#what a WONDERFUL introduction to a wonderful new melanie!

[pellucid-constellations]

Azriel with single mom reader? I feel like being a single mom in ACOTAR would be tricky as hell... reader comes from autumn court and flees to night court because she got pregnant out of marriage? 😯 the shame

Pairing: Azriel x Reader

Word count: ~950

Warnings: Nothing yet, maybe just a little angst

a/n: Okay I know this is a drabble but this is definitely getting more parts like I am attached to this storyline now and LOVE that you requested it 🤗

Read part two here

____________________________________________

You leaned against a pillar just outside the school, a twitch creeping up your hands until your fingers spasmed. You shoved them under the bend of your elbows, crossing your arms and biting into your lip. 

She was fine. 

She was more than fine—Velaris was safe. 

Anything would have been safer than facing your father’s wrath back in Autumn, but you had gotten extremely lucky with the timing of your escape. Falling pregnant with your daughter had not been in the cards, especially not after a single night of rebellion, but with Velaris’s doors opening up just days after your healer broke the news, something seemed to be written in the stars. 

But every day was still a gamble; your father could find you at any time. 

The past five years had been a miracle, if you were being honest. 

School was supposed to end two minutes ago. 

Your foot began to shake, popping your knee up and down and making your body vibrate with the anxiety that consumed you. 

You shouldn’t have let her go to school. 

Melanie only had a few friends—neighbor kids whose parents you had vetted extensively—but that had been enough for her to get the idea into her head. You had planned on homeschooling her, or at least waiting until she was a few years older before letting her out into the world. Unfortunately, that had not been Melanie’s plan, and Melanie had so many wonderful plans. As most five-year-olds did. 

Gods, what if—

“First day?” a rumbling voice made you pause your nervous fidgeting. The man spoke again. “If you’re worried, don’t be. The teacher is great. Just forgetful when it comes to time. They are typically a few minutes late every day.” 

You swallowed and turned around despite every voice in your head telling you not to. But those voices in your head were completely and utterly wrong about a multitude of things. Behind you, you found a man—an Illyrian—with wings an ungodly size and shadows swirling down his legs and onto a uniform pool along the ground. And he was gorgeous—unabashedly gorgeous in the most devastating way. 

You looked up from your blatant investigation of him, meeting his eye and stuttering out, “Oh. That’s… that’s good to know. Thank you.” 

If he noticed your stutter, he didn’t make any sign of it. Instead, the man with the wings and the shadows blinked several times, furrowed his brows, and took a step back as if to steady himself. Perhaps, if you weren’t a bundle of unreasonable nervous energy, you would have found his actions strange, but you were. So you simply offered him a superficial, airy laugh and uncrossed your arms. 

“I—” the man began, but he seemed to lose his train of thought, a heat traveling up his cheeks in a way that looked foreign. “I’m Azriel.” 

Oh, wonderful. Introductions. 

You tried your hardest to stay very far away from very many people. It was the best way to keep yourself hidden. You couldn’t avoid the neighbors, and you supposed you couldn’t avoid fae like Melanie’s teacher, but this was different. 

Shit. 

You offered your name, anyway, afraid of appearing too outlandish in an otherwise casual setting. 

It would be fine. 

This was fine. 

Azriel repeated it in a breathless way, but then the school bell rang and something seemed to click in his brain. The small smile that had curled up the corner of his mouth became hard and he shot his eyes quickly one way and then the other, inspecting your surroundings. 

Maybe this wasn’t fine. 

“Are you a new mom in the area?” Azriel asked. 

All of your nerves shifted to guarded unease. “I am,” you offered, not caring if it was almost a lie. 

“The moms here don’t usually do the pick ups alone.” 

“You’re doing a pick up alone, it seems.” 

“I’m picking up my nephew,” Azriel explained, relaxing his posture, making himself smaller, seemingly gauging the building tension. “I didn’t mean to come across—I just asked because the mothers here typically have help. From their mates or partners. From the father.” 

You bit the inside of your cheek, your next words tumbling out before you could catch them. “Well, I’m alone.” 

Double shit. 

Azriel seemed to let out a breath, his shadows whipping around along the ground. 

You braced yourself for further questioning, for the judgments that would surely follow, but then you were attacked from behind by a pair of arms wrapping around your knees. You turned quickly, scooping your daughter into a hug and promptly dismissing any further conversation with the stranger. 

“Hi, Mel,” you smiled, tucking her hair back as you subtly looked her over. “How was school? Did you like it?” 

“I loved it!” she excitedly replied. She rambled on a bit more after that, retelling her day by the minute. 

You felt eyes on you the entire time. A small boy had run and jumped into Azriel’s arms in your peripheral, but even as the boy talked and talked just as Melanie did, you felt the occasional glance your way. And some of Azriel’s shadows had to be reigned in multiple times, the small wisps licking at your ankles. 

The teacher suddenly spoke up and you were eavesdropping, straining your ears to listen in on her greeting towards the Illyrian.

“Oh, Azriel, lovely to see you. We were hoping the High Lady would be picking Nyx up, but this is even better. There is a showcase in a few weeks that—” 

You felt your world freeze. 

High Lady. 

You had been speaking to someone in close relation to the Night Court. You let someone know your name, told them you were alone with a child, and they had direct access to the High Lord and Lady. 

You whisked Melanie into your arms despite her protests and beelined it home. 

Shit. 

part two

[ao3feed-jonmartin]

Paper cranes

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/dIW263U by NohaIjiachi “...Sure,” Martin replied glumly. He wondered if this is how all those french people felt, back in the days of guillotines. “Huh— How do you think I should introduce myself to this Archivist, anyway? They are going to be my boss, technically speaking, so I suppose I can at least try to make a good first impression…?” The look Tim and Sasha shared was… Certainly something. “I don’t think introductions will really be required,” she said, delicately. “Right. Ok. Sure. Do you know what their name is? I ought to at least know that, right?” Martin pressed on, voice tinted by desperation. “Mr. Bouchard wouldn’t say—” Again with the look. Martin was going to scream. “Don’t you worry about that, bud,” Tim said with a very forced, nervous little grin. “The Archivist is just The Archivist. Just get in there and… Godspeed?” ---- Moved by desperation, Martin accepts a job he's perfectly aware is bad news, but maybe... It won't be as such for long. Words: 5085, Chapters: 1/12, Language: English Fandoms: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: M/M Characters: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood, Sasha James, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Georgie Barker, Melanie King, Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, AU, Monster Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Mystery, Canon Typical Horror, Canon is my sandbox, and I can do what I want with it read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/dIW263U

[autistpride]

These books are written "geared towards" adults and older teens. I personally would let my teen read all of these, so I'm not gatekeeping literature, but use your own judgement on what you think is acceptable for your own kid to read.

Nonfictional Books for adults:

All the weight of our dreams by Lydia XZ Brown

Stim: an autistic anthology edited by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Connecting with Autism by Casey Corner

Sincerely your Autistic child by AWNN

Uniquely human by Barry m prizant

Engaging autism by Stanley Greenspan

Raising human beings by Ross Greene

Beyond behaviours by Mona delahooke

The whole brain child by Dan Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

Autism and gender by Jordynn Jack

It's your weirdness that makes you wonderful Kate Allan

Women and girls with autism spectrum disorder Sarah Hendrick

Worlds of Autism by Joyce davidson

Authoring autism by melanie yergeau

Nerdy Shy and Socially Inappropriate Cynthia Kim

Autistic disturbances by julie rodas

War on Autism by Annie McGuire

Rethinking autism diagnosis by kathenne Cole, Rebecca mallet, and sammy

Leaders all around me by Edlyn Vallejo Peña, PhD

Ido in autismland by Ido Kedar

Typed words loud voices by Amy Sequenzia & Elizabeth J. Grace

It's an autism thing by Emma Dalmayne

What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew by Autism Women’s Network

Women on the Spectrum: A Handbook for Life by Emma Goodall and Yenn Purkis

Unmasking autism by Devon Price

Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

Love, Partnership or Singleton on the Autism Spectrum & Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, both edited by Luke Beardon and Dean Worton

Autism, Anxiety and Me: A Diary in Even Numbers by Emma Louise Bridge & Penelope Bridge

Autism: A New Introduction to Psychological Theory and Current Debate by Sue Fletcher-Watson and Francesca Happé

A Practical Guide to Happiness in Adults on the Autism Spectrum: A Positive Psychology Approach by Victoria Honeybourne

Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism by Eva A. Mendes and Meredith R. Maroney

The Guide to Good Mental Health on the Autism Spectrum by Jeanette Purkis, Dr. Emma Goodall and Dr. Jane Nugent

Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After by Chloe Hayden

Memoirs:

Odd Girl Out by Laura James

Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale

Drama Queen by Sara Gibbs

The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May

Fall down Seven Times Get Up Eight by Naoki Higashida

The Reason I Jump by Naomi Hashida

The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May

Wintering by Katherine May

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Explaining Humans by Dr. Camilla Pang

Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham

Adult Fiction:

Adult Virgins Anonymous by Amber Crewe

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

A Girl Like Her by Talia Hibbert

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

[handicappedbuenchico]

Five Characters, Five Tags

Andy Barclay (Child's Play series)

The original Child's Play from 1988 was my first horror movie that I watched as a wee child at 8 years old. It was my introduction to the 80's slasher genre, and bred my love for old school horror movies. This very blog wouldn't exist without me seeing this movie, in fact. Enough gushing about the original movie though, you came to hear about why Andy Barclay is here. I immediately loved Andy Barclay because Andy was like ME at that age. He played with dolls, he was the pinnacle of childhood innocence and wonder, he lived in a big city and had a mother who was struggling to make ends meet WHILE STILL TRYING HER BEST TO MAKE HIM HAPPY FOR HIS BIRTHDAY!! Hell I even looked like Andy at that age, except I'm a girl and I was chubbier. Nowadays I just feel so fucking bad for Andy. It genuinely pained me to witness just how paranoid and (admittedly) obsessed he had become, how much of his normalcy and innocence he lost, despite knowing it was all Chucky's doing. Now I just wanna wrap Andy up in a blanket and make him feel safe from that possessed hunk of plastic. I think it's safe to say that Andy Barclay will always have a place in my heart, no matter what. Andy can be my friend to the end, Hidey Ho!

2. Carlos Rodriguez (Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare)

Now, what can I say about Carlos that I haven't said already? I don't really think there truly is anything new I can add, so I guess I'm gonna be redundant! Carlos has been a big comfort character for me ever since I was in late elementary school. Yes I'm aware I said I first watched Freddy's Dead in middle school, but my sense of time is clearly non-existent because I first watched it in the 6th grade, however I did rewatch Freddy's dead for the second time in middle school. That's probably what my brain has been remembering all this time. I also used to look up every little bit of info on Carlos I could on my grandma's old dinosaur computer, like I'm talking the ones that were big and clunky and had their own separate computer towers, and on DIAL-UP INTERNET. I guess you could say I was THAT hyper-fixated on Freddy's Dead content. Another fun fact, I used to think that Carlos was so fashionable lmao. Like, I wanted to have Carlos's wardrobe because I thought that having a hoodie under a jean jacket on top of a black muscle shirt was peak fashion. He's also the reason I wanted to own only Converse for the longest time.

3. Spencer Lewis (Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare)

(Small Disclaimer: I'm gonna be using he/him pronouns for Spencer here because he is canonically a cis male. Also, I will only be referencing my Spencer's got ADHD headcanon for him here because it is relevant). Oh Spencer. Spencer, Spencer, Spencer. Where do I even begin with you? Well, let me first establish that, like Carlos, Spencer has also been a character that my brain refuses to let go of since late elementary - early middle school. Spencer didn't really join my comfort character roster until I was well into high school, however. See, what made Spencer join that camp was the fact that I could see my younger siblings in him, who both have ADHD. My younger brother specifically also has a hyper-fixation on video games and is an actual string bean, so he has also been my main point of reference on how I portray Spencer's ADHD, with my sister's former knack of not taking shit from bullshit authority figures leaking into the portrayal too. Did I also mention that Spencer and I both have fathers that were borderline absent/meddle in our lives when they by all accounts had no right to due to how they basically abandoned us in all the ways that counted? Yeah that's a thing too. I think Spencer has transcended the label of comfort character, and has made a home in the trauma dump character category. Holy shit Spencer I am so sorry babes.

4. Crybaby (Melanie Martinez)

Crybaby as a character was someone I could relate to on an emotional level. I was saying for many years that my dysfunctional family almost fit Dollhouse to A FUCKING TEE! I also related the song Crybaby because I too was a very emotional little girl who got made fun and taken advantage of for it. I related to all of Crybaby's failed attempts at love in songs such as Carousel, Soap, and Training Wheels. Out of all my muses, Crybaby is the most like me because I already related to her long before I would even take her up as a muse. If Spencer was my trauma dump character, then Crybaby was my trauma incarnate. She also became my sense of empowerment, because she owned her emotions and empathy, and didn't let those who refused to understand her suppress her.

5. Major Theodore "Ted" Lockwood (Creepshow 2019 Shudder series)

Finally, we have Major Theodore Lockwood, or Ted as he's mostly referred to in The Right Snuff. Ted is, at least in terms of the other characters listed here, a very recent edition to my comfort character list. Also yes, I literally mean he's a comfort character. When I was recently super stressed out over RL things I had no control over, I just popped in Creepshow season two in my DVD player and put The Right Snuff on, just to see Ted's smiling face. I felt better almost instantly. Sometimes, when it's just me alone with my thoughts, Ted's voice just pops into my head to tell me that it's okay. That my stress and my responses to it are valid and make me human... Ted is easily my emotional support fictional character. Beyond all of that stuff, Ted Lockwood is also just my autistic experiences and traits incarnate. We're both nice to everyone, including people who probably don't deserve it. He and I both miss social cues a lot, and we can't read a room sometimes to save our damn lives (quite literally in Ted's case). We both have our own special interests, his is are centered in the sciences and mine is are centered around the arts. He and I both also have a heightened sense of empathy, like Ted could immediately tell that Alex was miffed about not being the one to meet the Gorangi, despite Alex's best attempts to hide his envy and disappointment. I tend to absorb others' emotions like a damn sponge, much to my annoyance. We both also have this strange inability to truly express anger, like neither of us really shout or get angry looks on our faces. We both just raise our voices a little and overenunciate words to get our point across. I know that it can be seen as tacky, and in certain cases disrespectful, to armchair diagnose a fictional character with a mental/physical disorder or illness, especially if said character is technically not human. However, I'm not just some neurotypical person doing it in order to dehumanize an entire group of people, I am an autistic woman who truly saw herself and her autistic traits in a fictional character that brings her legitimate comfort. It may not be officially canon, but it's canon to me and my interpretation of Ted. Plus, up until the ending, you don't really know that [SPOILER ALERT: Ted's a member of the Gorangi, the alien race he was supposed to make contact with.]

Tagged by: @trashcollected

Tagging: @depictedmorada

@kurtzbergsiblings

@scribedhorror

@popularmxnster

@depictedblue

[auxiliarydetective]

OC Masterlist - One Piece OCs!

What can I say? - Special interests are a thing.

As per usual, everyone is listed with their age at their introduction into the storyline. The birth years are according to my calculations and approximations of when the story of One Piece takes place. For OPLA, we have a set date for the Syrup Village Arc - Kaya's birthday, which is August 24th! I used that date to figure out if a character had had their birthday yet that year and went from there. If you want to know why I put the year 1522 as the "present" year, check out this post on my resources blog.

-> Aurelia

"I'll tell you all the things you should know. So, baby, take my hands, save your soul." - Ariana Grande, in: God is a Woman

Full name: Dracule (née Silvers) Aurelia

Birthday: September 25th, 1486 ASC (35 years old)

Identity: bisexual, polyamorous, trans woman

Faceclaim: Zión Moreno

Tag: x | Fic: -

Aurelia is feared and revered all across the seven seas. Marines call her the "Black Widow" because she's like a spider in an invisible net of connections and most of her lovers end up dead one way or another, but most pirates respectfully refer to her as "La Donna". Donna Aurelia gets her title from her "family" of underlings, protégés and associates, from up and coming pirate crews to the absolute big shots. And as if that weren't enough, her father is one of the most infamous pirates of the old era, her mother a former empress, and her husband a Warlord of the Sea and the current World's Greatest Swordsman - Dracule Mihawk. Even though her focus is mostly placed on the Grand Line, Baratie remains as one of her firmest territories, and so she she stumbles across some unruly straw-hatted pirate turned chore boy.

-> Cora

"Coraline vuole il mare ma ha paura dell'acqua." - Måneskin, in: Coraline

Full name: Akaito Coraline

Birthday: June 5th, 1504 ASC (18 years old)

Identity: bisexual, polyamorous, cis female

Faceclaim: Jenna Coleman

Tag: x | Fic: x

Cora comes from a long line of world-famous tailors who were all wiped out by a king in the North Blue shortly after her birth. After having suffered beneath the tyrant for sixteen years, she escapes with her craft, a needle, stories, and the powers of her family's heirloom, the Sew Sew Fruit, making it to the East Blue. Two years later, she meets none other than her childhood friend Sanji, taking the time to catch up with him. One thing leads to another and she finds herself travelling with a crew of pirates and falling in love with not only her childhood friend but also the crew's mossheaded swordsman.

-> Lily

"They call you cry baby, cry baby, but you don't even care - tears fall to the ground, you'll just let them drown." - Melanie Martinez, in: Cry Baby

Full name: Felicity

Birthday: March 30th, 1509 ASC (13 years old)

Identity: fennec fox? (she doesn't really think about it)

Faceclaim: Thomasin McKenzie

Tag: x | Fic: x

Lily is half human, half fennec fox mink, and travelled the seas with her parents for years until they disappeared. Luckily, she was found by Merry while he was travelling for the shipbuilding business, and brought back home to Syrup Village, where Lily since lived like Kaya's sister. But a month before Kaya's 18th birthday, she is kidnapped by the Buggy Pirates, and stuck in a cage until the clown makes the mistake of kidnapping the Straw Hat Pirates as well.

-> Inari

"Sometimes I wonder when I look at my reflection if the person looking back is really me. A couple years spent learning how to disappear, a couple more spent learning what I could be." - mxmtoon, in: growing pains

Full name: Charlotte Inari

Birthday: June 25th, 1508 ASC (14 years old)

Identity: pansexual, gender is all over the place

Faceclaim: Reina Triendl

Tag: x | Fic: -

Charlotte Inari ate a devil fruit when she was still very little, one that made her a servant to whoever last saved her life, one that since then dragged her all across the globe, finally ending her as a slave to the “God” Enel. But with some new pirate crew from the Blue Sea showing up in the God’s domain, it seems her fate is finally going to change for the better. Oh, and she’s also the daughter of one of the Four Emperors, but that’s not a big deal, is it?

-> Kaede

Full name: Shimotsuki Kaede

Birthday: September 4th (23 years old)

Identity: bisexual, genderqueer

Faceclaim: Komatsu Nana

Tag: x | Fic: -

Kaede is a regular Ebisu Town citizen by day, dying and mending kimonos, and stealing food and shooting arrows by night. In a one-in-a-million chance, Kaede was lucky enough to get a SMILE fruit that still had traces of its former power left, allowing her to turn into a flying squirrel at will. This little mistake will come back to bite Kaido and his men in the upcoming revolution.

-> Kan-chan

Full name: Kanyalani

Birthday: January 10th (39 years old)

Identity: pansexual

Faceclaim: Namtarn Pichukkana

Tag: x | Fic: -

Kanyalani, also known as Kan-chan, is a betta fish mermaid and former slave. Upon her release, she joined the Sun Pirates, eventually leading her to meet the joyful Straw Hat Pirates.

-> Luna

"Luna, quieres ser madre, y no encuentras querer que te haga mujer. Dime, luna de plata, ¿que pretendes hacer con un niño de piel?"- Mecano, in: Hijo de la Luna

Full name: Aether S. Luna

Birthday: December 11th, 1503 ASC (18 years old)

Identity: she doesn’t think about it, loves everyone and identifies as ethereal

Faceclaim: Maria Amanda

Tag: x | Fic: -

Luna is the daughter of the moon goddess herself – or at least she believes that. Her strange powers connected to the moon certainly don’t serve any evidence against it. Having wandered the seas for years, she eventually finds herself stuck with the Foxy Pirates. But her rescue arrives in the form of the Straw Hat Pirates and their overly charming chef Sanji.

-> Lux

"Here we go again. We're sick like animals, we play pretend. You're just a cannibal and I'm afraid I won't get out alive." - Neon Trees, in: Animal

Full name: Lux Jirou (he goes by his last name after leaving Syrup Village)

Birthday: July 1st, 1500 ASC (21 years old)

Identity: bisexual (male preference), cis male

Faceclaim: Jack Kilmer

Tag: x | Fic: -

Jirou is sick. It's something that Klahadore tells him again and again. He's only got a few years left to live, so why not live those final years in a state of wealth and luxury? But things go wrong, as they usually do in Jirou's life, because is feelings get in the way. One of those feelings is pity, the other his a sudden crush on a green-haired swordsman that simply appeared in the garden on the big day. Things can never go right for Jirou, can they?

-> Sonoko

Full name: Roronoa Sonoko

Birthday: March 9th

Identity: lesbian

Faceclaim: Hirukawa Yu

Tag: x | Fic: -

Roronoa Sonoko is Pirate Hunter Zoro's sister and a freshly promoted Marine Ensign. Under the care of Vice Admiral Garp and Bogard, she has the best chances of adcancing through the ranks, but Garp has further plans for her: As a deal with Dracule Mihawk, he convinces to take the World's Greatest Swordsman to take Sonoko in as a student, starting a whole new chapter in her life. If only her brother would stop getting into trouble…

[ghostbustermelanieking]

other people are gonna say this a lot better than me but: i was really kind of annoyed by today's episode. for a couple reasons, but mostly: being this close to the finale, especially 3 episodes away... i don't see the point of a filler episode, where literally the only new information we get is that martin thought annabelle would kill jon (??) and the cult was taken, offscreen. i don't really like sitting around complaining about an episode but like. for the purposes of airing out my thoughts, here they are -- under a cut, in case people don't wanna see them

i don't. really know why we needed a random vast statement here but ok

i'm really kind of worried that martin's explanation and jon's "we'll talk about it later" is the extent we're gonna hear about this arc, and i really hope that isn't the case. there were a lot of issues broached in that whole mess that i was hoping would actually get DISCUSSED (martin's accusations of jon wanting power/enjoying smiting people too much, the various things they said, martin going off with annabelle -- i don't think martin was exactly in the wrong but i still want it discussed). maybe if thered be an echo of like "it doesn't matter i'm just glad you're safe" i'd be ok leaving it offscreen, but we know there's gonna be a discussion... i'm not sure where it'll fit into the last 2 episodes, even if they are longer, and i hate that we won't get to see it. i hope whatever last interaction we get between jon and martin is satisfying, and i'm sure it will be, but i'm bummed at the prospect of not hearing this conversation

adding onto that... this is probably nitpicky of me but i continue to be kinda disappointed as to how the resolution of martin and jon being separated has gone. i feel like there hasn't been much emotional payoff and i expected a little more? basira seemed more pissed/worried than jon. and sure, there's always fic, but i just... hoped for a little more

other people have mentioned this too but i'm just sitting here going... where's the tragedy?? i am sure that 199 and 200 will break my heart into a million pieces but like... i expected it to be a little broken already. i am ready for pain, and i feel like it's been a little lacking lately. aside from the cult members going. i guess this fits into wanting more Things To Happen but... i am not nearly as devastated as i expected at this point

the cultists disappearing wasn't a bad plot introduction but it makes me wonder two things. 1. why didn't we hear that? the tapes have followed them, and georgie and melanie, before. surely that's plot relevant. 2. why did we bother meeting the cult at all? for the longest time i figured they had to be plot relevant, what with the return of lynne hammond, and the focus of them in the trailer... if i had to guess now itd be that their purpose was to motivate georgie and melanie to actually take action rather than just sit by (plus they can leave the tunnels now that they don't have anyone to protect) but like... if thats the case why bother meeting them, if they're not going to play a deeper role. they could've been entirely offscreen. i don't dislike that we met them, i just think -- assuming this is the last we'll see, assuming they aren't being held hostage to force the main crew's hand -- that introducing new characters this late in the game should be for a good reason, and that we could've spent the time we spent on the cult on something else if this was all they were there for

also the way that scene was paced felt weird to me, emotionally and otherwise

if they needed a filler episode, i think this late in the game, it would've been beneficial to focus on character interactions, NOT a random statement. sure, we get to hear martin's side of what happened with annabelle, but there wasn't much we didn't already know, and i would've rather seen that as a one on one conversation between jm. (maybe thats still coming but if so, why couldn't it have been this ep?) we could've gotten something with the cult being taken, or the aftermath of georgie and melanie mourning; we could've skipped ahead to the actual crux of the conversation i assume we'll get next ep (maybe??) about what to do next. episodes like 190 and 191, imo, didn't feel like filler bc we were getting character stuff. i wish we could've gotten that this ep

i don't rly like complaining about this ep, especially when it comes to a show thats consistently had pretty high plot content. (it isn't perfect, of course, but i'm not used to episodes like this at all from tma lol) i still have hope for the final 2 eps, but i don't see how we're going to get through everything that should be covered, and that worries me a little.

i do still have hope for 199 and 200. i hope they're awesome! i hope they make me like the last 2 more. i hope they pull a full mag 160 and make me appreciate stuff that seemed boring or like filler. if nothing else, i hope they're good and plot thick and emotionally affecting in the way we've been expecting. i just feel sour towards 198 and i don't like that. and i seriously hope it doesn't set a precedent for the rest of the show.

[melanierosemusic]

A Review of The Battle at Garden's Gate: Greta Van Fleet's New Album

by Melanie Rose

Greta Van Fleet are a Michigan-born band, consisting of three brothers: Josh Kiszka on vocals, Jake Kiszka on guitar and Sam Kiszka on bass, as well as good friend Danny Wagner on drums.

They released their debut EP From The Fires in 2017 with a follow up album Anthem of the Peaceful Army in 2018. Immediately, they were met with an array of fans with a wide age range, from nostalgic mums to impressed dads trickling right down to teenagers with a new found love for 1970s inspired rock with a folk edge. The band were also met with a lot of critics, accusing them of being Led Zeppelin copycats, unoriginal and simply ripping off classic rock artists from many years ago.

Despite the criticisms, Greta Van Fleet have proved their tenacity with the release of their well awaited second studio album, The Battle at Garden's Gate. I will be reviewing each song in order of tracklist and exploring how Greta Van Fleet have evolved their sound and creativity.

Heat Above: We open the album with a merry and magical start. Josh's heavenly vocals mixed with warm and inviting lyrics provide a great accompaniment to Sam's Hammond organ. This song feels very peaceful and has a great groove, reminiscent of the hippie sounds of the late 1960s and 1970s. A great opening track makes for a promising start.

My Way, Soon: This song is a pure hit of dopamine to the system. I loved it since the first time I heard it when the band released it in October of last year. The cheery song paired with the homemade music video feels like nostalgic memories from childhood summer camp. It makes me feel like I stepped right back into the past. The bass in this song is strong and the guitars pair up in a dynamic duo with the drums as the song builds to its chorus. Great lyrics in this song make for an anthem feel and a strong lead single.

Broken Bells: This song would make for an amazing concert opener. It reminds me of the early work of psychedelic influenced rock bands like Rush and Pink Floyd. The music builds with such gravitas in this track; it's magnetic and holds the attention of the listener throughout. The way in which the instruments marry each other in the chorus is stunning and the drumming of Danny Wagner really shines on this song. The song almost feels like a soundtrack for The Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings, with a battle-like quality to the intensity of the song's build up. Once again, Josh's vocals are ethereal.

Built by Nations: This song showcases the sexier side to Greta Van Fleet's musicianship. The drums have a great groove and the guitar is quite bluesy. This song is an excellent example of how much the band have matured their sound since their previous releases and how they have evolved their songwriting skills.

Age of Machine: From the very first moment I heard this song, I knew it was going to be one of those amazing, long classic rock songs that draws you in and makes you feel like you're on a trip. The way the drums fade in paired with the vocal talents of Josh Kiszka gives the song a psychedelic undertone and gives me chills. I like how the vocals compliment the guitars in this song and the drumming is beautiful as always. The group vocals in the chorus add a really nice touch to the song. The guitar riff after the verses appears to take inspiration from Rush once more; that part alone definitely makes this one of my favourite songs on the album.

Tears of Rain: The opening acoustic guitar is so beautifully crisp and clear and it is rather mindful of the kind of music you would hear upon an evening beach walk in Spain. The bells are a beautiful addition and piano shows a lighter side to Greta Van Fleet's musical abilities and the vocals compliment everything wonderfully. This song stands out because it sees the band branch out from their electric guitar - drums - bluesy bass combo. The rain clouds at the end leave the song with a magical, theatrical quality. The ending puts me in mind of Rainbow by Kacey Musgraves; a retro and introspective piano ballad with a touching final chord.

Stardust Chords: What a beautiful name for a song! I love the drums at the beginning - they suggest an anthem is about to unfold. Josh's booming vocals introduce another great riff from Jake on guitar. I love the groove of this song that the bass and drums create. The music in the chorus mixes harmoniously with Josh's melodies. Greta Van Fleet prove to be amazing at never leaving a single instrument to fade away in the background. The middle eight in this song stands out; it's very different sounding for them and feels like fire. A captivating solo from Jake towards the end is followed by more group vocals - a nice touch that Greta Van Fleet hadn't explored in their previous album or EP so it's nice to see them expand creatively.

Light My Love: This is going to be a fan favourite. An opening piano melody that would remind you of Elton John in his prime kicks off this love song and adds a light and airy touch. The lyrics are particularly strong in this track and Josh sings as beautifully as ever over the chorus. The acoustic guitar feels warm, bright and happy and the electric guitar adds a great backbone. The vocals at the end leave you feeling all sparkly inside.

Caravel: Another Rush influence? The opening guitar is groovy and a more mature sound for Greta Van Fleet. The riff after the chorus paired with the 60s sounding drums are so pleasing to listen to. Sam's bass in this track adds a great bounce and the orchestral plucks add an interesting and new element to the record - an impressive creative choice for the band. This song further demonstrates Josh's maturing vocals and captures Jake's excellent guitar songwriting skills. The drums at the end are rather noteworthy; you can really feel Danny's passion.

The Barbarians: The opening music is rather unexpected and a nice touch. Jake comes in with a great guitar riff and Josh's vocals deliver as always. The swing of the guitar in the verses of this song really stands out for me and the drums pair well with it. An interesting middle eight really lifts the song and makes it stand out from the rest of the album - the bass and drums do a great job here with interesting chords and haunting vocals. The organ adds another 1970s feel or even a slightly gothic element to the track.

Trip The Light Fantastic: A great opening riff and awesome drumming from Danny in the verses and throughout. Interesting chanting vocals in this song that add a nice flavour and another hippie element to the album. Jake's playing is significant in the chorus of this song and the lyrics are noteworthy. This song sees Greta Van Fleet explore different instruments that they haven't really used before, bringing an outer space feel towards the end of this song and really making it feel like a trip to the stars and beyond. A nice piano touch further adds to the feeling of "light". This song again makes me think that Greta Van Fleet had been listening to a lot of psychedelic rock when making this album.

The Weight of Dreams: A thought provoking introduction from Jake on guitar - one of the most unforgettable intros on this album. Great swooping bass moments from Sam on this song and excellent drums from Danny that bring the song to a new level. The solo guitar moments on this track really make it feel like an album closer, at times being reminiscent of Broken Bells, tying the whole album together at the close. Marvellous drums and vocals from Josh bring the song to a magnetic and dramatic end as a solo from Jake brings an emotional touch. This feels like one of those songs Jake would freestyle on in live performances with an extra long guitar solo. One of Jake's strongest solos wraps up this album with a bang. The outdo acoustic guitar leaves a wonderful magical touch to end things off on a more thoughtful note.

After an initial listen, the strongest songs on the album feel like Heat Above, My Way Soon, Broken Bells, Age of Machine, Light My Love, Trip The Light Fantastic and The Weight of Dreams.

The album was well worth the three year wait and you can tell how hard Greta Van Fleet have worked on this album - their sound has matured beautifully while still staying true to their musical roots. They have broadened their horizons with new instruments being explored throughout the album as well as impressive new vocal techniques from Josh.

While some critics have called the album another Zeppelin rip off or compared the band to others through a rather snarky and gatekeeping tone, I couldn't disagree more. While Josh's vocals are at times comparable to the great techniques of Robert Plant, his voice also could put you in mind of AC/DC and Rush - but ultimately I feel the more you listen to Greta Van Fleet, the more unique sounding Josh's voice becomes.

Their new image may suggest a Queen influence as the band opt for a more glam rock look, but their music feels inspired by more psychedelic rock and blues artists. However, despite many clear influences, this album feels authentically Greta Van Fleet and is much more evolved and original than their previous work. A transcendent and thoughtful album from one of the most promising rock bands of our generation.

[klein-archive]

First blog by our new Archivist Christine English - Klein on Memory

26th July 2021

A brief introduction: I’m Christine English, and this is my first blog post as the new Archivist for the Melanie Klein Trust, taking over the position from Jane Milton. Jane introduced me to the Melanie Klein archive some years ago, since which time I have been looking particularly closely at Klein's record of her work with an adult patient, Mr B – this was brought to light by John Steiner in recent years, when he published Klein's Lectures on Technique (Steiner, 2019).

I am delighted that, in taking on this blog, which Jane originated and developed, I will have the opportunity to continue her work sharing Klein's thinking on a vast array of topics. In this first post, I pick up where Jane left off, looking at what Klein has to say on the subject of memory.

File D.23 of the archive is entitled, ‘Notes for intended paper on memory’, and is dated 1958. The file is short, and contains a mix of clinical notes, fragments of thoughts on the subject of memory, and more developed ideas that Klein clearly had in mind for a paper. It is likely that, as she was gathering these notes, Klein was also thinking back over her own life, since 1959 was taken up with writing her autobiography.

At the start of the file there is a newspaper article which Klein saved from September 1958, that is pertinent to the subject of memory. It is written by the Scottish poet and translator of Kafka, Edwin Muir. In his article, Muir remarks that what sets aside the great novelists is, ‘the extensiveness, exactitude and free availability of their memory’.

Their characters, he argues, ‘remind us of how little of our own experience we have preserved intact, and how inevitably it has leaked away into a kind of nothingness’. How then does one ‘preserve memory intact’? Muir argues that it is through the immediate imbuing of experience with personal meaning, a capacity which the great novelists possess. These novelists notice things, Muir writes; they ‘seize…the meaning of word and gesture in their passing’.

It is not difficult to see why Klein would have been moved by these words. She had made it her life’s work to study, in the finest detail, the particular and often very problematic ways in which her patients imbued their experience with meaning. I expect she would also have been deeply interested in the kind of mental freedom Muir was describing. The article is so engaging, it is little wonder that it captured Klein’s imagination. An image of the original article is shown here:

Next in the file, Klein makes a couple of statements on memory, without elaborating upon these. First, she writes:

Forgetting somebody is killing them in the deep unconscious. Therefore any painful situation or person forgotten is killed. In the Bible “his name shall be forgotten” is one of the curses.

Secondly, she notes that,

Not building up memories sufficiently strong [sic] is one basis for the loss of memory, at a later age.

This point seems to be very much connected with Muir’s idea that that experience must be imbued with meaning in the first place in order to become memorable.

There is then a longer note headed, ‘Note to paper on memory’. Klein reflects here upon why a perception - necessary, of course, for the creation of a memory - may be interrupted:

‘Note to paper on memory’

All the time perception has been cut out of various things in order to avoid a conscious realisation of something which would have made the splitting impossible. The pain of consciously perceiving would be too great. But it is more than that, because it would not allow the splitting which had been successful to continue.

Even in a normal person definite perceptions are cut out. During a session I moved my briefcase which immediately meant to the patient that I had been putting down the dream in writing. After a whole train of associations had finished, he became aware of that “hallucinatory” feeling going on while he was speaking. There was every reason against thinking I would have done that, but he had a hallucinatory conviction. Why had he left it out? That brought us to leaving out things in infancy, noises, suspicions about parents’ intercourse, etc. If the conscious perception had been there, splitting could not have been maintained.

This perception of reality goes on simultaneously with the inner feelings of conflict etc but is kept separate. Reality is split off.

Finally, I present a clinical vignette that Klein titled, ‘Recovery of a Childhood Memory During Analysis’. Here, she shows how work in analysis can liberate memories that have previously been denied:

‘Recovery of a Childhood Memory During Analysis’

The patient, a man of 35 years – came to analysis because of an acute breakdown in which he was very depressed – apparently precipitated by his deciding to get engaged to his girlfriend. A similar episode had occurred under the same circumstances 8 years previously. A great deal of homosexual material was produced during the first months of analysis and though he allowed me to give the interpretations about this he always denied that he was aware of it.

He also revealed that at the age of 8 years he had a fight with another boy in which he (the patient) was concussed – but ill in an emotionally disturbed way for several months afterwards – and when I interpreted that he felt it had been a sexual fight between them he very strongly denied anything of the sort. About six months later when he had been able to admit his conscious homosexual feelings in the present situation – he referred again to the fight when he was eight and he now said he remembered that he had started it by making a grab at the other boy’s penis – and this was why he had knocked him out.

[lsmithart]

‘The Object’ by Antony Hudek: Documents of Contemporary Art

Art theory research that collates a series of writings by art critics, theorists, psychologists, philosophers and more. This book has introduced me to theories surrounding the object as commodity, token of memory, being of the body and the relationship between casting, sculpture and found object.

Hudek’s Introduction to the Text:

Page 14 - Martin Heidegger – thing ‘ding’ differs from the object as it is autonomous; self-supporting. E.g. a jug is assertive of its independence, its presence as well as nearness. Objects are everywhere in equal measure, neither near nor far. The thing resists appropriation.

Jacques Lacan – the thing resists and stands outside of language and consciousness

Page 14 - “The world of objects, however ordinary, is a trove of disguises, concealments, subterfuges, provocations and triggers that no singular, embodied and knowledgeable subject can exhaust.”

“Artwork is the prime example of the object’s capacity to evade the knowing grasp.

Page 15 - “Do objects define us by catering to our needs as users, consumers or collectors, and by limiting our movements by their physical properties?”

“Objects define us because they come first, by commanding our attention, even our respect; they exist before us, possibly without us”

Page 20 – ‘Transforming the Duchampian readymade into something dubious and obsolete was a widespread preoccupation in the 1960s and 70s, as the post-war euphoria at the potentially infinite multiplication of consumable objects turned into doubt.

Page 22 - Casting and moulding – the subjective or positive application of plaster, clay or papier-mache on an object and the objective or negative indexical trace of the object’s voided form. E.g. Bourgeois and Hesse’s casts of quasi-body parts (resembling), Alina Szapocznikow’s partial body casts ‘awkward objects’, Marina Abramovic’s clay mirrors. Rooted from Duchamp – small casts Objet Dard and Feuille de vigne femelle.

Links to Freud’s theory of the drives;

Melanie Klein’s ‘part objects’;

Reconnecting the object to the human body;

Identifying the artwork with transitional objects such as toys**;

Psychoanalysis – identifying the object as more than a thing in itself lying statically outside of the subject. It is a dynamic element in constant flux, mediating the subject’s inner and outer worlds.

If matter in these art objects still matters, it is better to confuse genres (and genders), swapping still life for dead life, or still life for a strangely organic, not necessarily human life form.

Krauss on Hesse’s reliefs: demonstration of a ‘wonderfully humorous elaboration of Duchamp’s interest in the mechanics of desire and the relays established by the readymades between bodies and objects.’

‘This mechanistic as well as psychic interpretation identifies the artwork closely with other intermediary or transitional objects (Donald Winnicott), such as toys. Indeed, one of the indisputable achievements of psychoanalysis is to have identified the object as more than ‘a thing in itself’ lying statically outside of the subject, but as a dynamic element in constant flux, mediating the subject’s inner and outer worlds as well as coercing the subject into varying configurations with itself and (other) objects. the toy, like the relational art object, is unpredictable; there is no telling when it will lose its aura and lapse into thingness, or, on the contrary, change from mere thing to object of ceaseless wonder.

Page 24 – ‘The subject must now contend with its own availability and attraction as an almost-object, while the object accrues the status of almost-subject, bearing little relation with the material, graspable thing.’

Further research? Rosalind Krauss ‘part object, part sculpture’; On Duchamp and impressions – Georges Didi-Huberman.

Page 30 - Theodor W Adorno (1969) “Everything that is in the subject can be attributed to the object; whatever in it is not object semantically bursts open the ‘is’.

Universal and particular – neither one can exist wtihout the other. The particular only as determined and thus universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and thus itself particular.

Adrian Piper ‘Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography’ of an Art Object (1970-73)

Page 32 - As an artist separate from my art, I saw the effect of my existence in the existence of the work. The work changed the world for me by adding something new that wasn’t there before. Thus in the existence of the work, I saw my effect on the world at large.

Jane Bennett ‘Vibrant Matter’ (2010)

Page 23 - “If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimised, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated.” We cannot simply cast-off objects and things permanently; the object is an almost subject.

Page 40 – ‘By acknowledging that the framework of subject versus object has indeed at times worked to prevent or ameliorate human suffering and to promote human happiness or wellbeing.

Marcus Steinweg ‘What is an Object?’ (2011)

Page 42 – Fascination digs a trench between subject and object. The subject is faced with an object that opens a distance not easily bridged. Difference or trench, rupture, chasm or distance – in any case there is a gap that gives way to an absence and a disappearance, a non-identity and un unstable presence. The objectivity of the object cannot be compared to a constant entity. It is characterised by all manner of fractures and what it presents is this fragility, this instability and contingency.

In the possibility of self-objectification, the subject transcends its status as object and moves toward its status as subject.

Page 43 – The tear in the present means precisely this: that there is always something missing or absent, that every present is permeated by a non-present.

Allan McCollum ‘Perfect Vehicles’ (1986)

Page 94 – ‘I have observed that a common vase becomes an art object upon the suspension of its utility; that is, it is filled with meaning and value only after it is emptied of substance. Thus, its privileged status must be maintained according to a tacit agreement amongst the social body (a body, perhaps, represented by the vase itself): that the object should not be used for what it was intended.’

Neil Cummings ‘Reading Things: The Alibi of Use’ (1993)

Page 97 - ‘A functional object has a metonymic relationship to meaning while in service; the effect and implementation of its function can be juxtaposed to produce a figure of meaning by contiguity. Outside of its immediate context, stripped of its function, in a museum, gallery or photograph, for instance, an object operates more conventionally, like a sign or written language.’

‘It is conceivable to theorise away any absolute value of use and to erode distinctions based qualitatively upon function.’

‘It is possible to play with the semiotic difference of those actions, to luxuriate in the endless possibilities of signification, but there is a bottom line, a referent, some resistance.’

REFERENCES:

Adorno, T. W., (1969). On Subject and Object. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 256-257.

Bennett, J., (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. pp. 12-13.

Cummings, N., (1993) Reading Things: The Alibi of Use. pp. 19-24.

Hudek, A., (2014). Documents of Contemporary Art: The Object. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press. pp. 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 32, 40, 42, 43, 94, 97.

McCollum, A., (1986), Perfect Vehicles in Damaged Goods; Desire and the Economy of the Object. New York. New Museum of Contemporary Art. p.6.

Piper, A., (1970-73). Extract from: Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object. In: Out of Order, Out of Sight, vol. I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996). pp. 34-36.

Steinweg, M., (2011). Extract from: What is an Object? In: Majewski, A., (ed), The World of Gimel. How to Make Objects Talk. Berlin and New York: Steinberg Press. pp. 218-20.

[nix-that-rad-lass]

A Bunch of Links, Receipts, and Sources for my fellow Terves

A Girls Place In The World by William Buckner About the reality of women and girls around the world https://quillette.com/2019/05/09/a-girls-place-in-the-world/

I Was A Lesbian Tomboy Allowed To Be Female; I Fear Young Girls Today No Longer Have That Choice by Tonje Gjevjon About the transing of gender nonconforming girls that would likely grow up to be lesbians if not for being transitioned before they are even old enough to understand what transition is. https://www.feministcurrent.com/2019/06/11/i-was-a-lesbian-tomboy-allowed-to-be-female-i-fear-young-girls-today-no-longer-have-that-choice/

Dagny on Social Media, Gender Dysphoria, Trans Youth, and Detransitioning. A transcript of a talk given by Dagny, a detransitioned young woman and member of the pique resilience project https://www.feministcurrent.com/2019/06/04/dagny-on-social-media-gender-dysphoria-trans-youth-and-detransitioning/

Ross Douthat Revealed the Hypocrisy in Liberal Feminist Ideology, and They’re Pissed by Meghan Murphy Self explanatory title https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/05/04/ross-douthat-revealed-hypocrisy-liberal-feminist-ideology-theyre-pissed/

A Neo-Liberal Concept of Freedom has Allowed Gender Ideology to Take Hold by Heather Brunskell Evans https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/12/02/neoliberalism-patriarchy-gender-identity/

Inauthentic Selves: The Modern [LGB(TQ+)] Movement is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf and Based on Junk Science https://medium.com/@sue.donym1984/inauthentic-selves-the-modern-lgbtq-movement-is-run-by-philanthropic-astroturf-and-based-on-junk-d08eb6aa1a4b

Politicians are Betraying Women in the Rush To Support Trans Rights by Jenni Russell Self explanatory https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/politicians-are-betraying-women-in-the-rush-to-support-trans-rights-xzvhcf7m8

“Don’t Forget”, a compilation of sources, receipts, and other resources on male violence, compiled by @astro-didacted on tumblr https://nixtheoneandsecond.tumblr.com/post/188876269165/dont-forget?is_related_post=1

Pretty much a masterpost of RadFem beliefs and resources, compiled by @unleashtherage on tumblr https://nixtheoneandsecond.tumblr.com/post/188804771810/radical-feminism-is-a-political-movement-in

PDF of Lundy Bancroft’s “Why Does He Do That” https://www.docdroid.net/py03/why-does-he-do-that.pdf

The Wikipedia Page for the one and only TERF Icon, Magdalen Berns. She deserved better! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalen_Berns

A bunch of Andrea Dworkins works in a google drive PDF https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1i3r-gSizLC6UbyvM1ZJyCYMHtYvdss-S

Sex Before Kissing: How 15 year old girls are dealing with porn obsessed boys by Melinda Tankard Reist Self explanatory https://fightthenewdrug.org/sex-before-kissing-15-year-old-girls-dealing-with-boys/

Some tea on the tumblr porn ban from 2018. https://fightthenewdrug.org/tumblr-banned-porn-from-its-platform-one-year-ago-how-is-the-site-doing-now/

Why Victims Freeze Up During Sexual Assaults by Jackie Hong Tells about experiences, and the fight, flight, and freeze response. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wd7945/i-froze-up-when-i-was-sexually-assaulted-and-we-should-stop-dismissing-that-response

Why Women Have Higher Rates of PTSD Than Men by Melanie Greenberg (spoiler: its because of sexual violence and misogyny)https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201809/why-women-have-higher-rates-ptsd-men

The Difference Between Toxic Masculinity and Being A Man by Harris O’Malley Finally, a small handful of men are actually attempting to be better and make a difference! Took em long enough! https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-difference-between-toxic-masculinity-and-being-a-man-dg/

Criminal Justice System: The Actual Amount of Sexual Assault Perps, Pimps, Johns, Rapists, and Pedophiles that Get Away With It https://rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system

The First Legal Abortion Providers Tell Their Stories by Alex Ronan https://www.thecut.com/2015/10/first-legal-abortionists-tell-their-stories.html?mid=twitter-share-thecut#

How Much Does An Abortion Cost? by Charlotte Cowles Not only covers the price, but also types of abortion, prevention, and more on reproductive health https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/how-much-does-an-abortion-cost.html

8 Signs Your Partner Is Being Sexually Coercive by Suzannah Weiss https://www.bustle.com/articles/155328-8-signs-your-partner-is-being-sexually-coercive-because-you-can-always-say-no

Why Conservative Women are Okay With Harassment by Jennifer Wright This is regarding not only the general societal expectations which conservative women help uphold and enforce, but also why they are surprisingly okay with electing sexual predators to the government https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a23453699/conservative-women-response-brett-kavanaugh-allegations-sexual-assault/

Archaeologists Find New Way To Determine Sex of Cremated Individuals by Katherine J Wu Because we all run into those TRA’s that say its impossible to know someones ‘gender’ or ‘sex’ by just looking at them, or their remains in the case of those already passed. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/archaeologists-find-new-way-determine-sex-cremated-individuals/

Analysing the Bones: What Can A Skeleton Tell You? by Hayley Dunning Again, because TRAs love to say that skeletons are ambiguous when, in fact, they are not https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/analysing-the-bones-what-can-a-skeleton-tell-you.html

Sex Determination in Skeletal Remains from the Medieval Adriatic Coast - Discriminant Function Analysis of Humeri Hmm, wonder what this is about. You guessed it! More differences in the bone and skeletal structures of male and female humans https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3692335/

Sex Determination from the Talus of South African Whites by Discriminant Function Analysis Woah, more information on telling skeletons apart by sex! Almost like human skeletons differ between the sexes https://journals.lww.com/amjforensicmedicine/Abstract/2003/12000/Sex_Determination_From_the_Talus_of_South_African.3.aspx

The Reliability of Sex Determination of Skeletons from Forensic Context in the Balkans Oh my god, whats this?? More factual evidence of differences in physiology between the *gasp* TWO human sexes?? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15567621/

Mandibular Ramus Flexure: A New Morphologic Indicator of Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Skeleton Okay, okay, I think thats all the skeleton stuff for now https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1096-8644(199603)99:3%3C473::AID-AJPA8%3E3.0.CO;2-X

Further Evidence to Show Population Specificity of Discriminant Function Equations for Sex Determination Using the Talus of South African Blacks Partner to a previously aforementioned article https://www.astm.org/DIGITAL_LIBRARY/JOURNALS/FORENSIC/PAGES/JFS2003431.htm

Why Talking About Bowie’s Sexual Misconduct Matters by Angelina Chapin Article about David Bowie and his misconduct. pretty much, you shouldnt always separate the art from the artist. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-talking-about-bowies-sexual-misconduct-matters_b_9009230

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Barbara-Ehrenreich-and-Deirdre-English-Witches-Midwives-and-Nurses-A-History-of-Women-Healers.-Introduction..pdf

This entire blog is gold. To quote them: Saying No To Penis is NOT Hate Speech [ffs] http://thenewbacklash.blogspot.com/?

Steven Hassan’s BITE Model about what constitutes a cult. You know, like the gender cult. https://freedomofmind.com/bite-model/

What Is Darvo? by Jennifer J Freyd DARVO is the reaction that many sexual offenders display in response to being faced with the consequences of their actions. https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html

Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva Genuinely just read this, its too good to summarise http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory?fbclid=IwAR2cQyCRT5olIzkBGfO_F5HvES28bhdIcbUyc9g1W_p0L6o7U8gopDp5Kxw

Taking Back Your Mind: A Radical Feminist Approach to Recovering from Porn Use by Kitty at medium com https://medium.com/@kittyit/taking-back-your-mind-a-radical-feminist-approach-to-recovering-from-porn-use-8ae9347c3d8f

About Female Infanticide http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/abortion/medical/infanticide_1.shtml

About Female Genital Mutilation https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/female-genital-mutilation

About Child Marriage https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/about-child-marriage/

Who Cooked the Last Supper? from @aeroposter

https://aeroposter.tumblr.com/post/166368772300/who-cooked-the-last-supper-by-rosalind-miles

Breast ironing: Abhorrent Practice Becoming Endemic In UK by Alexandra Sims

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/breast-ironing-abhorrent-practice-becoming-endemic-in-uk-a6950521.html

About Forced Pregnancy

http://www.stopvaw.org/harmful_practices_forced_pregnancy

Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans or Was I Trans All Along? As if we needed any more proof that it is, indeed, a fetish

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/2mn8au/did_sissy_porn_make_me_trans_or_was_i_trans_all_a/

Did Porn Make Me Transgender? Who coulda thunk it

https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/did-porn-make-me-transgender.61492/

Jealous of Lesbians? Yep, thats right folks. Transbians really are just rapey straight guys with a lesbian fetish. https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/55zkbs/jealous_of_lesbians/

Just when you thought men couldnt get much worse... https://metro.co.uk/2013/07/09/peeping-tom-arrested-after-hiding-in-septic-tank-and-staring-at-people-using-the-toilet-3874756/

Houston Man Posed as a Doctor to Rape a Student

https://abc13.com/5730127/

Rape In War: Challenging the Tradition of Impunity

https://www.hrw.org/legacy/women/docs/rapeinwar.htm

Doctors & Sex Abuse: Patients Sexually Abused While Sedated

http://doctors.ajc.com/doctor_sex_abuse_sedated/

Man pretended to be gay in order to get close to a woman and ultimately rape her

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/man-convicted-of-raping-woman-who-he-allegedly-befriended-by-pretending-to-be-gay/

Complete collection of Andrea Dworkins work

http://radfem.org/dworkin/

[shadyb00ts]

How 2020 Turned Me Into A Swiftie Again

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d have not one but two Taylor Swift albums in my year-end favorites list, I would’ve thought you were out of your mind. Then again, stranger things have happened in this hellscape of a year.

I’m really not sure where the first time I heard the phrase “Life is too short to pretend to hate Taylor Swift” was. I have no idea who originated it, but it stuck with me when I started to unpack that about a year ago, during her Lover era. By then, my perception and feelings about Taylor had been very... inconsistent, to say the least. I started out as a full-on stan, then it dwindled from there overtime until I basically became a hater, which then turned into indifference but silent respect. Now, I’m pretty much on the road to becoming a stan again. Revisiting her catalog, analyzing her lyrics, watching interviews, the works. 

I wanted to examine what it was that made my opinions about her go through so many steep rises and falls within this entire decade. Part of it was her shift in musical style that I didn’t quite mesh with, but another part was owning up to the internal biases I had when I was younger and how gullible I was in going along with whatever the media or the popular conscious was saying about her and the kind of person she is. 

I’m somebody who’s incapable of separating art from the artist. I simply don’t listen to artists when I don’t like them as people or don’t agree with their actions. Examples include but are not limited to Kim Petras, Melanie Martinez, Azealia Banks, Grimes, just to name a few. I have my own personal reasons for just not wanting to engage with any of their music, and if you still want to, that’s none of my business.

At some point in my life, I think Taylor got on that list. Looking back on it now, I find that completely ridiculous, because she never really did anything or acted in a way that warranted that reaction out of me. So I wanted to delve into how that even came about in the first place.

With that said, I want to take a trip down memory lane and go back through her eras, and go through the timeline of my strange relationship with Taylor Swift’s body of work as well as her public persona. Fair warning, it’s gonna be really cheesy and emotional at parts, but it is fully my truth. Thank you in advance if you manage to read the whole thing.

Part 1: The Country Era

It’s 2010 and I’m in eighth grade. I’m in an extremely Muslim country, the only son of an extremely Muslim family that enrolled me in an extremely Muslim school. I’m getting bullied by the boys in my class for being too feminine and being ignored by the girls for being a boy. The last close friend I had from elementary school had just moved away the year prior, and I’d never felt more alone in my life.

I was a closeted gay kid still trying to figure himself out and hating who he was. I escaped to cringey online chat sites like IMVU and catfished as a girl, because at the time I thought the only way to get boys to like me and want to be with me was to pretend to be someone else, someone I actually liked.

When I think back on this era, I mostly remember the girls in my class obsessing over these three albums and singing her songs with each other all the time. I desperately wanted to join them and fangirl with them over her music, though of course they never gave me the time of day. I remember I would memorize so many of her songs and write them all down on a special notebook I kept. When I wasn’t paying attention in classes, that’s what I would do; scribble out a collection of all the songs of hers that I knew by heart.

To me, these three albums represented a certain kind of vivid fantasy. Taylor’s songwriting has obviously grown exponentially over the past decade, but even back then she was always so damn good at storytelling and detail, painting you a very clear picture of a scene and placing you right there. For a miserable, self-hating fourteen-year-old gay boy that was always seeking escapism from a homophobic environment, this was the perfect outlet for me to live out a different kind of life, to play pretend.

I honestly can’t explain what it is about her style of songwriting but she always made me feel like I was genuinely experiencing everything she was talking about. Things like kissing in the rain, riding around in the truck of the boy of my dreams in a tiny one horse town, shedding teardrops on a guitar that I definitely didn’t own, experiencing crushing heartbreak. This was stuff that my sheltered ass couldn’t comprehend.

Taylor perfectly captured that ideal, that small town girl with big dreams and storybook romances. I was in love with her discography at the time, having memorized pretty much the entirety of Fearless because that was my favorite of three. Middle school was hell for me, but her music was definitely something that helped me pull through, because she sent my imagination into overdrive.

This was a time in my life where I didn’t really care yet about an artist’s public image or the media’s portrayal of them, It was purely about the music for me. Of course, when looking at these albums now, there were a few questionable choices she made lyrically, I have to admit. Particularly with songs like “Better Than Revenge” and “Innocent”, both having aged terribly with the former being bafflingly misogynistic and the latter being about Kanye. As of my writing this, Taylor is currently in the process of re-recording her old catalog, and I assume that she would skip these two songs in particular, as well as several others that haven’t exactly aged well.

This era really got me through some tough times and she provided much-needed relief for me within each of these three albums. I’ll always have an attachment to them because of the bittersweet memories they represent.

Part 2: Red

Red I decided to put in its own category, because this was kind of a weird era for Taylor. Even back when I was an ignorant teenager that barely had any critical thinking skills, I felt the dissonance of this album and its Max Martin produced singles. This album represented Taylor dipping her toe into pop music, which she made abundantly clear when she decided to release We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together as the lead single.

I actually remember this moment quite clearly. She premiered the single at some kind of fan event that I believe was streamed live on YouTube, and either I watched it live or I watched the full recording of it later on. At the time I remember feeling it was kind of bizarre to hear Taylor adopt this style of music, because it was so drastically different from her previous work and it took me a while to adjust. Obviously I enjoyed pop music at the time as much as I do now, but I just hadn’t been expecting it to come from Taylor. 

Fortunately it was just the three singles that were full pop, and the rest of the album still had her signature DNA and also includes some of her best work. All Too Well, for example, is I think one of the best songs she’s ever made, if not the best. I think if I were introducing Taylor to someone that’s totally unfamiliar with her, that would be my first choice, because it’s a masterwork in songwriting and emotionality.

I do think the thing that irked me the most about this album and era, even to this day, was the lack of cohesion. Of course I figured that she would eventually venture into pop music, but the way in which she did it just felt a bit too jarring to me. Perhaps if the album had a more even distribution of pop songs and country songs, it would’ve been slightly more palatable for me. It’s not even that the three pop songs were bad; they were quite good for their time. Though to be completely honest they’re the songs I barely ever return to any time I listen to Red now. They’re the kind of catchy pop songs where it’s difficult not to get sick of them at a certain point in your life. I’ve grown to really dislike the lead single, and even 22.

Her image was also starting to get much more scrutinized by the media around this time. I think this era probably marked the sharp rise of the “Taylor Swift has too many boyfriends!” argument people loved to throw around. I wish I could say I was smart enough to not buy into that shit at the time, but I wasn’t. While it didn’t bother me, it was something that I wondered about, why she dated and broke up with so many guys at such a young age. It was something that I judged her for. Obviously I didn’t yet understand that it was normal for people her age to date around. Plus it gave her some great material.

By this time, Taylor was making the gradual transition of country sweetheart to pop star, and while Red was kind of a rocky start to that, naturally she managed to pull it off. But not quite flawlessly.

Part 3: The Pop Era

Okay, I have a lot to say about these girls.

I think this era started off strong with 1989. It was a more fully realized version of Taylor’s little pop experiment, and it actually had the cohesion that I needed to be able to fully adapt to this new style she’d cultivated. She wrote yet another one of her best songs with Blank Space, which I like to think was a precursor to Reputation (and dare I say that one song did Reputation’s concept better than that album as a whole?).

However... Shake It Off. I’m sorry, I just hate that song.

WANEGBT, the first single off of Red, isn’t exactly the best song either but it made sense as to why she chose that as the first single. It was to signify her dabbling into pop. Reputation’s first single I also am not the biggest fan of, but again, made perfect sense as an introduction, but I’ll get to that later. Shake It Off, though? For the life of me, I have no idea why this song was the first single. Or to be frank, why it was even on the album at all. 

I’m sorry y’all, I just hate it. Everything about it. The verses, the chorus, the appalling rap bridge. She should’ve kept that song in the drafts and released Blank Space as a first single, and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. Sorry Shake It Off stans, but I’m sure all three of you will get over it. ❤

That said, 1989 had some excellent songs, and I was finally starting to get used to Taylor doing pop. However, my excitement and enthusiasm for her music started to falter due to my weak mind at the time once again getting swayed by the media. 

This time, I began to see Taylor as someone that seemed to be very calculated and conniving in the way she curated her image. Something that didn’t sit well with me was the “girl squad” stuff, and how all of the women she surrounded herself with were essentially these supermodels with unattainable beauty standards, and also believing the rumors about how certain famous women were given private requests to join Taylor’s “squad”. And then of course, the Kim and Kanye thing happened. #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty trended worldwide, and that was probably my earliest exposure to an instance of a celebrity getting canceled, so I was just happy to join the bandwagon. My opinion of her shifted like that, and it’s crazy to think about it now, how I barely had the capacity to form my own opinions and was easily influenced by everything I heard.

Despite me kind of joining the Taylor hate train, I did like Reputation as a concept. I liked how she disappeared from the public eye and came back being like, “You want me to be the villain? The snake? Fine.” Look What You Made Me Do, as I mentioned before, was the perfect choice for the first single despite the song itself being sonically....not the best. The music video and the line about how the old Taylor couldn’t come to the phone was an iconic moment in pop culture, I have to admit that.

I didn’t listen to the album as a whole until later, though. I was having my own hang-ups about Taylor that I think are silly now, but at the time when I didn’t like an artist I would mostly avoid their work. When I did listen to the album, though, I thought it was... okay. There’s one standout track to me and that is Getaway Car, and it’s the only song from Reputation I can say I fully adore to pieces. The other songs on there I either just like, or I find to be meh at best. (Also I know Ready For It is objectively a bad song but I really enjoy the chorus, don’t @ me, @ god)

A few years later, Lover happened and.... Once again, horrible first single. ME! is a genuinely atrocious song, and I have no idea how esteemed, prolific songwriter Taylor Swift managed to reach a point where she had a song with the phrase “spelling is fun!” in it. I feel the exact same way about this song as I do about Shake It Off. It had no business being in the album whatsoever.

As far as Lover the album goes, this came out around the time where I was kind of feeling indifferent toward Taylor (which is hilarious if you know what the first track on it is). I was much more politically aware and had learned not to put too much faith in white women, and I was focusing on other artists so much that Lover barely even came onto my radar. I listened to it once, thought it was meh, and moved on. I revisited it earlier this year and realized I was a bit too harsh on it the first time around. Sure it was her weakest album overall, but it wasn’t bad by any means. It was perfectly alright, and there were songwriting moments within it that were still quite strong. The title track and also Miss Americana comes to mind as standouts.

She started to become more vocal politically around this time. A lot of people thought it was too little too late, which was a fair point. However to me it made sense that she stayed tight-lipped about politics when she was younger, considering she was operating within the realm of country music. Plus, upon watching her documentary, it was pretty clear she had old white men behind the scenes telling her what she should or shouldn’t say, to make sure she maintained that all-American country girl sweetheart image. Still, I do agree with the people who thought that she should’ve used her platform sooner.

Oh and for the record, I think You Need to Calm Down is a terrible song. The video was cute, and the message behind it is fine, but I just hate it sonically.

At this point my interest in Taylor was probably at an all time low. The era started off strong with 1989, but it progressively got weaker. She just wasn’t really giving me much in terms of lyricism, and her pop productions were starting to blend together to the point where a lot of them were sounding very same-y. Lover to me marked the point of stagnation in her music; it was solid enough, but it just wasn’t going anywhere. We’ve seen Pop Taylor, she was cute for a while, but what else? Where does she go from here?

Well... She went into the woods.

Part 4: The Cottagecore Sisters

When I heard about Taylor dropping a surprise album, I suppose I was intrigued. She is one of the few artists that are successful enough to be able to make a move like that and cause a lot of buzz and excitement. I didn’t think much about it though, because my 2020 at that time was still inundated with SAWAYAMA and Ungodly Hour on repeat. On a whim, though, I decided to listen to it one day, not expecting much out of it.

Earlier when I was talking about her country era, I mentioned that Taylor’s storytelling and her penchant for detailed descriptions were my favorite parts of her writing. Her innate ability to transport me into other worlds, to provide escapism when my life became too much to deal with. I feel like these aspects were missing in the several years that Taylor focused on pop music. There were flashes of it in some of her later work, sure, but very few. She was becoming a huge mega superstar and her songs started to lose that sense of relatability that had been easy for me to latch on too. These things definitely contributed to my loss of interest for her work in general.

And then Folklore managed to bring me back to that place of fantasy I described before, but heightened. Elevated. Evolved. This is why I think that Folklore is Taylor Swift’s magnum opus.

Storytelling is without a doubt her strongest skill as an artist. To be able to construct not just a narrative but an entire world through songs is not something anyone can pull off. Throughout her pop era, there was always that something missing because I knew that she was capable of more. I couldn’t explain it well back then, but despite her penmanship still being commendable during those years, it still felt oddly lackluster. I knew she could do better, but I didn’t have the proof yet.

This is it. Both Folklore and Evermore showcase exactly what I knew she was capable of. This is Taylor Swift at her most creative, at her full power.

I think in a recent interview I watched (though I can’t remember which one), even she herself acknowledged how it would’ve been a disservice to continue strictly writing autobiographical songs, and so she decided to write from the perspectives of multiple different characters while also occasionally inserting herself and her life experiences into these narratives. She essentially created her own folklore and managed to make me invested in characters that don’t even exist.

I have to talk about the love triangle trilogy: cardigan, august and betty. It’s a testament to her songwriting ability that these fictional characters feel like real people. The story of Betty, James and Augusta/Augustine is just so well done to the point where I forget that it’s Taylor Swift singing. When I listen to these songs, I am fully imagining the characters she conjured up. 

The song that I find the most profound out of the three, and also happens to be my favorite song on the album, is august. To me, it is the most heartbreaking song out of all of them. I relate so much to that girl who’s hopelessly in love with someone that just doesn’t give a shit about them and is merely using her for a summer fling. And it’s not even like I’ve experienced something similar to this in real life, Taylor just somehow made it relatable with the sheer power of her pen game. It’s even more heartbreaking considering we don’t know what happened to this girl, if she ever managed to find happiness, because in the Long Pond Sessions Taylor mentioned that Betty and James eventually got back together. They got their happy ending, but what happened to Augustine?

I can’t believe she’s got me this deep in my feelings over non-existent teenagers, I swear to god.

Just when I thought Folklore was going to be the end of this new side of her for a while, she releases Evermore in December, its sister album. While I don’t think it’s quite as strong as Folklore, it still delivered immensely in terms of lyricism, productions and vocals. Evermore’s release pretty much solidified the realization that I was basically becoming a Swiftie again, a whole decade later.

I was embarrassed by that thought at first, but honestly now I’m at a point where I don’t think there’s anything to be embarrassed about. Taylor is too skilled of a songwriter for me to consider her a guilty pleasure. I just needed something to help me come to that conclusion, and these two albums did just that. She finally gave to me what I was waiting for.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really stan artists the same way I used to now, which I mentioned previously in my review of Chromatica. I don’t deify them or hold them to an impossible moral standard they could never live up to anymore. I see them as flawed human beings that have the capacity to make great art. So when I say I’m becoming a Swiftie, I’m still fully aware that Taylor Swift is a thirty-one year old rich white woman who is bound to have shortcomings and missteps as a person. In my mind, she hasn’t done anything drastic enough or stupid enough for me to become uncomfortable in listening to her work. I had my own ideas about how she could’ve been fake, conniving, manipulative or whatever else the media was trying to convey about her, but there really is no way of knowing who she truly is as a person.

Celebrities and influencers have the power to curate their image however they want. The relationships they have with us, the audience, are entirely parasocial, so of course we base our judgments of them based on very limited knowledge, or just the surface-level view of what they’re like. I don’t know if Taylor is as down to earth and genuine as she appears to be now, and I honestly don’t need to know. If she does things I disagree with or acts a certain way that deserves criticism, of course I’d still call her out, and depending on the severity of what it was she said or did, it might end up with me not wanting to engage with her work anymore.

But the reality is, as a person, I’ve realized that she is just fine. I was holding on to a certain idea of her in my head where I think at one point I dubbed her “the Anne Hathaway of music”, meaning someone that comes across too perfect to the point where it seems calculated and disingenuous. But honestly, I just don’t feel that way about her anymore. I don’t feel particularly attached to her as a person, either. 

But I do feel an attachment to her music. At the end of the day, that’s where I’m standing now when it comes to her. I don’t have any expectations or delusions about her as a human being, and I’m not going to remain devoted to her if she does something dumb, but I believe that she is an insanely gifted artist who has written so many songs that genuinely speak to me and make me feel intensely. She lost me for a while, but now I’m right back in it.

So yeah, like I said in the beginning of the post, life’s too short to pretend to hate Taylor Swift. I’d rather just pretend to live in a mystical small town as a sad gay witch. And I’m at peace with that.

[megababymoy-blog]

Gabriel's Inferno: Part II pelicula completa en español [[latino]] gratis

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Titulo original: Gabriel’s Inferno part 2 Lanzamiento: 2020-07-31 Duración: 103 minutos Género: Romance Estrellas: Melanie Zanetti, Giulio Berruti, Kurt McKinney, Agnes Albright, Margaux Brooke Director: Tosca Musk, Sylvain Reynard Sinopsis: una exploración intrigante y pecaminosa de la seducción, el amor prohibido y la redención, Gabriel’s Inferno es una historia cautivadora y apasionada del escape de un hombre de su propio infierno personal mientras intenta ganar lo imposible: el perdón y el amor.

El pasado mes de mayo se estrenaba en Moviefarm la película Gabriel’s Inferno, que adapta la novela El infierno de Gabriel de Sylvain Reynard. Sin embargo la segunda parte de la película no se estrenará en la plataforma hasta finales de julio. Tal y como confirmaba la propia página a través de sus redes sociales Gabriel’s Inferno Part II llegará a Moviefarm el viernes 31 de julio. Esta película es la secuela de la exitosa comedia Padre no hay más que uno (2019), que vuelve a dirigir y a protagonizar Santiago Segura

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There are also documentaries with original and real pictures, or biographical films that tell the story of a character. There are many other popular genre films, ranging from action films, horror films, comedy films, romantic films, fantasy films, thriller films, drama films, science fiction films, crime films, documentaries and others. That’s a little information about the definition of film or movie. The information was quoted from various sources and references. Hope it can be useful. >>> TV MOVIE <<< The first television shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within a very short range from the broadcast tower starting in the 1930s. Televised events such as the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany, the 19340 coronation of King George VI in the UK, and David Sarnoff’s famous introduction at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the US spurred a growth in the medium, but World War II put a halt to development until after the war. The 19440 World MOVIE inspired many Americans to buy their first television set and then in 1948, the popular radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “”Mr Television”” and demonstrating that the medium was a stable, modern form of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The first national live television broadcast in the US took place on September 4, 1951 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets. The first national color broadcast (the 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade) in the US occurred on January 1, 1954. During the following ten years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. A color transition was announced for the fall of 1965, during which over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 19402, the last holdout among daytime network shows converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season. >>> Formats and Genres <<< See also: List of genres § Film and television formats and genres Television shows are more varied than most other forms of media due to the wide variety of formats and genres that can be presented. A show may be fictional (as in comedies and dramas), or non-fictional (as in documentary, news, and reality television). It may be topical (as in the case of a local newscast and some made-for-television films), or historical (as in the case of many documentaries and fictional MOVIE). 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If you are wondering what you can watch on this website, then you should know that it covers genres that include crime, Science, Fi-Fi, action, romance, thriller, Comedy, drama and Anime Movie. Thank you very much. We tell everyone who is happy to receive us as news or information about this year’s film schedule and how you watch your favorite films. Hopefully we can become the best partner for you in finding recommendations for your favorite movies. That’s all from us, greetings! Thanks for watching The Video Today. I hope you enjoy the videos that I share. Give a thumbs up, like, or share if you enjoy what we’ve shared so that we more excited. Sprinkle cheerful smile so that the world back in a variety of colors

[thezolblade]

Some quick Martin meta as I've had some thoughts, looking back on the earlier seasons and Q&As in light of his current loneliness. (Tagging @somuchbetterthanthat​ as you were interested!) I may have slightly lost track of canon vs fanon for some of the finer details, but anyway:

- Martin had to care for his mum from age 8 when she got ill after his dad left them, and he eventually had to drop out of school at 17.

- He started looking for work to support her, and applied to the Magnus Institute because he was looking for just about anywhere that would take him and pay well enough. He lied on his CV about having a degree and lots of relevant experience, and probably had to lie about his age and pretend to be several years older.

- He absolutely threw himself into his work. Sasha said he's 'a great researcher' but doesn't have much sense of 'self preservation'. He was probably worried that lacking the skills he'd lied about on his CV would get him fired, so he tried to make up for it with determination. By devoting a lot of time & effort to the job, he seems to have given people the impression he was over-keen even if they noticed that he was good at some aspects of it. And it took up at least some of his evenings.

- As he mentioned in the letter to his mum that Jon challenged him about, he was scared of what his colleagues would think if they knew he was lying to them all about his life experience.

- That would've kept him from opening up at work, since talking about himself at length would've made the lie more complicated. How well could he pretend to have been to university if someone took a sustained interest in getting to know him?

- He spent at least a few years pining over Jon, who was too disinterested to pose that risk. Talking to Jon was relatively safe, in that sense; he consistently maintained an emotional distance, though he always made an effort to keep people’s physical safety in mind (as I mentioned in some Jon meta), and was somewhat on the same wavelength in terms of throwing himself into the work.

- Martin’s unrequited crush would've been an additional obstacle to trying to meet people in a romantic context.

- Since he had to support his mum, the care home fees probably didn't leave him enough for a particularly great flat or any really expensive hobbies or nights out. He wrote poetry (inexpensive) as a creative outlet, but wasn't stellar enough at it to get any literary success (though he might've done better if he'd been able to stay in school).

- Melanie and Basira complained in s3 that he got snippy with them out of jealousy that they'd been talking to Jon, as if they were going to 'steal his archivist', so there's yet another way Martin was prone to getting too defensive to make friends at work.

- The Assistants Round Table comment about Martin's 'nervousness and obsession with trying to make things work' may have been somewhat about his attitude to the job and the professional relationships he had to maintain. As far as he was aware, if he ever said the wrong thing or slipped up too blatantly with a case, he could have been fired, which would've placed his mother's health at risk, and she already refused to talk to him, so he couldn't afford to fail her if he ever wanted to make things right... There was an ever-present risk that things would fall apart.

- He had to take responsibility for keeping his Mum alive from an age when would've been too young to deal with the pressure even if she'd been affectionate and grateful. The way she hated him and he still kept trying to please her... seems like he learned to respond to negativity/rejection by trying harder, not giving up, so long as he still had a chance to try to fix things. And that carries over into other areas, where he tries to 'make things work' in the hope that it'll all work out okay, long after the point where other people (e.g. Tim) would have cut their losses and said "that's not my problem".

- One of Alex's comments in the Round Table was that Martin is like an 18 year old who needs to be told "some people are going to hate you, that's okay, you can't fix everyone" - but if teenage Martin had actually been told that, it wouldn't have helped him accept his Mum hating him, and he wouldn't have given up on doing what he could to 'fix' their financial situation to keep them both alive. He absolutely needed to find an employer who didn't hate him, and if he didn't manage to keep in touch with any school friends after dropping out, he would've had a hard time being 'okay' with it if any of them despised him for his situation.

- In his formative years, Martin learned something more like the message "the people you love and need most will hate or abandon you, and if you care the slightest bit about them you'll still be completely selfless for their sake".

- By the time Martin's somewhere around 30, in season 1, he's been at the Institute for long enough that he's bound to be more confident than he was at the start, and his determination and resourcefulness shine through right from his introduction in episode 22. Still, the lessons he'd learned in his youth were ingrained enough that he hadn't entirely unlearned them, and as the points above describe, I can see why he wouldn't be able to let himself open up completely around anyone, or genuinely brush off criticism, as opposed to dealing with it with obsessive effort and / or mild denial.

- I've seen headcanons that he attends an amateur poetry group, which I could totally see. If so, he’d have had to quit when he got too busy to write, after season 3.

- So far in season 4, after he had to accept that he'd lost the people most important to him... well, a lot of his abruptness seems to be due to the requirements of his new goal, but he also sounds sort of bitter now. Trying to support everyone didn't work, or at least not well enough, he couldn't save them, and he had to face up to the fact that he couldn't save himself or his remaining colleagues from the ever-increasing danger they were in by carrying on the same way. He signed up for a different strategy on an intellectual level, and it involves cutting emotional ties that he couldn't maintain anyway, at a time when he was grieving and vulnerable and everything was changing. No wonder he's not trying to please everyone anymore, even if he's still holding out for a time when he can explain himself.

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘Dark Matter’ (S04E15) Analysis

I return!  After a very nice vacation in the land of sometimes-internet, I’m excited to get back to writing up the newest episode of TMA. And it’s even more fun to come back for the long-awaited conclusion of the Daedalus Space Station story.  We’ve had the Lonely, and we’ve had the Vast, and finally we get the perspective of the crewmember representing the Dark. And a member of the People’s Church of the Divine Host, no less.  Come on in to hear what I have to say about ‘Dark Matter’.

Although Manuela didn’t say much new about the Dark itself, I definitely found some interesting points in the statement.  First off, a great deal of the ‘creation’ that happens with each power seems driven the feelings and beliefs of its adherents.  Manuela was well aware that the Dark Star couldn’t be created with real science, but because she was a scientist, it had to feel like science for her to accomplish her task.  This seems to mirror a lot of powers.  For Jon, he has to feel as though he’s asking questions and getting stories to generate any real power.  For Jude Perry, she had to feel as though she was creating pain for people who didn’t deserve it.  For every avatar and every powerful adherent, their power comes from feeling.  

And I think that’s why Peter and the other powers require consent to truly use someone.  And it can’t just be lip-service consent either. Someone has to FEEL as though they belong to a power, they have to believe it, or it simply won’t work.  I think that may be why Georgie seems so impervious.  By removing her fear, the End may have inadvertently created someone who will never feel the possession of a power.  Because the fear also seems to be a crucial component.  They have to feel, believe, and fear, and somehow that alchemy translates into true power.

I’m also interested that it was the Dark that initiated the project to fund the Daedalus.  The Vast would seem to have just as much reason, but we don’t know what the ritual they needed was.  Perhaps space wasn’t necessary for them the way it was for Manuela to create the Dark Star.

I also wonder if the Fairchilds and the Lukases knew they were chipping in to help the Dark with its ritual.  From the statements given by Kilbride and Chilcott, I can’t see that they were any obvious part of a ritual, and indeed, Jan Kilbride was used to prevent a different ritual later.  He was specifically only touched by the Vast (and Manuela knows that Gertrude used him to stop a ritual, and lied to him to do it).  So, if they weren’t all competing for the same ritual, why help one another?

That’s a question I keep coming back to.  Helping another, similar power seems logical when it’s not about a ritual, but rituals by their nature eliminate all other powers.  So why would any power knowingly assist another in performing one?

And it seems, at least according to Elias, that the Dark hasn’t performed its ritual yet.  Which is very interesting, as Peter insisted to Martin that every power save the End, the Web, and the Beholding had a go and failed. Who’s lying?  Is Peter deliberately concealing the other unattempted rituals from Martin to make him think Peter isn’t trying one of his own? Or to focus Martin on this supposed 15th power?

Or does Elias want Jon in Norway for a reason not related to the Dark Star (and I have absolutely no doubt he was instrumental in getting Jon this statement when he did)?  Jon flailing at the Dark while the Beholding gears up for the Watcher’s Crown would be quite practical.  

Or does Elias not really care much what Jon does for a bit?  Is his focus on Basira instead?  The beginning of this statement, the way that Manuela spoke of the head of the Institute, may be the strongest evidence yet that Elias is Jonah Magnus, or at least that Magnus is a parasitic personality that attaches to each head of the Institute in turn.  It seems a stretch that Elias, pre-Institute, knew Maxwell Rayner, especially since we know for certain that Rayner and Magnus were acquainted.  It’s not 100% confirmation, perhaps, but I would say it’s a strong bit of evidence in favor of Jonah being a parasitic personality that moves from host to host.

And Basira was right that Elias can’t enact the Watcher’s Crown from prison.  But if the parasitic personality of Jonah Magnus can leave Elias’ body (potentially through its death, as Elias seemed very excited indeed for Basira to try to kill him), could it leave prison behind in a shiny new Basira suit, all ready to enact the Watcher’s Crown from Jon’s side.  

And if Peter and Elias are working together, this could be the link there.  It’s not that Peter desperately needed Martin, but Elias desperately needed Martin out of the way.  Getting Martin to cross over to the Lonely, and damn near destroying Melanie and Daisy, would leave Jon with little option but to rely more and more on Basira. And if Magnus could slip into her mind without her noticing, how better to slowly push Jon to be receptive to their own ritual than through the guise of a friend?

But that circles right back, doesn’t it, to the question of why one power would help another perform their rituals.  This is potentially two rituals the Lonely has assisted in, neither of which are its own. The Lukases helped create the Dark Star. If Peter really is trying to steal Martin as a favor to Elias, he’s potentially helping foster the Watcher’s Crown.

Why?  What is the Lonely getting out of helping the other powers near completion of their rituals?  The Web I can almost see ‘helping’ only to screw with the other powers, but the Lonely has no such obvious motivation in its makeup.  In fact, helping others, getting involved, seems the exact opposite of what the Lonely would do.

There are pieces missing. The Watcher’s Crown is on the horizon, and Jon seems to have all but forgotten about it.  The Lukases are helping other powers with their rituals for no clear reason.  Elias is playing a long game, but I think Basira far more than Jon is at the heart of it. Peter may or may not believe there is a 15th power on the rise, and Martin is hey to stopping its emergence.

There are so many balls in the air at this point, and I still can’t see any obvious shape for this season.  I know it’s still early days, but unlike previous seasons, it’s not that there’s no clear antagonist, it’s that there are too many.  Each splintered fragment of the Archival team seem to be focusing on a different power and a different problem, with no cohesion between them.

It makes me really want to see what would happen if they could all sit down and properly compare notes. Jon has his knowledge, but it only goes so far.  He tried to Know about the Dark this time, but he can’t see into it for obvious reasons. Basira has some more of the pieces of the puzzle, but they may or may not be accurate, depending on what Elias’ game is.  Martin is working on something totally separate, but I have to wonder if it’s not more connected than anyone thinks.  

No matter what, the endless refrain for this show of ‘things would work out so much better if these assholes would just talk to one another’ continues.  With so many balls in the air, I have no idea how they’ll fall throughout the season.  I don’t trust Peter or Elias, and I think the changes we’re seeing in Basira are only the beginning.  For all I can tell, the colonization of someone’s mind might be a gradual thing. Elias needs to maintain contact with her in order to transfer Magnus over to her, and so he continues to lead her about, detaching her from everyone including Daisy, encouraging her to view people only as tools for her to use or discard.  She may be in the process of becoming Jonah already, and no one has even recognized it as such.

Conclusion

And with that we’re five episodes to the midseason finale.  I really sort of hope that’s not Ny Alesund, because we’ve spent the better part of a half season building up other major plot issues (Peter Lukas, Elias in jail, Helen, the attacks on the archives, everyone being split off from one another), and this has come on very suddenly.  No buildup, just bam.  New threat, deal with it.  And while that’s moderately exciting, I’d rather focus on the stuff we’ve been building toward rather than a new ball in the air.

So I hope that the Dark Star will get the same gradual treatment that the other stories have, or that it’s a red herring from either Peter or Elias or both to distract from what’s really going on.  I don’t particularly care about the Dark, as I haven’t given enough time to do so.  I do care about Peter’s effect on the cast, on Jon’s isolation, on the looming threats of the Lonely and the Watcher’s Crown. Even the Extinction seems more pressing than the sudden introduction of another ritual.  And considering the contradictions between what Peter and Elias have said regarding the other rituals, I think it’s a fair bet that whatever is happening at Ny Alesund, it’s not so straightforward as a new ritual to disrupt.  

Other things are at play here.  Whether Peter and Elias are working together or at odds or (my personal theory) both, they’re doling out contradictory information, and no one is checking on what anyone else is doing.  I really want, no matter what happens in the next five episodes, for that to happen. If only to piss off Peter.

[efortmanteau]

TMA Headcanons

I sort of spoiled myself in terms of headcanons for The Adventure Zone, so now I try to finish/get caught up on podcasts and form impressions entirely in my head before introducing visual ideas via fanart. And lately I've been focusing on The Magnus Archives SOOOO here we go:

My headcanons for The Magnus Archives. A few were originally written after listening through s2. I've added my s3 thoughts below characters or in a new section. I'm only 3 episodes in to s4 so no spoilers after the end of s3.

Jon (I only recently discovered that there's no H in his spelling, whoops) aka The Archivist - Obviously Jon doesn't really have fun ever, so the main word I think of is 'austere.' He's a pale white guy with dark hair and greyish or brownish eyes who basically always dresses formally--collared shirts, slacks, maybe even vests, usually neutral colors. He's thin, but not fit--just the type of guy who doesn't put on weight since he doesn't focus much on food. Rectangular face, maybe has facial hair… I haven't decided, but if he does, it's like a goatee/mustache scenario that's always well trimmed. In my mind, he's young to mid 30s, but could look older. When he's scared or disshevelled though, he looks a lot younger. I think he's also kind of short, maybe 5'8", so he keeps really good posture to make up for it. Ben Whishaw is almost right, but he'd have to be homelier. S3 updates: Not really any? Although apparently it's Jon without an H. I've confirmed that he looks older than he is since the spider picturebook episode (which I would love Don Hertzfeld to animate, perhaps with assistance from Jules Feiffer who is 90 gd years old… that episode is so vivid in my head). Also I forgot Jon has worm… scars? Pock-marks? Not sure how that works, but you probably don't see them much, given I can't imagine him in short sleeves or shorts, although maybe he has a few on his neck visible pretty frequently, above collars. I'm was pleased to learn he is canonically asexual, but not all that surprised. Something about the way he interacted with Georgie in her apartment had me wondering… maybe it reminds me of me and my ex (I'm the asexual one, my ex isn't, but we still get along).

Martin - I immediately imagined Marty (Terry Gross Waters-Waters SAT tutor in Gayle) when I learned more about soft, sweet lad Martin, so Matty Cardarople has always kind of been in my head. That is probably just a similar name situation, but it's kind of perfect. Since Martin said he wasn't the smallest of guys but still made it into a basement window, I imagine he's kind of tall and chubby, but doesn't seem tall, slouchy, not the most confident person. Sort of a Neville Longbottom situation (before the glow-up). I think somewhere between Matty and Nick Robinson is around the correct appearance: a little more clean shaven and formally dressed than Matty often is with shorter hair (but still flippy), but softer than Nick is. This guy wears sweaters a lot. I guess he's canonically 29 at the end of s1--I had imagined him in his mid 20s somewhere, but I guess he was pretending to be older since he claimed he had a master's degree. S3 updates: Martin is probably the one who was most easy for me to imagine. I never really thought of his fixation on Jon to be a crush, which I'm really intrigued by in terms of character development. I was parsing it more of Martin being a bit of a subservient character, that he was like that to everyone in the office, but we only saw it from Jon's POV as the primary narrator. If I do a re-listen, I'll be very interested to pick out some Martin/Jon moments now that I have a different context.

Sasha (or maybe Sascha) - I sort of had Sally Donovan from BBC's Sherlock in mind initially. I tried to stray away from that and looked up "half black actress." I picked out Zawe Ashton without even realizing that she had in fact played Sally (in one episode, so not her main actress) because of her hair and skin and the fact that her face is pleasant, but not the typical hyper-button baby doll face that some actresses have. Sasha has natural hair with light curls (sometimes straightened). I originally pictured a small afro, but I think in s2, they refer to her as having long hair, so I guess not? I'm also not clear if that was Not-Sasha imitating her, or just straight up not looking like real-Sasha at all. She's slim, pretty posh/minimalist in style--grey herringbone peacoat, umbrella, boots. I imagine she's half Russian heritage-wise, since is a common Russian diminutive for Aleksandra. I would put her in the 25-27 age range. S3 updates: I caught on to Not-Sasha (partially because I saw the name in the voice actor credits, whoops), but I think I also caught something in Lottie's flat affect that clued me in. I thought that the imposter was just good at disguise, not that people had been cursed to forget what real Sasha looked like, so Melanie's introduction and take on Sasha/Not-Sasha threw me off a bit. I don't remember if the "long hair" comment was for real- or Not-Sasha. But I don't have any headcanons about Not-Sasha… just that she looks nothing like the original.

Tim - In my head Tim is the tallest main character, maybe 6'2", and pretty fit. He's imposing at first glance, but since he's so congenial and laid back (at least in s1 before Jon totally pisses him off) everyone who knows him knows he's a nice, fun guy. He's black, with fairly dark complexion, short hair, clean shaven. He probably wears sweaters too, but like… the thinner kind. None of this bulky knit from grandma that Martin rocks. I first think of Alan from Russian Doll (Charlie Barnett), but darker, just black instead of more mixed. I'd say he's around Jon's age. S3 updates: RIP in pepperinos. I guess him being fit is not unreasonable since he is… canonically? (does Alex and Jonny joking about it make it canonical) an outdoorsy adventurer. I certainly missed his friendly nature, but my headcanons didn't really change. He just looked a lot more tired up until the end of s3.

Elias - He is older than the rest of them, I would guess in his 40s or 50s, but given that it's canon that he rose in the ranks kind of quickly, maybe he's not that old after all. I don't really have a good mental picture of him, maybe because I can't differentiate his voice from John's a lot of the time until I piece the context together. In my mind he has a beard and mustache though, kind of full, and maybe dirty blonde hair that's greying a bit. S3 updates: I wouldn't be surprised if he carried a cane that was actually a sword or a gun (I'm American, so having a gun seems very easy to me, so I'm not sure if that would be rare in England). Also, did I hear something about having a grey bun? Maybe I'm completely confusing it with something else, but I'm chuckling about man bun Elias.

Michael - Well, he isn't human… but he looks kind of like a really pale guy who is mishapen and thus wearing a lot of clothing at first glance? He probably wears a lot of clothes so you can't really make him out under the trench coat, scarf, hat, etc. (I might be confusing him with someone else). I think it's canon that his hands are large and maybe have too many bones. For some reason, Michael reminds me of tourmalinated quartz--black and white for the most part, striations cutting through the clearer crystal--sort of like a metaphor for how he kind of… dimension hops? Ends up where he isn't supposed to? I imagine striations of his appearance sort of blip in and out when you look at him based on the static he causes on recordings. S3 updates: I now know that he was an assistant to Gertrude. I guess my idea of his human form is basically the same color and demeanor, just not other-worldly in proportions and bone count. Probably the tall gangly type of white guy. ALSO I guess he's kind of Helen now…? I'll do a separate one for Helen.

---BREAK to add characters I didn't write about until the end of s3---

Basira - I assume she is a Muslim woman, based on her name. I imagine she wears a hijab. I picture her as Middle-Eastern, perhaps Iranian, but she could also be black (there are a fair amount of black Muslims in America, not sure if it's common in England). Other than the hijab, she's not very feminine in her styling. Being on the force probably means you want pretty functional, utilitarian garments. I don't remember if she talked in great detail about how she joined the police, whether it was straight from school, but in my mind she's late 30s.

Daisy - I think I recall she has a back tattoo? She's a murderer so she has a tough air about her, but she's also a subtle murderer, so nothing about her screams that she's dangerous… you just get that feeling, you know? I imagine a white lady, short blonde hair, blue eyes. Kind of like Brienne of Tarth, but more plain than ugly. She's maybe early to mid 40s. I'm not sure if her relationship with Basira is supposed to be romantic or not. I kind of prefer this weird closeness that doesn't always equate to trust given their specific experiences. Regardless, I imagine they are around the same age.

Melanie - Melanie is probably the youngest, early to mid 20s. Typical build and height, maybe a little chubby, but not unable to climb fences or anything (gotta hunt them ghosts). She has a short, asymmetrical bob, dark hair, but part is dyed a bright color of pink, purple, maybe green. I imagine she has a go-to windbreaker that has some neon colors.

Helen - I'm so sad that we had to lose Michael to gain Helen. I really love the Spiral and the characters we've met who are involved with them. Helen in my mind was a badass realtor, ready to close a deal, very driven… and that carried over into becoming SpiralHelen. She sort of outsmarted it with the locked door, didn't she? I can't imagine that's very common for humans/avatars to get the better of their entities. She seems really strong willed, so I'm excited to see where she goes as a human who is becoming an avatar. I think her personality translates into her being 40-something but like lowkey hot? She probably rocks a suit with a skirt in bold colors that men's wear usually doesn't offer (all over red suit, tailored to her, pumps, straight brown hair, nice makeup). I'm not sure how the Spiral would affect her… maybe her angles just get a little more pronounced? She's probably not yet to the point of disfiguration that Michael was anyway.

Georgie - She is like a terrier who will bark at a big dog because they don't know to be afraid of it (or… how to be afraid of it, in her case). She is short, 5'2" or less (I just remembered that a lot of the listeners probably use metric measurements, so sorry for that, but I'm not going to bother converting). I imagine she is cute--she dresses up for her dates to Hungarian restaurants (my favorite detail omg girl get it) and wants to look hot, but really she can't get away from cute. Brown curly hair, big brown eyes, button nose. But resting bitch face… gotta ward off those catcalls and get taken seriously somehow.

Jergen? I can’t spell, it’s Jurgen - Jowly white guy. Wispy caramelly colored hair that's going white. Probably pretty tall, which I'm sure what an annoyance in those tunnels.

Gertrude - At first glance, just some old white lady. But after you get to know her, you realize she can probably murder you and is nowhere near as frail as you think. Curly, wiry grey hair.

[soveryanon]

Review for MAG123 (rambling/pondering/speculating/ etc. /o/)

-  That’s it, time is catching up and we’re fully reaching Jon’s era as the Head Archivist: the statement was given on August 1st 2015, explicitly after the end of Gertrude’s reign, and the consequences culminated… when Jon was already firmly rooted in the position:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] I did do some light searching myself on Gregory Cox. … Vanished, unsurprisingly. Sometime in late July 2016, which is… [CHUCKLE] Two years ago. […] It looks like the statement came in just after Gertrude disappeared. […] I may be the first person to actually read it, so… sorry Angie, I suppose.

I always felt strongly for people coming to the Institute as a last resort – not because they wanted to share a story, but because they needed help and that nobody was able or knowledgeable enough to believe them. They don’t appear often (and none has topped the heartbreak of MAG037′s Jason North for me… yet) but they still pop up from time to time, and this one was almost in that category, which served as a reminder that from then on, people’s calls for help will technically be… Jon’s responsibility, too, unless he follows the Institute/Elias’s guidelines (MAG017: “record and study, not interfere or contain” / MAG092: “Jonah Magnus did leave him in that place, Jon. […] it was because he was curious. Because he had to know, to watch and see it all. That’s what this place is, Jon, never forget it.”) and declines to get involved. Jude Perry had also snarled about it, so it doesn’t sound like it’s an Institute thing, even less an Archivist, to intervene in anything (aside from stopping other rituals). Despite that, Jon still felt like he had to apologize to Angie – a bit light-heartedly… but he still did, as if he had indeed let down someone who was expecting assistance in her situation. Which… is not even something that Jon used to do in season 1. That’s pretty good?? I had feared that there would be something about his guilt getting cauterized, but no, it’s still sweetbean!Jon-trying-harder from the end of season 3???

(MAG123) BASIRA: Well, just back off. You haven’t been here. ARCHIVIST: O… Okay. You’re right. I haven’t. So explain it to me. […] BASIRA: That isn’t funny, Jon. ARCHIVIST: I know it’s not–! … Sorry. It’s just… it’s a lot.

He’s putting efforts in when interacting!! Relenting!! Taking a step back and calming himself down instead of taking offence right away!! Same strategy as with Tim in MAG114: developing what he’s thinking and avoiding to ask direct questions!! Jon!!!

- … so what the heck HAPPENED for Jon to apparently forget a chunk of memories, starting with the end of The Unknowing (and until – and including – when he apparently ~made his choice~ after Oliver’s statement). Jon might still be lying through his teeth when recording but… it sounds like he indeed doesn’t remember anything and still thinks he’s coming out of a normal (if long) coma (without any actual damage, since he’s back in office two days after waking up (the medical staff wanted to kick him out fast, didn’t they.), but still):

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [HEAVY SIGHS] Where did the– [PAPERS RUFFLING, THEN MUTTERING] Coma, great! Let’s rearrange his office. Sleeping people don’t need… pens. […] MELANIE: Tim is dead. Daisy is dead. And you, what? You’re just fine? ARCHIVIST: No, I’ve been in hospital for six months! […] ARCHIVIST: [CHUCKLE] Two years ago. … That doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t feel like… … There’s just this… great… gap of time, where I wasn’t. […] [SIGHS] Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired.

Is it Jon blocking out the memories because he can’t handle them? Beholding censoring them? The Spiders? Something else? (Also, has Jon had the time to visit his flat? Does he still have his flat? Does he still legally exist? I suppose that Tim’s body was Section 31’d, not sure that Jon was even reported as having been at the Wax Museum, the Institute could have transferred him without any proof… but aaaah, what is Jon’s current legal status.) I’m not sure whether the others never telling him outright that hi!! Jon!! only your brain has been functioning for the past six months, what the heck!! is a case of miscommunication (they tend to do that a lot ;;) or… something spooky preventing them from telling him, without them realizing it. Who will drop the news to Jon? Or will Jon remember it/pick up on the hints beforehand? Except his introduction with “the Archivist” and his feeling of being “more real” (MAG122), there has been no indication whatsoever that… he’s actively aware of something being Different. And I don’t feel like he’s acting differently from the end of season 3 either? He still sounds like he’s Trying a lot, aware that he could make the situation worse by reacting badly? Even powers-wise: he hasn’t compulsed anyone since he woke up (unless the tape recorder doesn’t react to it anymore). And if he doesn’t remember anything of The Unknowing past Gertrude’s appearance, he probably doesn’t remember about the shiny new power of… apparently being able to See/unravel someone’s backstory…

(- But there’s no way that he hasn't in fact become a full Beholding avatar, since he now makes awful Eye puns. “I mean, I know me and Melanie have not always seen eye to eye before” jON UHJBIUBHJHJBNUIHJN NO, DON’T–)

- … yeaaaaAAAAAAaaah, I’m definitely dreading Elias&Jon’s next conversation, whenever it finally happens: I’m fearing more and more that Jon or someone will be reduced to asking for Elias’s help since… nothing is good right now, and how are they supposed to get rid of Peter? How are they supposed to stop becoming a target for other entities? (I’m still wondering if Jon’s clock in his hospital room was Elias’s, and maybe acted as a protection? It’s curious that Jon wasn’t attacked when at his most vulnerable (even half-dead, there could have been ways to ensure he would get a bit deader.), while other avatars, such as Nikola or “Michael”, had been able to track him down before. Then again, the spiders apparently sent Oliver to him, so maybe they’d actually been protecting him, too?) But whether it’s a visit-of-shame to Elias in prison, or Elias coming back by himself at some point… I’m D: that if Jon still doesn’t remember, Elias… might know about it already anyway… He seems aware of which statements Jon reads, according to MAG102, so even assuming he would not know or have witnessed the moment of ~choosing~ firsthand from Jon’s dreams (since he demonstrated that he could see them in MAG120), he… probably has already noticed the switch to “the Archivist” in Jon’s introductions. (And no mention of Jon getting his hands on MAG120′s tape so far, but that one surely won’t be pleasant either.)

- Jon explicitly said that it’s been “Two days” since he woke up, which means that heeee recorded two statements in two days (and received Oliver’s), which is… a lot, but not unheard of (he got three VERY intense weeks from MAG071 to MAG081, and five awful days from MAG089 to MAG094). But!! Interestingly, he ended up audibly drained after this one. I thought he was mostly emotionally drained, but he did explicitly mention getting tired (“Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired. … End recording. [CLICK.]”) and his voice was getting slower and he sounded like he had trouble focusing. Which means that statements might still be taking their toll on him?

- Belated realisation, thanks to Melanie’s comment that… Well, I had assumed that Basira behaving so warily and firmly around Jon in MAG122 was because she suspected he might have fallen deeper into Beholding, hence the fact that he surprisingly managed to survive? But it’s because Elias’s statement in MAG120, and Oliver’s in MAG121, that we listeners knew that something was in the works in that regard. Other characters… had reason to suspect other things:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Me–Melanie, it’s me– MELANIE: No. No. […] How did you make it out, then, mm? […] Tim is dead. Daisy is dead. And you, what? You’re just fine? ARCHIVIST: No, I’ve been in hospital for six months! MELANIE: Something has been in hospital. Something that’s got your face like– I warned Basira, I said not to let you back in here, but she just doesn’t listen!

… with him back as basically a corpse with an active brain, did they initially think that he was one of the Stranger’s creatures that had managed to take his skin? Melanie’s description sounds exactly like… something resulting from an encounter with the Anglerfish… (AND AOUCH AOUCH AOUCH when thinking about Sasha ;; The Not!Them acted differently with her, overwriting her existence in the mind of others, but still… Melanie had been the only one to be able to tell that “Sasha” didn’t look like the Sasha she had met, and had to deal with people not believing her about the differences, back then… And unlike Jon, she actually liked Sasha, from their single encounter… even without taking her Possible Current Slaughter-Induced Condition into account, that would be enough to not want to go through that experience again…).

- ALL THE KUDOS TO LYDIA FOR HER PERFORMANCE THIS EPISODE HOLY HECK… The frenzy and irrationality and rejection was just WOW… And ;; Elias had pretty much stated that she would see Martin ensuring his arrest instead of letting her kill him as a form of betrayal (MAG120: “You didn't tell her. [CHUCKLES] Worried she might create too much of a scene. I understand. I just hope she… doesn’t hold it against you.”), and she hasn't even mentioned Martin in this one but… was not tender about Basira, worse towards Jon:

(MAG123) MELANIE: […] I warned Basira, I said not to let you back in here, but she just doesn’t listen! [STOMPING? AND FURIOUS STRANGLED NOISES] […] You don’t know me. And I don’t know… you, so stay the hell away from me, or I swear– ARCHIVIST: Okay– MELANIE: –I will…

It seems like the influence of the bullet (?) tends to make her see anyone as a potential enemy? ;; According to Elias, she mostly couldn’t stand the feeling of being trapped by the Institute (MAG102: “Even more than the others, she has a visceral hatred of being trapped. Regardless of how much freedom I afford her.” / MAG106: “A rationalization, of course. A lie, about your own selfishness, that you would rather be dead than trapped without the self-determination you prize so highly.”) and it seems to be confirmed that her biggest problem is with the concept of the Institute:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Basira said Elias was gone! MELANIE: Oh gone, right, yes yes, he is… he’s gone. Like that makes any difference. ARCHIVIST: I don’t understand. MELANIE: No? You don’t, do you? He’s still alive. You are still alive. So THIS PLACE is still–! [HEAVY STRANGLED BREATHING]

;; She had told Jon that she saw him as responsible when he had talked her into not killing Elias (right now) in MAG102 (“We’ll try it your way. But whatever your way actually is, you’d better figure it out fast. Because it is your fault that I’m here. Fix it, or get out of the way!”), and Elias’s arrest… indeed has fixed nothing. More dead people on the borders; a worst replacement; and attacks on the Institute itself. There is a part of irrationality in her reasoning (Jon wasn’t even there when she accepted the job, and he had done nothing to make her feel at ease in the Institute?) but also enough arguments that hit the mark so efficiently, holy heck. Her words were a riot, fifty shades of HURT and stabbing hearts here and there. She managed to render Jon speechless, for Arceus’s sake!!!

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Melanie, Melanie: it’s… it’s me. MELANIE: Oh! Okay, so what, “Hi Jon, how are you, get anyone killed lately?” ARCHIVIST: … I… MELANIE: Wipe that look off your face. Like you’re not the reason all of this is happening. Like you’re any better than– ARCHIVIST: [MESSY STUTTERING] MELANIE: –than him!

AOUCH AOUCH AOUCH for the fact that she’s putting Elias and Jon in the same bag!!! D: (And for telling Jon that… the assistants are dying because of him. That it’s a thing that's happening because of him. Tim’s death wasn’t Jon’s fault, he didn’t lie to Tim, but he still used him to stop The Unknowing, just like Tim wanted… from an exterior point of view, it would sound just like Gertrude already. If Jon was remembering any of it in the first place. Right now, for all anyone knows, it’s “Jon came back while Daisy and Tim didn’t”, and Sasha died during the Prentiss attack while Jon didn’t, and it feels like a long string of having assistants dying around/for Jon… until the next ones ;;)

- The use of “we” to talk about Beholding stuff was a bit worrisome:

(MAG123) BASIRA: [SIGHS] Alright. Best I can understand it, Beholding, or The Eye or… whatever you want to call it, we’re one of the only powers that hasn’t actually taken a shot at our ritual. Yet. And everything out there knows it. ARCHIVIST: … No, I mean, we… we can’t be the only ones, surely? BASIRA: I don’t know. Probably not. But we made a big noise with The Unknowing and… other stuff, and… now they’ve taken notice.

… but at the same time, maybe a matter of pragmatism from Basira? Kind of “us against them” talk from an ex-police officer? They’re de facto a “we” since they’re all tied (/trapped) with the Institute right now, and they have more or less the same goal of surviving. (Still, all these “we” to talk about themselves as The Beholding’s ilk hurt ;;)

1°) Basira sounded very cold and not absolutely invested in helping Martin nor preventing Melanie from falling deeper in, but that’s how she was operating before, too, and it’s not far-off from how she used to behave overall with the Institute (the only thing she adamantly wanted to do was to do something against Elias because of what he had done to Melanie after MAG106 and, even then, she didn’t act on her own but invited the others to do something about it). She’s grown colder in these six months, sounds even less ready to help than before, but at the same time… is apparently not serving? It doesn’t sound like they kept recording statements while Jon was away, and Basira was pretty dismissive/downright insulting towards the concept of Beholding when referring to it? And she insisted on leaving as soon as Jon was going to read a statement both in MAG122 and MAG123, while it used to not bother her with Martin? At least, Basira has turned against the tape recorders (“And we’ve got an audience. Perfect. I thought you said you decided to throw them all out.” “Yup. And I did. And here’s another one.”) which… is probably a good thing (or she’ll pay for it later ;;). Will Jon will be back to being the only one to record statements for a while?

2°) Squinting at the “The Unknowing and… other stuff”: is it about Gertrude interrupting the other rituals before, or did the assistants… do some other things while Jon was away? (Was there another leak of statements to the public?)

3°) Aouch aouch that of course, them preventing the other rituals from succeeding would be perceived as a matter of ensuring that their ritual would win the game… and not just plainly preventing the world from being transformed into a “factory farm” for any of them. Last time, The Stranger’s attempt had been countered by avatars from The Slaughter, and we know that The Tundra had brought Gertrude and Michael Shelley to the place where The Spiral’s ritual would happen (+ The Dark might have made a move against the old Archives in Alexandria in the 4th century, according to MAG053): it’s not only an Archivist thing to meddle with others’ rituals, people serving the powers do it all the time… but the Magnus Institute has probably been a bit too good at it to go unnoticed. Of course it would be their turn to be perceived as The Enemy…

4°) It doesn’t look like there could be many options to get out of this, uh ;; Either they stay on standby in the Institute forever (/until another power manages to wipe them out); either they launch the ceremony to get a chance of survival, or out of loyalty (ahaha.); either they find a way to kill their ceremony in the egg; either they find alternative ways. Will Jon try to make an alliance with other avatars? I’m… not sure that the archive team going vocal about not wanting to launch theirs would result in anything good: sounds a bit too much like blasphemy for it to be well-perceived by others? Is it even possible to turn against your own god without dying pretty quickly, even if Jon keeps on with the regular feeding-what-feeds-you thing through the written statements and his own fears (and avoiding the live-statements)? There have been a suspicious amount of deaths by heart diseases/cancers amongst people who were not serving while theoretically being tied to an entity (Evan Lukas, Gerry…), I’m not sure those were… natural.

- … sudden realization that maayyyybe The Lonely doesn’t have a ritual? Gerry was a bit ambiguous about it but at the same time literally said that not all of them had one:

(MAG111) ARCHIVIST: […] Tell me about the rituals. GERARD: Well, they all have one. Most of them, anyway. Takes centuries to build up to a level of power where they can try it, and if they fail, it’s back to square one. ARCHIVIST: Okay, but what do the rituals do? GERARD: They… kind of “shift” the world, just enough for the Power to come through. Merge with reality. Some say, or well, they guess, that it could bring other entities through with them. I mean, I doubt The Buried would be bringing through The Vast, but you know.

Could this be why The Lonely is collaborating with many other powers’ projects and throwing money around despite its, uh, whole… concept… of isolation…? (The ties with the Institute dating from its foundation, given that Mordechai Lukas was already on friendly terms with Jonah Magnus, that the Lukas family are currently patronaging it, and that Peter even helped Gertrude when she went to stop The Spiral; the Lukas also co-financed the Daedalus project with people from The Dark and The Vast…) Does it need to leech on others in order to have a chance to sneak in?

- I’ve literally spent a whole weekend with someone who would occasionally suddenly snortgiggle before muttering “Coma? great! Let’s rearrange his office.” out of the blue so: same, I’m still laughing hard at the return of rambling grandpa!Jon, I’M JUST LOVE HIM…

(MAG123) [CLICK–] ARCHIVIST: [HEAVY SIGHS] Where did the– [PAPERS RUFFLING, THEN MUTTERING] Coma, great! Let’s rearrange his office. Sleeping people don’t need… pens. [DISGUSTING MOIST SOUND] Ewagh? Oh, wha–

and I effing love the writing because it was an incredibly funny line (Jon is SO funny when he complains and takes mundane little things personally), it was also a very functional one (informing us right away that he’s back in his office, and that people apparently got access to it/moved things around when he wasn’t there, possibly that The Flesh attack reached all the way into there?, and that it’s another detail in the stack of alien things making him disorientated) aaaand it made the verbal roughness, the bittersweetness and the heartbreak even more violent afterwards. We began the episode laughing about Jon, we end it feeling awfully sad, thanks Darkrai. (I was wondering what was the disgusting thing that Jon had found/perhaps tried to eat or drink? Apparently, Word Of God confirmed on Discord that it was something disgusting under his desk. So, I’m guessing it was something from The Flesh’s attack. Still: laughing HARD at Jon just being earnest in his disgust =D)

- I’m not even mad at Jon for cracking up about Peter Lukas because seriously:

(MAG123) BASIRA: He’s been… restructuring. Separating out the departments a bit. Not a surprise, I guess, with his pedigree. ARCHIVIST: But i–if you’ve never… seen him, I mean… BASIRA: Rumour is, a couple of researchers up on the third floor decided to ignore some of his new directives, and… wwwsssshhhh. ARCHIVIST: … Sorry, what’s “wwwshhhh”? BASIRA: Wsssshhhhh. Gone. ARCHIVIST: … oh.

Oh My Gods, Peter. (He had mentioned that Elias was “very protective of his people” and given that Elias had allowed Martin to be besieged by worms for two weeks, Sasha to get killed by an agent from The Stranger, Tim&Jon to get worm’d, and that he traumatized Martin&Melanie himself… yeah, it was already a huge red flag for Peter’s own standards. And the Institute’s people are not even Peter’s people.) I kinda hope that the researchers are still alive, “just” isolated, though, because I’m not too fond of NPC dying around the corners when they were only doing their job and are not given any attention outside of “they dead” for nervous laughter :w But I’m also cracking up a lot jknrhdfjnrf Peter, that was so gratuitously extra fezhjdcfdnk… … I wonder how Rosie is doing.

- But, more seriously, WOW about how Peter is… already unsettling precisely because characters can’t reach him while he has an effect on them anyway. And he’s unsettling to listeners too, in the way he totally avoids categorizations so far! We don’t know what his intentions are, we don’t know why he’s set his eyes on Martin (sheer dumb bad luck because Martin was in the office the first time? Martin being a prey of choice for The Lonely partially because of sad one-sided gay crush, lack of relationships and no family? Elias sending him after Martin because less valuable, or precisely because he was reading statements? Martin having ties to the Lukas?), we don’t even know why he was specifically chosen by Elias as a replacement (Is it to prepare The Watcher’s Crown? It is to buy some time by having the assistants focusing on a shared enemy instead of teaming up against The Beholding? Is it because Peter was still the lesser evil for the Institute? Is it because the Lukas would have taken over anyway and Elias tried to damage-control the transition? Is it because Peter is supposed to keep an eye on Jon and nobody else?) ;; Even if he’s not intrinsically tied to Martin, I’m worried that there could be rumours in the Institute about how Martin could actually be the one pretending to be Peter…

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [LONG EXHALES] Yes. Well, I’m sure there are better ways to deal with it than getting cosy with Elias’s successor. Who I’ve yet to meet, by the way. BASIRA: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, join the club. ARCHIVIST: Sorry, you haven’t– BASIRA: Nop. Never seen him. As far as I can tell, Martin’s the only one who has. ARCHIVIST: … right. A–and you’re sure he’s… real? BASIRA: We get emails from him. Memos. ARCHIVIST: [HUMOROUS EXHALES]

…………….. the fact that Basira and Melanie have never met him is extra-weird, though, since he had asked Martin to bring them to him at the end of MAG120:

(MAG120) PETER: Oh, what’s that look for? You won! I am sorry if it doesn’t look quite like you hoped, but… here we are. MARTIN: I suppose so. So what now? PETER: Well, if you could send Melanie and Basira up to see me, I’d like to introduce myself.

Did Melanie&Basira come to the office and not realize that he was there (not seeing him while he was seeing them)? Or did they meet him and… immediately forget the encounter, somehow? It’s also strange, actually, that Elias never ever mentioned that he had chosen Peter as an interim director (even when he was escorted by the police officer, he didn’t taunt Martin about it), or even that he had been talking with Peter. We only have Peter’s word that he did…

- … is it a Lonely thing specifically, or is there something deeper about how some avatars (such as Agnes?) sound… more tied to a power than regular ones? This is the second time that a sentence referred Peter as an incarnation of The Lonely itself, and Martin had strongly reacted to it the first time (which… raised suspicions):

(MAG108) PETER: Ah, I see. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. It’s one of Elias’s little jokes. MARTIN: I don– What? PETER: Did he suggest you record a statement today? One that mentioned me? MARTIN: … yeah? Sssort of? I mean… not you specifically, but…

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] Haven’t seen Martin about yet? BASIRA: Yeah, he comes and goes. He’s busy. Well, he seems it. ARCHIVIST: Working for Peter Lukas. […] Martin is working very closely with The Lonely, who is, predictably enough, isolating him […].

I don’t really remember other cases in which a Fear and an agent of it were equated so directly? Is there something deeper in here? *squints*

- I wonder if Jon will meet him soon, or if Peter will avoid him too, or if Jon will try to force his way to him. Technically, communicating through emails and memos is the best way for anyone to avoid Jon’s compulsion, so… he could still elude Jon. (I would have found it extra-funnier if he had met everyone but prevented Jon specifically from meeting him, what with Jon getting so frustrated about Elias telling him to back off when the Lukas were involved in past statements, but it seems like nop, it’s everyone-except-Martin! … Martin T___T). … if it were season2!Jon, he would probably have tried to break into Elias’s office anyway, to force a meeting and/or to try to get the rest of the files that Elias had taken from Gertrude (he had stolen the key for the tunnels from Elias’s desk before MAG041, after all) but 1°) not sure that Elias’s office is still accessible, 2°) not sure that Jon would find anything (never mind anyone) inside, 3°) Peter could make sure that Jon would grow to regret it, given how things have been going so far. (*whispers* I have no idea what Jon’s plans are since he’s been baaaaack, aarrrrg!!!)

- One of the constant things for the past two episodes has been about Jon losing small anchors, small familiar details: Georgie having enough and leaving; Basira being cautious and wary, then cutting and dry (“Ah… what do I do if… Melanie comes back…?” “I don’t know. Play dead.” was just outright MEAN, holy heck…); Melanie being hostile and threatening; Martin being… absent and working for someone else. Tim and Daisy are dead. Elias is gone and that good news is tempered with the fact that he got replaced by Peter Lukas, messing up the Institute. Jon’s clothes have been thrown away (uh.), his request of tea was cut short (while until now it was usually offered to him); his office was meddled with. It indeed feels like waking up in another world, with his footing thrown off balance, since he is aware now of what had been lost (and that it also covers missed opportunities: “I wish I could talk it through with Martin. … Or Tim. Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we…?”).

… I wonder how Jon will behave, next time he’ll see “Helen”. Six months have passed, there is no guarantee that she will still be as unsettled as she was in MAG115, but maybe Jon could understand that situation a bit deeper, now.

- The only “stable” thing has been the tape recorder popping up again, now fully acknowledged as being totally autonomous and… choosing to be there and record whether they agree to it or not.

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] Aaand we’ve got an audience. Perfect. I thought you said you decided to throw them all out. BASIRA: Yup. And I did. And here’s another one. ARCHIVIST: Maybe it’s hungry. BASIRA: Seriously? ARCHIVIST: I mean, I did have a statement I was planning to record. BASIRA: Great. Perfect. You can get on with that, and I’ll just leave, then. [CHAIR SCRAPING]

Laughing for a long while at the fact that they now sound like demanding babies that will ruin your life if you decide to not cater to their needs right away. ;; I’m sobbing a bit at the mix of… annoyance turning into “trust”, with Jon ending the follow-up with his own feelings about what has been lost. It’s nothing new, but, I don’t know. It always feels more intimate when Jon acknowledges the tape recorders as sentient or actively listening? He hadn’t done it much, so far (unlike Martin), mostly in indirect ways.

- Jon is still a sweet bean… but I didn’t feel like he was as disgusted/scared of spiders as usual…? Is it a matter of knowing a bit more about them, or has he lost some of his fears by turning full Archivist? He used to react very strongly when it came to spiders:

(MAG056) ARCHIVIST: […] As for the spider person, the only… proof of its existence seems to be that I am far too unlucky for it to simply be an old tramp’s hallucination. I need to have some words with Martin.

(MAG059) ARCHIVIST: […] I have done my best to prevent Martin reading this statement in too much detail. I have no interest in having another argument about spiders. In fact, after reading this statement, I have no interest in thinking about spiders any more than is professionally required.

(MAG068) ARCHIVIST: I’m in the tunnels. I was exploring and I got lost. I haven’t gone down any of the stairs and I– I think I’m still under the Institute. There were a couple of spiders, so I changed routes and found, I think it’s a gas main.

(MAG069) ARCHIVIST: Statement ends. More spiders. […]

But true that there hadn’t been any Web-related statement afterwards in season 3 (or not… explicitly), except for his own, the failed attempt in MAG100, and the one Martin read in MAG110 and explicitly mentioned that Jon hadn’t worked on it (“I mean, I think it sounds like a Jurgen Leitner book. About spiders. Hum. Good that Jon didn’t have to read this one, anyway, I know he’s not a fan – although this one wasn’t too bad, actually.”) Maybe the fact that Jon gave his own statement about Mr. Spider, and learned more about the entities and a bit about The Web, removed some of the horror? It’s an aspect of the Beholding that Jane Prentiss had denounced (MAG032: “I see now why the hive hates you. You can see it and log it and note its every detail but you can never understand it. You rob it of its fear even though your weak words have no right to do so.”); but at the same time, we know that Jon used to feel the fears of the statements he was reading, and he was terrified during his dreams when Elias described them in MAG120… (;; Given how turning into an avatar seems to steal from you, I’m a bit paranoid about everything and wondering if anything that feels different in Jon is related to thiiiis…)

- It isn’t established, either, whether he had planned to record this statement right now, or if he wanted to research it a bit more (“I mean, I did have a statement I was planning to record”) and ended up recording now since the tape recorder looked like it wanted to be fed! I’m curious about why it ended up being this statement in particular since… spiders. Was Jon drawn to this one by them? Has he started to investigate spiders-related ones because he’s suspecting that they’re actually more important and dangerous than what he thought before?

- Since Jon said “I have no theories on it, no… no sudden insights” -> I wonder if “Insight” is referring to what happened with him suddenly knowing that Gerry had travelled with Gertrude (MAG099/MAG102)? It sounds like the right word to cover the phenomenon, indeed.

- The statement was tied to so many incidents happening in the Archives that it… raised questions as to whether or not these events were connected. Gregory Cox was contacted to begin his work on the website shortly before Gertrude’s death; the statement was given to the Institute after Gertrude’s death (1st August 2015) and either when Jon had just been appointed as new Head Archivist, either shortly before; Gregory Cox himself disappeared in late July 2016, which was around Prentiss’s attack on the Institute (Jon took the statements from the staff post-attack on July 29th 2016). Jon got suspicious, at the very least, but it was also… a series of reminders of what had happened to Jon in the Archives since he began with the job, what was lost, and the gap between what truly happened and Jon’s awareness of it?

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] Sometime in late July 2016, which is… [CHUCKLE] Two years ago. … That doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t feel like… … There’s just this… great… gap of time, where I wasn’t. […] [SIGHS] I wish I could talk it through with Martin. … Or Tim. [SHORT SAD CHUCKLE] Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we…? … Everything’s changed. … [SIGHS] Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired. … End recording.

The Prentiss attack was also when Sasha got killed; she’s been dead for one year and a half, at present time. And yet, it took Jon six months to realize it, and he spent another six months in a “coma” afterwards – he was only aware of it for a third of that time (from February to August 2017). Tim has been dead for six months too, and yet for only two days for Jon. No wonder the timeline feels so messed up to him…

- Following up on dates: taking a step back to think about the passage of time also helps to contextualize a bit where characters are standing. It… might have influenced Basira and sheds some light on the fact that she sounds so firm (almost ruthless) to Jon right now. She had met him a few times before, but she joined the Institute (/was coerced into signing a contract) on April 28th 2017; Jon was barely present afterwards, keeping some distance with the assistants (as Martin mentioned in MAG098), then getting kidnapped for a month, then being sent to China and America, before they went to stop The Unknowing on August 6th. That’s barely three months and a half, during most of which Jon wasn’t physically there nor trying to be emotionally present with the assistants, versus more than six months with Melanie and (a bit of) Martin, trying to keep things afloat in a place she never chose to be, and which she joined only to save Daisy and/or herself and the other archival staff under Elias’s threats… when Daisy is now “dead”. I don’t think that Basira regrets stopping Daisy when she was on the verge of killing Jon, back in MAG091, but I cannot help but think that she at least wondered how things would have unraveled, afterwards, if she had allowed it? Maybe The Unknowing would have happened, but maybe other people would have stopped it. There is, at least, something very heart-wrenching in the fact that Basira had agreed to become a prisoner and coercing material to save someone from the Hunters of Section 31, when that person is currently officially dead, and that Basira is still trapped and that she was the one who had to be “keeping things together” (s4 trailer) in that place. I mean! She was planning to get in control of her own agency by the end of season 3:

(MAG117) BASIRA: I don’t want to be here. But by the end, I didn’t want to be police either, so… guess I don’t really know what I do want, which… maybe that’s just as well. My options… they’ve gotten a lot narrower over the last year. I don’t know. I feel kind of bad. Everyone seems to be having a much worse time of it than me, and I was meant to be the hostage. It’s amazing, how much you can ignore when you keep your head in a book. Mf! My dad would hate me talking like this. He couldn’t stand people who just passively moaned about their problems. He always said: “If you don’t like something, you accept it and you adapt; or your fight and you change it. Whining doesn’t help.” I’ve always tried to live like that, but I think sometimes… you feel like you’re adapting, but… it’s just denial. But not anymore. I’m going to fight and change it. I just hope I’m not heading into the wrong battle.

… but it was also when she was presenting Daisy as her own anchor (“she’s solid. She’s a fixed point. And if she’s there, I know exactly where I stand, exactly what I’m doing relative to her.”), and now she’s lost her. There would be enough to get very resentful and bitter about the Institute and the fact that she has to be the one in charge of everything, and that she doesn’t see Jon as a reliable person. Quite clearly, she doesn’t see him as a leader right now – and indeed, Jon… never was one.

- ;; for Basira being defensive of Melanie, despite it all!!!

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: You were attacked. … When? BASIRA: About two months ago. It was… it was The Flesh. ARCHIVIST: [MUTTERING] Oh god. BASIRA: Yeah, it was bad. We took them all out. Melanie did most of them. She was… she got a knife from somewhere and– ARCHIVIST: Basira, I… I don’t know if that’s a good sign…? BASIRA: … She saved my life, Jon. She saved all of us. I won’t forget that.

Jon is probably right on that one (the more Melanie gives in to The Slaughter, the worst it will get, probably); on the other hand, yeah, Basira indeed can’t really blame Melanie’s murderous urges if it actually protects them when nothing else does. She was also oddly defensive of Martin, after throwing some shade at him during season 3?

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [SIGHS] Fine… Fine. Haven’t seen Martin about yet? BASIRA: Yeah, he comes and goes. He’s busy. Well, he seems it. ARCHIVIST: Working for Peter Lukas. BASIRA: Don’t be too hard on him, Jon. Your, er… “situation”, it hit him. Hard.

;; Not one to kick the puppy when he’s (too) down, is she.

- … I wondered if Martin’s visit to Jon from the trailer was after The Flesh attack. He had claimed that he had decided to be more active, in MAG117, which resulted in him confronting Elias in MAG118 and the arrest in MAG120… but now, we know that it made their whole situation even more unstable and threatening, since Peter didn’t even protect them against The Flesh? So Martin probably felt responsible for that failure? ;; He was the one who ultimately threw Elias out of the picture and that backfired badly… In the trailer, he asked if the others would be “safe”, apologized and said goodbye to Jon, so it did sound extremely bad already, but if it happened after The Flesh attacked and he only got saved thanks to Melanie going on a rampage… no wonder that he went for something that already sounds an awful lot like self-sacrificing, in turn… (No clue about the details of what he’s doing ;; Does he specifically have to avoid the others as part of the deal? Did he trade his cooperation for a bit more protection for the others? … Is he actually helping in preparing The Watcher’s Crown, whether he knows about it or not? Or something specifically tied to The Lonely?)

- IT BREAKS MY HEART that Jon apparently still doesn’t get Martin and… is kind of assuming the worst from him? His wording was almost insulting:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: [LONG EXHALES] Yes. Well, I’m sure there are better ways to deal with it than getting cosy with Elias’s successor. […] Martin is working very closely with The Lonely, who is, predictably enough, isolating him […].

On the one hand, Jon already picked up that Martin being inaccessible is not natural. On the other hand, “cosy with Elias’s successor”?? He… didn’t raise the possibility that Martin had been coerced, or had no other choice since the assistants had to find ways to survive while Jon was simply not there?? It… could be, once again, Jon Biting Because Hurt – hurt that Martin, who was supposed to be a fixed point, is not there, and the bitterness turning into resentment. He was pretty insidiously vicious to Basira after Georgie’s departure in MAG122 (“… What about you? Disappointed to see me alive? … Basira?”), and it’s a usual Jon thing, so… But I’m really worried that the next time Jon and Martin finally see each other, it… will probably turn out to be a disaster. If Martin apologized to Jon in the trailer, it means he’s already doing something to feel ashamed of, and probably won’t want to have Jon anywhere close to it, or Jon misunderstanding what he’s aiming for. Or he could have changed, too, in these six months (;; when we left him in MAG120, he was very adamant about calling Peter ~Mr. Lukas~ to keep some distance between them, I really hope it hasn’t switched to “Peter” in the meantime. In a way, it would be more terrifying to picture Martin as not frightened of him anymore…?). And Jon sounds more peeved than worried about what Martin is doing, which makes me fear that he won’t be as patient with him as he was with Basira in this episode. There are so many ways it could go just awfully that… I don’t think that they will be ~nice~ to each other. (Hey!! Speaking of Hurting and How Things Could Get (More) Awful: it’s not like Idiot Jon could spit out that he heard about the crush in a moment where he would be blaming Martin for being fickle and switching loyalty so easily, is it!!)

- There is a question raised about who filed the statement, since it was given after Gertrude’s death:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] No notes or follow-up here that I can see, just… [SIGHS] It looks like the statement came in just after Gertrude disappeared. Another gap. And whoever took it didn’t do any follow-up, just… filed it away. I may be the first person to actually read it, so…

It could have been Jon who filed it, while mindcontrolled? Or one of the assistants? Or a random staff member? But someone filed it after Gertrude’s death, and without following the usual procedure, so… there might be something.

- Ssssooo Annabelle (assuming it’s her but. That description. This “network of pale stitches that stretched over one side of her head” wasn’t made of surgical stitches, uh) has been doing her own stuff for the past seven years… lo… vely… *cries*

1°) Spiders seem to be adamantly polite. Mr. Spider had “IT IS POLITE TO KNOCK” (MAG080), Annabelle wanted to have “Come in!” where the ~threads~ (YUGHJBNYUGHB I HATE) would be posted (MAG123). THAT’S SO NICE FROM THE ENTITY THAT MINDCONTROLS PEOPLE…

2°) Thank you Nelja for picking up that the website’s name was “Chelicerae”, I wouldn’t have made the word out on my own, and I’m half admirative, half horrified that you immediately understood what it was. *screams*. (Either spiders are super-smooth, operating from the shadows, hiding their very existence, either they don’t give a funk and are just the unsubtlest things that ever unsubtled. Very urban/school-legend like, though, I got Jigoku shōjo and Higanbana no Saku Yoru ni vibes from the concept of the thing!)

3°) ;; The website was created and running during Gertrude’s last moments as the Archivist… and shortly before Jon took over, and we know that a few people from the website went to the Institute. So it feels like the spiders might have been using the opportunity given by the transition to sneak into it…?

- Ooooooookay, but anyway. The concept of the website sounded like a mirror of the Institute, inviting you to tell a “horrible event that had happened to you or to someone that you loved”, though, unlike the Institute, baiting people with a reward (getting someone killed), and with a bit more ruthless selection process than the Institute’s, where… fake made-up statements are just taken and won’t cause you any harm (the only risk being that your story will be put in the “Discredited” section in the Archives and receiving Jon’s glares). The “Chelicerae” on the other hand wins in both cases: if you give a fake story, you’ll apparently be the one getting consumed (“I’m sorry I lied”); if you give an actual one, the person you hate will get killed by them… annnnd as Jon put into perspective:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: […] There’s a small supplemental document with it, though, that is a… bit alarming. I–it’s apparently a list of people whose names appear in the various pieces of text Mr Cox was pasting into the code. It’s unclear if they were meant to be… users or victims, but I cannot help but note that there seem to be the names of several statement-givers who found their way to the Institute, including noted arachnophobe Carlos Vittery. Perhaps a coincidence, just… people… shopping their traumatic event around… but I have to wonder… how much their actions were their own.

… some of the people with actual stories were sent to the Institute. The whole basis of the website sounds like ~a spider catching flies in its web~, it sounded like the point of it: getting stories? Was it The Web gifting the statements to the Institute/Archives, or was it way to make its way inside of it? In any case, yIIIIIPS… (I love/hate how there were so many concerning things in this episode and then… the confirmation that The Web has been doing a lot from the shadows for a while, while we discover it has been more active than what we could fear…)

- I’m so mad about the pun for this episode (“Web development”) rizefjkdsnfd and… given the weird parallelism between Annabelle’s website and the work at the Institute (and the fact that The Web most likely sent people to give their statements to the Magnus Institute), I can’t help but think back to MAG065… and… I’m going… to be… very mad… if the trick… was that… the “power” at work in that one… was actually a Web+Beholding collaboration of some sort … because. The title. Was “Binary”.

(Which worked because Internet + Tim&Jon arguing at the end, and Jon making the distinction between the Institute’s agents/victims… but if!! the thing!! in the statement!! was that it was actually about two powers willingly trying to work together… I had personally suspected either Beholding, either The Web, either The Spiral for that one, but given that you can also summarize it as “someone was forced to watch a terrifying video, which would pursue her until she agreed to watch it through to the end”… there is the trapping and the seeing something that you would rather avoid but that you have to watch even if it makes you suffer. And we have known for a while that spiders were spreading in the tunnels below the Archives, and the whole thing about the Assistants being trapped by the Institute has always felt more like a Web thing than a Beholding one to me… So… *squints*. Is the Web trying to force its way into the Institute and/or to parasite its ritual and/or to prevent it, or is it an actual willing and mutual collaboration?)

As usual: what does Elias know about it? He said he hadn’t bothered with Tim’s backstory but surely he would have known about Jon’s and his encounter with The Web as a child, before hiring him, he wouldn’t be this dumb? (… I’m honestly not sure. It was already super dumb and lazy to not bother with Tim’s when, come on, there were only three assistants initially, you… could have… bothered…) And even if he hadn’t known before offering the position to Jon, he would have known after MAG081 and Jon giving his own statement…? And he didn’t especially change his stance on Jon afterwards, it didn’t seem to bother him that Jon had been marked by The Web. So what the heeeeeck Elias, did you plan something in that regard or were you completely fooled too… He had insisted a lot on his free will (“it’s also very important to me, in a personal capacity, that you understand I’m answering you of my own free will. […] There’s so much of this place, of ourselves, twisted by forces far beyond us. I just wanted you to know– […] It’s very important to me you understand that no action I have taken has been controlled. I have done everything because I wished to.”) and told Jon “And your will is still your own, mostly.” back in MAG092 (that “MOSTLY” was… uh.)… which sounds more and more concerning know that we have confirmation that The Web has been lurking and scheming… What do you know about it, you terrible garbage man, you……………………

(I love how there are so many reasons to get anxious about everything??? Spiders, Lonely, Watcher’s Crown incoming, Martin doing… stuff, Melanie getting worse and worse, Jon’s whole status / what happened for him to be able to wake up?? So many elements laid around for things to get terrible pretty quickly??? Aaarrrgggg.)