ok so i am not someone who is good at the thinks OR the words.

but.

tma and romanticism, right.

specifically, the preoccupation in romanticism with interiority, the autobiographical, and the self.

so, i mean, let’s just get it out of the way that the author quite literally named his protagonist directly after himself to the point where the fandom in general has unilaterally adopted “jon” for character and “jonny” for author so as to lessen the potential confusion.

(also, a point here, this is not in any way intended as a read on jonny as a person, what he does and doesn’t put out is his business and he has every right to privacy and space. i’m just. analysing romanticism. moving on.)

i’ve been thinking a great deal about how the whole plot is given in this... adjacent-to-epistolary style? like we are constantly reminded that we are being read a statement that was given on paper -- i’m reminded specifically of all the statements that refer to gertrude and later jon in the second person. it’s a conversation where the speaker is always both observing and observed. or perhaps beholding and beheld.

something that really strengthens this theme to me is how versatile jon’s statement-giver-voices are. like i think that in-universe is beautifully addressed through it literally being a supernatural influence that enables/forces him to read the statements in this way, but i think it’s also in a meta sense a really interesting point for rumination: when a statement is being read, and we hear “i”, how much of that is the “i” of the person giving their statement? how much of it is jon internalising their trauma? how much of it is the “i” of the eye (ha ha) as it steals bits of the statement giver’s personhood?

i think this is something that’s strengthened even more by the fact that as time goes on, the process does become so much more... self-involved? like contrast: mag 22 and 26, where martin and sasha both give their statements in very conversational ways, mag 32 where although jane is addressing gertrude in a very direct, self-aware manner, she’s really just letting her thoughts -- or her fear -- run, and mag 81 and 104, where because we’ve spent so much time with jon and tim by now, it is, to my mind, a very different, much more... personal version of fear. like by that point to me we’re much beyond anthological spooky stories and into glimpses into the psychologies of people who we’ve become painfully aware are deeply, deeply broken and traumatised.

another really fascinating manifestation of this aspect of romantic style to me is the preoccupation both in the narrative and in fandom with smirke’s 14 + the extinction: i think it’s a really normal but also really fun thing to do to sort yourself into neat boxes, and i think it’s very Romantic that it’s such a major part of the story. not only because it gives such an interesting and potentially complex shorthand for what sort of person each statement giver and avatar likely is, but because it provides such a cool potential for the audience to do the same thing.

i love listening to people discussing which entity is the one they’re most afraid of, and of which they think they’d be most likely to become an avatar. it’s similar to a lot of personality-sorting methods: i think you can tell just as much, if not more, about someone by hearing how they assess and categorise themselves.

along a similar vein, and this is based largely on my personal experience/thoughts, but it’s a sentiment i’ve heard echoed by a lot of people: this type of horror that is so personal and human can make for a fantastic framework for self-examination. i don’t know, of course, whether that was built in intentionally or if it’s a side effect of tma being such a cohesively romantic piece of writing/media overall, but using it as a way to, as an audience member, look at yourself can be so gratifying and so cathartic. i know in the group of people i talk to frequently, we facetiously refer to doing this, but in all sincerity, i could write a post ten times longer than this one about how much i love martin on account of his helping me see so many things about myself in a new way. and intentional or not, i think it’s a really fascinating aspect of tma.

(note: yes i realise i have not examined ol’ fuckhands in this post despite how relevant they are, but oh boy that is a whole ‘nother post that it is too late at night for me to write rn lmao)