only thing it does is perpetuate incredibly harmful and hurtful stereotypes.

And listen, I love tma to bits. It’s taken over my blog. I’ve really loved my interactions with the fandom. And I am consistently blown away by Jonny’s writing and how well he’s able to weave foreshadowing and plot into an incredibly complex collection of stories. But I absolutely Cannot stop thinking about the Haans because it’s just. It’s such a blatant display of racial stereotyping in writing. And I’ve certainly seen a few voices talking about it here and there, and I don’t know if I’m just not looking in the right places, but it certainly feels like something that is just straight up not on the radar for a lot of tma fans. And I’m disappointed about that. 

Just, I don’t know. Take a look at those episodes again and do some of your own thinking about why these characters had to be specifically Chinese (answer: they didn’t.). And in general, PLEASE for the love of god turn a critical eye on character portrayals and descriptions whenever they are assigned specific races/ethnicities (Some examples that come to mind are Jude Perry, Annabelle Cane, and Diego Molina), because similar issues, to an extent, extend beyond the Haans, though I haven’t covered them here. 

You shouldn’t need a POC to do point out these problems for you when they’re so glaringly There. But for those of you who really didn’t know, hope this was informative in some way. I’m tired, man. If some of the only significant Chinese characters you write are violent cannibalistic men with a perverted relationship with meat, just don’t do it. Please don’t do it. 

EDIT: Since the making of this post Jonny has acknowledged and apologized for these portrayals on his twitter and in the Rusty Quill Operations Update, which went up September 2020. A long time coming, but better late than never. This of course doesn’t necessarily negate the harm done by Jonny’s writing, and doesn’t make me much less angry about it, but is appreciated nonetheless. For more on this topic there’s a lot of productive discussions happening in my “#tma crit” tag and in the notes of this post

[venfx]

magnus fic roundup

as tma comes to a close, i thought i'd post some of my favorite fics to come out of this fandom. most of these are classics, listed in no particular order.

A Weather In The Flesh by @cuttoothed​ | 3K | S1-S4 | Jon/Martin | Complete

"There is a span of years where Jon doesn’t touch anyone other than the occasional hand shake. It’s not so bad. He’s never been someone who’s needed physical affection."

Jon has never been any good at making people want to stick around.

↳ this is such a well-done exploration of jon’s character and his relationship with touch, and i’ve re-read it at least five times. sweet and sad and phenomenally well-written.

in the chillest land and on the strangest sea by imperfectcircle, singlecrow | 20K | Safehouse, S1-S4 | Jon & Daisy, Jon/Martin | Complete

Jon remembers a statement he read years ago given by a Jesuit priest, who said that the shortest prayer he knew was, just, fuck it, as in fuck it; it's in God's hands. He takes Daisy's hand and trails on after her.

or; hope is a thing with feathers.

↳ hey, you wanna fuckin..... feel things? read this.

The Magnus Institute vs the 21st Century: a series of emails and IMs by shinyopals | 26K | Series | S3 | Pre-Jon/Martin | Complete

The Magnus Institute hires a Data Protection Officer. He sets about diligently booking in meetings, writing policy documents, and training all the staff in the importance of confidentiality. Now if only he could get hold of the Head Archivist, who seems to have vanished again...

(Jon is only trying to save the world, but apparently some people think he should still be doing his day job.)

↳ i’d be surprised to find people who haven’t read this series, but it’s the definition of “the magnus archives is a workplace comedy”. also, alasdair stuart has actually read some clips of this on Twitch, so that’s a fun bonus.

Bell, Book, and Candle by yellow_caballero | 102K | Series | S3 into S4 | Jon/Martin | Complete 

In accordance with the Ride or Die Pact of 2009, Jonathan Sims can call upon Georgie Barker at any time for aid with no strings attached. Despite their rocky history, their childhood friendship, and Jon’s barely recovered alcoholism, this pact is sacred and must be upheld.

Georgie Barker may regret this. She may regret it when she discovers that the world is full of monsters and eldritch gods and dickhead managers. She may regret it when a punk rocker who should be dead collapses on their doorstep, a teenager again who needs their help. She may regret it when her stupid ex-boyfriend starts selling his soul for knowledge and the ability to keep his new family safe.

But she probably won’t. Georgie isn’t scared of anything - not a Clown’s apocalypse, not the apocalypse that Jon is destined to begin, and not Jon’s own loss of humanity.

Maybe she should be.

↳ if you’re looking for an everyone-lives-no-one-dies-happy-ending fic that also happens to be massively chaotic, look no further. 

The Reverb in These Holy Halls by @wolftraps​ | 98K | AU, S1-S4 | Jon/Martin | Complete

Undoing the apocalypse would have been enough for Jon, if all his people survived. Without them, Jon's only recourse is making it so it never happened in the first place. He's going to do better this time.

↳ quintessential time travel AUs. plot-wise, i feel like these can be difficult to write, but op does a fantastic job of tying things together in a way that makes sense. plus, it’s just fun to read.

jon sims v the nhs by @thoughtsbubble​ | 12K | Series | S3 | Complete

Joan Bright has a new patient. He's carrying an old tape recorder and is covered head to toe in scars. Jonathan Sims looks dangerous, but Dr Bright has dealt with all sorts of atypical individuals. She has no reason to be nervous.

Right?

↳ if you’ve ever thought “hey, jon should probably go to therapy”, then 1) you’re absolutely right and 2) this is... probably what would’ve happened. prior knowledge of The Bright Sessions is not required. also, apparently, this fic is written by the showrunner of The Underwood Collection? wild.

Family, Found by Dribbledscribbles | 9K | S4 | Complete

It’s Basira who catches onto it.

The collective shift that seems to come over them when heading in or out of the Institute. Not just the oppressive sensation of being observed, their every move catalogued for the voyeuristic cravings of some unseen Eye(s). That feeling remained with them even when they left the Institute these days, but it was always stronger inside its walls. That wasn’t the change. Nor was it the point.

The point was: making life worse for Jonathan Sims.

↳ i think being part of the avengers fandom circa 2012 has given me permanent found-family-trope brainrot, but you know what. jonathan sims can have a little happiness, as a treat. 

Road to Damascus by @titanfalling​ | 107K | Series | S4 | Jon & Tim | Complete

n. an important moment of insight, typically one that leads to a dramatic transformation of attitude or belief

Or, in which Tim becomes an avatar for the end of all things.

↳ tim dies and then he doesn’t. there is catharsis and world building. just....read it.

Come, Change Your Ring With Me by @backofthebookshelf​ | 29K | S3 | Peter/Jon, Jon/Martin, Peter/Elias | Complete

The Lukases demand the Archivist marry into the family, and the Institute relies on them too much to say no. Peter is smug. Elias is fuming. Martin is suffering. Jon thinks this might be tolerable if only Peter would hurry up and leave him alone already.

OR, the soap opera we call an Archives revolves around Peter Lukas this time.

↳ superb evil-bastards-in-love content, feat. martin pining, tim being obnoxious, and jon being... well, tired, mostly. i will literally never get tired of how op writes peter. 

creatures that i briefly move along by @dotsayers​ | 16K | Series | AU, Post-S4 | background Jon/Martin 

Mr Sims was so weird, was the thing. Miss Grant always said calling people weird was rude, and Anna sort of agreed, but she didn’t know what other word to use to describe Mr Sims.

He’d only been in with the class for a few days, really, and half of that he just sat at the back listening, but that didn’t stop her from making a swift judgement. 5BG had had student teachers before, back when they were 3ST, and they’d been uniformly normal.

Mr Sims was… actually, Anna had a better adjective. He was interesting.

↳ i just.... love teacher!jon fics. this series delivers. 

Once Bitten by @apatheticbutterflies | 1K | S4 | Jon & Daisy | Complete

Jon Sims has always been a jumpy kind of guy. Nervous. Twitchy. Daisy used to think it meant he was guilty. Turns out he was. Just not of what she’d thought.

Daisy learns how to peel an orange.

↳ daisy and jon’s relationship is an example of an instance where i’m happy to say “fuck what you wrote mr. jonny ‘chocolate torte of tragedy’ sims, i want them to be friends”.

pins and needles by mutterandmumble | 13K | S1-S4 | Complete

He’s got a reputation to uphold anyways; an uptight, rigid reputation that dictates the way that he interacts and functions and is such an integral part of him that he can’t let go of it anytime soon. He likes his safety nets. He likes his contingencies. He likes his privacy, and everything around this place right down to the walls seems to have ears, so he’ll stay tight-lipped up to and beyond the threat of death.

He’s good at that.

In which Jon takes up embroidery and bumbles through life the best that he can.

↳ out of all the introspective jon pieces i’ve read (and there are many), this one stands out. maybe it’s the symbolism or the characterisation, or maybe it’s the fact that i have an embroidery kit lurking in the back of my closet along with a hundred other half-pursued hyperfixations. whatever. this is excellent.

sleeping in by @ivelostmyspectacles | 5K | S2 | Jon/Tim | Complete

“Who are you trying to convince?”

Jon gives up, letting his head sag against Tim’s shoulder. “I don’t know.”

aka Elias gets tired of Jon and Tim's bickering, sends them away for a "team-building" weekend trip, and is sure to book them a room with only one bed

↳ this has everything you’d need from a “oh no there’s only one bed” fic. someone please get these men therapy.

if you try, sometimes (you get what you knead) by @ajcrawly​ | 3.5K | S1-S4 | Jon/Martin, Tim/Sasha | Complete

It starts with an abundance of boeuf bourguignon and ends up as a team tradition.

Food and love in uncertain times.

↳ more found family fic, this time with a diverse og!archival staff and food as a metaphor for love. hurt in all the right ways. made me hungry in the process.

[fakecrfan]

Since you very nicely offered to write me a fic:

Your prompt is: A story about a background character or characters dealing with life after the TMA apocalypse.

It can be set in the OG TMA universe in the post-post-apocalypse, or it can also be set in a different universe that was affected by the events of MAG 200.

Both OCs and characters established in-show are allowed.

This one aligned so well with my interests that I am actually tempted to open my inbox, briefly, in case anyone else has questions like “what is X bavjground character doing after the apocalypse?” so I can make a series out of it and expand on my post-post-apocalypse headcanons.

For now, you can read your fic here, on over here on AO3

---

Sarah doesn't know where she is.

England, she has to still be in England, she thinks. But it's not an England she recognizes. Not the cobblestone streets of London, and not the moors she used to visit on her vacations. The ground is barren, as though all blades of grass but a few have shriveled up and died. There are no trees, houses, or landmarks for miles--just scorched remnants of where they might have been before.

For a moment, the emptiness of it all is a relief after the hotel. But everything is the same on all sides, and she doesn't know where she is or where to go. She's starting to get hungry, too. She never got hungry in the hotel, nightmarish as it was.

She has to sit down for a moment, take a few deep breaths, and think.

Get food. Find shelter. Survive.

Find Alex.

(God, why had she left her child in a hotel room? Little twelve year old Alex who was still afraid to sleep without a night light. He'd begged her to stay, she should have--)

With that in mind she gets up. Doesn't know what direction to walk in, so she doesn't concern herself with trying to pick one. There's nothing to do but walk, keep her eyes open, and hope.

So she hopes.

---

None of our old maps match the landscape, anymore.

The world these days it's... not like in the before times, as I suppose we're calling it. Despite our hopes, ending the apocalypse wasn’t like everyone waking up from a nightmare. The land is...

It's scrambled, I guess. There are patches of the world that--well. They're not the same, but still have infrastructure intact. Electricity, running water, air conditioning. No scorched earth or rubble in these areas. Just a bunch of traumatized people living in an intact town, or city.

When I talk to them, they tell me it's not the city they remember, though. Everything has been switched around, houses and stores not where they remember them. Their neighbors aren't the neighbors their remember.

Those are the lucky ones. And then there's, well... the outside.

Some places have rubble everywhere, jagged steel ripped apart and waiting for someone to cut themselves on it. Some are frozen over, still waiting for the ice they were frozen over with in the apocalypse to melt. Some are scorched to dust. No phones out there, or anything that lets you connect back with home base.

I'm going out there. We need to map it out. We need to figure out our new world, understand it--and we need to get as many people out of the wastes as possible.

Melanie, Georgie--I’ll see you soon.

---

Sarah does find water. That's something. She's hungry still, so hungry, but she knows that the water is more important.

She wonders if she should stay there. She doesn't know if there will be more watering holes in the future, after all, and she has no way to carry it with her. She decides to keep moving on, and hope for the best.

She starts to see blades of grass poking up, along with some sort of metal crap strewn about the landscape. She looks at them a moment--it seems to be bits of an old carousel? Eventually, a giant sit in their shade, for a while. There she takes a moment to look at the horizon, and goes cold.

She recognizes the tower on the horizon.

A  scaffolded tower with two legs beneath it. A sight she'd last seen on a postcard from her brother. The Eiffel Tower.

Is she in Paris? No, that can't be it. It's just the tower out here in the wastes. There are none of the buildings that would normally surround it. It's almost as though its been ripped out of the city and transported here.

Does Paris even exist anymore? Does London?

If she even finds Alex, will there be a home for them to go back to?

---

I have a theory, Melanie. I think lots of people got transported to different places in the world based on what fear they belonged to. Like, a bunch of lonely people were put in the same place, a bunch of claustrophobic people were put in the same place, and so on. All away from the people they knew.

I’m in one of the suburban safe areas now. No one here knows each other. I talked to them all, and all of them remember living in the same house before, but none of them recognized the houses near them or the people in them. When I went from house to house, everyone had a different native language. I talked to a German guy and a French guy who spoke English, but a lot of them… couldn’t talk to me at all.

There was a woman who--she saw me and she lit up. She grabbed me and started talking a mile a minute in Arabic, I think. But I couldn’t understand her, and she--when I tried to talk back to her in English, her face just. Fell. And then she started to cry.

My dad refused to speak it at home, you know. He-- Actually, never mind. It’s not important. 

She ended up shoving me away.

---

Sarah makes it to the ruins of a forest. 

There’s nothing but stumps left of it, along with litter everywhere. She finds water again, filthy brackish water, and she drinks it anyway because she’s so thirsty. She starts sifting through all of the garbage strewn about for something edible. She finds stale bread crusts crawling with ant and eats them anyway. 

She finds a can of beans, and almost cries. When she can’t find a can opener, she screams instead.

---

The death count has gotten to me, honestly.

I’ve found dead bodies even in the towns and cities. Some looked like heart attacks. Some suicides. People who woke up but couldn’t bear the agony they’d just gone through. That’s still not… the worst of it.

I passed a whole field of dead bodies today.

Hundreds of people, I think, all of them lying dead in the soil. But there were... trails. They had been walking, before they collapsed. All walking in the same direction, to where you can still see London on the horizon.

They were alive. They were trying to get help. And they just... starved, it looks like. The walk was just too long.

How many people are going to die from it all, Melanie? How many already have, out where we can't see them?

I left as many jugs of clean water and rations along the roads as I could. I put up signs pointing to London, saying how many miles out they were, where I had stashed food. I gave them your number, so they know who to call to get to the shelter.

I hope it means the next group that passes by won't die.

I hope there is a next group.

---

Sarah can see what looks like a city in the distance before she collapses. 

She tries to get up, but can’t. She’s been walking for days now, it feels like, only sporadically drinking and almost never eating.  There just isn’t enough energy left in her to stand.

She tries to think about little Alex again, running around in his Batman cape, hoping some kind of love or maternal instinct will kick in and give her the last burst of adrenaline she needs to get up. It doesn’t work. Maybe she doesn’t love her own son anymore, really. Maybe it’s just been fear and guilt driving her this far, and that source has already been wrung dry. 

She manages to crawl a few feet, before she can’t even do that. With nothing else left to do, she starts to cry out. “Help! Water, please!” 

She doesn’t think anyone will hear, or show up. But against all odds, in her dimming vision she sees a figure come into view. Backpacked, clutching a water bottle. 

“Help,” she croaks out again. 

The figure gets closer, and she starts to be able to make out the details of his face. He’s her age, or older, with worry lines carved into his forehead and wide eyes. His nose looks eerily like her brother’s nose, and the shape of his jaw reminds her of her old boyfriend, the one who left her with--

She blinks. Maybe she’s hallucinating, or maybe she’s somehow run into a long lost cousin. But then, the man’s eye’s widen and his mouth opens.

“Mum?”

No, no it can’t…

“A-alex?”

No, Alex was a little round cheeked boy. This is a thirty year old man, at least, taller than her. It hasn’t been that long. It can’t be, it’s not--

“Mum?” He’s doing a frown that looks so, so familiar. This has to be a dream. “Mum, it’s--no.”

He sniffles. He steps forward, and steps back. He paces, uncertain.

“No, no,” she hears him mutter. “It’s all fake, all fake. It’s a trap. That’s what they want, the monsters and the face stealers. No one is real. Don’t give them what they want--’’

“Please.” she begs. 

But she hears him walk away, sniffling, and shortly thereafter everything goes dark. 

---

I have a confession to make, Melanie. I was going to side with Jon, back then. I could have lived with keeping everyone here suffering to prevent more of it. But when he said he was going to kill the whole world, not just leave it--that’s what made me snap. 

I couldn’t let the whole world die. Genocide of the entire human species? Anything but that. Surely passing along the suffering would be better, as long as it didn’t lead to the extinction of whole worlds. But… 

I keep finding more dead bodies.

I went back to that suburb I talked about, to restock on all my food. It was a lonely domain before, I think. I’d thought everyone there would be fine, you know. They didn’t have any deadly sicknesses, or twisted flesh injuries. They had food and water and shelter. But when I went back… more of them had died. 

Lots of suicides. Some of them snapped, and started to self injure.

The German guy I talked to had started to starve. He had a pantry full of food and he just wouldn’t eat it. I tried to get him to eat, to move in with someone else, but he said talking to people “made him sick.” 

I gave up, and left. I had to. There were too many people, and too much to do, so I left him. He’s probably dead now, or going to die soon. Because he can’t find the will to live, and I don’t know how to help someone with that.

The Lonely is probably one of the least directly harmful entities, right? This domain was just a suburb, probably the most comfortable you could get during the apocalypse. And yet the victims are still all dying. 

How much worse is it in places without food and water? In the corruption domains that still probably have deadly diseases spreading? In war zones, in flesh factories?

I think about that nursing home we found. All of the patients who'd died of heart attacks a few minutes after they'd woken up. The ones left alive screaming for help where no one could hear them, for days after the fact. All of the ones that died in their beds before we found them. 

I think about that field of bodies I found the other day. I think about the ruins of that Circus I found, people refusing to talk to me or each other--refusing to help because they didn’t believe it was over and thought everyone else was a mannequin. 

I think… I think it doesn’t matter that we saved the world. If people can’t find the will to live, ro rebuild, to trust and help each other again… I think we’re going through a mass extinction event anyway. 

---

Sarah’s in a car, she thinks. Not a moving one. She’s propped up against a seat,There’s something plastic pressed to her lips.

“Come on,” says a woman’s deep, level voice. “Come on. I got you. We’re getting to London. All you have to do is drink.”

Sarah opens her eyes. She sees a dark-skinned woman trying to coax her to drink, holding up a water bottle. 

“Just a sip,” the woman says. “Just enough to make it.”

Sarah closes her eyes, and takes a long moment to consider whether she wants to.

[aflyingcontradiction]

The Magnus Archives Relisten: Episode 89 - Twice as Bright

Jon: Right. But no more abattoir metaphors, please. Jude: Suppose it’s not really me, is it?

Yeah, too Fleshy.

Jon: I just have a few questions. Did you burn down a section of Gwydir Forest last year? Jude: Not alone, but yes. You should have seen how devastated they were, such a loss. Jon: I’m sure the Forestry Commission were mortified. Why? Jude: Stop that! And it was because Nikola Orsinov asked us to.

Jon doesn't even know what he's doing and Jude is getting all bristly, like a scared cat hissing.

Jon: I just… er, you were a friend of Agnes Montague, correct? Jude: She’s not one of your little stories. Jon: According to the statement of Jack Barnabas, she very much is.

Anyone going to throw things at me if I say "Oooh, burn!" in this context? Because, this is very much an Ooooh burn sort of situation.

Jon: Yes, yes, I understand, you could easily kill me, I’m at your mercy, blah, blah, blah. I have heard it before. And from things much scarier than you.

Jeez, Jon, where's all THIS coming from all of the sudden? Man, I wish I ever went from 'exhaustedly done with the world's shit' to 'I'm giving the world its shit right back!' like that!

Jude: Are you trying to talk me into killing you? If I wanted, I could reach through your chest like runny wax, and hold your heart while it cooked. No-one would even notice, if I didn’t give you time to scream.

Oh god, I love Jude. Every other avatar we've met is all quiet menace until they go full-monster and even then they're just 'JooOoon, coming to fiiiiind youuuu'. And here's Jude just CHEWING the goddamn scenery with relish, cutting things asunder with her edge. I've said this multiple times to people while discussing TMA but Jude is just basically the navy seal copypasta of avatardom and I'm enjoying her so much right now!

Jude: Hard to say. When I look at you I feel that burning liquid pain, eager to flow out and purify your rotten carcass, but I feel that a lot. Jon: Oh. M-More or less than normal? Jude: Hard to say when every nerve ending’s on fire. Hard to tell degrees. Jon: Third degree, maybe?

I cannot tell you which of the two I want to squeal at more right now. I adore this entire dialogue so much.

Jude: Oh please, your god is nothing! The Eye, Beholding, Ceaseless Watcher, whatever you call it, that’s all it does, it watches and knows, sitting bulbous and comfortable in the ignorance of infinite knowledge. I serve a reckoning, a surging tide of destruction and pain.

Okay, but you still react like a cat that's been sprayed with water whenever Jon asks you a question, Jude, love, you're not fooling anyone...

Jude: The unfathomable contest of eternal forces is not the only reason I might want someone dead.

This is important right here. Obviously the idea that avatars are still their own people, regardless of the Entity they serve, became really obvious somewhere along the line, but at this point in my first go I was still basically thinking in terms of "Hm, well, this power and that power interact in this way... wait, that makes no sense..." and sort of discounting that it's not always ABOUT the powers, despite how obvious that was!

Jon: Statement of Jude Perry, regarding… some advice.

Jon just vacillates wildly between fear and being so DONE with Jude's bullshit and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

Jude: The pain is sensational. You feel your flesh cooking, your nerves screaming out as they die exquisitely. Your whole body changes texture as you become that which feeds the fire. In that agonising, beautiful transformation, you can feel it ignite again and again and again.

Okay, now she's just making self-immolation sound tempting...

It was Agnes, of course. I don’t know where she found me, I only remember sitting in a booth with a beautiful young woman who smelled like matches and incense.

Well, someone's certainly smitten...

And with each act of glorious, hateful destruction, I felt my god’s love embrace me, consume me, give me life. Any feelings of pity or mercy I might have had for the poor woman I fed from were cauterised.

Ah, come on, like they existed to need cauterising in the first place...

And so I ended it. For all the agony and pain on Gretchen’s face, she didn’t seem surprised when I doused myself in kerosene and set it alight. I think she screamed. She must have screamed.

Tbh, Gretchen may have been traumatised for life but Jude seems to have lost interest in her after, so that was probably fucking lucky for poor Gretchen here.

Jon: Michael? (...) Corridors, weird limbs, laughs like a… headache? Jude: What? No. He’s pale, got a big, weird scar. Smells of, um… Jon: Oh, ozone! Jude: Yeah, that’s the one. Hangs around with the Fairchilds sometimes.

I love that the podcast is lampshading the fact that they've got two recurring characters named Michael (AND one Mikaele on top but at least he's usually referred to by his last name). I wonder at what point Johnny went "Whoops, I may have created a confusion." (I mean, not that it's unrealistic, my UK friend group-and-adjacent-people had enough Andrews, Johns and Matts that they basically all ended up with weird nicknames but it's just a bad idea to have identical names in fiction.)

Jude: Come on. It won’t hurt. (...) I lied. Jon: - SCREAMING IN INCREASING AGONY -

I mean, first of all, duh, yeah, OF COURSE SHE LIED! But also, Johnny is not a bad actor. The scream reminded me a little of that one time that my partner managed to scald a hand with boiling water while making tea (one of the worst sounds I've ever heard, incidentally, would like to not hear that again.)

My impression of this episode

First of all, I adore Jude. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean I'd be friends with her (I mean, duh, she was despicable as a human being and is now a fully devoted servant of the Entity-of-torment-and-loss, having near-orgasms over the idea of making people suffer, so...) but as a character she's just so beautifully over the top! It's fun! And Jon's interaction with her is incredibly interesting because, well, this may be the first time that Jon meets anything Entity-adjacent that is actually afraid of HIM (and yeah, Jude may be putting on a tough act, but she seems fucking terrified.) That was just really fun to watch, to be honest. A little bit of ... vicarious power fantasy, perhaps, at least until Jude turns the tables again. This was just a really enjoyable episode!

[ollieofthebeholder]

leaves too high to touch (roots too strong to fall): a TMA fanfic

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] Also on AO3

Chapter 17: Jon

Jon knows he should probably feel bad about this, but he’s too shaken to feel anything else. Part of him feels guilty for bolting and leaving the others behind. God knows they must be upset by what they just heard too. It isn’t just his fate Martin Prime laid out in a series of framed pictures.

But he needs space, he needs air. He needs a chance to think about what he heard before he does or says something utterly stupid, even for him. He needs to regulate his breathing and he needs something to soothe his nerves.

He taps a cigarette out of the pack he keeps in his glove compartment and puts the rest in his pocket, then lights it up and leans against the corner of the garage. The first shaking drag nearly makes him choke, as always, but he holds it for a moment before slowly expelling it in a puff of air.

“Those things will kill you, you know,” a too-familiar voice says from behind him.

Jon doesn’t look up. “Obviously not, if you’re still here.”

Jon Prime comes over and leans against the wall next to Jon, arms folded across his chest. He doesn’t say anything, merely stands there and watches the smoke curl up in paisley spirals.

“Want one?” Jon finally asks, more as a way to break the silence than anything.

Jon Prime shakes his head. “No, I quit ages ago.”

“So did I,” Jon says dryly.

“Yes, but I stopped even keeping a pack on hand ‘just in case’ or ‘for emergencies’. Martin doesn’t like it. Never said anything, but…with everything else trying to kill me, the last thing I wanted was him worrying that I’d manage to do it to myself. I haven’t touched a cigarette since…before we lost Tim.”

Jon glances at his counterpart out of the corner of his eye. He sounds…haunted, for lack of a better term. Not that Jon can blame him. Bad enough to have to listen to all that as it was, but Jon Prime had to live through it, and then have it served up like an art gallery. And to hear it come out of Martin Prime’s mouth…

He thinks about that, thinks about the sinking panic in his stomach when he thought about his—their—Martin having to go through half of what Martin Prime must have endured, thinks about the way the Primes clung to each other when they were first reunited and the way they’ve maintained some degree of physical contact almost constantly since. It all combines to make him ask, “When did you figure out what he meant to you?”

“Almost too late,” Jon Prime murmurs. He gives Jon the same sideways glance Jon just gave him. “It sort of…crept up on me gradually? I wish I could tell you that it came to me in a grand realization, some big, theatrical, dramatic moment, but…no, it was—” He pauses and lets out a soft sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “It was really such a small, stupid thing, but…no. The moment I realized…”

He returns to staring across the backyard, but Jon isn’t sure that’s what he’s actually looking at. “I was…trying to retrace Gertrude’s footsteps. Trying to piece together what she’d learned, what she’d been working on. At one point, she was at the Pu Songling Research Center in Beijing—it’s something of a sister organization to the Institute—and went from there to Chicago. I had a bit of time before the next flight out, so I thought—I was dying for a cup of tea. Hadn’t had a decent one in ages. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d been able to finish one. And here I was in the middle of one of the most well-known places for tea in the world. I decided to go to a nice teahouse and get the full experience. So I did.” He snorts softly and shakes his head. “I couldn’t finish it.”

Jon makes an interrogative noise. He isn’t really sure what to say to that, or how it connects to anything they’ve been talking about, but he’s willing to wait it out.

“Silly, isn’t it?” Jon Prime muses. “I—I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. It wasn’t the quality of the tea, that was perfect. It was made exactly the way I like it. Hell, I even watched them make it, so it wasn’t fear of them accidentally poisoning it or whatever—so what could it be?” He sighs heavily. “And that’s when it hit me. I watched the woman make it. The woman. I realized, sitting in the middle of a crowded shop in one of the most populated cities in the world, that I could come up with as many excuses as I wanted, but the simple truth was that I hadn’t finished a cup of tea in two years that Martin hadn’t made for me.” He looks back at Jon, and his eyes are tight with self-reproach. “That was the moment I knew. And then, like a coward, I didn’t say anything for more than a year.”

Jon wants to say something, anything, but before he can, Jon Prime looks away from him again. “Oh, I told myself there were good reasons. I-I was away, I wasn’t going to say something like that over the phone, I had to wait until I saw him in person again. And then when I did get back to the Institute, we were in the middle of—we had work to do to save the world, we didn’t have a lot of down time, we had to—to plan, to prepare. A-and then, the, the night before we left for our mission…I told myself that wasn’t the time. I was going and Martin was staying behind—he had a plan of his own to carry out, and someone had to stay back, just in case the rest of us didn’t make it, and…I didn’t say anything, but I needed it to be him. I needed to know he was safe, even if the rest of us weren’t. But I convinced myself it wouldn’t be fair to burden him with that, to tell him how I felt and then just leave, because if God forbid I didn’t come back I didn’t want him to live the rest of his life knowing we never had the chance to—to explore what that meant.”

“And then?” Jon ventures.

Jon Prime closes his eyes. “The ninth picture.”

“You—we—” Damn, it’s hard to know how to say it. “A coma?”

“Six months. Nothing functioning except my brain. I—I had to make my choice. I chose to come back. But when I did…everything was different. Martin had—he’d taken another job in the Institute, to protect everyone in the Archives. To protect me. He had…he was working on a plan of his own, but…” Jon Prime sighs heavily. “I don’t know…”

“It’s not likely to happen now, is it?” Jon asks. “Whatever this is? You’re—we’re going to stop all this from happening, so what’s the harm in telling me?”

Jon Prime swallows. “Because it still hurts to think about. But…all right. Martin had managed to gather enough evidence to have Elias arrested—this was before we knew…the full extent of things, so we thought he was just a moderately clairvoyant, malicious ass—but Elias had anticipated…something of that nature, and laid plans ahead of time. He’d chosen Peter Lukas as a temporary successor. Actually there was a bet involved, but…I really don’t want to discuss that, and we didn’t find out until later anyway. But Peter Lukas was running the Institute. There were…attacks, and Martin finally made a deal with Lukas that he’d work directly for him if he would protect the others left behind in the Archives. Most of what he did was to protect us—to protect me, because he thought if he kept Lukas’ attention on him, it would keep the rest of us safe. And for the most part, he wasn’t wrong.”

“Lukas…as in, the Institute donors?” Jon thinks back to the statement of the young woman he’d rather brusquely dismissed. “The woman who—the funeral—wait a minute.” He compares the statement to the list of entities and ventures, “The Lonely?”

“It almost got him.” Jon Prime exhales shakily. “The Lukas family is…very wrapped up in the Lonely. Oddly, for such a large family, but…yes. He worked on Martin for months, and I—for a moment, I thought he was going to go over. But in the end, he didn’t. He stood up to him and chose not to. But as part of what he was doing to Martin—and what Martin was doing to protect me—we didn’t interact. Couldn’t.” He gives a small, humorless laugh. “The loneliness of distance.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s…the Keeper’s domain, actually. A mixture of the Lonely and the Spiral. That peculiar feeling when you’re separated from someone you love, and it—it should be so simple to cross that barrier, but you can’t. Maybe you’re physically separated, maybe an emotional gulf…maybe by necessity. But it’s coupled with the—the fear that if you do try to reach out…”

“They won’t reach back,” Jon says softly.

Jon Prime nods. “And it hurts. I-I mean, both of us wanted to close that gap, but…we were afraid to. Me because I was afraid I’d well and truly botched it and he didn’t want me to, him because it was the only way he could think of to keep me safe. Relatively, anyway.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. “We got lucky. We got that second chance.”

“So how do you feel about him?” Jon asks. It’s probably a stupidly obvious question, but honestly, his own emotions are still so mixed up that he genuinely doesn’t know how he feels, and knowing how Jon Prime feels…

Jon Prime unfolds his arms, straightens up, and looks Jon square in the face. “I love him,” he says, quietly but firmly. “He’s my anchor, my compass, the one thing keeping me human. He is the one person I trusted when I was at my lowest and the one person I wanted there when I was at my highest. He was the first one I told when I found out how to quit the Institute and the one who found a way to bring me out of the Buried when my own stupidity nearly trapped me there. He’s the reason I’ve made it this far and the only reason I have to continue. He is the most important thing in my life and I will do whatever it takes to keep him there.” He pauses. “And before you ask, yes, he does know all this. Now.”

That was, in fact, Jon’s next question. “And he…?”

“He feels the same.”

For just a moment, Jon feels dizzy. Could Martin…? But he’s not even sure if love is what he feels for his—their—Martin, not yet anyway. Could it be love? Maybe. Someday. But all hearing about his future self’s feelings has done is make him more confused. Still, he keeps pushing. “You haven’t…said anything, o-or done anything, since…” Even the way they clung to each other when they first were reunited could be construed as two friends, two people who’ve lost everything else, finding something familiar once again.

“And believe me, it’s killing us both.” Jon Prime reaches up like he wants to run his hands through his hair, then checks, evidently remembering the braid, and rubs his face instead. “I didn’t realize how comfortable I’ve become with being able to show that affection—to take comfort from him—until we were here and I couldn’t. God, when he was done giving his statement, I—I wanted to—” He gives a ragged sigh. “And don’t think for a moment I couldn’t tell how much effort it took to restrain himself to what little he did when I overdid things. We’re just…we got accustomed to being allowed to do that, I suppose. It never occurred to either one of us we’d be somewhere we couldn’t.”

“Well, why can’t you?”

“I don’t know if you realize just how bad Martin’s self-esteem is at times,” Jon Prime says quietly. “God knows we haven’t done him any favors. We worried that if you saw us together, then got together yourselves, your Martin would always harbor that little bit of suspicion that you’re only with him because you think you have to be.”

Jon swallows, but he cant really refute that assessment of Martin, mostly because he doesn’t know him as well as he’d like. It still rings true. “I—you know I wouldn’t—”

“I know. And my Martin knows that, too. He’s…as horrible as the next two years were for us, they definitely helped him forge his sense of self-worth. But yours still thinks you hate him.”

“I don’t—I never hated him. I—”

“Was projecting, yes. He called me on that and I copped to it. But it doesn’t change the fact that that’s what he thinks now. My Martin and I don’t want to risk damaging what you two could have by making either of you think it’s forced.” Jon Prime returns to lounging against the side of the building.

They fall into another long silence, Jon Prime sliding his hands into his pockets and watching the sky cloud over and Jon returning to smoking. There’s always a small amount of guilt when he sneaks a cigarette—which he really does far too often to claim he’s actually quit—but it’s worse than usual today. Or maybe it’s just that what he’s just sat through is too intense to be soothed with nicotine and menthol. He watches the smoke curl on the wind and thinks about the paintings.

Finally, he asks, “They all happened, then?”

“Yes.” Jon Prime’s voice is barely audible. “All of them. Including, thank God, the last one.” He pauses, then adds, “I’m—I know it’s selfish to say it, but if he had to be blinded, I’m glad that’s the last thing he saw.”

Jon understands that. “Anything would be better than the gallery of horrors. And…the last painting, the one he didn’t turn around to see. Do you…?”

“It was probably the moment I ended the world.”

“You ended—” Jon’s cigarette slips from his fingers. Stupidly, he grabs at it as it falls and manages to sear his hand. He curses softly and shakes out his hand, inspecting the cigarette. Somehow, it’s still lit. Wonders will never cease.

“Graceful,” Jon Prime says dryly. He starts to fiddle with the cuffs of his sweater, then tucks his hands firmly into his armpits, evidently to stop himself. “And yes. It wasn’t…exactly my fault, I suppose, but I was more or less the catalyst, at least.” He seems to debate with himself for a moment, then sighs. “We’ll explain a bit more when we’re back with everyone else—I don’t want to have to relive this more than once—but, broadly, the entities all have rituals, designed to bring them fully into the world and recreate it in their image, so to speak. The ritual for the Eye is called the Watcher’s Crown, and the Archivist is the keystone. Jonah spent three years preparing me, and then—well, he disguised the incantation to finish the ritual as a statement, and I didn’t discover it until I’d already started reading it.”

“You didn’t stop?”

“I—I tried. God knows I tried. But I physically couldn’t. Even from the beginning, I found it hard to stop recording a statement once it was begun, unless I was interrupted. I convinced myself for far too long that it was just work ethic or some such nonsense.” Jon Prime sounds bitterly amused. “I don’t know that I could have stopped myself without intervention. If—if I hadn’t been alone, if I’d asked Martin to stay in the room…he might have been able to snatch it away from me before I got to the second page. I don’t know. I can’t Know hypotheticals or the future or anything like that, but I-I’m terribly afraid that if he’d tried to interfere, especially once I got to the actual ritual, that I might have hurt him.” He closes his eyes tightly. “I-I wouldn’t have survived that.”

Jon presses his lips together for a moment, then takes another drag on the cigarette. He tries not to think about the possibility of hurting any of his assistants, let alone Martin. Even now, the very idea makes him flinch away in horror. How much worse would it be if he’d sorted through the tangle of emotions inside him?

“You didn’t—Tim and Sasha. That wasn’t you, right?” he asks, and could swallow his tongue. He almost does swallow the cigarette and holds it well away from himself to keep from doing something even stupider. “I-I mean—”

“It’s all right. It’s a valid question,” Jon Prime says quietly. He opens his eyes. Somehow, Jon isn’t surprised to see that they’re wet with unshed tears. “No, I never laid a hand on either of them. Sasha was—she was killed by the thing from Amy Patel’s statement, the one that was not her friend Graham. Tim died trying to stop one of the rituals. He—I didn’t want him to go. I definitely didn’t want him to do what he did, but…God, he was so angry. I-I think he needed to do it, but it hurt when I woke up and found out he was gone.”

Jon notes that whatever killed Tim—likely an explosion, since Martin Prime mentioned a detonator—also put Jon Prime in his coma, but he decides not to bring that up. Not now. He doesn’t want to think about losing any of his assistants. He can’t. “Please tell me you’re going to help me keep that from happening.”

“That’s our goal,” Jon Prime promises. “Well, our secondary goal at least. Obviously our main goal is to stop—”

“The world from ending. I know. Your Martin told us that.”

Jon Prime smiles, just a little bit. It takes Jon a second to realize that it’s the words your Martin that made him soften like that—that even though Jon meant it to distinguish Martin Prime from the Martin who could have died last night if the CO2 system had been a hair slower to trigger, a thought that’s going to haunt him for a while, he heard it as a possessive statement. Your Martin in the same sense as your partner, your reason, your love. There’s another uncomfortable flutter in Jon’s chest that he tries his hardest to ignore.

“But our other goal is to protect everyone we care about,” Jon Prime continues. “I—I am sorry that your Martin got hurt so badly. I am. I know what he’s going through, physically at least. We really were hoping to avoid any of you having to go through that. But if we can at least stop him—stop all of you—from going through the hell we went through…we’ll run whatever risk we have to.”

“Short of letting…Elias win,” Jon says. It seems safer to call him that for now.

Jon Prime hesitates, which surprises Jon. “I…I’d like to say yes. That stopping Jonah is more important than keeping you all from getting hurt. And certainly you’ll all suffer a great deal if he does win, but…God, I don’t know. If the cost is anyone’s life…I don’t know that I can pay it. Not again.” He takes a deep breath. “We have a good chance, though. Jonah doesn’t know we’re here, and as long as we can keep him ignorant, we should be able to catch him off-guard. And I know what to prepare for better now.”

“Wait, you’re following through the same plan you had post-apocalypse?”

“More or less.”

“Even though it obviously didn’t work?” Jon wonders what happens to him that he would consider trying something he knows is doomed to failure.

“It would have worked,” Jon Prime says. “I didn’t know for sure before we tried—like I said, I can’t Know the future—but what Jonah did made it clear that what we were going to do would have worked, and that he found the only method possible of stopping it.”

Jon knows he shouldn’t ask, but he can’t help himself. He wonders if it’s the power of the Eye or just his own natural curiosity, or maybe both. “What—what did he do?”

“He hurt Martin.” Jon Prime’s voice is quiet but raw. “Badly. I—I knew I could save him, but I also knew that going to Martin first would give Jonah enough time to get away, and we’d never get another chance to catch him unaware. And I knew that if I took Jonah down, even in the relatively short amount of time it would take to do that…Martin would be beyond help by the time I was done. I only had seconds to decide.” He looks up, and the pain in his eyes is evident. “Not a thing in me said to do other than what I did.”

The memory of Martin being wheeled out of the Archives on a stretcher hits Jon almost like a physical force. The panic, the desperate need to get to him, the sense of guilt, return as if he’s feeling them fresh. And that was with trained medical professionals on the scene. What Jon Prime is describing is infinitely worse. Jon Prime had to watch Martin Prime hurt, by someone he once at least marginally trusted, and know that he was the only one who could save him…but at the cost of the rest of the world.

And, honestly, Jon can’t condemn him. He doesn’t know what he’d do if faced with that situation himself. Truthfully, there’s a part of him that’s afraid he would hesitate for too long and lose both opportunities. He knows, with utter certainty, that he’d never forgive himself if he did. At least Jon Prime made a decision. At least he saved the man he loved.

“I—I think you did the right thing,” he manages.

Jon Prime huffs a soft laugh and folds his arms over his chest again, banging his head lightly back against the wall of the garage. “Martin didn’t think so. At first, anyway. He fussed at me for not stopping Jonah when I could, but…when I told him how little time he had, and pointed out I wasn’t even sure I’d get anything out of taking down Jonah but revenge, he let it go. Still don’t think he agrees it was the right choice, but he does at least understand it was the only choice I could have made.”

Jon doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about what that must feel like—to be the only ones left standing at the end of the world, to make a pact together to turn it back, to go through what must have been literal hell together, to see your happy ending on the horizon, and then to nearly have everything destroyed in an instant. If the chasm that opened up before him at the idea of losing Martin had been deep and vast, how unfathomable must it have been to Jon Prime? Especially knowing how close he must have come to losing Martin before that?

“What would he have done?” he finally asks. “If your positions had been reversed. If you’d been the one hurt. Would Martin have saved you and let…” He trails off. He still can’t bring himself to call his boss Jonah. That’s honestly the only thing he’s having trouble believing. That Elias Bouchard is in the service of an eldritch fear god, that he might want to end the world as long as he can be in charge of it, that he’s using Jon as a cat’s-paw to do so? Certainly. But that he might actually be Jonah Magnus, or at least possessed by him? No, Jon can’t quite buy that one yet.

Jon Prime looks unhappy. “I don’t know. Our plan relied—relies—on an ability Martin simply doesn’t have. So the likelihood of him being able to do anything to Jonah…I don’t know if he would have tried or not. He might have. Martin’s got a lot more pent-up rage in him than you might expect, and most of it is directed at Jonah. He’s hurt us both over the years, repeatedly, and I know Martin wanted revenge. I did, too, but…the difference is that I knew how precious little time there was before the damage done to him was irreversible. Martin wouldn’t have known that. He—he might have thought he could at least get one good stab in and then save me. You’ll have to ask him, but honestly, I don’t think even he knows.”

Actually, the thought that Martin—stammering, unassuming, inoffensive Martin—would attack a being that’s essentially a demigod with a knife to pay it back for hurting them is strangely comforting. The idea that Jon might have died as a result, less so. “So—why attack Martin and not you? What if you’d chosen differently?”

“I think he knew damn well I wouldn’t. And I think he knew there was a good possibility Martin would, which also tells me it would have worked, too. That Martin could have killed him. Then, too, there’s a chance that he couldn’t have actually killed me. The Eye may have liked me better than it liked Jonah. Certainly it seemed keen to keep me alive and functioning.” Jon Prime pauses, then adds on a small sigh, “But mostly, I think he attacked Martin because when he started picking at my confidence, started me doubting myself—again—Martin stood between us and refused to move.”

Jon coughs. “Wait, what?”

Jon Prime nods without looking at him. He folds his arms tightly over his chest, rolling the fabric of the sweater between his thumbs and forefingers. It’s a nervous tic Jon himself isn’t familiar with, and in a distant way, he wonders when it started. “It wasn’t—I won’t pretend it was like you might imagine in the movies. He was scared, I could taste how scared he was, and I know he was trying not to cry. But he stood in front of me anyway. He looked Jonah square in the eye and told him to fuck off. Told him he wouldn’t let him hurt me anymore and—” He breaks off and closes his eyes, pressing his lips into a flat line for a moment. “He wouldn’t budge. He didn’t take his eyes off Jonah when he told me that he’d stand in front of me as long as I needed him to, as long as it took for me to remember who I was, and that it wasn’t what Jonah had tried to make me.”

Jon can’t fathom what kind of courage that must have taken. “And that…what, angered Jonah so much that he wanted to hurt Martin?”

“Oh, no, he didn’t sound angry at all,” Jon Prime says bitterly. “He was perfectly calm as he told me that I ‘might want to reconsider my course of action’ as ‘time can be a precious resource, after all’.”

“And then?”

“And then he shot Martin.” Jon Prime slowly turns his head to look Jon square in the eye. “Three times. In the chest.”

Jon freezes. Everything seems to still down to a molecular level—heart, lungs, even his brain. Nothing exists beyond the words Jon Prime has just spoken and what they imply. At first, it’s focusing on the thought that Elias Bouchard shot Martin—that his boss, the man theoretically responsible for them and their well-being, leveled a gun at one of his assistants and fired it. Then the details catch up to him, and Jon somehow manages to forget how to breathe, despite the fact that he isn’t breathing to begin with. Not only did he shoot Martin, he shot him the same way Gertrude Robinson was shot, if Tim is to be believed. Spots begin forming at the edges of his vision.

He feels pressure on his shoulders and hears a voice that seems to crackle with static. “Breathe, Jon.”

Jon complies without realizing it. He inhales—exhales. Again. Again. The creeping darkness recedes, and Jon sees his counterpart standing before him, his eyes wet and anxious behind his glasses, matching his breathing to Jon’s. He has his hands on Jon’s shoulders—that’s the pressure he felt—and he’s shaking faintly.

“My God,” Jon whispers. “He—dear God.”

Jon Prime nods, infinitesimally. “Yes. He was—making a point. As much as—” He breaks off and closes his eyes again, but Jon sees a tear trickle out of the corner of his eye.

Jon swallows hard. “He killed Gertrude Robinson.”

“Yes.” Jon Prime takes a deep breath and opens his eyes again, looking a bit calmer but still shaken. “That…was not how I wanted to tell you that. But yes.” He pauses, then adds, “If you want more on that, you’ll have to wait until we can talk to everyone. They probably deserve to know.”

Jon isn’t sure he does want to know more about that. Or if there’s really that much more to be known. Still, he understands not wanting to talk about that more right now.

He reaches over and wipes the tear off of Jon Prime’s cheek. “He’s all right, though. I-I mean, you saved him. He’s alive. He’s…alive.”

“He’s alive, yes.” Jon Prime slowly releases Jon’s shoulders and takes a step back, giving them both a bit of space. “I—I was able to stabilize him. The Keeper appeared and offered us a relatively safe place to rest, and we were able to stay until Martin was well again, but…he’ll always have those scars, I think. They’re a bit worse than they would have been had he been given real medical attention, but I-I did the best I could. And…at least he’s alive. At least I still have him.”

Jon exhales and leans back against the wall. In light of everything he’s just learned…he can’t imagine how difficult the last week has been for Jon Prime. Being separated from the last person you knew from your previous life is bad enough, but to be separated from the person you love…especially so soon after a near-death experience…and then to not have any way of contacting him, of knowing how he was…it must have been absolute hell.

After a moment, Jon Prime says with a small, humorless laugh, “You know, I came out here to make sure you were all right, and I think I successfully made things infinitely worse.”

Jon thinks about that for a moment, then says, somewhat surprised, “Actually, I think you may have helped.”

“Really,” Jon Prime says, sounding skeptical.

“I-I mean—it’s bad. It’s very bad, what happened, and I—yes, all right, I definitely panicked a bit there. But…” Jon tries to figure out how to phrase it, then gives up and decides to just talk and see what comes out. “I didn’t even know why I came out here. Why I needed space. But talking to you, I—I think I figured it out. Listening to what you said…it wasn’t what you—we—went through that upset me. It wasn’t even hearing it spoken about. It was hearing Martin—well, your Martin—talk about it. I was more upset that Martin Prime had to go through that than I was that you did. And…” He sighs. “I still don’t know exactly how I feel, but…at least things make a little more sense now.” He looks over at Jon Prime. “I’m all right. Or as all right as I can be.”

“That’s…going to define the rest of your life, I’m afraid. ‘As all right as you can be.’” Jon Prime sighs. “Go ahead and finish that cigarette and we’ll go back inside.”

Jon Prime stares at the half-smoked cigarette in his hand for a long moment. He started smoking in university, more as a way of avoiding conversation than anything, and found it helped his anxiety. All his rather messy break-up with Georgie had done was cause him to switch brands, and all his grandmother’s nagging and disapproval had done was cause him to stop smoking indoors. He’d tried to quit after her funeral, but even though he rarely smoked more than one or two out of the packs he bought before he had to throw them out because they went stale, he never managed to actually stop. Truthfully, there were no external factors more powerful than the soothing nature of the nicotine.

But now…

Slowly, he raises his foot to his knee and grinds out the end of the cigarette on his heel. He pulls out the pack, tucks the cigarette into it, turns around, and drops the whole pack into the bin at the corner. Judging by the state of the bin, it’s almost trash day, so he hopefully won’t be tempted to dig around and rescue the pack later.

He turns back to see Jon Prime watching him with a genuine smile on his face. He doesn’t say anything, merely reaches over and gives Jon a hug. Jon is momentarily surprised, then relaxes into the hug and returns it. It’s a bit—there’s no other word for it—weird to be hugging himself, but at the same time, he needs physical contact more than he lets on and he hasn’t really had all that much in the last few years. The stress doesn’t go away, but it does ease back, a hell of a lot better than the cigarette managed.

After a moment, they separate. Jon Prime claps him wordlessly on the shoulder, and they turn to head back inside. To face whatever is coming next.

[smallestclowninthecircus]

Tma season 2 notes baybeee

I made myself take several breaks so I could give my frie d who is listening to it at the same time as me a chance to catch up. Honestly just posting them so I have them saved somewhere but whatever.

ep 41: real graham wrote keep watching before he was replaced. Jon feels like he's being watched. But they werent replaced by things related to the eye. It's the web that's on the box that replaces them. Endless hallways and doors to nowhere. I bet nicholas will have ideas what entity this relates to. If it even does. They're like the tunnels in the one with the builder guy. Tunnels closing in etc. Also like the cave diving one. He's assuming it's just one

ep 42: so 100 gecs? (IM SORRY I LIKE 100 GECS BUT LMAO) so there's some entity related to music right? There's the piper episode and the 27 w/ the calliope. Ah yes, this season is gonna be the season of Paranoid!Jon

ep 43: section 31? fucking books. god no. smashed lights? cult lady did that. covered the lights too. she mentioned a spooky clown doll. thats not random.

ep 44: is this that same circus that got mentioned before? it is! the pipe organ! pop off organ! pipe off! mouth on the stomach! yes! mouths in unusual places my beloved!

ep 45: antiques! like that one ep!

ep 46: every time books get mentioned i sigh. hhh sus smells. it got brighter. I get the vibes occasionally that the dark and the eye are sorta at odds with eachother. GRRR BARK BARK LEITNER. ayyy ex altiora. entity go brr. which entity do we thing it is? my guess is The Dark. The book buyer's name is Mike. He has scars? Electricity? The childhood friend of the guy who got it later on perhaps? The Vast? its formatted like an entity idk. This happened before the other one. He got trapped in the wood carving. a win for the web lol spiders go brr

ep 47: did i hear spiral? ITS THE NOT THING FROM THE EPISODE WITH NOT GRAHAM "it didnt move, it shifted" is like the exact same sentence as before. ay john's starting to remember. the laughing woah thats weird. is "michael" one of the entities? "you make it seem like theres a war" supports my theory that theres a struggle between a couple of the entities. I said i thought it was the eye and the dark i believe but im not sure. its whatever entity michael is vs the worms? what did nicholas say the worms were again? The Corruption? still dont know which one michael is tho.

Had to take a break after that episode. smth about the quality of michael's voice makes me feel like im gonna slip into one of those states where it feels like nothing is real, so i got a nice cold glass of water.

ep 48: jesus ok this one's kidna corny. you're telling me love made the crowd go away come on now. Ur losing it big J. also shouldnt it be more sus that "sasha" is so unaffected by the worm incident/ finding of gertrude's body

ep 49: haven't we heard hector's name before? oh is he the crime guy? fucking jared... so it's a throat? chompa chompa. (it's just a little bit hot) the good part about these episodes is that we know whoever's telling the story isn't gonna die. even if it's a close call, they're not dead. hotworth? ok not jared keay. it bothers me how theres so many repeated names, can they not come up with other names? "sasha"'s computer is breaking... sus. Elias our favorite weed man! jon ur so paranoid lmao

ep 50: robert smirk, at it again. this is like that one episode with the old dude who locked his door. who said idle beforehand? was it smirk? fingertips. thats so weird lmao. bahahah tim

ep 51: simon fairchild. im sure jon will mention the name at the end i cant remember where we've heard it. this is just like the cavediving episode. a hand? there was a hand in the last one right? the scalpel! and an eye thing. she's trying to throw them off.

ep 52: thats the guy from before! with the hearts! god i hate this guy writing the statement hh. lights blowing, and brackish water. we know how this ends but its still tense. rainer? reigner? rain man. we've seen him before

ep 53: pls not a leitner. oh boy mans scratched out his eyes. rip skelly. why would gertrude have had this statement off the books? jon stabbed himself?? bruh im? big man are you okay

ep 54: cockney boys! ayy its our favorite delivery men. she cut out their eyes. she knew that the eye was a thing?

ep 55: oily residue like the retirement home!

ep 56: worms? no. spiders?? bruhh. aaah yelling :(( aww martin anyways yeah i called it about paranoid!jon he needs to take a nap and drink some hot chocolate and calm down for once please

ep 57: just remembered, i think theres an entity called The Lonely?? This feels pretty lonely idk. fairchild, lukas/ lucas, some spooky place in norway idk. "sasha" knew he was recordinig hmm suspicious cmon jon figure it out. Sasha and tom. hm sus. for records sake i feel liek i should note here that I did have it spoiled to me simply that that's not sasha, but thats really all. i assumed it was like the thing that happened to graham in S1

ep 58: i feel like i recognize the name eustice (?) wick. someone please tell me im not just watching jon's descent into madness over the course of this podcast. im hoping it isnt so but, (and pardon the dsmp reference) im getting real wilbur vibes from this one.

ep 59: oh dear ok account from the fielding house. swirling designs? Spiral time? oh boyy. oh wait! 6 inch hole in the middle! is it not a spiderweb type design on the table? thats what i had assumed but that description sounds more like a spiral thing. cobwebs is a Web thing. ayy nicholas was right! the box goes in the table! the place that she kissed him was burning. Raymond is an avatar of The Web and agnes is the burning one. Lightless Flame! Why did she save him? i guess she was against this guy eating ppl or wtvr but why was she at the halfway house then? I think she's like michael.

ep 60: the eye go brr

ep 61: breacon and hope once again. tom. sasha's boyfriend. vampires sleep in coffins. the guy just walking in seems similar to the mind control of the vampires

ep 62: bones! its that one leitner. is this mother keay? the mom of gerard? this is what happened to her right? her skin was found on hooks? oh yeah thats what i thought the pages are made of skin. yeesh. The End!! sounds like an entity. phrased like one, and i think i remember it. are the people trapped in the pages? or... kept?

ep 63: eaten by the darkness! cavediving episode! (just like eaten by the sky) did my brain make up one called The Vast? it feels like it should be one, and all these episodes have some similar description about their feelings when they do whatever chosen hobby they have. ok now this one kinda feels like the dark. lights going out and all that. ok so not really a The Vast thing, its more of a Dark thing. feckin smirk gah.

ep 64: dice! the death guy! the death game thing! the person tricked somebody else into becoming death and then they were immortal? but if the egyptians wanted to kill him or punish him or whatever couldnt they just kill him? it worked in the end when he had the person giving the statement stab him, that did the job and actually killed him

ep 65: finally jon is actually acknowledging something is wrong.

So we know Mary Keay was revived most likely with the book by gerard.

Gertrude was way more aware of the entities than Jon. mary keay referenced The End openly and she cut the eyes out of her magazines and all that which makes me think she was aware of The Eye

ep 66: please not buried alive pleeaase not buried alive. lukas of the tundra? didnt we hear the name lukas before? she wanted it to be difficult to find important files because that way bad people couldnt find them?

ep 67: agnes... the girl in the hilltop house? agnes poppin off!! he's really not gonna question how she knew where he lived?? oh no D: the tree. were they the ones working on the house? aww they kissi- OH DEAR. why did she kiss him? it seemed like she cared about him? also she could kiss that other dude on the cheek and he was fine, but maybe it was cuz she was younger? lightless flame go brrrrr.

ep 68: oh god books. yup its bitchboy leitner. mans said "this seems supernatural, its a werd book!" bruuh.

ep 69: heh nice. aw cmon jon listen to martin. gahhh spiders. is that the class we heard about in the other doctor one with the teeth apple? some kind of psych class? oh dear. fucking spiders. aaaah. web do be goin brr. it's like the girl in the homeless shelter! who made the guy leave and she took his bed.

ep 70: is this gonna be the book that mary keay had? Most likely a leitner no matter what. Oh boy latin. Why did it start in latin then become old English? I'm guessing people put them in the book? He cant burn it. Phrophecies go brr. He says eh it's a decade in the future it's fine. Its gonna have changed. Ayy called it. Just accept it, it's a magic book. His death is getting closer. Leitner didnt make them but just collected them? Gertrude burned the book! She burned them down there so no one would know.

ep 71: oh boy tunnels. Our favorite thing /s. is The Buried a thing? Idk this seems pretty buried. Oh dear he's trapped here isnt he. "Not enough space to move, never enough to breathe" is that from the computer episode? With the guy who uploaded his consciousness? Somebody living down there. Hmmmm. Guesses: tom, sasha's boyfriend. Gertrude herself? (Though I doubt it)

ep 72: sweeney todd moment. Meat. The slaughter? Idk we'll see what the supernatural part is. Meat is meat. Similar to the slaughterhouse episode. Is it fucking Jared I swear to God it better not be. Hooligan teenagers, you know how it is. Meat is me lmao. Is the kid gonna be in the freezer. Ok that's good. OWW. Oddly textured candles. Made from people? Human fat or smth? Tom from the meat processing plant!

ep 73: outer bay shipping. Bet it's a subset of breacon and hope delivery. The Dark go brrr. Uh oh mans is gonna die. Leo or whatever. Cult ppl go brr. The people's church of the divine host. Who is the divine host? Is it reigner or whatever his name is? I dont think Jon can quit tbh. Probably an anonymous tip but from who?? One of the entities?

ep 74: fucking teeth hhh. I dont know which entity is related to teeth. Spiral. Isnt the spiral an entity. It feels like it could be related to many things idk. Yeah this sounds like the spiral. Heart attack at 29? Jesus... michael! That's kinda what I was thinking. Sasha goin in the tunnels. Hmm sus. They move the floor. Wack. Bet its tom.

ep 75: Man with a lightning scar. Has one of the leitner books. The childhood friend of the one who first introduced us to leitner. Oh my god that sounds terrifying. Michael crew.

ep 76: scalpel? Hmm spooky. NotSasha... think jon think.

ep 77: another double! NotThem, The Stranger. Not related to the table?

ep 78: what was that at the beginning? Question mark?? Oh boy more NotThem. Decker... what is the deal with the table. Does it contain the creature? Fucking Michael. Bitchboi himself.

ep 79: yes pop off martin. Ugh fucking Michael just leave man. I hate that dude. New person. Hmm. No idea who it is.

ep 80: shitener himself! Ok sir tell us the entities. Ayy The Spiral. Ok we know what that one is. The Eye is the beholding! Oooh. The Stranger. Did elias just kill leitner? Popping off honestly.

[oidickhead]

Aight the time has come

TMA / DIVINE COMEDY META POST

inspired by @soaringsearingphoenix

I loved their idea and really think they're onto something with that, there are quite a few parallels in the whole Two Men, One Of Which Non-Mortal and with Absolute, Supernatural Knowledge, Going Through an Hellscape.

Source for this is gonna be the three years I spent studying the Divine Comedy as part of my Classics high school degree, and also the hyperfixation I had on it when I was 12 - buckle up!

The thing I really love about the Divine Comedy and the way Dante describes the soul in Inferno (hell) specifically is the lack of judgement which seems so counterintuitive like

Medieval Europe was a time where mankind - and especially writers - abode rules very strictly, subjectivity and personal feelings weren't something important. Writing was symbolic. I think it's something people overlook a lot when they do those "Dante just wrote a self insert fic!" posts about the Divine Comedy and similar like yes yes absolutely he did and he got to hang out with his literary bud Virgil, but to him that was very different than what self insert fics are to us today. He's writing himself as a symbol for all humanity (he's well intentioned, but a cishet white man nonetheless), and then he needed someone to show him around. A dead person that to him represented Moral and Knowledge so naturally he goes "oh yeah Virgil is that. Obviously." - TO HIM that's simply the most obvious thing because Virgil is the author of the Epic Poem that founded Roman culture, the Aeneid, so if he's gonna write the next Epic Poem to found Florence/Italy's value (Italy wasn't a thing yet but he still uses the word) he HAS to be guided by who did it before him.

Jonny Sims does know his fair share of classical myth as proved by his work with the Mechs, Ulysses dies at Dawn has some slightly niche references that did impress me (I don’t know a lot of the mechs’ creative process tho so it might just not be him writing those bits in the album?)

I don't know if any of this is useful for metas but I definitely do think the fact that Virgil does not get to be in Heaven at all, no matter how good he is, is interesting if we compare it to Jon because he is doing his Best to not eat people, and not give in to his nature, but eventually we all know it is not gonna go well. In the Divine Comedy - Purgatory specifically - Dante has to leave Virgil behind before going to Heaven, and it's one of the most tear jerking bits of the whole work. We read it in class and there were literally 30 teens sobbing.

But this is a massive tangent on the issue of judgement which is where I think the juicy TMA parallel can also be bc as I was saying everything in medieval times follows very specific rules. The rules the Church has decided, and the Church is seen to be the absolute power of God.

So no matter how Dante feels about morality, that Truth is there. An excellent example of this is the circle of Sodomy - aka homosexuality: there Dante finds his teacher, a person he loved and admired. He feels immensely sorry for him and he shows him all the affection and respect he has for him. This most likely reflects Dante's real, personal opinion on homosexuality. however if the Church and therefore God says u go to hell for being gay, it's out of Dante's hands. U go to hell. So he cannot change that, even in a text that he himself is writing, cause it’s not about his own pov at all - he's writing a poem to reflect the word of God and he's showing how even "sinners" are just human and some sinners did literally NOTHING wrong on a human level but still end up there.

I think when it comes to TMA this is pretty similar to how Jon feels about the Avatars. Some of them are awful evil people eaters like Not!Sasha, and some sort of stumbled into it and while they might not be great people it's really not their fault either (the kid I can't remember the name of, or Oliver Banks, and so on)

And they all ARE monsters in the same way Jon also is a monster and doesn't really shy away from that anymore, but also there isn't that much judgement in that state of monstrousness. Sometimes no matter what you do you end up in Hell.

(Also the “punishments” work in a very Dantesque way where what you were most afraid of in your past life is coming back to torment you forever.)

So anyways this was my piece, thank you for coming to my ted talk, honestly can’t wait to have my ass handed over to me on a plate by some Jon kinnie who hyperfixates on medieval history and has to Wellacthsually me, this is not me mocking you or asking you not to do it I am a Martin Kinnie, if I’m wrong please break me with your FACTS I think that’s very HOT

[quickufo]

I think theres a sprinkling of a misconception happening in the TMA fanbase that I wanna address personally

I think a lot of people are under the mindset that Jon is trying to push more responsibility and decision making onto Martin in a way that's toxic and/or trying to free himself of the burden of undoing the fearpocalypse. And while this seems to be Martin's perspective as well, I don't really think it's accurate.

Since when have we really known Jon to shirk personal responsibility onto others? Even when issues arise that are not Jon's fault, he typically takes it upon himself to fix those problems. (And while this is just something protagonists generally have to do to make the story move along, I think it's somewhat telling that Jon isn't being given these tasks so much as he is giving them to himself.) Jon took it upon himself to free Daisy from the Buried. Jon took it upon himself to find the truth of Gertrude's murder (although this one's kinda sticky because he was being a creep in S2.) Jon took it upon himself to free Martin from the Lonely. Even if Jon was not the cause of these problems, HE wanted to solve them. And yes, he did on occasion enlist and recieve help, Jon still gave himself the most work to do. (A la, removing two of his ribs and climbing into a nearly endless coffin???)

We also know that Jon has problems trusting and putting faith in others, as well as being honest and forward with his feelings. Credit where credit is due, Jon has had a lovely arc of trying to be trusting of others, especially in S3 and 4, however it's obvious to me that Jon still has a ways to go in terms of being completely open, even to his most trusted. In this case, Martin. Martin comments on Jon's inability to come clean with his feelings AND to tell Martin what is happening around them.

We also know that Jon is incredibly protective of Martin. Generally, his nature has become to care for him and keep him out of harm's way. Obviously, he loves him very much but it's to be noted that Martin is Jon's anchor to humanity. If Martin were to be lost to an entity or to chance, Jon would not really be able to continue, as he is am Avatar and an Avatars purpose is to fulfil the will of their God. This puts a lot of stress on both of them-- both on Jon to care for Martin and ensure his safety, and for Martin to not feel wholly responsible for Jon's continued survival (because that's an incredibly toxic dynamic, and frankly I'm very glad that Jonny and Alex haven't turned the whole "you are my reason" thing into a guilt trip or ball-and-chain against Martin, and more of an earnest portrayal of how important they are for one another.)

We know Jon feels responsible for the end of the world, even though we know he was compelled completely unknowingly by the Eye/Jonah. And we know Jon is trying to get better at not walling up and taking the full brunt of responsibility. So how can Jon, someone who feels the need to fix all issues he inadvertently causes AND someone who's building his sense of trust from the ground up really cope with this big of a responsibility?

By compromise.

I personally think that Jon isn't TRYING to put unjust responsibility on Martin's shoulders, I think he's trying to seek input from Martin so that he feels less lost. Just because Jon can Know things, doesn't mean he REALLY has all the answers. He doesn't know how to free people from their Entity entanglements, he doesn't know how to save the world, and he doesn't know how this will really culminate and end. Any reasonable person with this many blank spots would seek input from those around them. Jon wants to know what's best in Martin's opinion, and he wants to know what Martin wants so that they can move along safely.

I think it's a little unfortunate that Martin sees Jon's what-would-you-like-to-do questions as attempting to shift the responsibility. I could be wrong, but I think Jon just wants help and he wants to ask for help, and wants to know what Martin wants so that he can be safe.

TDLR; Jon just wants some help, it's kind of sad that he can't really get it.