i’m gonna get even more controversial and say that, in response to the ‘who gets the one fuck in tma’ poll, jon should not only get the fuck but it should specifically be him getting to say 'fuck you’ to one or more other characters when they’re treating him like shit
I'm glad we have the same Jon opinions lol. Like yes he was a jerk at the beginning of the series and then burned a lot of his bridges during his nervous breakdown but wow does that not excuse the way everyone treated him MAN. And Jon just takes all of it because he thinks they're right and he's a monster (which isn't helped at all by Elias' gross ''you chose this'' speach). It's just all so aaaaaahhhhHHH. Like guys. I know you're mad at Elais. But even though Jon also has the spooky eye stuff and is right here (as opposed to safe in jail) does not mean you get to treat him like this please ;-;
Genuinely like the top ten character who's treatment by others makes me oh so angry on their behalf. I can't believe the only person Jon had in his corner for a while was the cop that harassed him, kidnapped him, and then slit his throat!!! Argh. Anyways
As president of the Jonathan Sims Protection Team, I am glad to know you’re a member. Take a team jacket, a steel bat, and an air horn to blare every time some character pulls a game of ‘Blame it on Jon!’ out of their ass.*
- if you are really invested in the idea that any
character (and I am explicitly looking at Basira and Georgie because
they are the ones that tend to get held up in things I see as
Unproblematic Faves, but I do mean any character and this also
includes Martin and, obviously, Jon) did not, at some point in this
season, behave in a selfish, hurtful, morally reprehensible fashion for
which they bear full moral responsibility - in short if you think any of them
did not at some point Do Bad Hurtful Shit to other people in order to
attempt to assuage their own pain/terror at their loss of control - then
you don’t want to read this, and you can spare us both a lot of
aggravation by just moving along. Nobody has clean hands. Nobody.
- if you thought the other essay was heavy, this one’s going to be worse. It’s also going to deal very starkly and directly with the idea of being in an unwinnable situation,
with no nifty Captain Kirk “hah hah I reprogrammed the computers to
win!” Hail Mary. I’m going to be pulling out some realities of the
situation all of these people are in that I find both some parts of
fandom and the characters themselves are prone to ignore or forget
because of the cognitive dissonances involved and what admitting how
fucked they really are would do to their ability to get up in the
morning.
- this essay is specifically focused on Jon
Archivist Sims, but Jon is not the only one with trauma. Indeed he’s not
even the only one with trauma affecting his actions - not by a long
shot. I will touch on others’ trauma (as I did on Tim’s) and
psychological states (as I did on Martin’s), but a. it’s not going to be
as in-depth (as then I’d be here FOREVER), b. that anyone’s actions
arise from trauma does not inherently erase moral agency (and we’ll get
to that) but even when it does have an impact on their moral responsibility (and sometimes it does, and we’ll get to that too) it doesn’t necessarily change the effects,
and that may in some ways be the part of this essay that may seem
Heaviest? Because I’m gonna be getting into the fact here that moral
agency and moral responsibility do not have a direct correlative
relationship with scale of effect: to whit, harm can be done, incredible harm, without it being reasonable to blame anyone involved.
-
In the other essay I did a brief thing about what my background in
knowing about trauma at all was; here what I’m actually gonna foreground
is the following: I am a queer AFAB neuroatypical (autistic) woman, a
survivor of assault, and a member of a religious minority who has lived
with depression her entire adult life (and most of my adolescent life, I
was probably clinically diagnosable by 11) and whose depression
includes significant suicidality that has at this point in my handling
it literally become existentially boring. I mean it’s still also a
huge mental health challenge and a risk to me, but it is also boring: I
live perpetually with the fact that given an inch a significant chunk
of my brain wants to kill me.
I don’t entirely like
foregrounding this, but bluntly for the same reasons I made that first
note up there and given some of the ways that fandom approaches these
discussions these days, I already know it’s worth front-loading it: if
you’re gonna come at me from any position that assumes I am not intimately familiar with the experience of being any of the things above, please just save us both the aggro and go talk about how much I suck somewhere other than the notes here.
[
“So Feather why are you even making this post if you’re that
apprehensive?” Well firstly more than one friend went *!!!!* at the
idea; but also secondly one of the things I’ve found happens as a result
of these posts is at least a few people going “oh. OH THAT APPLIES TO
MY LIFE, oh, uh.” often with extremely useful results. Plus I have
Terminal Opinions Disorder and this is tumblr, if I can’t make seriously
unwise leaps into talking about contentious things here where can I?]
So.
Now comes the Read-More. And it’s gonna be a lot more. (Oh my god, you
say, that was the PREAMBLE and there’s going to be MORE? I’m sorry I
know exactly why I’m like this but well here we are.)
This is a fantastic meta. A lot of this hit really hard, especially the summary at the end of the others’ contradictory actions and victim-blaming towards Jon. Also, “No choice of his will make that stop. If he went and checked into the best mental health institution in the world and swore to never do … anything you decide is connected to him being an Archivist again he … would die.” I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion along the lines of" Jon should have gotten help or talked to people!“ Nobody would give Jon the time of day except Daisy. And yes maybe he could have gone to therapy but I doubt it would have been very effective due to his lack of options to remove himself from his stressors. Ultimately Jon is responsible for his own actions (giving people PTSD is BAD, Jon) but honestly it’s a miracle that he didn’t go full Monster mode sooner, given that everyone around him treated it as a foregone conclusion.
Another note on Georgie: of course she had the right to distance herself for her own mental health! But it’s worth mentioning she visited him in the hospital. Unless her plan was always to bail once he woke up, it really seems like she made the decision to cut ties after Jon woke up. Implying that Jon’s new unnatural abilities were the final straw, rather than his actions or own lack of mental health. Those were definitely a contributing factors, as she tells Martin, but I don’t think they were the only reason. This is not me bashing Georgie - again she absolutely had the right to distance herself from Spooky Stuff for her own safety. But doing so literally minutes after Jon woke up from a coma with little to no explanation was undeniably harsh.
I mean, tbh: Georgie actually behaves fairly poorly in S4, and it’s actually not about her decision to distance herself - it’s about how she actually doesn’t stick to that decision in ways that are both super passive-aggressive and actually totally inappropriate.
Because here’s the thing: when you walk out on someone the way she did - however good your reasons, and she DID have the right to do that - you lose any right whatsoever to involve yourself in their life, to insert yourself into their life, to comment on their life to them, to attempt to exert influence over their life, or to get involved in their emotional landscape.
You don’t get to have it both ways. Either you’re saying goodbye and you’re not picking up the phone and you’re accepting that some day you may read their obituary in the paper? Or you get to come and ask them about their life, what they’re doing, and give them opinions, and poke at their coping mechanisms and decisions to cut you out of their emotional discourse.
I have been desperate for SO LONG for meta like this. I want to pull my hair out each time I see people hyping Georgie “Queen of Boundaries” Barker’s actions as some sort of gold standard ideal in season 4. I hereby refuse to discuss these scenes with anyone who hasn’t read this analysis as homework first lol
Those discussions always come back to the “right to distance herself” and “she has no obligation to support him” etc etc, but the actions she takes go so far beyond distancing herself—they include actively trying to convince the only person with any faith in Jon to give up on him as well, with excessive personal attacks and textbook victim-blaming. It is horrible to listen to, and I have no clue how Martin kept his cool as much as he did. Especially since he is also trapped at the Institute with no way to escape! No external friend to help him “get better”! Everything she said about Jon doubles up as an attack against Martin, and every word of it is wrong and unfair. She knows she has partial knowledge, actively refuses to accept the offer of more understanding, but then doubles down on her judgements.
What do you give up when you refuse to learn the detail’s of a person’s situation? The right to go around telling people what a toxic and terrible person they are for being in that situation. The right to tell people that trying to help them is no use. The right to say “he only wants people to suffer with him (and unless you leave him, that includes you).” The right to say “they don’t get credit for jumping on that grenade, because they’re the one who threw the grenade.” These comments are so far from what we know to be true about Jon as a person, and Martin knows it as much as we do, but as soon as he starts to disagree the “I’m not involved so don’t want to know more” door is slammed in his face.
This scene is so over-the-top “what NOT to do when cutting someone out of your life” that I never even thought of this analysis’s commentary on Infectious Doubts. She knew she wouldn’t reconnect with Jon, and she asked right away about Melanie, so with him barely saying a word she instantly gave him some very hurtful information: that he had been cut out, with still no explanation offered, but that Melanie was still welcome. It doesn’t take a psychologist to guess the mental effect that would have on a person.
I can’t count how many fix-it fics I’ve read that force Jon to grovel with apologies to restore their friendship. I can’t count how much meta I’ve seen that concludes with “Georgie did what she had to do, good for her! Queen of mental health! No one better criticize her or else!!”. None of the characters in this show are perfect, but seeing some of their biggest mistakes put on a pedastel as something we can all only aspire to is immensely frustrating.
I know most of this is about Georgie’s actions, but I also want to just complain about how Basira acted toward Jon, especially after finding out that Jon has been taking live statements. And I just want to get the feelings out and OP has done a great job at talking about a lot of it
Somehow I missed @cucumberkale’s addition which is tragic because YES and I have continued issues with exactly this and even the exact way Martin interacts with this issue in S5 that make my way more ambivalent to their relationship than most of fandom that I’ve seen and just….yeah. Very much so.
The extent to which Jon Archivist is continually objectified and then punished for being so even by people supposedly on his side is…a thing.
Me after watching +6 hours straight of doctor who: so what if…tma doctor who au………..
Martin is the plucky companion who is working a dead end job when he’s attacked by an alien race of worms who wish to shell out humanity (literally) and farm the planet for resources. He’s begrudgingly saved by the perpetually scowling time lord known as the Archivist, who only does so because he is also trying to not get eaten by alien worms as he collects parts to repair his ship (which was damaged by a rouge K-9 unit that mysteriously got inside). Neither are quite happy about this situation but in an attempt to flee Martin hits a wrong button and they end up stranded on a distant planet with no way of getting back so they’re forced to work together to make repairs and maybe bond and have what could vaguely constitute as a heart to heart in the meantime (at least, what Martin assumes is the Archivist equivalent of a heart to heart). And then everything is fixed and dandy and Martin is able to return to his planet but then the Archivist is like so um. Maybe would you perhaps like to go and see a different time or planet since you did like help me out even though it was KIND OF your fault that we ended up in this mess and I’m not saying like I want to spend more time with you or anything but you know it’s only polite? To take you on a little adventure? You know? 🙄 and Martin is like um. I mean I’m kind of unemployed now so sure (and also maybe he thinks that the Archivist is a little cute but he CANNOT admit that because it would be SO shallow of him to say that he hopped in a spaceship with a random guy he barely knows bc he thought he was hot, but also maybe if he hangs out with him more they could maybe get to know each other better? And like. Maybe even hold hands. As a totally normal thing that space traveling companions do 😳)
And they like. Go on adventures together
ALT
Nodding along and shaking your hand…you are so right and correct for this and I can definitely see this becoming A Thing bc at first it’s just a random alias that he uses when he’s trying to not be singled out as the infamous Archivist but then like um maybe it’s kinda nice when Martin calls him that 😳 like maybe there is something there and— yes, Martin, he’s feeling fine. No, he’s not warm. Yes, his pulse is very normal for a person with two hearts, leave him alone you know nothing about Totally Normal Time Lord Things
But also I’m just imagining a conversation like
Martin: so if Jon was just an alias, what’s your real name?
Archivist: …the Archivist.
Martin: haha, very funny. Where’d you get that one?
thinking about how Martin’s whole character arc was about ‘not making yourself smaller’ and 'not burning yourself to keep others warm’… but Jon’s whole character arc was about how shitty of a person he is and that he needs to grovel at everyone’s feet because he did bad things and being traumatized doesn’t excuse that
No. I just can’t get over the cognitive dissonance of what we were told and heard versus what actually happened.
The entire time, Jon was judged and dehumanized for perpetuating and inflicting trauma on people. His actions were solely his own and he had to own up to them in order to regain trust. He was rightfully labeled a monster because he had power and abused it.
AND. FUCKING. YET.
At the end, when we get to the final decision, that’s exactly what the others decided was the right and moral thing to do. To pass on and perpetuate the same suffering they’d been subjected to BEFORE the ritual even fully realized. To unknown universes.
“But that’s all hypothetical, and the ritual could be prevented by those other universes!”
Okay but like. Did they just forget how awful things were for people? That people still suffered and died and were irrevocably affected by the Fears? That THEY were? That the reason they were even trying to stop it was because they know how horrible it was?
And they were just. Going. To pass. It on.
So, yeah, no fucking shit Jon was like, ‘fuck y’all, I’m going to kill them right here and now’. BECAUSE HE WAS TOLD AND SHOWN THE WHOLE TIME THAT WHAT HE DID AND WHAT HE BECAME WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A MONSTER. THAT HIS ACTIONS DESERVED NO FORGIVENESS.
WHY WOULD HE EVER BE OKAY WITH LETTING ANYONE ELSE BECOME THAT? EVEN HYPOTHETICALLY???
He learned and listened and took in every criticism and judgment and went ‘alright, bet’. And they still didn’t see that he was fighting and fighting against the thing that told him to enjoy and relish in what he caused. They still didn’t allow him his humanity. They STILL SAW HIS CHOICE AS HIM BEING POWER HUNGRY AND INHUMANE.
So yeah. No. I’m sorry, but the fact they saw allowing the Fears to spread if it meant their world survived as the right and moral choice completely doesn’t make any sense with how they viewed Jon as a perpetrator of their and other’s suffering and how he should’ve just not done any of that.
Y’all can argue with me if y’all want and I will listen and if there’s things I misremembered or misinterpreted then go right ahead and point them out. I legitimately only listened to the last season once and the fourth twice. And that was a good year and a half ago. But this is how I feel and this is what I got from it.
Elias: Jon did something no one else has done before. He escaped The Buried.
Basira, who escaped The Stranger WHILE THEIR RITUAL WAS IN FULL SWING just by thinking her way out: 🤨
Okay, this keeps crossing my dash. I am so sorry, but I have to rant just a little.
Yes, Basira reasoned her way out of the Unknowing - because she’d been vibing with the Beholding for months.
Like, really.
She’d been in the archives, absorbing knowledge like a crazy sponge. For months.
She’d been on the Eye Juice. For months.
While everyone else was running around, being terrified, reading statements, getting scars, she was literally sitting on a bookshelf in the Archive, chipper, absorbing so much knowledge that she amazed even herself.
Remember how GOOD she felt? When Martin or someone came across her, she was like YAY look at what I LEARNED yay!
Let’s not overlook that she was being happy and chipper as a hostage - while Daisy was forced to go kill things at Elias’ command to keep Basira safe.
The Eye was rewarding her for absorbing knowledge. We saw it do that to Jon, too.
Basira was dangerously in tune with the Eye. I am completely convinced this is the major reason she got out of the Unknowing. Unlike Jon, she wasn’t fighting the Eye’s curiosity at all, and it gave her enough of her own mind to make her way out.
Basira can absolutely be logical, but by this point in the show… she was really not.
Never mind that she’d already been supporting Daisy killing people, and only barely stopped her from murdering Jon. (She KNEW where Daisy was burying bodies in the woods, for crying out loud.)
She thought it was fine that Melanie was dangerously violent because it was really convenient. Basira barely had enough conscience left to agree to Jon removing that ghost bullet.
Speaking of - Basira treated Jon like the worst monster of all monsters when he had done nothing but survive. If she’d worked with him, tried to use her supposed logic to help him figure out what he was becoming, he’d never have ended up taking statements without asking first. But she did not. She told him he was a monster and pushed him away.
She wasn’t even consistently paranoid. Basira I cAn OnLy TrUsT MySeLf Hussein then proceeded to visit Elias in jail and believe him, haring off on some crazy adventure without even telling anyone where she went. Because Elias apparently is more believable than Jon???
And after all that, she had the gall to be UPSET that Daisy came back from the Buried with her own mind intact, no longer possessed by the Hunt.
I love her as a character, but yeah. She got out of the Unknowing because of her connection to the Eye.
She DID punch Elias, though. Absolutely legend. Full stars for that.
Hi I'm actually not over how Jon woke up from a six-month coma with his friends dead and all he got was a call-out statement and his humanity questioned. He didn't even get a hug wtf. No one held his hand. No one smiled at seeing him alive. No one said "thank god" and no one said "welcome back" and no one said "i'll take you home." He didn't even get a cup of tea
Hi I'm actually not over how Jon woke up from a six-month coma with his friends dead and all he got was a call-out statement and his humanity questioned. He didn't even get a hug wtf. No one held his hand. No one smiled at seeing him alive. No one said "thank god" and no one said "welcome back" and no one said "i'll take you home." He didn't even get a cup of tea
Everyone spouts off about how none of them had to be sympathetic or kind to Jon, but no one wants to address the fact that he had no one else. No one wants to address the fact that because they expressed so clearly how little they believed he was human and how little they wanted anything to do with him, that he was taking their advice and ISOLATING HIMSELF FROM EVERYONE ELSE. And so many people applaud Melanie and Basira and Georgie as multi-faceted and realistic, not even realizing that the narrative does nothing to say they are in the wrong! We get ONE scene in the penultimate episode where they decide to take some responsibility for their culpability in Jon becoming what he did and halfhearted apologies that Jon readily denies he needs. Because they were right about him, in the end, that he was just a monster who ended the world. And they were the winners, they were the only ones out of all the named main characters to officially survive. But sure. The hypocrisy and victim-blaming was the point.
The thing about choices in The Magnus Archives and how they don’t matter is that the opposite is true for Jon. In the actual narrative. Every choice Jon made was the wrong one that brought him closer to being inhuman and hurt innocent people and ended the world. This is text in the story. This is the view point being shown by the other protagonists/antagonists. Jon didn’t have to shake Jude’s hand. Jon didn’t have to ask Mike Crew about his scar. Jon didn’t have to read a Guest For Mr. Spider. He was one of an innumerable amount of puppets of the Web that would’ve ended the world. He could’ve just. Not. So I’m sorry if I want to have a more charitable view of a FICTIONAL character who LITERALLY had no agency within the text of the story and not just because it was a story being told in the first place.
far too old to care about fandom opinions i am an adult with a *sees a take* hm. never mind actually. i am in fact so blessed to have a huge brain and correct inconsequential opinions on fictional characters. there but for the grace of god go i
Anyway yeah season four of The Magnus Archives is nothing but people being mean to Jon for hypocritical and ridiculous reasons. Give me any evidence to the contrary and I will refute it.
Thinking hard HARD about how my dislike of Georgie genuinely boils down to the fandom and their inability to be normal about the main female characters.
You don’t get to point out the blatant hypocrisy and double standards they hold Jon to without being accused of just ~hating to see a #girlboss winning~. You don’t get to care about both them AND him without them gnashing their teeth about how female characters shouldn’t be burdened by male characters.
And it’s just. So. Irritating.
Georgie may have had Jon’s best interest at heart. Georgie was well within her rights to cut him out of her life. Georgie did not have to let him sleep on her couch and wear her merch and feed him takeaway. Georgie was absolutely not Jon’s savior or a tool for him to get back on his feet. I will never EVER deny those facts.
However.
And this is a BIG however.
The way people act like Georgie was a martyr for even deigning to allow him on her doorstep makes me loath to even begin to think of her as anything but a callous and cold hearted person who would just as likely drop a freshly blinded Melanie on her ass if she knew the truth about the bullet and why it stuck around so long.
Saying this, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t adamantly express that no I don’t actually think the canon version of her would. No I don’t actually hate her for anything she in canon did or said to Jon, beyond how hypocritical it was. Mostly cause I’d be hypocritical myself if I did.
But my fucking god does this fandom really fucking try my goddamn nerves with all these goddamn pedestals they put Georgie, Melanie, and Basira on. I’d include Martin and Tim there as well but it’s not pertinent to what I’m saying which is that wow. The minute a series has a majority female recurring cast, people sure like to forget nuance matters and you don’t actually have to think everything those female main characters do is righteous and just.
Anyway. Fuck Georgie Barker. Fuck Melanie King. Fuck Basira Hussain. And fuck their fans.
Some sketches of an extremely self indulgent post-series AU. Just… Jon being a single ‘dad’ and working as a barista can be something so personal, y’know?
Did more sketches. Still don’t have an actual plot yet though. Maybe someday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
M…m…more…
What’s this???? It’s… LEVAA WITH THE SINGLE!DAD BARISTA JON TMA AU!!!!
And now comes in the beloatheds. Except Martin. Currently he’s ‘Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Fanfic’. He’ll probably be on the next batch. Idk.
Enter Martin. Planning on finally making the master post for this later.
Did some sketches of a version where Daisy ‘survived’.
Because this is my self-indulgent AU and if I want this type of fluff I will draw it.
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