Hello! I'm relistening to tma and absolutely loving your blog, your posts, observations and audio edits (Me and the devil gave me goosebumps, I'm not kidding. It's perfect). I was wondering what you thought about the finale? You probably talked about it and I simply haven't reached that particular post yet, but I'm wondering if you consider it to be thematically fitting or not

I didn't actually listen to the last season beyon the first couple of episodes. I was busy by then and never got around to it. But I've read the summary and I've seen that in the end they had two choices: Jon becomes the Eye and keeps watch as the world extinguishes around him, taking his friends and, hopefully, the fears with it, or they open a door to another world (killing Jon in the process although I'm not sure why or how, but I trust they must) and drag the fears there, freeing their world and surviving but dooming unseen others. I'd have loved if what took place was the first choice, and I think it would have been thematically fitting, except it would have almost been a good ending, no? The fears (probably) defeated, even though the price is everyone's life. But the second is also very fitting with just, humanity, and the actions of the characters up until that point (the woman in the cave begging the buried to "take her not me, take her not me") the actions of Johna, the need to survive. So I was curious about your thoughts

Apologies for the lenght

thank you 💜 i'm always very happy to hear people like the edits

about the finale, they had this trolley problem-esque scenario where they could either let jon ascend to godhood and speed up the end of the world which would starve all the fears, or take annabelle cane's bargain of reversing the apocalypse by releasing the fears into infinite universes. jon didn't need to die for the second option to work, they were just told to kill jonah and burn down the institute. it's difficult to talk about the thematic relevance of either choice without further context, so i'm going to bring up some s5 plot details. the big one being that the web had orchestrated the events leading up to the apocalypse (they had this planned since MAG 1, it's very obvious on a re-listen), it was in their interest for the eye's ritual to occur, and the eye's ritual is jon, so it was in their interest to have jon marked. they directly interfere with almost all of his s4 marks while elias is in prison. but the broader implication of this was that the web was revealed to be The Narrative. the tapes belonged to them and the tapes are the frame device of the podcast. i think on paper this is a very clever bit of metatexutal story choice, especially since they were aiming for a tragedy, and this has that precise sense of tragic inevitability to it, that this was always going to happen, because they were never going to escape the trappings of the narrative.

so what happens in the finale is that everyone agrees to go with annabelle's offer, except for jon (well he agrees to it and then runs off to do his own thing) he climbs the panopticon in MAG 200 with the intent to kill jonah and replace him as the pupil of the eye, he successfully achieves the first bit and then martin walks in to reveal he told the others to go ahead with their plan before time so jon's prevented from crawling into the eye. they end up releasing the fears. i don't think this is thematically incoherent, part of their thesis was that there's nothing more human than making the decision to doom someone else—hundreds of people, an entire world—for personal salvation. it's why plenty of people chose to become avatars. it's what jonah did. it's what he hear from a lot of statement-givers, lost john's cave is that, yeah, but also MAG 29 cheating death. they didn't fix anything, they just passed it over. so it's an appropriately cynical ending (not entirely. the last words are, "good luck", that was another bit of thesis. that the stacks are against you but you have to Try). so on paper this works. i personally hated it lol because i think 1) the web multiverse reveal comes too late. like way too late. like literally three episodes before the finale. 2) it's comically rushed. one minute jon's telling him, "sorry i have to do this." (and this is while martin's audibly tearing up and having a little breakdown. jon's not even slightly moved by this) but two minutes later it's, "i love you martin cut the tether <3" it's just not effective. 3) the emotional thrust of the finale largely hinged on whether or not you cared about jonmartin and brother (gn) i did not. and 4) the horror of it happens out of sight. we're told those countless universes they doomed are Real but it's just presented as a statistic to us, they're not narratively real the same way their world is, and i can't be horrified by a statistic. and finally 5) i'm a very jon-centric guy in my reading of the podcast, i enjoy the thematic implications of the first choice a lot more because of what they would mean for his character.

the thing about the first five minutes of 200 is that it's jon's personal attempt to escape the grasp of the fears. avatarhood in the podcast is about the transformative nature of trauma and this is the basis of jon's story arc. marking is not this nebulous collect these 14 scars level up into the archive type of thing, marking is about being traumatised, and trauma is about being rendered helpless because of the application of force: through violence inflicted by another person or the environment. so in the first four seasons of the podcast jon has his mind and body continuously violated and is made abjectly helpless, it's in the way elias says he had to "instill in [jon] a powerful and acute fear for their life" and that can only be achieved by making jon experience a total loss of control in each encounter. my favourite bit of podcast writing on this theme is the way a guest for mr spider sets him up for future marks (here and here), so jon's story is a trauma narrative and jon's story is about agency and the lengths he will go to get back some semblance of control. he's a survivor who will later become a perpetrator. s4 is very sharp about this, jon exercising his abilities is about power, it feels good precisely because he gets to be the one in control for once, and not the one being victimised. they continue this in season five when he begins seeking out every avatar who marked him. and this is not framed as a righteous thing because revenge doesn't really bring the catharsis that is desired, doesn't undo the harm that was done. jon giving into his urges here is not a straightforward narrative of ascension, it's actively destructive to him and we see this reach its peak in 200 which is a suicide wish. he went in there to play out a revenge suicide fantasy. he was just told that his entire life has been a set up for the apocalypse, that his body was made an object, a vessel for all that horror and violence by jonah and the web for the completion of their own private goals. choosing to kill the fears is about jon not wanting anyone else to experience his guilt, yes, but it's primarily about the desire to get even. it's very evident in his choice of words, "I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ll be leaving these things that you serve trapped and starving in their own private hell.", 160 is jonah's ritual to escape the grasp of fears by dooming the world, 200 is jon's ritual. and it IS a ritual, it seeks to transform the world in a manner that "[would] remake that physical reality into something closer to itself. [fear entity] wants to make this world its own." and the specific fear this serves is the extinction! remaking their world into a lifeless void is how peter lukas describes the extinction, how jon speaks of his intentions to jonah, (read the transcript dialogue in this post before continuing), i suspect that's one of their scrapped plotlines. i don't think this would've been a hopeful ending. he's willingly, lucidly killing an entire world (including his friends) this is an incredible, tragic low for jon. and is the final step that allows him to symbolically take jonah's place in the narrative (x) and crucially. i don't think it would've worked out the way he wanted it to. what i'm imagining here is that like jonah, jon's attempt would've also ultimately proven unsuccessful because that's another thing about the magnus archives universe, you cannot extricate yourself from that cycle of existentially meaningless violence.

and it's pretty easy to see what would've happened here, his attempt to choke the fears dry ends up birthing another fear and reallyyy interesting possibility here of jon himself being the final fear, his "I wonder if they’re even capable of fearing their own ends. I look forward to finding out." makes me lean towards this, because see, as an avatar he's functionally a fear eating vampire who has spent several seasons struggling with his affliction and for his last gambit he hoped to end the forces that have enabled his suffering except it would've led to his final apotheosis into one of them. this essentially gives him the power to subdue the other fears, but it does not bring him the escape he desired. because he's part of that dread power cosmic fear machine now. he's IN CHARGE of it now. this makes a tremendous amount of thematic sense to me (comes at the cost of an entire world) and is an appropriately tragic ending for his character and is also something that would've thwarted the web's role as the master entity as he assumes its place. he finally gets his narrative agency back but in theee worst, most horrifying way possible. compels me.