“‘But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King.’” -LotR: RotK, Chapter IV, emphasis mine

“‘I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.’” -The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Chapter III: 'Mount Doom’

“ARCHIVIST

Cut the tether. Send them away.

Maybe we both die. Probably. But maybe not. Maybe, maybe everything works out, and we end up somewhere else.” -MAG 200: 'Last Words’

Think about who lives and dies out of these pairs and then go cry like I did.

It’s time to play TMA or LotR!

“The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable.”

Guess in the comments!

“JUDE PERRY

Fancy seeing you both here. (sarcasm) To what, exactly, do I owe the pleasure – the honor – of being graced by the great and powerful Archivist, harbinger of this new world and his, mm… (deliberately obtuse) …valet?” [MAG 169: ‘Fire Escape’]

She is being deliberately obtuse about Jon and Martin being in love, I suppose. I wonder if she read LotR?

It annoys me when people say that spiders don’t really fit the Web, that people don’t really fear spiders manipulating them (which I. also have arguments against. I may put them at the end of this).

Leitner says we have to think about the meaning of the thing. And while I give him the same disgusted side-eye I give Freud…he has a point. Sure, maybe we don’t fear a spider will trap us (although animals do, as someone has pointed out on this website [hee hee website]). But we have thread and weaving associated with them and with fate (as in the Fates), associated with plot threads as well…there’s Anansi the spider trickster god…there’s Athena with weaving and strategy under one dominion (and Arachne but it doesn’t work as well)…

[edit: I have more examples:

what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive

The painter plays the spider and hath woven
A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men,
Faster than gnats in cobwebs;

And now, dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly, flattering words, I pray you ne’er give heed;
Unto an evil counselor close heart, and ear, and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale of the Spider and the Fly.

Marmion, The Merchant of Venice, ‘The Spider and the Fly’]

Yes, spiders actually trap animals and not us. But we have built this symbolism around them that they could trap people. Actually, it amazes me that someone could say they don’t fit the Web. Of course they do. We made them fit the Web. We made the Web. We did that.

Back to the objection that people don’t really fear spiders manipulating them. Yeah, it’s often that we’re repulsed, and really if we didn’t give them the title of manipulator, they’d be Corruption probably. But…sometimes spiders just disappear. They’re there and then they’re not. I find that a bit scary. Where are they now? That could be extrapolated to 'what are they plotting’. Like Carlos Vittery, he was scared of the fact that there are spiders everywhere. (Which honestly is a bit Eye now that I say it. But I think you get my point. Hopefully?)

Okay, so TMA is a tragedy. We know that. And we, the audience, listen to it again and again, half ‘it’s a sad song but we sing it anyway’ and half 'we’re making them die for our enjoyment’.

And you can do it over again in fanfiction. (Usually it’s not the case in a larger story for TMA, but still) You can make people die over and over.

But…TMA has so many people who are already dead. And if we retell and relisten to the story, they keep dying even though they’re already dead. They keep being dead, over and over again.

Okay, so in the Great LotR-TMA Parallel List, right up there in the Biggest ones (along with ‘two men in either a romantic or a vaguely romantic relationship walk through a hellscape to an ever-watching tower with an addiction-related-MacGuffin that gets destroyed)* is:

Helen parallels to Gollum.

They both used to be people, maybe not good but not monstrous and evil. And they both have bits of the old self in; Helen is still Helen and not; Gollum still has a bit of his old self, even hundreds of years later.

They both serve as sort of…a reminder of ethics? Maybe 'what not to do’, but also 'should we do something about them?’ Martin, I think (confusingly enough) doesn’t want to smite Helen. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) Jon eventually does. Sam wants to kill Gollum, but Frodo does not, out of pity. ('Many who die deserve life. Can you give it to them?’)

The fact that Frodo does not kill Gollum is essential to the story. [SPOILERS] Frodo gives in to the Ring’s temptation right at the end, but Gollum bites it off his finger and falls into the lava with it. Now, I wonder if that means Helen would have done something at the top of the tower. Would she have wanted to do the Web’s plan? I suppose not. Same with Gollum and Frodo’s plan (throw the Ring in the volcano).

Both Helen and Gollum are absolutely essential to the plan, at its last, succeeding.

*Yes, this is, like, nine different distinct parallels.

It’s super interesting that Jon finds all the horrific things not only horrifying but beautiful. The Dark Sun, the Unknowing, the Bone Garden, even being the Pupil.

Because on one level he’s terrified and he hates that people are getting hurt. And one another…he’s not enjoying it, exactly, but he does think it’s beautiful.

It probably makes him hate himself more.

I’m still thinking about that TMA vs. Supernatural post (I know, I know) and perhaps I’m digging up a grave (no idea of the actual expression for this, help me out in the comments if you want), but…

It mentions people making quizzes with ‘not-deer’. And I find that just very funny, because while there is, of course, the Not!Them in TMA…they’re in London. I don’t think deer are walking around London.

No, not-deer are more 'American gothic’. Like Night Vale, maybe, or Old Gods of Appalachia (definitely, actually—there kind of is one in that podcast), or, you know…

Supernatural.

*becomes short of breath because I didn’t breathe correctly while drinking water*

immediate thought: I will make this happen to Jon in a fanfic

I don’t know if I posted this before, and I may have, but: remember when Jon’s like ‘what, you don’t think the sudden gift of omniscience would make me less likely to look in people’s heads" and Martin and Basira are like “uh no”?

I think for Jon, that would happen. Because look. He cares so much about people, for one. And I’m sure he knows full well that with great power comes great responsibility. He read Spiderman. He probably read LotR. So when he got huge power, he went “okay I have to use this responsibly”.

I’m still thinking about how unchanged the End is from simply Death. I mean, even the Dark has the (probably?) new idea of the Dark Sun, and the evil Sandman, and the blanket that never did anything.

But…okay. For the End, we have: prophetic dreams, which is already a thing. That’s sort of. A thing. Also cheating death, which is very much a thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Jonny’s writing was bad. I’m saying that the End didn’t need to be eldritchified. Even in the apocalypse, Oliver’s domain isn’t, like, that noticeably eldritch? It’s only that they are reminded of their fear, when usually you can distract yourself from the fact that we will all, one day, die.

The End didn’t need to be eldritchified in a cosmic horror podcast. That’s terrifying. It’s just. The ultimate unknown. All the other things-they’re just things. Here, with no entities, they’re just weird and scary but they’re of Earth, if that makes sense. The Vast is just a really big space. The Web is just us and society. The End, though, death is something else. Something that no one knows about, not really. It’s unknowable. It’s already eldritch and cosmic (since everything will, one day, end).

Okay, so you know how Guillermo from WWDITS looks like Martin fanart? And how Bruno from Encanto looks like Jon fanart?

It’d be really funny if someone (non-TMA) did a WWDITS-Encanto crossover.

inthetags:

Reblog and put in the tags if you joined any new fandoms this year 

I think MAG 2 is that good partly because of the pacing. Like, yes, it’s good because Jonny’s acting is amazing. But it always is.

The pacing is so…slow. But it works, weirdly. And it never changes. It just plods on nicely and steadily towards the end.

Remember the part where Jon is hinting to Basira about that she has to kill Daisy for her character arc to complete and she gets annoyed that Jon is being really vague? I was kind of annoyed at that because:

In the real world, Jonny’s just blocking Jon from getting the knowledge that he’s in a story. He’s like one millimeter from becoming self-aware.

And…in-universe, yeah, Jon can probably put it together from what the Eye’s giving him that Basira needs to kill Daisy to complete her character arc. But…he’s probably standing there like “do you really want me to analyze your character arc for you?” Because no, Basira wouldn’t like it at all. And Jon knows it.

Latest in the series of tma-lotr parallels: the Eye of Sauron is referred to the Eye. Capitalized.

Also this: “I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind… and he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!” (Galadriel, ‘The Mirror of Galadriel’, FotR, pg. 355, emphasis mine)

Season 1 Jon’s response to fake statements: *stares straight ahead while ripping the paper up very slowly and deilberately*

Season 2: *folds it into a box, adds it to the wall on his desk that prevents people from seeing him through the massive window*

Season 3: *looks at statement and faceplants onto it, sleeps for two hours with his head on the desk*

Season 4: *eats it and goes on with his day*

Season 5: There was a fake statement in the tunnels, somehow. Jon picked it up and looked at it and sighed dramatically and tiredly. Then, he stared straight ahead while ripping the paper up very slowly and deliberately.

I am wondering when the first time that Jon says “I love you” to Martin is, and vice versa. And I could look through the transcripts, but I feel like this will be faster to ask the fandom at large.

Edit: ‘I really loved you, you know’ doesn’t count. That pesky past tense and all. That’s not what I mean here by them saying 'I love you’ to each other’.

Edit edit: 161 for Jon; 183 *to Jon* for Martin

Continuing the saga of reading about people like Georgie:

I want someone to write a fic with Georgie and Jon running through a haunted house like this.

Source: Living Without An Amygdala, which I’m reading the preview of on Google Books

Okay, so I was reading about like. Amygdala loss things. (because Georgie) Like that cool post I read that’s in my blog not far down. that one disease which destroys your amygdala.

And apparently when they removed amygdalas from monkeys they all pretty much died right away. The monkeys isolated themselves and didn’t even drink or eat.

But the thing is we have nice big prefrontal cortices and we can form a routine. I mean, I assume Georgie’s going to some intensive therapy, but humans can set reminders for themselves to do things and have that executive function and stuff.

All I’m saying is I sure hope Georgie doesn’t have executive dysfunction.

Does anyone else randomly go around saying ‘Martin’ in a Jon voice?

Wait a minute. What if after the Panopticon falls, all the actual statement tapes are still intact. The ones that Jon read from an actual statement or took from someone.

And Georgie gathers them together. And at first it’s sad to hear Jon’s voice without ever being able to see him again. But his voice is quite nice, as she knows well.

And eventually she starts using them as a reference. She can’t feel fear. But she knows the things in the statements made people afraid. As the years go by and she forgets what it’s like to fear, she has the tapes to help her remember what makes people afraid.

I don’t know, I thought it was an interesting idea. She uses the archive of fear to help her remember. Not that she wants to fear, but it’s nice to keep up the pretense that she can fear.

I wonder if blinding yourself after the apocalypse would work to cut yourself off from the Eye. The Fears probably wouldn’t let you do it, but…could Martin or Annabelle or Mikale? (Jon would probably die if he blinded himself, so not him.)

I’m playing a text-based horror game, and. And the first line of dialogue is.

“Do you want a cigarette?”

Me, immediately:

NO.

season 4 Jon. Boulevard of Broken Dreams?

The End is a really interesting Fear because it’s so passive, it’s still just…the Grim Reaper. It’s so simple, not some nuanced thing like the Web or the Stranger.

Like, the others are present in other things (hence people assigning other works Fears), but most of them haven’t been presented this way, I think? I mean, this is a very innovative idea, I think, gods of fear that are fear and are incomprehensible. But then Death is still just Death. It needs no elaboration, I suppose.

How much moisturizing can one skin hold? Does it saturate? Did Jon come back from Nikola a sponge?

Martin: *pokes Jon*

Jon: *liquid starts pouring from him*

Martin: Ah! What, what is happening? Why are you bleeding water, Jon?

Jon: What? Oh, no. No, this is, uh, moisturizer. Nikola put so much in that I oversaturated.

TMA door symbolism is kind of funny because sometimes you have a door to a coffin that someone named John gave to someone else and yet he still got trapped by it, representing the illusion of control and foreshadowing Jon’s plight a little bit,

and sometimes you have a door monster made by the god of messing with your mind.

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Internet: *tweets: we have free will*

Me: free will, he says, as we stand on the middle of his f****** web

All right. So I’ve seen this phenomenon happen to myself and others, where if we have something we’re scared about, connecting it to an Entity and/or making a ‘statement’ about it actually makes the fear go away. It helps.

I’m guessing it’s because it helps us process it somehow? But I want to know, like, the actual psychology behind this if anyone knows.

Today in LotR-TMA parallels: the Ring parallels with the Web lighter.

How did I not get that before? They both are carried to and destroy the tower. They both have something to do with addiction (although while the Ring is constantly like PUT ME ON, the lighter slips through your thoughts). And they’re both part of a final twist.

Nikola, sending an ask to Jon’s Tumblr threatening to kidnap him: It’s gonna be May

Jon was so patient with Tessa going on about digital and analog mediums :)

And it’s probably because he has done the same kind of thing many times before :)

I don’t know if I said this already in some post long ago but the fact that Jon was watching Naomi Herne’s dreams may have actually made them more bearable. To have someone there, watching. Even if they couldn’t do anything, she wasn’t alone.

Or perhaps it made it worse, since he was on the outside always looking in et cetera

Wait would Jon’s hair have grown during the apocalypse?

He didn’t need to eat or sleep. I’d say no. Their hair and fingernails would not have continued growing. No one’s would have unless they were in, like, a Flesh domain of some sort.

Did they need to go to the bathroom? Maybe not? Because they didn’t eat? Hmm.

The entities me and a mutual spotted in the pandemic:

Buried: general crushing weight of capitalism, we still have to work and go to school, etc.

Corruption: …well.

Dark: when people say ‘it’s unprecedented times’ because dark = unknown (even if it’s not true that it’s unprecedented, also this was a tough one)

Desolation: the fires in California and Australia, although that’s a pretty common occurence these days

End: …well.

Eye: everyone filming each other, TikTok, etc.

Extinction: …well.

Flesh: ??? we couldn’t think of one

Hunt: police brutality, (the cause of) the BLM movement, etc.

Lonely: quarantine, social distancing

Slaughter: the Capitol insurrection

Spiral: also TikTok

Stranger: people not recognizing each other with masks, having masks, also TikTok with that being not how people look

Vast: general existential dread, although it may have been more End or Extinction themed

Web: anti-vax conspiracy theories, etc.

While we can never know the full extent of what the apocalypse was like, for Jon and Martin, not to mention the people actually in domains, I feel like being a young adult in the pandemic has to come pretty close.

You can go ahead and assign an entity for something bad that’s happened in 2020 and get almost all (or all) 14.5. And we as young adults don’t really have an extended period of time where it was good (besides hopefully childhood, but I feel like that almost doesn’t count in a way I can’t put my finger on) to draw on. We see all the things that cause fear play out every day now.

Watch me get into rqg now that the finale came out. Just like with tma.

Edit: look I even got spoiled for the ending just like with tma and Martin stabbing Jon!

You know the Creators Quizzed bonus episode, where Chioma asks Jonny and Alex trivia questions about TMA?

Is there a reason they don’t appear to all be doing it together? Is it just because of quarantine? Or are they together and they just really want to make it sound like a game show?

Jonny said something about looking over the answers beforehand, which doesn’t make sense either. (Also if he looked them over beforehand, wouldn’t he know the answers?)

Hmm I’m wondering this for my TMA fic, do you think that voluntarily letting yourself be controlled by a Web avatar, knowing the risks et cetera, trusting them to do what you want to do, and they do what you want when they control you…

do you think that’d still be a Web mark? Comment below!

(Hey, it is below this post, after all.)

What if I suggested the idea of a TMA episode in which the statement-giver had these weird sleepwalking episodes in which their eyes were open and they could see everything, remember things like it was a dream, but they were still in their dream-brain, so they did weird stuff like get up and move things around for no real reason.

What if while they watched that dream-self did weirder and weirder things every night and slowly the dream self took over for longer and did worse things? What if the dream self walked into other people’s homes and killed people? What if they can’t escape from those weird dreams with their eyes open?

It’d be a terrifying (Web-themed!) episode, wouldn’t it?

Well, what if I told you (the first paragraph of!) this has literally happened to me

multiple times