plightofthecentipede:
plightofthecentipede:
plightofthecentipede:
season 4 of tma is crazy on first listen because jon wakes up from his coma and like, everyone is highly suspicious in regards to his remaining humanity, wondering if he’s gone full monster, but all we hear is the tapes and he largely sounds pretty normal, like, for him? like all things considered?
and THEN you find out halfway through the season that he’s been running around london finding random victims and nonconsensually slurping statements out of their brains, forcing them to live in their trauma every night, and you’re like OHHHH. this is why he’s been thinking about free will vs manipulation and humanity vs. monsterhood every fucking episode. the clues were there all along.
^ things you say when you are absolutely not stalking people in coffeeshops to eat their supernatural experiences and feel guilty about it
exactly. like imagine a version of events where jon had a support system.
Will literally never get over the fact that when Jon flat out asks Basira if she’s disappointed — not glad, not angry, not sad, but disappointed — to see him alive she says, verbatim, “we’ll talk about it later”.
AITA for breaking my promise to my boyfriend?
My (M31) boyfriend (M32) and I haven’t been together long. 3 weeks and then some amount of time roughly feeling like a couple months? All of this time was spent either hiding from the police or people who wanted to kill us, and then trekking through basically a post-apocalyptic wasteland of my own creation where I had significantly more power than anyone there, including my boyfriend.
My boyfriend gets worried about me, I understand the feeling, I’m worried about him a lot. He has it in his head that I’m suicidal or self-sacrificial, or have some sort of martyr complex. I admit that I’ve put myself into situations where I would likely — or probably — die before, and yes, a few of those situations could’ve been easily avoided, but this situation, the one where I lied to my boyfriend isn’t like that.
So, remember the post-apocalyptic wasteland I mentioned? We got the chance to end it, to save our world, but to do that we had to pass on the things that caused the apocalypse to other universes (not me, I was sort of the unwilling pawn? it’s a whole thing).
I didn’t want to do it, I couldn’t handle the thought of spreading our apocalypse to other universes. I proposed to kill the whole word (including myself and them), burn out these entities, stop them from spreading. The others (my boyfriend, my ex-girlfriend/friend (F30s) my ex-girlfriend’s girlfriend (F30s, my sort-of-friend’s (F40s) (dead) friend (F30s)) disagreed.
Later, my boyfriend came to talk to me, and I told him that I’d follow his and the others’ plan. He reminded me of the promise we’d made a little while before, that I wouldn’t die if there was another way to save the world, and he wouldn’t stop me if I had to die to save it. I think, even now, that a lot of his reasoning for having me not save countless more people, more worlds, is because he’s always just wanted me to be fine after this. I just never saw an after.
I went through with my plan, but before I could actually get started on killing, my boyfriend found out, he tried to stop me, and revealed that my ex-girlfriend managed to begin doing the other phase of the plan, even though I thought I had the important object. Eventually, I decided that I couldn’t save the other worlds, but I could save this one, and I couldn’t watch my boyfriend die. I told him to kill me, and I hoped we’d end up somewhere else.
It’s good here. Peaceful. I haven’t known that in a while. There’s still that worry that the world’s going to end again, there’s still that guilt over ending it, I don’t think it’s ever going to go away, but it’s good. Things with my boyfriend are more fraught. We love each other, we do, but he’s angry for breaking my promise, for making him kill him. I know that it hurt him, but I know that if I had been able to go through with my plan, if my boyfriend and the others had let me then this world would be safe, this world would be allowed to be good. There are kids here, they go to the park with their parents every evening on Wednesdays. If anything happens to them it’ll be my fault for letting those things spread.
So, AITA for breaking my promise to my boyfriend, even though it was to save countless lives?
aita-blorbos:
*clangs pots and pans together* TELL ME HOW DOING WHAT THE WEB WANTED THEM TO DO JUST BECAUSE IT SAID IT WOULD RESULT IN ALL THE ENTITIES LEAVING WAS MORALLY JUSTIFIABLE AFTER MULTIPLE SEASONS OF THEM SPOUTING OFF ABOUT HOW DOING WHAT THE EYE WANTED THEM TO DO IN ORDER TO STOP THE RITUALS WAS MORALLY INDEFENSIBLE AND EQUITABLE TO BEING A MONSTER???
EXPLAIN. I NEED EXPLANATIONS.
samamakhalid:
Jon “my grandmother openly resenting the space I occupied but still putting up with our forced cohabitation was just the way of things” Sims probably had a well adjusted emotional reaction when every ally in his s4 life either dismissed, mocked, or contributed to his torture
samamakhalid:
Immediate red flag whenever anyone writes a fic scene where Jon does a stupid thing and then someone else in the archives like chastises his dumbass and course corrects him. Immediate marriage proposal whenever anyone writes a fic scene where Jon does a stupid thing and then someone else in the archives is stupid², dumb of ass and dumb of heart, gives him the exact wrongest answer via megaphone and totally straightfaced like they’re handing moses some stone tablets.
hawkfurze:
This part had to get split in half because the original update ended up being 34 pages, so next update will be a hefty one with even more backstory!
“[…] why does pretty much all georgie discourse ignore her s5 scenes?”
Probably because most Georgie discourse isn’t about Georgie herself but instead about the fandom’s need to put her on a pedestal as the queen of self-care and boundary setting.
And how the podcast does nothing to discredit this.
Even with her apology.
Cause Jon automatically denies it and continues to deny it and by not accepting it — no matter how much SHE acknowledges her faults — narratively, her actions are venerated while his are despised.
It’s the same issue with almost every single other character when it comes to their actions and emotions towards Jon. Narratively, no matter how much the fandom or the writers themselves wants to disagree, Jon is the Big Bad and everyone against him are the heroes. And narratively, that means the heroes are in the right and he’s in the wrong.
It would be different if Jon wasn’t the linchpin of the apocalypse. It would be different if his role wasn’t to become the anti-Christ. Because if he didn’t have the power he had, he wouldn’t have been who they were needing to stop. If he was less of a manifestation of all the pain and fear they were needing to stop, the weight of his actions would’ve been equal to theirs.
But narratively it wasn’t. They weren’t.
His actions were absolutely greater in their effect than theirs against him. That’s the whole point.
So. To bring this back around. Narratively, any apology or ~aCoUnTaBiLiTy~ the others make have less importance than anything Jon does. So. No. We don’t think about or acknowledge the weak ass platitudes they give him in the goddamn penultimate episode because it doesn’t actually matter. Narratively.
Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.
iamnmbr3:
levaagrace:
levaagrace:
Good morning! I’m in a nice frothy rage so!
Everyone was being hypocritical about Jon becoming a ‘monster’ :)
It doesn’t help that, unlike him, Melanie and Martin’s abilities were seen as useful and without cost :)
But the fact everyone decided THEY, and Daisy, were still ‘human’ enough to be cared for :)
Is supremely hypocritical :)
This isn’t up for debate :)
Fuck you.
The bullet in Melanie’s leg was seen as a good thing. That gave her strength to defend them. Sure, Basira immediately agreed to get it out, but she sure as fuck also regretted it, and Melanie definitely wasn’t seen by Georgie as culpable for her act in wanting it to stay there.
Martin so quickly accepted the lonely that it didn’t take long for him to be able to use it for his disappearing acts. Yet no one at all ever called HIM an avatar or a monster for passively embracing the same kind of entity Jon did, nor did they confront him about it.
Daisy, as a near lifelong Hunter, was the only one of the three that had any real idea of what Jon was going through, who actually wanted to change and not be who she was. Even if it was way too little too late.
And the thing of it is. This isn’t addressed in the podcast. At no point is this disconnect discussed. Martin is SHOCKED, SHOCKED I SAY, at the fact he has a domain in the apocalypse… on top of him egging on Jon to smite people. Melanie barely has the wherewithal to say that Jon probably wouldn’t have caused the apocalypse on purpose. Probably.
This doesn’t bode well for y’all’s narrative that the point of TMA was to show how power corrupts or what the fuck ever y’all wanna say it was about.
Because they had that power. They used that power. And Melanie gouging her eyes out after having her connection to the Slaughter severed and Martin never outright being said to have fed the Lonely shouldn’t absolve them of that. Yet they were. Melanie was outside of the dichotomy of Watcher and Watched and at peace even with all the suffering around her. Martin’s push to kill every active avatar was only seen as bad when we’re told JON enjoyed and actively wanted to continue it.
Their choice to follow the Web’s scheme, the scheme that MADE JON INTO WHAT HE WAS, THAT WAS HIS SOLE PURPOSE FOR EXISTING AFTER IT CHOSE HIM, was the good and righteous choice. We hear that with the reconstruction and birdsong in the background of the very end scene. We hear that with Martin railing against and questioning if Jon was even human enough to know his own choices.
If the story wanted to sell me that Jon had no right to have a happy life because he made evil choices. That he was just as bad as Jonah in wanting to survive. Then the story shouldn’t have made me care that at every chance he was broken. It shouldn’t have made him sympathetic. If power is evil then I shouldn’t have cared that he died the villain.
This is so true. For example, the way Martin is handled is still wild to me. He’s a full blown Avatar. He has a domain. A domain that is presumably full of people whose suffering he is feeding on. And yet he acts superior to Jon and contrasts his humanity with Jon’s supposed monstrousness. ????????
He’s just as much a monster. If he got cut off from the Lonely he’d presumably be just as weakened as Jon was at Upton. I don’t get why Jon gets blamed for his own suffering and victimization in a way no other character does. It’s such a weird double standard.
He’s like the opposite of a Mary Sue lol. Instead of the narrative ignoring all of his flaws and bending over backwards to make excuses for him, it goes out of its way to ignore aspects of his character that making likable or sympathetic, and goes out of its way to blame him. It’s kind of disconcerting and undermines the other characters as well as central aspects of the narrative.
YES. EXACTLY.
Fandom talks about protagonist centered morality and how TMA “correctly” questions that, but that necessarily means that any point of view outside of said protagonist is the moral center.
I get that the position Magnus Archives has is that everyone is capable of doing bad things, but at no point are the others judged and condemned in the way Jon is. Period.
Jon is the one who has to make up for the sin of his existence. Jon is the one who orchestrated and caused their suffering. Jon is the anti-Christ sent to destroy the world. The others are just victims of circumstance. He’s a victim of his own crime.
gooboogy:
You’re never going to experience the compassion you need
(ID: 4 images of Jonathan Sims in varying states of distress. In the first, he looks up, lost. In the second, he covers his face with a hand and grits his teeth, shaking. In the third, he’s hunched over his desk. He covers his face with both hands as tears stream down his cheeks. In the fourth, Jon is hunched over and he’s clutching his sleeves, tears splash out of his eyes, his teeth clenched, presumably hyperventilating. His hair is full of eyes, watching. /End ID)
itchyeye:
itchyeye:
itchyeye:
this is soooooooo vile lmao… “would you support me in trying to regain some of my humanity? since you’ve been berating me viciously about it for two seasons?” “no. you disgust me.”
why would martin do this in the first place? when he is also becoming an avatar of the lonely and it is also negatively impacting everyone around him? is that another thing that only he’s allowed to do? like he KNEW that this would happen if he revealed jon’s feeding. he knew the archive crew would turn on him again.
oh actually saying this rn i think leaving this tape for the crew was a deliberately malicious expression of his own avatarhood… he’s being consumed by the forsaken of course he would want jon to be as isolated as possible and remove whatever tenuous goodwill he had built up with the girls
girl real shit you were a POLICE OFFICER i do not want to fucking hear it. how many people have YOU murdered extrajudiciously? at least jon was hungry, you were just a cop
again, it’s all good for melanie to be an avatar of the slaughter!! it’s all good for melanie to physically assault jon in the archives!! to maul him!!! to stab him!!!! melanie only has this high horse perspective btw because jon saved her life and stopped her transformation! she is only here alive looking down her nose at him because he saved her life.
daisy is so meek here i’m honestly shocked basira is still so deep in denial and so adamant on protecting her because she clearly resents her defanged gf so deeply
and wow the absolute spineless behavior on daisy’s end of being part of this mob while knowing that she did more and worse for DECADES but it’s an issue that jon’s eating people because he doesn’t have a badge and a dumb hat
it’s only ok to traumatize innocent civilians when you’re doing it with a police baton i guess
#s4 did a spectacular job at providing a wide range of people who sucked ass. all of them. it was SPECTACULAR #and then what came of it… #tma #they were all so angry and resentful and hypocritical with one another and despite it being one of the most uncomfortable experience of my #life media wise listening to them basically piling on jon for 40 episodes it was SO well done… it felt purposeful… #how did this not turn into a villain arc for jon tho is beyond me (via @girlcaligula )
this is really really really really it for me like s4 set up a world for 38 episodes where every single person in jon’s life (literally except elias and helen, who aren’t people anymore) turned on him wrestled him to the ground and started steel toed boot kicking him in the kidneys. just psychologically curb stomping him every step of the way. being overtly cruel and cold and vicious. and then somehow the narrative was like [somber] this is a good thing for these people to do and logically jon should be doing everything in his power to lay belly up and take their abuse instead of having a villain arc
like somehow you’ve set up a story where the only place jon can find compassion, joy, or belonging is with the monsters in his life who call to him and then you turn around and are like “here is jon’s beautiful reward for choosing to ‘preserve his humanity’, it’s his shitty coworker who he doesn’t even like!! they’re in love!! there are cows :)”
