#i'm relistening to tma again

[xeerya]

jonny sims try not to write all of the desolation characters specifically for lesbians challenge : failed

[milkteamoon]

*ceaseless watcher voice* I just think they're neat

[unfortunatelyevent]

MAG 28: skintight

[rustyelias]

we are so back guys!!!! tma relisten! raaah!! oh how I've missed you spooky intro music

[darkacademiaarchivist]

catching up on tma and here's some season 4 thoughts

the Annabelle episode is so interesting because we get more Thoughts on free will and fate (?) The question wether it was their own decisions or the wep pulling strings that brought all of them where they are now... and does it even matter in the end? also i kinda wanna drae something for this episode now..

i'm glad Jon is trying to do better...

in MAG 149 we get one of the funniest cold opens, as had been stated by many people before:

ELIAS Good evening, Detective. [BASIRA IMMEDIATELY ASSAULTS HIM.] Ow! BASIRA Useless, scheming piece of shit!

i think we aren't talking enough about this bit tho:

[ANGRY NOISE] [FURTHER VIOLENCE]

i can't

[loverboybrightsideghost]

GOD I MISS MY MAGNUS ARCHIVES OBSESSION

[skvaders]

Nothing makes me consume media faster than being in a transition period in my life

[ghosty-schnibibit]

one of these days i'm going to submit the horror short story i've been working on to are you scared and then it's all over for you guys

[phantomrose96]

Been doing a selective relisten of TMA where I skim and listen to old episodes I remember quite liking. I'm enjoying this and it works considering the majority of statements are stand-alone but the funniest impact this has on the story is just speedrunning Jon's *gestures* everything.

Dude spends approximately 4 days being a stiff stuck-up pompous ass skeptic and on day 5 he's like "I'm DONE with that, actually. We're about to die by 5-trillion worms so I have to confess I am in fact scared of EVERY ghost ever and I've ONLY been acting like an asshole because I am so afraid of the thing watching me and also because I'm an asshole. I promise to no longer be an arrogant skeptic I will NOW be a paranoid conspiracy theorist who thinks every fart is a gunshot trying to kill me."

But the actual funniest impact is when I scroll and remember an old s1 episode I do wanna listen to and listening to that out of order is like "Statement ends. Btw I'm NORMAL again. I'm not a conspiracy theorist anymore never mind that. I'm the smartest person in the room again. Anyway this person's fucking stupid for thinking bugs exist. I hope Martin dies today."

[annabelle--cane]

im listening to mag again and damn do the archival crew HATE jon. listen i get it supposedly your lives would be normal if he hadn't brought you here... but he didn't? (minus og archive crew, jon requesting them and all) if anything he was just kinda there when you made decisions, bro wasn't EVEN THERE when melanie got hired like??? like how r u gonna wish him pain rn, he's ltrly sopping wet and on the verge of dying💀

like another anon I got a month or so ago, this is one of my sleeper agent trigger phrases, so this might be another marina monologue moment.

as I'm also in the middle of a (for my standards) incredibly slow relisten, I've been thinking about this topic, too, but I've been coming at it from a slightly different angle than I normally do. in tim's case, we don't get an actual look at the circumstances under which he transferred to the archives, it is theoretically possible that jon laid it on a bit thick in asking him to come with him to the department and tim wouldn't have even thought of it otherwise, but with melanie we have several scenes of her hiring and onboarding where jon is not present and she continually rebuffs people who tell her she's making a mistake, so the text very clearly sets up that her blaming jon for being trapped there doesn't make sense. and, even with tim having been requested by jon, he still had to make the ultimate decision to switch departments himself, so, yknow, what gives?

most people, I think, and myself in the past, have come at this question from a very jon-centric pov because he's the main character and it's a jon-centric show, but I think putting it down to "they lash out at him because he happens to be there and stops defending himself after a while" misses something, as does "they lash out at him because elias sets everyone up to think they have an adversarial relationship to jon." more than that, I think it's about the rejection of agency.

tma is a show that's very much About agency and choices, so it's important to keep track of where characters suddenly balk and try to offload their choices onto other agents. martin, despite being very proactive and efficient when he sets his mind to it, has a consistent habit of thinking of himself as fundamentally unimportant and unable to affect real change. jon, someone who is usually culpability_acceptor_4000, really tries to convince himself that the web made him pull statements out of strangers. and melanie and tim, on realizing that they've gotten themselves stuck in the archives, have similar reactions of trying to retroactively make those decisions jon's.

they hate being stuck there and they can't bear the idea that it might be their fault, and they don't know how to reconcile the choices they did make with the greater forces outside of their control that shape their lives. tim swings right from seeing jon as fully responsible to seeing everything as the result of cosmically inevitable bad luck, and this hits him so hard that it leads directly to his suicide. post-bullet melanie gets a better handle on it; accepting that she chose to fall further into the slaughter opens her up to accepting that she made other choices, like joining the archives, as well as accepting future choices, like quitting the archives.

and yes, in the moments where tim and melanie are most vulnerable and just starting to realize how deeply screwed they are, jon (at least from their pov) does something to make it worse. when jon tells tim that jane presntiss wasn't his fault, tim says "well you sure made me feel worse afterwards! and then everyone had to pay attention to how you were feeling to get you to stop stalking us!" when melanie goes in for a second assassination attempt on elias, elias makes jon talk her down instead of doing it himself, presumably to try and get the slaughter mark done with. neither of these are the inciting incidents for tim and melanie's situations, but they stand out. and because jon is culpability_acceptor_4000, a man who feels like the weight of the whole world is on his shoulders and is even right some of the time, the accusations stick. tim and melanie don't want anything to be their fault, jon thinks everything is his fault, and it's a bit of a vicious self-fulfilling cycle.

[questionmarklive]

I was relistening to TMA and going from the finale and Jon and Martin's goodbyes to "I'm sorry I should have listened. I just couldn't face the thought of the rest of my life never hearing him again." Had me dry heaving

Like Jesus Christ I was not prepared for that emotional damage

[goblinofthesun]

I've noted this before, but I'm (once again) relistening to TMA and I got to MAG 115 where Helen Distortion came to Jon to ask him for help. She's begging him to help her. She says she "took someone" and "didn't like it." She says it "didn't feel right."

Helen Distortion did not want to be a monster. The distress in her voice is so evident and clear and Jon is having none of it. He doesn't want to hear her being self aware or that she's anything other than a monster. In that moment, I really feel for her. Her plight is so empathetic, as someone who frequently used to worry that I was becoming a monster.

But Jon can't see that because it would mean acknowledging that he has a choice in what he's becoming. He likes the power Beholding is giving him. He likes how it feels. And to notice Helen Distortion's pain and fear and confusion would be to acknowledge his own and he just. Can't. Do that. In some ways, I'm even more sad for him.

And in the end, a lot of what Helen ends up doing, her trying to kill him in her Hallways, could have been avoided if he had just listened or empathized or validated or commiserated with her. They are the same. He just refuses to see it, which is rather ironic.

[shadow-the-crow]

This dracula daily stuff is making things confusing.

I'll be reading "I'm sure nothing bad will happen to my friend Jonathan this time" and think "Oh someone's relistening to tma! Sorry Jon will suffer again hehe"

And then i see the tags and go "oh."

[pillowspace]

I want to draw the door people as the subway masters from pokemon but since you don't have any idea on who these guys are I've decided to phrase it in dca terms

who would be more like Sun HW2 and who would be more like. erm. I guess Moon. SB ? Ingo is hard to describ.e in DCA terms. he's """calm"""" but in terms of his facial expression and I think body language meanwhile his voice is LOUD and he gets happier over more things than Emmet (HW2 Sun personality) does

sorry for throwing so many different fandom words at you I was just trying to explain how the train guys work via our one method of communication

I can't believe after all this time, I see the acronym HW2 and still say homeworld 2

This is actually really difficult because Michael and Helen are very similar in a lot of ways, plus it's harder for me to differentiate the two considering I am yet to meet Helen Distortion in my relisten of TMA. So it has been awhile since I last properly saw Helen

I keep wanting to go "Michael's colours are better for Sun, and Helen's fanon colours are better for Moon" then reminding myself that that's entirely irrelevent, this is about your subway guys. Uhhhhh. UHHHHHHHHH

Helen expresses more happiness than Michael... but Michael also laughs a lot-- I'm going to blow up

Michael and Helen are hard to describe in MICHAEL AND HELEN terms

I'm sorry, this is so hard to answer. I keep finding reasons why Helen would be better for Ingo, then finding reasons why Helen would be better for Emmet. I don't know your blorbos well enough for this. So here's some help if you still want to choose:

- Helen generally expresses happiness over things more frequently than Michael would. She's often having a lot of fun and taking enjoyment from things

- Michael is probably louder than Helen if my memory serves me right, he laughs a lot

- Michael is more aggressive than Helen. Her whole deal is being symbolic of a fake friend, so she doesn't get much out of... stabbing... her friends

- I'm very hesitant to say this because I haven't seen Helen in awhile, but I think she's more... judgemental than Michael? I need to relisten to my wife. Again, symbolic of a fake friend, she's... unfriendly-friendly

Excuse me if that's unhelpful :sob: if I stopped thinking about your subway blorbos and had to choose someone for HW2 Sun specifically, I think I'd choose Helen, and give Michael to SB Moon. I've compared Michael to SB Moon in the past

[v4mp1reb4t-sketchbook]

just finished relistening to s4 of tma and im much too scared to listen to s5 again. it will rip my heart out and tear it into tiny morsels and yet I'm going to listen to it. of course i will.

whyyyyyyyy

[nicecrumbart]

All seeing eye

Did a full tma relisten and now i'm insane again hi