April 2025

magnuspanoptes:

tma has that thing where wider audience perception does not align with the podcast’s authorial intent (and by wider audience perception i mean. what people were posting when the podcast was airing. i’ve read a fair few posts from 2020 so i know), like, it’s clear to me that the supporting cast isn’t made up of “"good”“ people, and the podcast is self aware about this (of course it is! why do you think they were written like that to begin with?), basira and martin and georgie weren’t accidentally conceived as varying degrees of hypocrites with a case of "i do not see it”. and to be clear. i’m not sneering at any of them, i post about jon eating people so i’m not in a position to sneer at a character for not wanting to associate with the people eater. so none of them are being framed as righteous or good when they make that 199 decision. just as basira isn’t right in s4 when she makes excuses for daisy while treating jon with hideous contempt. they’re being portrayed as flawed, scared people choosing to protect themselves at the expense of someone else, an all too human thing to do. i’m pointing this out because i keep seeing posts about how the podcast isn’t self aware about any of this and that’s just not true lmao this feels like a case of having spent too much time reading found family posts from 2020 (more likely than you think! it happened to ME. back in august when i used to have a way worse and uncharitable opinion of s4 and s5 mainly because other people’s opinions kept pissing me off) i would suggest re-listening, because you need to engage with the text on its own terms instead of getting mad about posts about the text.