#so ill probably be relistening soon

[jxnxai]

just remembered im a tma fan

[lycanlovingvampyre]

MAG 171 Relisten

Activity on my first listen: cutting the French tamarisk in my garden (how fitting!).

JON: "Don’t. Touch. Anything." MARTIN: "I wasn’t planning to." [HE GIVES A LITTLE HEH AT THE END.] Fair, after Martin constantly wanted to touch the plastic explosives xD

MARTIN: "You sound like you think they’re beautiful." JON: "Don’t you?" He is what he is, a part of the Fears and does seem in tune with it here. Accepting it (5th stage of grief - acceptance. I do like that theory of each season representing one of the 5 stages of grief, even if S2 doesn't quite fit anger). But to be honest, I also think the flowers sound pretty cool. Some people find morbid aesthetics beautiful. I always have.

JARED: "Not to worry friend; no harm done. Just a bit of pruning will set you right." [HE CLIPS SOMETHING. THE PERSON-PLANT YELLS.] [JARED SHUSHES THEM AS THEY CONTINUE TO DO SO. THEY START CRYING, OVER SOME FLESHY SOUNDS. WATER BURBLES.] JARED: "No real fuss. Should sort you right out. Soon you’ll be good as new." [THE PERSON-THING CONTINUES TO WHIMPER IN THE BACKGROUND.] JARED: "Better, even. You just need to – reach down inside and – really feel that fear. Let it guide how you grow." That however I find horrifying again. Obviously hurting the person, so much that they cry out in pain, and still think that what he is doing is the right thing, helping the person...

JARED: (dismissive) "Oh, and who’s this? Your boyfriend?" [THIS IS CLEARLY MEANT TO BE A DISS.] MARTIN: "Um –" JON: (overlapping) "Yes, actually." JARED: (Ah!) "Oh. Hm." Okay, the obvious here is of course Jared trying to diss Jon using homosexuality/homo-romanticism as an insult (is this btw. the only time homophobia comes up in TMA? There was implied transphobia in MAG 110, but otherwise?), which absolutely doesn't work on Jon and he even immediately answers with full confidence, taking the wind out of Jared's sails in an instant. Which can be a very good strategy against bullies, they want an emotional negative reaction, if you just refuse to give that to them, they will move on to their next victim (sadly for that poor soul). But it also tells a bit more about each character here. Jared has been described as "thick as mud" in MAG 17, that is pretty typical for individuals like that to resort to xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc. But Jon and Martin also tell us something here. Martin was absolutely not sure how to react. As far as I know he's gay, there was never any indication that he's bi or pan, so I'll go with that. He probably had plenty of experiences being bullied for being gay, especially if you take his age into account. Growing up in the 90s/early 2000s was probably not a good time (absolutely not saying it was easier before!). Homosexuality was listed in the ICD-9 in 1977. That is the International Classification of DISEASES!! It was only removed from the ICD-10 in 1990! (Not going into it's record in the DSM because that's only used in the US and we're in the UK here, but it was similarly bad, it was seen as a mental illness.) And additionally 1997 was the peak of HIV and AIDS epidemic and that really fueled homophobia back then. I remember calling someone/something gay was a really common insult back then among teens. So denying his homosexuality especially among unfamiliar and (duh!) hostile people is probably super hardwired into Martin, and he never was someone with a lot of self-confidence anyway (total opposite: Tim for example, of whom we know he's not private about "that stuff" - MAG 69).  And then we have Jon, biromantic. We don't know if he has ever dated men before, but generally being bi means you're probably a lot more likely to be in hetero-relationships, simply because it's a lot easier to find those. Also, I mean he has been raised by his grandma, there's every likelihood he has subtly been raised in a homophobic way and there's a good chance he has tried to rationalize crushes on other men as "a really close friend whom I'm looking up to", even if deep down he knows it's not that. Okay, what I'm saying is he probably hasn't experienced external homophobia towards him. I do like the popular fanon idea, that Georgie helped him work through that, as she seems a lot more confident than him. Otherwise he has probably experienced acephobia or he hid his asexuality well enough and grew up super insecure on the inside without showing it. Which, considering his behavior in S1, is pretty likely for his character. So it does make sense for Jon to show confidence here, given the possibility of him never to have experienced homophobia, usually presenting super sure of himself and also by now he knows how powerful he is in this world, that probably also works very well as a boost. (Also it's super cute how sure and smug Jon sounds, like he's extremely proud about Martin being his boyfriend.)

JARED: "Anyway. Willing. Unwilling. Don’t work like that anymore, does it? You made sure of that." MARTIN: "That’s – not fair." JARED: "And what?" MARTIN: "I – I – Mm, uh –" Ah yes, trying to speak up for Jon, which takes a lot of energy. Makes sense that he's deflating again when more resistance is coming his way.  Also, all the monsters and Avatars seems to know it was the Archivist's doing. Helen is obvious, she has suspected it and watching them this whole time. Oliver could kind of suspected it because the Web sent him to wake up Jon. But Jared here?

JARED: "[S’right.] Don’t really matter now, does it?" JON: "No. No, it doesn’t." Yeah, blaming someone doesn't change anything about the situation that resulted from it.

JARED: "Alright. Well, I’d like to hear about my garden." It's so funny how that somehow inspires, what? Sympathy? Compassion? Pity? in me. Like he loves that place, it means something to him and he wants to hear its beauty one last time. Aside from the plants being human beings suffering, it does sound peaceful here, birds, wind chimes...

"The soil should be prepared first, a rich and earthy cocktail of insecurity and self-hatred that allows the roots to twist and contort freely. The temperature should be kept the steady, humid warmth of air conditioners struggling to cope with the perspiration of a dozen bodies pushing themselves too hard, while the lights must be kept at a harsh, fluorescent glare." Pushing yourself at fitness studios to fit a certain beauty standard? Sounds like it to me.

"Counterintuitively, growth is most effective when the orchid is suffering from aggressive dehydration, and it is vitally important that the air roots be rarely praised, and only for the flowers’ appearance and growth." Yeaaah, sounds even more like body building. And this one is called Fortisium Reese, fortis meaning strong, fortisium also sounds a bit like fortissimus, the superlative of fortis. Dehydration is commonly used to get rid of that bit of subcutaneous water, so the muscles can be even better visible under the skin. And then the only thing that matters is appearance and ever more and more muscles.

"While the Gristlebloom Orchid may be the most eye-catching of the plants that you will find in the mortal garden, the Bone Rose is perhaps the most delicate. Thin and brittle, it is constantly on the verge of collapsing under its own weight, even as its ossified stems reach and twist and stretch in a desperate attempt for closeness." Beauty-standard super-skinny, Gracillium Patricia, gracilis - thin.

"At the final, glorious culmination that a body may someday achieve, the ever-retreating perfections that sit always on the tip of a knife. But also growing with the flower must be that other dread: Not of perfection to be hunted, but of decay to be fled." Plastic surgery? Decay to be fled - fear of aging? Secarium Leopold, secare - to cut.

"This is Maeve’s nightmare. There is no other word for it. To be trapped, unmoving, within the body that has betrayed her so often, feeling every sensation as it grows and warps and sprouts, never knowing what new mutation it will visit on her next." Ya, same. 

JARED: "Is it really that bad? Seeing what I’ve done here? Or – (heh) Is it maybe that deep down, you think it’s as beautiful as I do?" JON: (*snapping*) "Shut up!" Not willing to let those who he considers a monster know how he feels about it though.

MARTIN: "Are you okay?" JON: "I’m – (*not great*) Great. You?" Martin probably asked because it does seem to take Jon a bit of effort to call upon the Eye to shift its gaze, since he gasped there, when Jared was successfully deleted from existence. But Jon gets all snappy and defensive. Saying he's great when he isn't. He probably expected to feel great, or at least better, but it's doing nothing. Revenge doesn't give him the satisfaction he hopes it would.

MARTIN: (bit of a laugh) "I really thought this one would be messier." JON: "What do you mean?" MARTIN: "Well I mean – he’s a Flesh – thing, right? I thought he’d be all meat and blood and gore and all that." JON: (bit of a laugh) "Apparently not." MARTIN: "He didn’t even put up a fight." JON. "No." Right after Jude who was resisting really hard, trying to convince Jon to let her live, help his revenge arc even, Jared here just accepted what's coming for him. That probably contributed to rethinking the smiting.

MARTIN: "Jon – we are doing good, right? Making things better?" [THE SLIGHTEST OF PAUSES.] JON: "I don’t know if that was ever an option." The smiting is just a selfish act, Jon letting his anger getting the better of him, blinding him.

@a-mag-a-day

[rexaleph]

no grasp of time at all

just tracked down jw friedman's mental illness music project merostomata. i remember it being the first music i listened to after new year's, i thought it must have been 2022. but it came out in sept 2018, and i'm p sure i listened to it soon after he mentioned it on IDEOTV. like had it in a tab for a couple months and then listened to the whole thing on a train and really liked it. so 2019 probably.

anyway just relistened and i still like it (not gonna claim anything wrt my own taste), but what the hell, 2019, different world, very different self

[pleckthaniel]

On Mission To Zyxx

I think I heard the first ad for this show on some other Maximum Fun podcast (probably MBMBAM?) in mid-winter, 2021. I had just finished catching up with Dungeons and Daddies. Since I was then jobless, mostly friendless, living with my parents, trying desperately to suppress my gender confusion, and very severely depressed, I was burning through podcasts like crazy and desperately needed something else to listen to. (I was both using them as a remedy for my insomnia and something to do during the often 8+ hours per day I would literally just lay in bed or on the couch.) I had a very vague inkling of wanting to get back into sci-fi, which I’d always loved as a kid, and I was getting slightly burned out on Warriors fic, having recently posted two extraordinarily long one-shots and being very deep in the brambles with Brighter Fires.

Around March, I put on the first episode of Zyxx. I remember not liking it a ton, actually, but deciding to give it a second chance. When the next episode made me burst out laughing at 3 in the morning - genuinely smiling for the first time in what felt like ages - I knew I was going to keep listening.

It took me like.. a couple weeks to listen to the whole show, and then I immediately started relistening, and then again. It felt a little bit magical to be so happily obsessed with something when I felt so stuck, so alone, and so utterly directionless. As I recall, I was literally just finishing up my 3rd or 4th relisten when I noticed something new in the feed - the first episode of season 5. As soon as I finished it, I opened up my laptop - this was like, 5 in the morning - and started writing what would eventually become the first draft for both and if it’s not tonight and Tomorrow might be good for something.

At some point I also pretty much imprinted on Pleck like a baby duckling, for which Ray teased me endlessly, calling me a kinnie - they were more right than they knew, I think. This show does some really interesting things with gender, including multiple nonbinary lead characters, and even Pleck, ostensibly the cishet everyman, has his moments. I was also taking a gender-focused sociology class at the time and it set me off thinking a lot about masculinity and my own relationship to it. The thing is that Pleck is constantly de-masculinized on the show, but never or rarely in a way where he’s accused of girlishness or femininity. I was kinda jealous? It certainly set off more complicated feelings. Some part of that felt more attainable to me than traditional manhood and masculinity. Some part of it felt more difficult.

So yeah, if you wanted to be glib, I may have projected onto a fictional podcast character so hard that I accidentally transed my gender.

There’s a lot else I could talk about - how listening to the show did, in fact, rekindle my love of science fiction and caused me to read some of my favorite books, how the show’s approach to Pleck’s mental illness legitimately helped me deal with my own Brain Problems more than once, how I’ve met fantastic people and experienced some genuinely just straight-up extremely fun times thanks to this tiny little fandom. But beyond providing me with so much joy, beyond providing me with a lot of the help I needed to pull me back to shore in a tough time, this show has had an undeniably positive long-term impact on my identity and the course of my life, and for that I will never be able to put all my gratitude into words.

[creedthoughtddotgov]

I keep listening to ars paradoxica even though I never fucking know what’s going on!

[jetlaggingbehind]

Whooo I really am writing that bulleted list about mistholme s4e11 bc owie! under the cut:

Throughout this I'm going to continue to call guide guide even if that's not technically its name, mostly cause it proved too confusing for me to keep track of after a while, ill probably get used to it eventually tho

Starting off easy with the interdepartmental turmoil lol

Retrieval bro why u gotta be so rude

'does the guide get a vote' I MEAN YOU'D THINK SO AFTER ALL THIS TIME LMAO

The wish engine is just so wild man though I do think what you wish for and what you get will be very different, especially when you consider what it did when asked to not exist

Research's resentment is palpable D:

Side note I like her va's voice it is very nice :)

what I wouldn't give for a qna episode during a season break with all the vas

The museum is really struggling to keep itself together after everything nowadays, u gotta wonder what it's like for the patrons lol

Tbh this was such a plot heavy episode but it didn't feel full of exposition, which is great

Lmao ma'am did you forget abt the recording you requested??

Idk if we already knew that restoration is called diana, but either way neat!

Damn it retrieval you've jinxed it

Here we start the emotional damage :'(

Beast kinda forgot abt its curator story and I didn't notice until I relistened 😫

IT'S SO SUS HERE HELP

The guide puts so much trust in beast and it hurts me so much that it's misplaced get guide some more non abusive friends 2022

the voice actingggggg u can hear guides fear it's so aghhhhh

'Won't be happening anytime soon' AAAAAA???????

He broke out the villain speech O_o

OH DANG

OH DANG

IT'S NAME IS MISTHOLME

IT'S THE WHOLE MUSEUM

HELP

AGHFJDDJKGKVKDKDKJSEFCH

HOW DARE YOU APOLOGISE U ASS

'you just see a beast' IT SAID YOU WERE ITS FRIEND HOW COULD YOU

THE FACT THAT GUIDES DEHUMANISATION OF ITSELF WAS THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM BECAUSE IT DIDINT THINK IT HAD A NAME OR MEANINGFUL IDENTITY HURTS SO MUCH

IT MADE AN IDENTITY FOR ITSELF WITHOUT KNOWING AND HAD IT RIPPED AWAY BY BEAST PAINNNNN

IT'S TAKEN CONTROL OF GUIDE AAAAAAAGH

IT'S 'FRIEND' IS THE MAN WITH THE VOICE?????????

(though I have to say that switching TMWTV's gender was a genius move in making me be completely blindsided by this reveal bc I hadn't even considered him a possibility..... dang it's just so smart)

also im so angy that we started off w an antagonistic character, thought it had some good in it, then it turns out it actually was antagonistic... emotional turmoil :’(

Stares at the beast backstory episode that is now also a TMWTV backstory episode

*flashbacks to hello jon apologies for the deception*

(was it a reference? It would make me laugh through the pain it it actually was)

It's completely loyal to TMWTV..... it knows what it's doing is wrong and is still doing it???

me, sobbing: beast you absolute bitch we all trusted you we thought you were cool

OOH I DON'T LIKE HOW BEAST HAS CONTROL OF GUIDE AND TECHNICALLY BY EXTENSION THE ENTIRE MUSEUM

IT KILLED EAGLE OH LAWD

IT'S GONNA KILL THE REST OF THE TEAM TOO AAAAAAA

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?? THAT BEAST GAVE GUIDE PERMISSION TO SPEAK AND IT DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING??????

(probably it was in shock understandable tbh)

WE THOUGH THIS WHOLE BUNCH OF PPL WERE GONNA BE PART OF THE FUTURE ENSEMBLE CAST HOW DARE IT

End notes:

obviously this bodes terribly for the museum– beast literally having guide under its complete control is absolutely horrible, which gets worse when you consider how much information guide holds since it straight up knows restorations and eagles names for starters. adding in how its only just become considered anything close to a colleague/friend to the triple r departments, this whole situation is gonna give it even more trust issues

both plots were built on heavily, on one hand narrative wise this was a phenomenal episode, on the other hand me very sad D':

also this season is spelling 'IRRESOLUTIO', presumably irresolution. foreboding 😬

[cntrspll]

this is a love letter to my own fic

hi hello hey, this is an essay about my own fic and the feelings i have about it. fic can be found here.

i am going to try so hard to keep this organized but i don’t know how well that will work soooo let’s go!

on the fic overall:

i just... like magnus. i think he is a fan fave for a reason, but i think there’s a lot of missing discussion of his post-canon situation and the development thereafter. when i finished listening to balance for the first time (in february-ish this year, i think?), i remember being super frustrated with where parts of the fandom had landed their focus. this isn’t an uncommon fandom thing, and i totally get where it comes from. some characters are just super relatable and a lot of fun to write about and have like absolute piles of stuff to unpack, so it’s totally fair that some characters get more focus than others, but where i felt that some of my faves got a lot of fandom focus, others... didn’t.

so this fic was in part an attempt to rectify that, because i wasn’t finding the unpacking of magnus and his emotional / mental state that i wanted. that being said, there are a couple fics that i did draw a little bit of inspiration from, the biggest probably being patterns of migration by goodnicepeople. the depiction of magnus as this big strong dude who also has these quiet vulnerabilities that he doesn’t like admitting to people is like, in part just really accurate to canon, but also something that i really wanted to see explored more, and i didn’t find a whole lot of other fics that fit that, so in part i just wanted to set out to put a little more into that.

also, like, i work in food service, and we are in a pandemic, and i moved in the middle of this year and i started hrt this year and have been dealing with the fallout of coming out and just kind of everything, and this fic was a really good way of just like, distracting myself from everything and sitting down for a little every day and thinking about something else and not so much about everything that was happening around me. so there is a good part of this fic that is just like, me coping with everything and trying to reorient myself a little. and it worked pretty well for that!

on process:

ok first things first, this was never meant to be 133k long. when i first sat down to write this, it was going to be a handful of snapshots set across [undetermined amount of time here] of magnus dealing with isolation and insomnia, and it was only meant to be like, maybe a 20k oneshot? that obviously did not happen. i think my original estimate once i accepted that this was gonna be multichaptered was like 60-70k, but then the chapters started getting longer with each one i finished, and then i wanted to add in an interlude, and then i decided i needed an epilogue, and here we are.

i’ll talk about this in other sections too, but as i wrote, i just kept finding more and more things that i wanted to talk about. i was also in the process of relistening to balance i was writing, and i kept running into little things that happened over the course of the show that i was like... oh shit! and that would inspire another scene or an interaction i wanted to write or something i wanted to focus more on, and the whole thing just kept getting more and more and bigger and bigger.

i’ve said it like 50 thousand times now, but i have never written anything this long before. i tried really hard to be regimented about the way i did it, because from the beginning i knew this was going to be an emotional journey for me to write, but i knew that if i let it slide for a week or so then i would never finish it. so to get through it, i wrote almost every day for a minimum of an hour. the process that i’ve found works best for me when i’m writing is using word sprints, putting on some music, and then forcing myself to tune out of social media and everything else for 25 minutes. i try to do between 750-1k words in that time period, then the site gives you a five minute break, during which i usually check twitter or fact check if i need to, and then i go back in and do another sprint. this works really well for me because i wasn’t trying to hit a specific word goal in any given day, just like... trying to sit down and write. i also tried not to guilt myself too much if i missed a day, or if i only did one sprint instead of two, or anything like that, and that’s kind of what helped me get through the whole monster without instantly dropping it as soon as i had another idea.

on mental health and recovery:

so one of my big personal pet peeves in fiction is the idea that trauma recovery is like, a one time single event deal. like, someone has this big horrible thing happen to them or they have some pressing mental health issue and then someone else walks in and they have one conversation and bam, everything is fine. i was exposed to a lot of [fan]fiction when i was younger that kind of supported this kind of narrative, and i get that there is a certain sort of wish fulfillment thing to that, but it also sucks, being an adult and having Problems(TM) and knowing that it absolutely does not work like that.

so when i set out to write a fic about trauma and mental illness and recovery, i felt kind of a responsibility to not fall into that trap and write it like, okay and then magnus and taako talk about it and taako’s like hey dude you’re depressed but it’s okay and then magnus doesn’t have nightmares anymore. also, because this is taz and the canon of like, historical accuracy is complete bullshit, i can put therapists and psychiatry and psychiatric medications in my fic and no one can tell me i’m wrong and it doesn’t exist. elevators exist, so i can make ssris and anti anxiety pills exist.

but also, magnus as a character is not going to jump into that right away. it is canon fact that he doesn’t like accepting or asking for help with stuff like this, and yes there are a couple big moments where he does, but like i bring up a couple times in the fic, mental health struggles are a big jump from like, a physical fight using swords and axes and shit. and this i think is really accurate to a lot of people’s struggles with mental illness, just taking that first step and admitting that you don’t feel okay, and that you need someone’s help to deal with it. that’s super super scary even to admit to like, your closest friends.

so that’s why magnus kind of shies away a number of times from some of the conversations that people try to start with him about mental health. taako and carey and lucretia and pretty much everyone else approach him at some point about opening up about this stuff, but he pulls away because admitting that kind of vulnerability to someone else is super scary, even if you’ve maybe admitted it to yourself already.

i also wanted to make sure that at the end of the fic, he wasn’t magically better. this is something else that i think people kind of forget, like... trauma and the problems that it causes don’t go away just because of therapy and medication. those things help, they help you reform the ways you think about yourself and about the world, but they don’t change the struggles you’ve been through or the sometimes biological problems that are causing whatever issue you’re having. and i remember reading a lot of fic when i was a kid where someone would be depressed, and then they’d fall in love and get magic dick or something and then they’d never be sad again, which... isn’t great.

but at the same time, i didn’t want it to end on this note like, oh everything is still bad even though he worked so hard to open up and get help, because that sucks, too. so it was really important to me that the fic end on a hopeful note, like, magnus isn’t cured. he still has bad days and bad weeks and sometimes he is just as low as he was before, but he also has like, normal days, which is something that i think you kind of forget can even exist when you’re depressed, or when you’re dealing with any mental illness. but like, i really wanted it to be obvious that things did get better and even if he’s still coping with it and it’s not going away, he’s okay. he’s gonna be all right.

on an unreliable narrator:

this kind of plays into some of the mental health stuff, but one thing that i love about taz that i really wanted to play into with this fic is the idea of limited perspective. griffin does some really cool fucking things with this, specifically in relation to the ipre and the big reveal in the last lunar interlude, with the idea of like... a character can only know the things that they know. like, magnus knows that there is a picture of him depicted as a red robe, and barry knows that they’re all red robes, and taako knows that they found the umbra staff next to a red robed skeleton and that the umbrella spelled out lup at one point, but none of them necessarily know all the things that the other person knew, and none of them know all the things that lucretia knows or that fisher knows or junior knows, etc etc.

unfortunately, just because the pace of the story picks up so much in that last lunar interlude, there isn’t a whole lot of space to explore that like, disconnect between all these facts that they each have as individuals. and given the perspective of mental health and the way that plays into your perceptions of yourself and your perceptions of other people’s perceptions, i really wanted to delve into like… magnus’s misunderstandings.

this is not a strictly straightforward unreliable narrator situation, but i did bring in some elements of that. i really wanted to explore the disconnect between how magnus sees and how everyone else sees him and his issues. there are also a couple moments where he flat out completely misinterprets their intentions, which unfortunately i didn’t delve into as much as i wanted to so they ended up mostly being fun easter eggs for, uh… me? i guess?

one of those moments is the scene in ch 4 where barry and magnus are sitting in the kitchen and barry starts to ask magnus something. magnus assumes it’s going to be about his mental health, and that this is barry stepping up as representative for everyone else to talk to him about it, but it’s really meant to be a precursor to their conversation in ch 6 where they talk about barry and lup and marriage and proposals.

magnus gets a little perspective on this later, i think in ch 7(?) where he’s thinking about how maybe their lives don’t completely revolve around him and he’s missing some of their perspective. but like, they all have their own shit going on, and they all love him and they’re worried about him, but also, barry is thinking about lup. lup is thinking about taako. taako is thinking about lucretia. lucretia is thinking about davenport, and davenport is thinking about his own issues, and so on and so on and they’re not all just like… waiting to pounce on magnus the second he shows weakness.

a lot of that plays into the hypervigilance of ptsd, too. magnus is very aware of any perceived threat, and he sometimes treats the people around him as threats, when all they’re doing in reality is thinking like, man i wish he didn’t live out here by himself all the time.

on a more meta note, i also have a tendency to make every character i write just like, a super good judge of character. i don’t think magnus is that, and i really wanted to lean into that. magnus does not read intention super well, even when that intention is genuinely good.

on the ipre and their relationships:

so i… really don’t write gen fic a lot. even when i do, it is almost always tinged with a little bit of background shipping, and there is some of that in this, but whereas in most fandoms i end up being a multishipper, for some reason with taz i’ve ended up pretty much only caring about the canon ships (sorry…). that being said, the platonic relationships in taz (and especially in balance) are some of the most compelling and important fictional relationships that i’ve ever encountered. like, they are just really well fucking done.

this being the magnus love letter that it is, i really wanted to focus on magnus’s distinct relationships with every member of the ipre crew. i don’t know how obvious this is in the actual narrative, but with the exception of the interlude and the epilogue, the story is broken down into one chapter for each member of the starblaster crew (in order, magnus, taako, merle, davenport, barry, lucretia, lup). i did this specifically because it was really important to me that i dive into all of them and their particular issues. i didn’t quite get the deep dive with merle or davenport that i would’ve liked to, but hopefully in the future i’ll get more time to explore that.

anyway, in case it isn’t obvious, lup is probably my favorite fictional character literally ever in any media created by anyone in the history of time. i say this only because a lot of this fic was set up to build to the conversation between her and magnus in ch 8 out on the mountain where he finally opens up for the first time. there are some really incredible unexplored parallels and relationships in taz (unexplored mainly because like, where would it even fit in canon), and while some of them are super self indulgent (ie, lup and mags, barry and mags), i really really really wanted to dig into those a little more. things like the conversation where taako is talking about everyone brushing over his trauma to rush to forgive lucretia, or lucretia talking about trying to learn to love writing again and recognize happy moments, davenport almost admitting that he’s not completely sure about stepping back into the family in his former role… i could write an entire fic on any of these, really.

but ultimately, this being a magnus fic, i tried to filter those conversations through a perspective of two things: first, how does this affect magnus and his mental health journey, and second, what can magnus do to help this. those scenes where magnus is trying to help someone with something and they’re like, backhandedly helping him are some of my favorite interactions in the fic.

the other thing i really really really wanted to explore that i never see enough of in fic is magnus and carey’s relationship. carey is canonically magnus’s best friend, and yet in fic i feel like she gets pushed to the side a little in favor of the starblaster crew. which i get, they’ve got a hundred and ten years of shared trauma, but also, travis flat out states that carey is magnus’s best friend, so… i mean, there is also a little bit of self indulgence here, because i am also a man who is exclusively best friends with lesbians, but you know.

that being said, i really wanted to emphasize that relationship in particular, which is why carey doesn’t have her own dedicated chapter and instead kind of slides in and out of each one and slowly helps magnus along the way. her personality i also feel is like, the exact kind of thing that magnus needs to push him into accepting / asking for help and moving towards recovery.

on real life parallels:

ok, i swear to god i did not intend to make this a holiday fic posted during the holidays. i started writing this in june, and again, it was only meant to be like 20k and not necessarily entirely set during candlenights. that kind of happened, anyway? candlenights just seemed like the best vessel to get all these characters whose post-canon situations i wanted to explore into the same room, and i finished the first draft around mid october and i wanted to give myself plenty of time for editing, so it honestly just ended up coincidentally aligning with the holidays. go figure.

that being said, isolation ended up featuring pretty heavily in this fic. that i think is to be expected to a certain degree given the nature of mental health and recovery and blah blah blah, but i probably unintentionally ended up leaning into it a little more because like… this year. and the holidays tend to be a time that a lot of us feel really isolated, and this year especially, but one of the big things for me this year is that like, all of my friends live out of state. the closest one to me is still a good 2-3 hour plane ride, which i am absolutely not risking. i had like a hundred plans to go see people and do things this year, and those obviously got cancelled.

probably the biggest one of those things was seeing a friend who i have kind of started a new years tradition of seeing, but we ended up calling that off out of safety considerations, of course. and it sucks! it’s not fun! i also moved out this year and i have my own place and in june i was really hoping that things would be okay by now and i could have all my friends come in from out of town for new years and that didn’t happen. and i wasn’t intending for this fic to be a kind of wish fulfillment of like, here’s my new place post-[saving the universe / coming out and becoming a real person], let me show my found family around my hometown and let’s make new holiday traditions together now that we’re no longer [fighting the apocalypse / literal children] and everything will be fun and happy and good, but that is kind of what happened anyway. [insert joke here that goes like “do you project your real world problems and mental health issues onto fictional characters or are you normal?”]

but yeah, magnus’s mental health struggles did kind of accidentally become a little bit of a pandemic / quarantine life parallel. i did not mean for that to happen, but it did help me tease out a little bit of what it is that i feel like i’m missing and what i want in the future when things are better, and i hope it helped some other people figure that stuff out too, maybe?

and in conclusion:

i said this a little bit in the final notes in the fic, but i am so so so grateful and emotional over the comments i’ve gotten from some of you. i’ve said it already, but this was such an emotional rollercoaster for me to write. i put a decent amount of my own mental health issues into the stuff i wrote into magnus, and it was genuinely therapeutic and like… super helpful and important. it was also a big struggle, and there were some scenes i came out of feeling incredibly drained and like i needed to not write for a week.

so that being said, those of you who have commented things about how this fic helped you deal with your own emotional turmoil or helped put something in perspective for you, i am genuinely so happy to hear that i’ve impacted you in that way like, at all. that is so incredible to me, and not necessarily what i set out to do, but it means so much to hear someone say that and also to know that someone felt comfortable sharing that with a stranger on the internet. thank you so so so much.

again, this fic means so much to me. the fact that it’s impacted even a handful of people in that way is absolutely amazing. some of the things you guys have said have had me seriously choked up. i am so glad that anyone even took the time to read all 133k of this, let alone that it affected people like that.

i don’t know if i’ll be writing more about magnus in this universe. i would love to! but i’m also super happy with where i’ve left his story. i have plans to explore the calen thing in the future, but only kind of tangentially in a side mention and not fully, so who knows? there is more though, a lot with taako and kravitz and lup and barry and hopefully one day i will find the motivation somewhere in me to flesh out everyone else’s situations a little more, too. who knows!

anyway, i just want to say thanks again to everyone for reading, and even more so if you are reading this dumb essay. you’re super cool.

[nbmudkip]

📌🎥

📌: how did you find your hyperfixation?

the first ever time i got into taz:balance, it was because my sister had been listening to it. she had to keep recommending it to me for MONTHS because it seemed like such a daunting task to me. when i finally started, though, i didn’t stop listening for days on end. free periods at school, in the car while driving anywhere, slow periods at musical practice, sneaking earbuds into church, sneaking earbuds into detention, so on and so forth. it took a while to figure out the best way to listen to process the information correctly, but once i got that down i was hooked. as for this specific bout of focus though, when the news came out about a potential animated series for taz: balance, i lost my mind. i was screaming and crying and running around and i think everyone in my house and on my telegram contacts list wanted to kill me that night for being annoying as all shit. i found myself in a rut of nostalgia soon after that, so i started relistening to the podcast, and, well, here i am

🎥: any favorite scenes?

BOY DO I. i probably cant even name them all off the top of my head. lup’s return hits hard, as well as the taakitz reunion. the barry bluejeans reveal actually winded me the first time i heard it. i sobbed over barry and lup’s duet, and then again during all three of the forgetting scenes. especially taako’s—that calm, casual “who?” struck me to my goddamn core and i thank justin every day for that brilliant moment of improv, and griffin’s description of barry’s last moments as he falls off the deck and taako’s last few moments of consciousness as he forgets everything—GOD. i cant, ill start crying right here and now. another few that i love, either for the drama or the laughs, are merle losing his arm, taako’s “hey fool what’s your name im about to tentacle your dick”, the taakitz dates (“because im afraid no one else will have me.” HOUGH) and magnus’s training with carey as well as their reunion

[alter-koker]

that was so fun, ill probably relisten to it soon!

[diverseladybookproject]

I’ve been wanting to review this trilogy for a very long time, and I finally have a break in ARC reviews (read: I’m reading too slowly) to fit it into. I listened to the entire Delirium trilogy on audiobook, and I loved almost every minute of it. I say almost because there were times when I was so anxious that I didn’t love what was happening, but I digress. I don’t know why* I waited so long to read these books, but I’m glad I finally did.

*I do know why. I was completely overloaded by dystopian trilogies for a while there, as was most of the world, I think.

The Delirium trilogy is about Lena Haloway, mostly. Lena is just a summer away from her procedure, which will protect her from the dangerous disease known as the Deliria. What is the Deliria, you ask? It’s love. In this alternate version of the United States, love is outlawed, and as soon as kids turn 18, they’re signed up for the Procedure to prevent them from getting infected. Lena lives with her aunt and uncle and two cousins, because her dad died years ago and her mother committed suicide after being subjected to the Procedure multiple times. For some reason, Lena’s mother couldn’t be cured, and she decided she’d rather die than go through the Procedure again. So, needless to say, Lena’s been exposed to some shit. 

Delirium, the first book in the trilogy, starts with Lena’s evaluation, along with her best friend Hana’s evaluation – the evaluation is something that happens in preparation for the Procedure. Lena’s evaluation is going terribly wrong, and then… a bunch of cows break into the building where the evaluation is taking place. That’s bizarre enough, but then Lena looks up into the observation deck and sees a boy around her age… laughing. People don’t really laugh after they have the Procedure. They don’t show or feel much emotion at all, in fact.

While running a couple days later, Hana and Lena actually run into that boy – it turns out his name is Alex, he’s going to the local college, and he’s been cured for a year or so. Lena starts hanging out with him before curfew, and… she starts having feelings. The Deliria. And Alex… let’s just say that he has some secrets of his own.

I know that the first book in this trilogy came out a while ago (2010? 2011?), so the spoilers are probably already out there. If I’m going to keep things relatively spoiler-free, I can’t really go into the second and third books of the trilogy at all. I can say this – Pandemonium, the second book, takes place about nine months after Delirium ends, but it jumps back and forth in time to cover that time jump. And then Requiem takes place immediately after Pandemonium ends, but this time we’re jumping back and forth between Lena and Hana’s points of view. It’s a fascinating story told in a unique, fascinating way, and I’m so glad I consumed it on audio. Sarah Drew narrates, and she’s fantastic.

I think that’s all I’m going to say about the plot. Yes, I have decided.

3 Things I Loved

Alex. I fell in love with Alex in Delirium. Completely, totally, I was 100% invested in the relationship between Lena and Alex. Of love interests in the surge of dystopian YA literature that came out of the early 2010’s, he was my favorite (that I’ve read). *SPOILER ALERT* I grieved when Lena went over the fence without him, when he was left to die. I grieved with her throughout the whole beginning of Pandemonium. And I didn’t like the Julian plotline, because I just had this feeling. Alex was so essential to the plot. Is he really gone? OF COURSE HE’S NOT. I was so happy to see my sweet baby angel again that I forgave his broody-YA-hero mentality for a while. But anyway, spoilery spoilers, sorry about that. Yeah, Alex is my fave, and I’ll go to my grave with Lena and Alex as my OTP for this era of stories.

Raven and Tack. Okay, Raven and Tack aren’t part of the story until Pandemonium, but they’re one of my favorite side couples and I love them. They didn’t deserve the ending they got. Tack’s surliness and Raven’s mother hen mentality and I JUST CAN’T I love them so much. I’m still not okay.

The Wilds. My favorite part about the framing of this world was the Wilds. Cities aren’t connected like they used to be – each city is sort of like a city-state, separated from the rest of the country with the Wilds in between. I was here for it. I would want to live in the Wilds too, hands down. I would have hopped the fence with you in a heartbeat, Lena.

Anything Problematic?

Since I listened to these on audio, I was consuming the story in small chunks that spanned over a couple of months. Aside from the fact that the story was mostly about straight, white people, and ace or enby/genderqueer people would have had no place in this world at all (based on the general premise and structure), nothing overtly problematic comes to mind. I mean, the whole premise is that love is against the law, that it’s a disease, so the world itself is pretty effed up, you know? There were some cringey moments when they’d talk about matching partners based on intelligence, and how mental illness was a crime (basically), and things like that, but like I said. The world itself is effed up. That doesn’t give it a pass, but it gives me some pause.

Rating

A reminder of the rating scale:

Red = DNF, I hated everything

Orange = Ugh, no thank you

Yellow = I mean, I’ve read worse, but there were problems

Green = This was good, but not something I’d reread

Blue = Oh my gosh, everyone should be reading this book

Purple = This is the unicorn of books and I will be rereading it until the binding falls apart

I’m going to give ratings for each individual book here, because I don’t think they’re all equally good. I gave Delirium four stars on Goodreads, and I’ve already read it twice, so I feel like that puts it in GREENISH-BLUE territory. I don’t necessarily think everyone needs to read Delirium, but I like it a lot and may relisten to the series again in the future. Pandemonium was even better, but I’m sticking with GREENISH-BLUE for the same reasons. And then there’s Requiem. Requiem wrecked me. I gave it five stars on Goodreads, and I’m sticking with solid BLUE on this one. If you like this genre, if you like Lauren Oliver, if you like stories about revolution led by ordinary people against extraordinary odds – this is your jam. Read them. Enjoy them. Listen to them on audio, because Sarah Drew is fantastic! And then talk to me about them, because I loved them a lot.

Have you read these? They’re sort of a blast from the past now, but I liked them a lot in the current climate – dystopian is more relevant again, and that makes it extra freaky. Anyway, if you want to chat about these books, come find me! ❤

Happy reading,

-A.

Audiobook Review – Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver I've been wanting to review this trilogy for a very long time, and I finally have a break in ARC reviews (read: I'm reading too slowly) to fit it into.