i am way too late for any of this, but i felt like ranting a little (a lot) over tma, so here it goes.
i actually really, really liked the dreamlike quality of the S5 statements. i think they’re some of jonny’s best work. so evocative and just beautifully written, the feeling of horror so prevalent, so delicate, so entrapping. i would listen to them absolutely enthralled. what a submersive experience. so on that front, 100% would recommend.
the problems i have are mainly with the meta-plot. certainly, personal preferences and biases come into play here, bc i despise jonmartin with the fire of a thousand suns and would have loved a jonelias corruption narrative, but, i feel that, in his quest to appease the j-mart shippers, jonny sacrificed a lot of his story’s integrity. also, i have no way of verifying this, but it also felt like he inserted his own biases in a way that wasn’t necessarily productive.
ultimately, i feel like he disrespected his main antagonists and that essentially translated into a sort of irreverence towards his own story. elias was easily his most dramatic and interesting villain (regardless of what he originally intended for him, it’s how he developed throughout the story & i think there is a certain honesty in a writer acknowledging and respecting that), stole every scene he was in, yet after his great villain reveal in S4, he is absolutely absent throughout his entire apocalypse. it creates a lack of catharsis that i find bothersome. his death is way too easy. yet when he finally appears in MAG 193, it is glorious. he is terrifyingly in the throws of religious ecstasy as the eye’s pupil. such an interesting idea! so little it was developed though bc jonny for some reason doesn’t like elias.
there’s this entire commentary about how elias is really just there to be eye’s pupil until jon takes over from him, bc it’s jon the eye truly desires. as if after faithfully serving the beholding for two centuries and bringing about his ritual, the eye would just disregard elias and actually be interested in the one person who is unwilling to play ball. please be serious. not saying that jon can’t be the eye’s “special little boy” or whatever, but the nerfing of elias/jonah borderlines on petulant. ofc, jonny is the author and you cannot begrudge a man for writing whatever he wants, but, as a listener, i have to say it feels very unsatisfying whenever authorial biases directly affect the storyline. very deus-ex-machina. very unearned.
i also have a problem with how the eye was ultimately handled and, once again, nerfed. the introduction of this element in relation to the beholding, that it sees but does not understand, felt very trite to me. it was added as a way to de-power the eye and elevate the web. but how could it even be true in the context of the entity conceptualization? the reason scopophobia is a thing is because people fear someone is behind the watching. what they fear is judgment or someone keeping tabs on them and using that information to harm them in some way. that requires intelligence, a capacity to distinguish between the harmless and the incriminatory, a propensity for casting moral judgment, of holding people accountable, of assigning blame, of discovering people’s deepest, darkest secrets, of weaponizing shame. no one is afraid of a crow or a cat staring back at them, because, while those are also living beings, they lack the higher intelligence that creates the context necessary for scopophobia. so how can the eye not possess intelligence? apparently it doesn’t, because jonny decided he didn’t like the eye and the spider was oh-so-cooler instead.
but that only lead to the spider being way too overpowered than it should have been. as the so-called brain of the operation, the web really manifests a lot of faults that could have been exploited, yet the character never do, because the web needs to be true It Girl for some reason. this all feels very childish. the web’s motivations do not work in-universe. we are often told it doesn’t have a ritual because it is content with playing its games of manipulation within the world as it currently is. and that honestly seemed a rather fair assessment to make, but later proved to be a red herring, because it was the web that was actually behind the eye’s own ritual.
i have several gripes with this. 1. if the spider is so smart, why doesn’t it/can’t it have its own ritual and re-shape the world according to its own preferences? why does it have to piggyback on the eye’s grind? 2. the spider’s big plan seems to be bringing about the eyepocalypse just to convince the characters to let the fears out into the metaverse so it can start again. because, as it turns out, the eyepocalypse isn’t really it’s preferred state of being? it was the status-quo after all? the web DID prefer the world as it was, because it allowed it to thrive off manipulation and puppeteering, things it can’t really engage in as much as it would like, since now everyone is trapped inside various fear domains. so, why-oh-why, not just leave the world as is? why even bring about an apocalypse in the first place if your intention is to always inhabit a apocalypse-less place?
i felt like this was such a plot-hole of an explanation the way it was presented. the web’s greatest flaw was that it loved intricate plots so much there was a real danger of over-complicating its own plans and failing to see the forest from the trees, so to speak. the eye could have been used not to boggle down on meaningless details and ramifications, but to get a better sense of the bigger picture, something the web could very well lose sight of (pun intended). so the web’s “plan” could have been ultimately rendered meaningless, because instead of choosing the simplistic, straightforward, occam’s razor solution (no apocalypse, just thrive off the world as it is), it chose the overly complicated path that placed it in a situation it didn’t thrive in (eyepocalypse) and made it even more complicated to get out of in the first place. it basically surrendered its destiny into the hands of people who had zero reasons to act sympathetic and could have very well chosen to destroy the entire world, fears included. and yet i am supposed to be in awe of the web’s great intelligence and buy into the whole dumb eye propaganda?
many things have already been said about the moral dilemma at the end of S5 and my take on that is that jon was right. it was the merciful and just solution to prevent other people from other universes from suffering at the hands of fear entities. but i will be indulgent and account that it is a difficult choice to make for anyone, since human beings are so survivalist in nature and the choice to just make the fears someone else’s problem in the hopes of their plans maybe getting foiled more effectively by others is tantalizing. who knows what any of us would have chosen had we been in their situation? perpetuating the horrors on someone else just so you could get reprieve is so cravenly but it’s human and i get it. however, by no means is this a happy ending the way it was framed by the narrative. what melanie, georgie, basira and martin did was horrible and evil, but it is never acknowledged in that way. the least jonny could have done is have jon resist martin’s selfish decision and have martin genuinely kill him. but, no, martin gets his romantic send-off together with jon, with the open possibility that they get transported to another world where they could start over. melanie, georgie and basira get to start a new life in the entity-less world, after contributing almost nothing. the worst characters get to live & they’re validated in their awful behaviour.
however. i do feel like there were other ways to resolve the eyepocalypse without resorting to a horrible sophie’s choice in the first place, but that would require a more extensive endgame re-write.
Yes!! I agree with a lot of this!! Especially the bits about the Eye, like.. the fear of being stalked, of secrets being exposed.. that’s not just the fear of someone staring at you, it’s the fear of intelligence behind that. Of someone watching you, just for the purpose of harm. And that suddenly being flipped on it’s head with the web is just.. it doesn’t make much sense? Both the web and the eye are heavily paranoia based in nature- fear of being watched, of information being used against you, fear of being manipulated, of your actions not being your own. These are both fears of an unknown intelligence- so the eye just being the ‘dumbest’ one doesn’t make any sense. Honestly, i’d say the body/flesh oriented fears would be the most animalistic- the hunt, the slaughter, the flesh- not the eye. While the web having it’s fingers in almost everything makes loads of sense, the eye being a completely unaware observer.. doesn’t. And that’s always been an aspect of tma I’ll dislike, sadly, though it doesn’t quite ruin the series for me- just a gripe with the piece of media. also, i heavily agree that elias should’ve been given more of a spotlight in s5, or at least a more active role- like, come on!! You can’t just give him ONE one minute long actively speaking scene, that being his death!! I do sometimes wonder what s5 would’ve looked like if it were not adjusted for COVID. Tragedy, or something. And yes, basira melanie and georgie being the BIGGEST hypocrites in the series always bugged me, but i feel that part of their characterization is wholly intentional. All of the characters are morally grey, and just because something works in their favour doesn’t exactly mean the narrative is presenting them as right, i feel? Because, like, yea. Jon was right, but it all amounts to one really big cosmic trolly problem, and as you said; human beings are selfish! Basira, Melanie, and Georgie don’t want to die, so they choose the ‘shuffle the suffering out of our sight’ option! Simple, but not exactly *good.*
and jon’s motivations aren’t pure, either- jon is, at the end of it, completely correct in wanting to end it all now- but it’s explicitly stated that his motivations for wanting to become a ‘fear god’ of sorts was also a sense of envy for elias’s place in the food chain, which is a desire almost wholly given to him by the eye. He’s right, but his motivations are.. questionable.
thank you for posting this rant, twas a really good read!
Hello, fellow TMA enjoyer, I’m glad my yelling at the clouds was able to resonate with someone. 😅 Also SO glad someone agrees with me re: the Eye, because I’ve felt like I was going insane with the revelation of it being oh-so-brainless and apathetic. Of course, I accept the fact that, at the end of the day, everyone is going to have their own unique takes on the Fears, what they represent and how they manifest, but the Eye being Dumb just completely negates the power it would have to cause fear in the first place? Because if it lacks that element of hidden promise of harm (be it physical or judgmental), then what exactly are you fearing in the first place? The shape of an eyeball?
As for Jon’s motivations to become the Eye’s pupil, as long as he fulfills his objective of destroying the Fears, I think it remains secondary. The others don’t really stop him because they’re afraid he’s not going to destroy the world and just perpetrate the status-quo, they stop him because they actively want to funnel out the fears into the multi-verse. And I feel the selfishness of that choice could have been emphasized better? There is a narrative difficulty here, because there’s no one else left to do that (Helen could have? perhaps? but she gets killed), but to me the framing was deficient in this regard. I remember lots of people being upset with the ending because it was “happy” and not a tragedy at all, so the horribleness of that choice didn’t really come across properly - they just saw fan favourite characters alive and that was it.
I think a big improvement would have been if Jon was shown to actively resist Martin until the very end and stick to his guns on why they couldn’t doom countless other universes to the same fate + actually depict it like the betrayal it was. Instead Jon kind of goes “oh well, guess I have to play along now” and acts like it’s no big deal actually, as if those two diametrical choices were interchangeable anyway.
That being said, there was no need for this huge cosmic trolley problem in the first place - I can’t say I’m a huge fan of them, because it sort of removes the question of individual will. If you’re damned whatever you do, then what’s the point? But, still, even with the trolley problem. If you want to make it a tragedy, then go hard or go home, lol.
Personally, I’m sure other ways of resolving the apocalypse could have been pursued and set up. As for which ending you prefer, it’s true that depends on what kind of message you are tying to convey with the entire show. As it stands, I think it was too ambiguous of an ending to make a coherent point in either direction.
sorry. sorry! i know it’s been said. but how is it possible to write two characters who are so deeply connected to one another. across lifetimes, over oceans of time… you never wanted this, no. but I’m afraid you absolutely did choose it. in a hundred ways, at a hundred thresholds, you pressed on. you sought knowledge relentlessly, and you always chose to see… how you turn my world, you precious thing, you starve and near exhaust me, everything i’ve done i’ve done for you… it does tickle me, that in this world of would-be occult dynasties and ageless monsters, the chosen one is simply that – someone I chose. it’s not in your blood, or your soul, or your destiny. it’s just in your own, rotten luck… with all my knowledge and intrusion i could never entirely predict you. i can feed the caterpillar and i can whisper through the chrysalis, but… what hatches, follows its own nature and is beyond me… you’ll come to love it here, in this world that we’ve created… and you do this over the course of almost six years. over two hundred episodes. by accident.
have you eroticized the repulsive today? have you applied an element of carnality to what is considered by most to be gruesome, grotesque, and/or monstrous today?
Listen, it goes without saying that Jonelias is unhealthy, etc etc. That’s why we like it. But… fantasy-wise? In the safe realm of ideas? Who doesn’t ache to have a purpose, to be used to end the world, to be unwillingly turned into a god? To be worshipped by the man who seemed all-powerful, or alternatively, to belong to someone who is all-powerful? To behold and be beheld?
Ok I will say. Hot take here but i think JM in s5 is not MEANT to be healthy. I think that’s the whole entire point. It’s never portrayed as healthy; they spend the whole time bickering and arguing and not trusting each other and being so horrifically extremely codependent it’s pointed out BY ONE OF THE AVATARS, THE LITERAL HARVESTERS OF HORROR. I think making them dysfunctional is entirely the point. The last episodes they appear in together they’re arguing about jon becoming GOD, martin is very obviously against it, and jon simply decides he Does Not Care. And i mean, in the grand scheme of things? Jon, well, he’s correct! Doom one world and not millions of others. Martin isn’t portrayed as correct here- (in ‘checking out’, Jon says he knows martin is fine with the theoretical suffering of others, but when he actually SEES it then he’ll be horrified- same logic applies to his take on release the fears vs keep em in 199) all of them are just.. people. With opinions. Not really any of them good, or the standard, or healthy in the slightest. If you’re constantly bickering with your boyfriend about the morality of consuming other people’s terror, asking him to smite people you dislike, and practically insulting him at some points.. i don’t think that’s an intentionally healthy portrayal. Jmart is purposefully dysfunctional in canon, and I don’t think it’s bad writing because of it. And it goes both ways, too! Jon can be pretty mean to Martin throughout the pod!! He insults him behind his back to vent his frustrations about their relationship! Because, hey, loving each other isn’t enough, you’ve got to Actually Make It Work. And they can’t (won’t?) ever do the latter.
Actually, another hot take: not a single relationship exists in tma without extremely jagged or messed up edges. Even the canon ones, especially jmart. Because it’s a hORROR PODCAST.
…evil murder husbands JE, though? I get what you guys mean, tbh. That may be the exception to the above rule.
Same anon as before, i just wanted to add that none of that is from a place of frustration I just want to have a discussion about s5 jmart tbh. I feel like how unhealthy jm is isn’t spoken about in the context of ‘what if it’s intentional?’ Because a lottt of people just assume it’s bad writing when. No, no, i think jonny knows what a healthy relationship looks like, and this absolutely isn’t it (and that is pointed out in-canon)
Outside of my jmart Thoughts, I absolutely adore your writing!! How you DESCRIBE things just completely sticks me in the room in a way I don’t usually experience when reading fic. I sadly don’t really have any jonelias prompts floating around up in me noggin (for NOW), but i just wanted to say that. You’re super cool! I like seeing your stuff on my dash! Sorry i’m an anon, also; I fear people may come for me with fire and pitchforks if i were to use my main lmao. You’re really great at writing their dynamic!!
hey! thank you for sharing your thoughts. i’m not really a productive person to have this conversation with though because i haven’t listened past MAG 166 (I have previously said multiple times that I never got past episode 4 of s5. turns out that’s incorrect! the last episode i got to was The Worms, I misremembered it as 4 episodes because the first 2 episodes of s5 take place in Daisy’s safehouse, so I was counting the number of statement episodes i listened to. they were extremely disappointing so they stuck with me. the jmart plays house episodes i just blacked out i guess as a defense mechanism.)
so, i really can’t weigh in on what you’ve said here because i haven’t experienced this season and i’m not going to. publishing both to respond and because maybe other people would like to have this conversation with you and it’s clear you’ve put a lot of thought into this understanding of the text!
what i will say though is that i don’t doubt that jonny sims knows what a healthy relationship looks like. i’m not pretending i know anything about him or his irl marriage (besides the crazy and immediate chemistry he and sasha have solely as disembodied voices) but he does write a lot of healthy relationships from his statement givers. people who love and care about each other in romantic, platonic, and familial ways that feel real and three dimensional.
but i’m actually totally uninterested in what sort of healthy relationships he can write, though. i don’t seek out healthy relationships in my fiction lmao i seek out interesting ones. i don’t want my blorbos to talk to one another like they’re on the couch at couple’s therapy.
my problem with jmart isn’t that it’s “unhealthy”, it’s that it’s rewarded by the narrative. i’m supposed to believe that jon and martin randomly getting together in 158/9 is a culmination of their hard work. a reprieve from their suffering. finally, after all that horror, they can end up together. it’s a reward for them! it’s immediately taken away and that’s supposed to be the tragedy. of having had a glimpse at happiness, or having closed your fingers around it, and then it being snatched away.
it’s like, have you seen the descent (2005)? if you haven’t i recommend it, it’s one of my favorite movies. good buried statement. if you liked Lost Johns’ Cave you’ll love the descent (2005). i’m gonna spoil it for you now though, so sorry if you haven’t seen it.
there’s a scene near the end where our sole survivor sees daylight. she crawls for like a mile with broken limbs over sharp rocks and her hand breaches the surface. she escapes into the open air. she screams in the most primal, life affirming, animalistic way as she breaths lung full after lung full of fresh air. and then we snap back to reality and she is miles and miles beneath the earth, hallucinating her salvation.
it’s really really affecting. it’s such a gut punch. you think, huh, we’re close to the end of our runtime, i’ve really come to care about this person. i’m so relieved that she’s getting out. i’m experiencing her euphoria at finally escaping. and then it’s all ripped away from you. it’s incredible!!!
that’s what 158 - 160 was supposed to be. jmart in their little scottish cabin with their little highland cows was the fresh air. except ,well, it didn’t taste like fresh air to me! it felt like turning around 180* and crawling back into the dark. i think jon and martin are awful for one another but more than that: i don’t believe that they find comfort in one another.
one of the chief draws of jon/elias is that elias is a reprieve for jon. he’s the one person in his life who he is close to that doesn’t hate him. that doesn’t verbally abuse him as soon as he catches sight of him. he’s also the person responsible for turning him into a monster but listen, you win some you lose some. every relationship has give and take. i: isolate you from everyone you know and drag you deeper into your paranoia. you: crawl to me for comfort only i can give you. romance!
i don’t see the doomed romance that people who like jmart talk about because i don’t see the two of them ever enjoying one another’s company. i don’t see anything that they have in common. i see them sort of hunker down as s1’s sole survivors but even then, martin is pulling away from jon as hard as he can. we as the audience know this is because of peter, but basira tells jon it’s because his mom died (??????) and he hates him too (?????).
so, i don’t think that jmart is bad writing because it’s supposed to be a great relationship and it’s actually really unhealthy. i think jmart is bad writing because their plot arc hinges on me believing, despite 160 episodes giving ample evidence to the contrary, that they are in love with one another. maybe it’s bad love, maybe it’s a lie or an illusion or a veneer. whatever. i still need to believe (i the audience, the beholder in whose eye this is playing out) that they are in love. with one another.
and i honestly can’t even picture them further than arm’s length apart.
um also turning around to twirl my hair thank you SO much for your kind words about my writing D: i really appreciate that, it means a lot!!! i think it’s obvious i care about this podcast a lot and i spend a lot of time thinking about it so thank you for sharing your thoughts with me and for reading my stuff. you are welcome here on or off anon, i’ll also happily not publish things if you would like me not to publish them.
the fact that Beholding canonically graces its devotees with sensual pleasure when they are submitted to its power as well as when they are yielding it… jon compelling elias as a feedback loop of pleasure that they alone, as one under their god, have the ability to experience.
it is still. Unbelievable. to me. that they made jonmartin canon in like full sincerity. that this was a good thing somehow that the narrative rewarded. getting to 158 - 160 felt in many ways like rounding a corner and getting hit in the face with a cast iron pan. i successfully predicted the main gist of the watcher’s crown some time around the end of s3 and i was totally BLINDSIDED by canon jmart. hit with a 2x4 fr.
yes and no! in the s3 Q&A they talked about martin’s crush on jon being planned from day 1, which i totally believe. i think it was super obvious from the start that martin had an unrequited crush. i actually think it’s a well written unrequited crush from someone with really low self worth and a prominent authority figure in their life.
then in the s4 q&a they say that the watcher’s crown has been planned from the beginning, which i also think is really obvious. like it was clearly well executed and clearly building from day 1.
and then they talk about the overall plan for martin’s arc which i don’t believe lmao. i think there def was a plan for his arc but i don’t think the plan was what ended up happening in canon.
idk this sounds like flimsy and uncertain to me. like if i had been writing web!martin up until now and i was currently scrambling to rewrite s5 to not be web!martin, this is what i would say.
and then they mention that jon’s ace-ness was something that they had head canoned from the start but that they didn’t think it would come into play (i’ve talked to you about why this isn’t important lmao but moving on)
and then after that they talk about whether or not jonmartin is romantic. and from what i can tell here they’re hedging SUPER HARD for people with aro headcanons?????
and then there’s the famous “magpod will never have kissing because it’s an audio nightmare” conversation
but this is like. this conversation is so baffling to me. they’re both like well i mean you know i can’t like. like i can’t tell you- i mean. it’s like. well. death of the author and such. so. it’s like. i mean-
like this is an incredibly simply yes or no question. i have no idea why this was how they answered it.
Yeaaah watchers crown definitely was set up well! In general I think almost everything was foreshadowed and set up quite specifically which is what makes the suddenness of JM stand out so much. And their answers here…I think the part where they say they tried to make JM feelings more explicit in 159 but it rang hollow is EXTREMELY telling like guys lmao. Say less…. We know.
Also “We wrote it as a romance” no offense but yall suck at writing romance jesus christ
To me, this seemed like 1. Martin’s crush on Jon was implied from the beginning and throughout S1-S2 (though, it was subtle, blink and you’ll miss it, herein you can also argue Death of the Author, I guess). It does get confirmed by Elias when he looks inside Martin’s head at the end of S3 and asks him why would he waste energy on someone who treats him so badly (paraphrasing bc I haven’t listened in a while). and 2). It wasn’t supposed to turn explicitly into Jmart but it was kind of sprung on by how positively fans reacted to it after the S3 finale? And that’s how we got the S4 romance plot shoe-horned in.
To be fair, Jon does become nicer to Martin in S3 after he comes back from his hidey-hole, but from acting friendly to outright being in love with someone is a huge gap. No offense to jmart shippers, but these people are not well-suited to each other. What do they even have in common? What attracts them to one another? What do they even know about each other?
Ultimately, there are discrepancies on both sides, IMO, bc Martin is someone Jon absolutely despises in earlier seasons. He definitely starts off as a prickly character with a lot of room to grow, someone that is very difficult to get close to, but he has none of this attitude towards Sasha, Tim or Elias. Martin just somehow ticks his buttons so much that he doesn’t even seem to respect him. ? He gets a lot better later on, granted, and in S4 you can argue he is in such a bad situation that Martin is kind of the only person available (well, not really, bc he’s busy with Peter) who doesn’t bite his head off just for existing, so NOW he is drawn to him. But it’s. Such a sad state of affairs to base a romance on.
Whereas Martin gets his own character growth after Elias calls him out for his crush and even admits in S4 he was kind of fooling himself and that they don’t even like each other in the Archives. So that looked a lot like self-awareness? Realizing that your crush is predicated on an illusion, but still doing the right thing, as is - he’s standing up for Jon in front of the others and he’s refusing Jon’s offer to run away with him. S4 Martin is kind of a refreshingly actualized character.
It’s the romance ending of S4 that feels kind of implanted. Jon has had little contact with Martin after waking up from his coma; I struggle to see how the Martin he seems to yearn for isn’t some fantasy he’s built in his head, whereas S4!Martin was mature enough to break through the illusions he had constructed about Jon as a romantic partner.
Like, I could buy this relationship as two people not necessarily suited to each other, but maybe finding each other in bad circumstances and making due. But that’s just it - they’re not each other’s soul mates, they’re settling for each other, because there’s no one else available. And that’s kind of realistic in and of itself, even if it’s depressing. That could have been the point of S5, but it wasn’t acknowledged as such. Instead, Martin really regressed from all his S4 growth and turned into his most annoying version, clinging to Jon no matter what, often trying to control and manipulate him.
So, to me, at least, it does seem like this relationship was written pretty chaotically and doesn’t really look like something that was planned from the very beginning. The narrative doesn’t decide what the dynamic between these two characters should be. Is it a great love story? Is it abusive? Is it just passing time? Are they sincere, are they fooling themselves?
a JE truther AND a JM hater? we are few and far between. love this revisionist pro-jon meta i've been seeing on my dash lately. felt like gagging during the peak of the JM craze. jonny should have stuck to his plan of filling martin up with spiders for real.
je-truther jm-hater reporting 4 duty and also YES this year i have been 100% converted to web!martin truther
altho i will say i’m not a revisionist? lol i’ve been 100% pro-jon 100% of the time since 2019
…what does this mean
I was wondering about that myself! It appeared immediately after I left a comment lol. I thought it would have been more appropriate just to leave a quick message under the post instead of reblogging. IDK why it stayed hidden. 🤷♀️
I basically just wanted to add that I wasn’t referring to you specifically re: the revisionism comment. It’s more that the meta I remember being circulated at the time of S4-S5 was very much within the lines of “Jon deserves being treated that way”, which is something I’m glad to see getting more debunked nowadays.
Oh, boy. I have done it a lot before but somehow a quick search didn’t bring much up, so I will… attempt to summarise in as non ranty way as possible because I don’t actually enjoy feeling heated hatred towards characters and I’m tbh glad that taking distance from the fandom had made me feel less of it. This is not a sourced literary analysis or anything, it’s based mostly on my memory biases and vibes, but neither is it an angry rant because I’d rather not get into that mode.
I’m also answering with an assumption that you’re familiar with tma? Otherwise this may not make sense.
So, one thing was his connection to ~humanity~™. I have… a lot of issues with the idea of defining some ways of being a person as “more human” than others in a way that claims more human = more moral, and while tma often handled that theme in ways I like, Martin became emblematic by the end of the ways I don’t like. This association is probably also largely the fandom’s fault because I still remember having to see a post that called him “the most human character” (extended sounds of me screaming wordless rage in the distance), but I feel that canon did put him in that role through the combination of him having a very strong morality of “human = moral, less human = less moral” even as other characters began to see more nuance (see: him feeling entirely comfortable joking about killing Oliver, who was among the least morally bad of the avatars), and him dating someone who was also an avatar and even having a domain himself didn’t make him see more nuance or even struggle with his own morality or his attachment to Jon, but simply try to ignore those facts. (More on him ignoring things later!) Jon seeing him as an anchor to humanity while he ignored every part of Jon that was “less human” was a deeply uncomfortable dynamic to me, and the fact that Jon went along with the association of “humanity = morality” served to frame him as Jon’s moral compass even when the moral decisions he was making were worse that Jon’s. (See: him goading Jon into going on a revenge spree. See also: the very end.)
On the “ignoring” thing - in a show that’s all about voyeurism and dangerous knowledge, Martin was a character who very much preferred to stick his head in the sand and avoid facing anything uncomfortable for him. This is visible in his naive insistance throughout season 5 that fixing things would be as simple as “kill the bad guy, revert everything” after repeatedly being told it probably wouldn’t, his failure to reckon with the implications of asking Jon to kill every avatar they run into because they’re inherently evil while not wanting to think about the fact that Jon is an avatar (I will give credit where credit is due that he did reckon with his guilt over him having a fear domain in the episode about it, which is a good episode that almost made me like him again, but if any realisations stuck it didn’t show), his refusal to listen to Jon’s statements and loud distaste towards them, etc. On a less facing-uncomfortable-realisations note and more just general obliviousness… there’s a scene in early season 3, when he canonically already has a crush on Jon, where he’s surprised to hear that Basira thinks Jon is funny. This is innocuous enough on its own, but it’s a clear sign of him not particularly understanding Jon, and as a big believer in love as knowledge and understanding it irks me that he could be so unobservant about someone he claims to have a crush on. And the time when they actually are dating, his attitude towards Jon seems just… marked by a complete incuriousity towards him and trying to make Jon communicate on his terms rather than make any effort to understand Jon’s.
And finally, there’s the ending. I strongly disagree with the morality of sacrificing potentially infinite worlds to save theirs, and even putting aside ethics on a narrative level it would have been so much more cathartic and satisfying and powerful and tonally appropriate to have Jon break the cycle at a horrible cost or - if not - lean into the horror of letting it continue and not soften that with “but it’s okay because Jon changed his mind for romantic love and they’re together in the end!”. Martin is not the only character on my shit list for this but he’s the one responsible for introducing the romance angle and changing Jon’s mind at the last moment.
Top that all off with a large portion seeing him as sweet and innocent and the most moral person in the podcast, and acknowledging his flaws only to frame them as funny and endearing, and. Yeah. Not a fan.
(same anon) I'm having such heart eyes over your description of Jon and Elias's relationship. There really is so much to it. And you know, the story's turn baffles me especially in the light of the different sides we saw of Elias in season 3. I feel like him telling Jon about Barnabas or even the statement in the s3 finale didn't actually have much to do with the "big apocalypse plan". Especially the former almost seemed like a way to forge a connection, doubly meaningful of course in light of Elias being Jonah (including the fact that it's kind of a bit of a risk for Elias to draw this connection?) I mean, don't get me wrong, obviously, he was still very much staying on the apocalypse track, but I think deepening the personal relationship between Elias and Jon would have added such layers of tension and complexity.
And season 5, by showing us the birthday party, also confirms exactly what you said - we see how pleased Jon was that Elias showed up, especially since he was his usual grouchy self, how he lied about his age because he didn't want Elias to think of him as young and clueless.
And the finale, by having Jon kill Elias with his own hands rather than by calling down the watcher on him (which, granted, may potentially have not been possible but that's besides the point) again affirms that there is a special connection there, that Elias isn't just the next avatar on Jon's kill list. So I just don't understand why a) that relationship was so neglected in the past two seasons especially given how significant the tiny hints we did get were and b) the final confrontation was resolved so quickly.
I'll also admit to being mildly biased here, but I was also displeased with the overpowered Web reveal, especially since I feel like that also could have tied into things more interestingly instead of "oh btw the web has been planning this forever and everyone was just a chess piece". Imagine for example Jon deciding to team up with Jonah despite everything, because stopping the Web is more important to him than revenge, because Jonah's literally the only one who's with Jon on this matter, even if for different reasons, and there's delicious betrayal and moral complications going around, instead of having the Good Guy kill the Bad Guy who was really just that all along at a point in the story where there's no time to examine Jon's emotional state in the aftermath because we're rushing to tie up the story.
god yeah, I fully agree with you, especially in regards to how rushed the finale was. what gets me about the so-called resolution of Elias and Jon’s arcs where they tie in with each other is that the depth of their relationship and complicated feelings towards each other wasn’t just hinted at during previous seasons, it was an indispensable part of the plot. maybe the creators were too caught up in the Web storyline to properly pay attention to this other, more compelling story they’d written, or maybe they saw it and simply didn’t care for it; but Jon begrudgingly teaming up with Jonah, or even simply acknowledging him as anything other than a particularly cruel roadblock, would have been so much more interesting.
and while the plot relevance of Jon & Elias’s dynamic is undeniable, it would also have been such a fitting avenue to explore thematically. one thing that really captivates me about tma is its exploration of the false dichotomy of fear and desire. the two are shown to be inextricably linked, so much so that a lot of the horror in tma is made manifest by characters’ fears being warped into desire. avatars are absolutely fascinating because they’re the human embodiment of the möbius strip-esque duality of fear and desire, and Jon and Elias’s relationship is nothing if not a small-scale reproduction of the symbiotic (mutualistic? parasitic? I suppose it’s less of a biological discussion than a philosophical one) relationship between the entities and their avatars — two beings intrinsically linked, one shaping the other into an extension of itself, the other feeding and recognising the one as a reflection of all that is most grotesque and abominable in itself and still (or perhaps therefore) choosing to serve it.
YESSSSSS YES YES YES YES LIKE… sorey im on mobile otherwise i would type more lmao but it is absolutely fucking MADDENING
especially painful bc i love helen and i love jon’s rly tragic relationship w the distortion and i end up feeling so RESENTFUL like. literally she is only there in the first place because of jon. she stayed in the tunnels waiting for him bc she’s scared and in pain and she’s changing. and she’s staying in this foreign place of power waiting for her friend to come back…. protecting his “friends” in the meantime…
and melanie and basira just sort of accept her help???? but when jon comes back and is doing his fucking best they all tell him to his face that they never liked him when he was human and they would rather he have died than comw back as whatever he is now
The fact that Elias treats Jon so much better than any of his “friends” just really gets to me. Like yes, Elias is a manipulative bastard, but he does genuinely treat Jon as someone worthy of respect and who can make his own decisions, not an out-of-control monster who needs to be muzzled, which. Really can’t be said for basically any other character.
And I genuinely thought that was deliberate until s5 and then I realized that it was just poor writing and a weird bias against Jon as a character.
crazy how much jonny sims resents the eliasfuckers because like. almost every horror story has tried and the vast majority have failed to craft a seductive villain. a Gothic romance villain. a vampyric evil, a specter over the narrative. and he did this very successfully. and just like. hated it.
i am way too late for any of this, but i felt like ranting a little (a lot) over tma, so here it goes.
i actually really, really liked the dreamlike quality of the S5 statements. i think they’re some of jonny’s best work. so evocative and just beautifully written, the feeling of horror so prevalent, so delicate, so entrapping. i would listen to them absolutely enthralled. what a submersive experience. so on that front, 100% would recommend.
the problems i have are mainly with the meta-plot. certainly, personal preferences and biases come into play here, bc i despise jonmartin with the fire of a thousand suns and would have loved a jonelias corruption narrative, but, i feel that, in his quest to appease the j-mart shippers, jonny sacrificed a lot of his story’s integrity. also, i have no way of verifying this, but it also felt like he inserted his own biases in a way that wasn’t necessarily productive.
ultimately, i feel like he disrespected his main antagonists and that essentially translated into a sort of irreverence towards his own story. elias was easily his most dramatic and interesting villain (regardless of what he originally intended for him, it’s how he developed throughout the story & i think there is a certain honesty in a writer acknowledging and respecting that), stole every scene he was in, yet after his great villain reveal in S4, he is absolutely absent throughout his entire apocalypse. it creates a lack of catharsis that i find bothersome. his death is way too easy. yet when he finally appears in MAG 193, it is glorious. he is terrifyingly in the throws of religious ecstasy as the eye’s pupil. such an interesting idea! so little it was developed though bc jonny for some reason doesn’t like elias.
there’s this entire commentary about how elias is really just there to be eye’s pupil until jon takes over from him, bc it’s jon the eye truly desires. as if after faithfully serving the beholding for two centuries and bringing about his ritual, the eye would just disregard elias and actually be interested in the one person who is unwilling to play ball. please be serious. not saying that jon can’t be the eye’s “special little boy” or whatever, but the nerfing of elias/jonah borderlines on petulant. ofc, jonny is the author and you cannot begrudge a man for writing whatever he wants, but, as a listener, i have to say it feels very unsatisfying whenever authorial biases directly affect the storyline. very deus-ex-machina. very unearned.
i also have a problem with how the eye was ultimately handled and, once again, nerfed. the introduction of this element in relation to the beholding, that it sees but does not understand, felt very trite to me. it was added as a way to de-power the eye and elevate the web. but how could it even be true in the context of the entity conceptualization? the reason scopophobia is a thing is because people fear someone is behind the watching. what they fear is judgment or someone keeping tabs on them and using that information to harm them in some way. that requires intelligence, a capacity to distinguish between the harmless and the incriminatory, a propensity for casting moral judgment, of holding people accountable, of assigning blame, of discovering people’s deepest, darkest secrets, of weaponizing shame. no one is afraid of a crow or a cat staring back at them, because, while those are also living beings, they lack the higher intelligence that creates the context necessary for scopophobia. so how can the eye not possess intelligence? apparently it doesn’t, because jonny decided he didn’t like the eye and the spider was oh-so-cooler instead.
but that only lead to the spider being way too overpowered than it should have been. as the so-called brain of the operation, the web really manifests a lot of faults that could have been exploited, yet the character never do, because the web needs to be true It Girl for some reason. this all feels very childish. the web’s motivations do not work in-universe. we are often told it doesn’t have a ritual because it is content with playing its games of manipulation within the world as it currently is. and that honestly seemed a rather fair assessment to make, but later proved to be a red herring, because it was the web that was actually behind the eye’s own ritual.
i have several gripes with this. 1. if the spider is so smart, why doesn’t it/can’t it have its own ritual and re-shape the world according to its own preferences? why does it have to piggyback on the eye’s grind? 2. the spider’s big plan seems to be bringing about the eyepocalypse just to convince the characters to let the fears out into the metaverse so it can start again. because, as it turns out, the eyepocalypse isn’t really it’s preferred state of being? it was the status-quo after all? the web DID prefer the world as it was, because it allowed it to thrive off manipulation and puppeteering, things it can’t really engage in as much as it would like, since now everyone is trapped inside various fear domains. so, why-oh-why, not just leave the world as is? why even bring about an apocalypse in the first place if your intention is to always inhabit a apocalypse-less place?
i felt like this was such a plot-hole of an explanation the way it was presented. the web’s greatest flaw was that it loved intricate plots so much there was a real danger of over-complicating its own plans and failing to see the forest from the trees, so to speak. the eye could have been used not to boggle down on meaningless details and ramifications, but to get a better sense of the bigger picture, something the web could very well lose sight of (pun intended). so the web’s “plan” could have been ultimately rendered meaningless, because instead of choosing the simplistic, straightforward, occam’s razor solution (no apocalypse, just thrive off the world as it is), it chose the overly complicated path that placed it in a situation it didn’t thrive in (eyepocalypse) and made it even more complicated to get out of in the first place. it basically surrendered its destiny into the hands of people who had zero reasons to act sympathetic and could have very well chosen to destroy the entire world, fears included. and yet i am supposed to be in awe of the web’s great intelligence and buy into the whole dumb eye propaganda?
many things have already been said about the moral dilemma at the end of S5 and my take on that is that jon was right. it was the merciful and just solution to prevent other people from other universes from suffering at the hands of fear entities. but i will be indulgent and account that it is a difficult choice to make for anyone, since human beings are so survivalist in nature and the choice to just make the fears someone else’s problem in the hopes of their plans maybe getting foiled more effectively by others is tantalizing. who knows what any of us would have chosen had we been in their situation? perpetuating the horrors on someone else just so you could get reprieve is so cravenly but it’s human and i get it. however, by no means is this a happy ending the way it was framed by the narrative. what melanie, georgie, basira and martin did was horrible and evil, but it is never acknowledged in that way. the least jonny could have done is have jon resist martin’s selfish decision and have martin genuinely kill him. but, no, martin gets his romantic send-off together with jon, with the open possibility that they get transported to another world where they could start over. melanie, georgie and basira get to start a new life in the entity-less world, after contributing almost nothing. the worst characters get to live & they’re validated in their awful behaviour.
however. i do feel like there were other ways to resolve the eyepocalypse without resorting to a horrible sophie’s choice in the first place, but that would require a more extensive endgame re-write.
i have to say the events of the magnus archives would have gone very differently if I had been jon bc by the second time someone treated me like I was crazy for being suspicious of very real threats a la cassandra I would have just resorted to axe murder. “He doesn’t trust archive staff” one of them was literally replaced by an eldritch monster. “Oh he wasn’t here to help out” he was IN A COMA. Jon just felt sad and guilty every time I wouldn’t have. I would have started maiming.
If I think too hard about how Jonny Sims simply doesn't like Jon and wrote everyone treating him like that, I go insane. This is my favourite podcast, but it's also the worst?
It’s the worst because it’s not simply bad or mediocre. The writing is extremely good, except for when it… isn’t. It’s a beautiful story ruined because the author thought his protagonist was lame and refused to pay attention to his own best character, they sold out to the worst (and most vocal) part of the fandom (because it got popular as a gay love story instead of a horror tragedy), and the pandemic made things worse.
literally you freak bitches do you not hear yourselves… ooooh it was such an invasion of my privacy that jon cut the cursed bullet out of my necrotic thigh to say me from becoming totally possessed by the slaughter i hate that little freak bitch who just casts his sad wet eyes up at me when i physically maul him because he’s the threat he’s the danger and this is his fault
yeah you know
yeah
(backs up my theory that Elias only hired people he knew would punch down at Jon when frightened, because they knew damn well Jon wouldn’t punch back, so he was safe to be aggressive toward)
(it’s all about psychologically isolating your pet Archivist so he can be controlled, and will do the desperate thing, because he doesn’t have people to rely on)
(and then, ideally, after ending the world, will NOT come after you with his god-like powers because he’s too busy being depressed)
(fool proof)
(and then comes Martin with a steel chair)
yes to all of this except martin starts treating jon like absolute garbage as soon as they get together so i disagree that he is the exception to this rule
Society if Jonah had remembered what it’s like to be terrified thanks to Jon and Jon had discovered what it’s like to be powerful thanks to Jonah. If they had blurred into each other. If Jon had effected change in Jonah the same way Jonah changed him. Do you see.
The whole podcast is about Jonah and Jon spinning into each other’s orbits until they form a binary unit together. There would be no king of a ruined world without the archive and vice versa. They are irrevocably bound together. The one thing the finale got right is that they die minutes apart from each other and by the same blade.
i am sick to death of fourth wall breaks that are funny. i want fourth wall breaks that make me want to cry.
give me hamlet looking up during his monologue to see the audience and plead with them for help. give me orpheus, on the road back up from the underworld begging us to make sure eurydice is there, to tell him she is safe. give me orpheus turning when the audience stays silent.
give me someone, bloody and full of tears monologuing to the camera when the narrative has wound itself so tight that they can’t escape it anymore.
“youre just watching me. help me. im dying and im rotting and im losing myself and you wont do a thing.”
i want the tragedy to be the performance. i want the tragedy to be, truly, in the eyes of the beholder.
i wish s5 had been so much more je-wise and it kills me because i know it couldve been….like ok we’re gonna end s4 on such a high note (possibly a delusional take but what’s better than this manipulating mansplaining and manwhoring) but then elias isn’t even gonna hover ominously over the narrative? like sure they mention him a couple of times because obviously they’re on their way to kill him but most of the time it’s just jm horrorpocalypse roadtripping. and what they DID give us was pretty interesting actually! all the anger jon has towards elias, all the times he corrects people and says he’s not elias he’s jonah magnus but stumbling when he needs to say “i was the catalyst…elias–jonah magnus used me”, telling martin he’s going to confront him even though he doesn’t know if he’s capable of it (but he won’t hesitate!) but showing up to the panopticon just for martin to immediately clock him as envious instead of terrified…whew it really could’ve been something i swear
‘the eye can’t see inside itself’ being the reason why jon couldn’t sense elias throughout most of s5 is a valid one considering elias had become the eye’s “pupil” at that point but there’s also no reason why elias couldn’t have been looking at jon the whole time. like senseless and overloaded with the infinite flood of knowledge is all well and sexy but you expect me to believe that even though all that he wouldn’t still be looking at his archivist? on a subconscious level even i just believe that he would’ve turned his gaze to the one person that had his attention all this time. and jon should’ve felt the heavy weight of his gaze (if not the watcher’s call itself) all the way up to the panopticon!! he said the time of OUR victory is here!! he said you’ll get used to in the world that WE have made!! they made themselves for each other!!!!
s5 had very few JE moments (i froth at the mouth thinking about what could have been) but MAN the fact that they did a statement together?!??!?! even though jonah was overloaded by the eye?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?! still rocks me to my CORE.
no literally! if jonny sims didn’t want me to believe that there was a black thread of fate connecting jon and elias then why would he give us such delicious breadcrumbs like that one…s5 jonelias really just makes me sooo wistful because the bones of a true je ending were there and i’ll stand by that.
there’s a couple different ways that i think it could’ve gone but i know deep in my heart that what i really wanted was for them to pull a hannigram and fall off the cliff together…and i won’t even say that this is an implausible ending because they always made it clear that tma wouldn’t really have a happy ending (esp after jon started the apocalypse and all) and leading up to s5 they made it clear that jon was close to spiraling out of control with his statement-addiction (helped by his ties to the web) and also playing heavily into elias’ manipulations (like in mag158…elias was literally SO smug in that episode and jon was so compliant. maybe just because he wanted to save martin but honestly if i heard my evil boss be like …my you have grown. a masterpiece, isn’t it? i wouldnt just be like yeah. it is) (that’s not true i probably would. if i were gay for my evil boss)
Bruh, if you don’t think that having historically significant events well documented from multiple perspectives is a good thing, then idk what the hell u doin.
Besides, like, that is literally a Giant Monster Rampaging Through The Town. What the fuck is the everyday person gonna do other than Tweet/Instagram/Post about it going “It’s the apocalypse you guys! Eyyyy lmao #apocalypse #deathrising #nofilter”?
And heck, even if your own death is inevitable getting information out could help save other people, even if it can’t save you. ‘Here are 20 livestreams of the giant tentacle monster including how it moves and attacks, how can we beat it?’ is way more useful than ‘an entire city got wiped off the map and things smell vaguely of calimari idk man’
reblogging for this perfection: ‘an entire city got wiped off the map and things smell vaguely of calimari idk man’
I personally would be trying to give the Great One flowers and chocolate, but I don’t fault others for watching to get a picture of something so glorious and terrible. 😍
These are photos taken by Robert Landsburg of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. He realized he would never get to safety in time, so he kept taking pictures of the ash cloud for as long as possible. Then he put the camera securely in his bag and lay down on top of it to protect it before being engulfed in the pyroclastic flow. When they found his body, the recovered the pictures were invaluable to geologists because no one had ever been able to document an eruption that close up before.
There are many more such photographs of unimaginable perspectives taken moments before death, only because of the compelling human desire to assert that we were here, this happened, this was real. It’s the most human desire there is - to reach out across time and space to connect with our fellow beings until our last breath.
That’s haunting
I fucking tear up every time I see this post because that’s it. That’s the essence of what it means to be human.
I was here. I explored. I saw this. Remember me.
Fuck
“I don’t want to become a mystery. I refuse to become another goddamn mystery. […] If I die, wormfood or… something else, whatever, I’m going to make damn sure the same doesn’t happen to me. Whoever takes over from me is going to know exactly what happened.”
“That’s… That’s quite nice, actually. Tingly… but sort of freeing. [Chuckle] You know, even Gertrude never properly tried to compel me. I always wondered –”
*thinks about Hannibal feeding an unaware Will human meat and watching him eat it* *thinks about Elias feeding Jon statements because he secretly wants to make him his Archive* Ah yes, the intimacy of food
both of you are obviously correct but i’m throwing this significantly more deranged option completely unsupported by the text into the mix: melanie assumes/has seen jon and elias make their coffee together in the morning
you (sane): elias is just dismissively moving the conversation forward. he knows the coffee is poisoned and wants this clumsy half baked “assassination” attempt to be over quickly because he has paperwork to get back to
me (insane): IT’S ACTUALLY TEXTUAL EVIDENCE THAT ELIAS CONFIRMS
