#or basira idk

[dykedarling]

let jon go apeshit 2023

[purblzart]

Thing I’ve been working on for the past month or so!!

[chevs-and-spiders]

tma brainrot

[zoomclown]

My theory is that the reason Peter Lukas and Jonah Magnus have such a strained relationship is that Jonah has been stealing Peters Lonely-Aligned people to work for the institute. Like the wiki says that he deliberately picks people who he knows wouldn't be noticed if they went missing, so people who are already aligned with the lonely are prime candidates. I think it annoys the shit out of Peter that Jonah keeps taking people who are aligned with the lonely and making them work an office job together.

[honeydoe12]

The TMA experience

[spatiotemporal]

magmagmagmagmag

[wizard-legs]

I think Basira would keep a mini sunscreen in her pockets for Daisy bc she somehow manages to get burns even in gloomy rainy London. Also I think Daisy is going gray

[sapirserket]

There once was a time when we walked crooked lines but that's all over now

I'll walk with you into the blue

[id: digital fanart of Daisy and Basira sitting together. Daisy is a wolf-like monster and she's cuddling against Basira, who is leaning on her. Basira is looking to the side and crying. They're surrounded by trees and little blue daisies. Behind them shines a red moon. End id]

[toj1kuna]

basira........ save me basira.....

[dandyleyen]

On my TMA relisten and I have thoughts.

I’m in shambles after having finished MAG #104 because I know how this season ends for Tim specifically. This season does really build up to it with all his bitter and upset feelings. I’m glad we get to hear this statement from him but man, it hurts.

BUT ALSO an observation. This is not the first time that someone’s in the room with Martin and he hasn’t realized it. Which is,,,, oh lord. Knowing his entanglement later on with The Lonely, it’s very interesting. I didn’t finish s4 so don’t @ me, but I do vaguely remember that being a big part of his character. I don’t know if much of it has been set up in previous seasons but it is getting clearer that Martin is definitely falling in with The Lonely already. It’s interesting to me how all the people working in the archives have connections not only with The Eye, but also how they have their own connections with other fears and how it affects their lives. For Sasha it became the stranger, for Tim it also happens to be the stranger, for Jon it’s the web, and for Martin it’s the lonely. Unsure if I’ve picked up on one for Elias,,,,

Just some thoughts

[theoestofocs]

but the thing is, melanie hates jon because he is so very much like her.

they work in adjacent fields, they've got such similar temperaments - they both run straight for whatever supernatural horror they need to understand, they both suck at planning ahead (poisoned coffee, melanie?) and they both lash out as a primary defense mechanism - and jon wasn't qualified for his job, and martin's only "degree" was in paranormal psychology, so clearly the Institute was hiring from a broader pool than "qualified archivists." i can't imagine ghost studies are all that lucrative as a field. if melanie hadn't made it as a youtuber, what would she have done? we don't know a lot about her educational background but - she knows what it's like, to need to know. she walked into the Institute and got a job because Elias saw that he could use her.

If she'd had a legitimate encounter sooner, if she'd started her quest a few years early, if she'd come to the Institute to give her statement and stayed to use their library before Gertrude had died -

Or even if she just couldn't survive on a youtuber's salary, if she'd gone looking for job postings in relevant fields -

It could have been her. She looks at Jon, and she sees exactly who she could have been. It's only luck that it wasn't.

And that's the kicker, isn't it? It's luck, that she's in her shoes instead of Jon's.

And is she supposed to feel lucky? To feel thankful that she's had to suffer through attack after attack, Elias showing her how her father (her dad, who called her his little moth) died screaming, her body torn open by things that don't exist, her sense of self slipping as she ripped into flesh with no recognizable form, her trust violated as she woke up to two of the few remaining people who are supposed to be on her side cutting into her against her will - to feel lucky, because she had to gouge her eyes out just to have her body back in her control -

Is she supposed to be happy that she lived through all that? Is she supposed to be glad, just because she could have been Jon?

Nobody told Melanie she needed to feel sorry for Jon, or give him her sympathy, or any other kind of pity. She just wants to give it, because God, what he'd gone through -

(Thank God it wasn't her -)

- Fuck that, she isn't lucky.

She hates Jon, because she refuses to feel grateful for the horror show her life has been. (Because she's grateful, that it wasn't her; and she's furious, because - yes it was. she paid the price of the apocalypse in blood and scars and trauma, too. She wasn't Jon, and could have been - but fuck it, she was still Melanie. and the hell that she has lived through isn't nothing.)

It's just bad luck, that it was Jon of all people. It's just bad luck, that it was Melanie.

No one here is lucky.

[spiderh0rse]

got around to mag 146, Threshold. the whole intervention thing- eh. let me see if i can order this well.

Jon isn't entirely human anymore, may not be human at all, not entirely clear on that. Point is, he is currently relying on the Eye to keep him alive. Statements, written or taken directly, seem to keep up his health. He says outright that he felt weak when he began hunting. We've heard Jude Perry's say on the matter, "Feed your patron, or it will feed on you." This isn't hunger, it isn't addiction, it's mutualism of a horrible sort where one party cannot choose to back out. If Jon were still human, the Eye would outright be a parasite. Point is, the Eye will eat at him unless he feeds it. At that point, most people would give in.

Daisy underwent something similar, and we've seen what it took to even loosen the connection between her and the Hunt. She had to go into the heart of a completely different entity, and even now that she's out and actively trying to resist the Hunt, she's weak and very clearly in poor condition. And she was still human.

Basira and Melanie are correct that feeding off of people's fear and trauma is a terrible thing to do, but I'd bet anything Basira wouldn't mind if Daisy got right back up to her Hunting shtick and started killing avatars again. She has an intense bias about the situation. Daisy's situation was easier than Jon's, in some ways. Daisy is able to back down. Melanie has felt an entity, been influenced by one. She didn't get a choice in having it excised from her, and has lost trust in everyone involved in the situation. She was the least afflicted of any aligned human in the Archives, and still had a rough time getting back to who she was without the Slaughter.

The situation as a whole is terrible, but Jon is being accused of being a monster, a terrible person, because he is doing everything he has to to avoid being eaten alive. He was tricked into all of this, everyone in the Archives was tricked into being there, but Jon had the least agency in the situation, and still does.

[pescadodeoro]

Annabelle Cane: Oh, Martin. You have no idea who's listening, do you?

Me:

[gammija]

only tangentially related to this ep, but - i have an Avatar concept around the cold/freezing water/hypothermia and drowning, and Ive discussed before which Fear that would most closely align with. A lot of people said the Buried or the Lonely, maybe the Vast, mixed with Dark.

Water and cold can be hard to categorise, even aside from how the categories are arbitrary lines drawn between fears etc etc. Cause these motifs have shown up with the Vast, Buried and Lonely, and probably others on occasion too.

But I think the cold an sich, and cold water especially, are most closely related to the Dark. Just like how Manuela describes the darkness as not the opposite of light, but the absence of it, the universe's natural state; so too does she talk in today's ep about how cold is not the opposite of warmth, but the lack of it. Cold is stillness, quiet, numbing. Dark.

...and also;

109, Nightfall: "As soon as my foot hit the water, I fell into it completely. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced, and the torch slipped from my hand as my vision immediately went dark."

140, The Movement of the Heavens: "I gripped the head of my foul adversary, and forced it down, into the dark pool before us. There I held it, the water so cold upon my skin the marks have yet to fade."

143 Heart of Darkness: "... I began submerging the first of the sacrifices in the brackish water it had blessed with its stillness."

143 ,, : "There is another world, a world of still and quiet darkness, where no heat touches..."

Other Fears statements occasionally also feature water, sometimes even cold water (though it's always accompanied of a mention of how dark it is, too), but it's not as much of A Thing as with the Dark. And I think it's a cool motif which they should get more credit for!

@a-mag-a-day

[fiendishartist2]

does anyone have a canon description of melanie king from tma? i thought i had heard in an episode that she was described as a black woman with short hair, but i can't find any quotes that support that andi feel like im going insane

[chaotica-forgets-to-draw]

Tonight I offer you Daisy and Basira, tomorrow? Who knows