that bit in S2 where Martin is fully prepared to go down into the tunnels by himself to go help Jon
and then when he and Tim are wandering around in there and he just goes tf off on Tim for not being sympathetic to Jon’s side of things
You know what. Pretty sure if Martin had met the Not!Them he woulda just killed it with his bare hands. Martin Blackwood really out there living his best life like:
he bring snacc. he protecc. if you threaten jon he will snap your neck
There’s this weird perception that before the s3 finale, Martin was this feeble spineless doormat who just stands around wringing his hands, so it’s so wonderful to actually listen to the show and hear that he’s been ready to fistfight monsters and drag insensitive people since Day 1
He had the guts to threaten Michael and say ‘the two of us can beat ur ass’ while Tim was all ‘uhhhhh Martin no?!’ And if Tim had been down for it he may very well have tried I think.
Not pictured: a doormat
And these are all just from one episode. Martin really showed up like: “I came here to throw hands and love Jon and right now I can’t find Jon so get wrecked I guess”
Martin: *talks to Jon when he messes up and calls him out*
Anyone: *tries to threaten Jon or insult him behind his back*
I am one hundred percent sure that the world could’ve ended a different way and everyone who knows Jon would’ve blamed him for it anyway.
Tell me I’m wrong.
You are right.
Been thinking about this lately.
The Eye’s Special Little Boy would feel like the Eye to everyone - paranoia, judgements, forced discovery, etc.
It wasn’t all Jon’s fault by a long shot, but the nature of his Entity would drive people to blame him.
Even for things that happened while he was in a damned coma.
I mean like. He could’ve actually gouged his eyes out. Somehow survived it and got away. Then a few years down the line some other sorry son of a bitch could’ve been the linchpin. Or hell. Jonah could’ve decided to mark himself. And while they’re all huddled as the few that could walk around untouched by the entities. They would’ve snarked at him about how he didn’t do anything to prevent it. Because he’s Jon and all he’s good at is being a stress ball or pin cushion.
How characters like Basira and Melanie and Tim get to be awful in a human way. A way that gets to be considered complex and understandable and justified due to their situations and past. A way that validates their autonomy even in the bad things they do.
While everything Jon does is a sign of him being a selfish and uncaring monster who all but begged Jonah FUCKING Magnus to turn him into a WMD, a puppet, who uses his history as an excuse to minimize and shift blame for his actions and failures.
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.
I SWEAR AT SOME POINT I’M GOING TO WRITE THIS MOTHERFUCKER. IT MAY END UP NOT INVOLVING HIM RASING A KID. BUT I AM GONNA WRITE IT.
Outsider POV on Somewhere Else Jonathan Sims must be just. so much.
Like imagine. You’re part of a support group, and a new guy decides to join. You ask him his name and he says, “Jonathan,” and then after a long pause, “Blackwood. Jonathan Blackwood. But call me Jon.”
He doesn’t like tape recorders. You only know this because the person who hosts the support group is into retro things, and tries to keep a couple around. She turned one on once when someone asked about it, and you noticed Jon clutching his nails into his hands so tight he’s nearly breaking the skin. You lean over and whisper, “Do you want me to ask her to stop?” He says, “It’s fine,” and you nod, but you still try and change the subject whenever people bring up tape recorders from that point on.
He full-body flinches one day when someone says Hello, Jon. Nearly slams into a wall and everything. He tries to play it off, but after that people say Hi Jon, or Nice to see you, or things like that. Anything but Hello.
He says he used to work at a ‘non-profit for studying the supernatural’. Someone asks where it was and he says London. You tell your wife about it, and two days later she emails you an article. Magnus Institute Burns Down In 1999. It was in Manchester. You tell her not to bring it up again.
The guy is snarky and blunt and downright rude at times, but when a woman comes in and tells them about being trapped in a empty warehouse for a week, he comforts her in a way none of the rest of them know how. “I believe you,” he says, repeats it like a mantra, like a prayer. “I believe you.” He says 'I’m sorry’ less like he’s sorry this happened to her, and more like he’s taking the blame onto himself.
He talks about Martin, sometimes. His reason, he calls him. Normally you’d point out that while it’s of course good to love your partner, you should have other reasons to live, but you stay quiet. This guy needs all the happiness he can get.
You leave a little late that day, and when you do you hear him on the phone talking to someone. “She’d been touched by the Lonely, Martin!” he says. “Which is bad, of course, but–” he seems to choke up, “Martin, I didn’t feel any compulsion for a Statement. A-at all. I think it’s really gone.”
You just walk by.
You don’t know what’s going on with Jon, but it really isn’t any of your business. You’re an anxious queer lesbian and he’s a traumatized ace guy, and you aren’t going to make his life any harder than you have to.
its so weird to me the way parts of the fandom talk about 160. like jon “accidentally” ended the world, or was “manipulated” into it. like. bruh he was literally being mind controlled and wasnt able to move any of his limbs even tho he was audibly straining. he wasn’t “tricked,” as if he chose to do it out of misinformation (like say, gertrude was tricked into her binding with agnes). he was only “tricked” into picking up the wrong piece of paper which stripped him of his free will, in a very unsettling mirror of his first mark. everything after that was completely without any input from him, informed or no. jonah ended the world. jon was just forced to be present for it.
its like if i offered u a handshake, then when u got close picked u up and threw you at someone and then said you were “tricked” into hitting them. like no there were actually a few more steps there between the deception and the violence.
JON IS THR GRENADE. JON IS THE GRENADE YOU ABSOLUTE WALNUT.
How does no one get this? How does no one understand that his choices and autonomy are nonexistent? Why on gods green earth do they accept what Jonah fucking Magnus says about his culpability in what JONAH GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING MAGNUS AND THE FUCKING WEB did to him as the truth???
But no. Every crumb they used to lead him around was just an excuse for his lack of willpower. He should’ve just not. He could’ve just left.
periodic refresh of my slaughter avatar that’s like. kind of a sona but not really. average twenty year old fall out boy fan that needs music 24/7 to be normal
It is so fucked up how at the end of the magnus archives everyone on earth remembers the apocalypse
Like there just six months where everyone on earth was suddenly in a hell dimension specifically designed to torture them and then *poof* things were just back to normal and everything looks exactly the same except for one building that fell down in London. And there’s no explanation for it! No lingering proof either except the fact that everyone on earth also remembers it and that the dickwads who tortured you are still here!
Did people really go back to work? Because if that happened to me I’d just assume there was no economy anymore and start breaking shit
One minute you’re in a job interview, then you’re a flower made of meat being cut up, and then you’re back in your interview as if nothing happened but the interviewer is white as a sheet and whatever happened to you also happened to them. Then you find out that EVERYONE literally EVERYONE ON THE PLANET went through it too and you’re just supposed to go back to normal?
There would have been riots
There would be arguments of mass hallucination
Ironically there would be new cults
And then eventually there’s going to be a new generation who didn’t go through that and they’re just going to have to take everyone’s word for it that the world turned into a hell dimension for six months but then got better before they were born!
And time will move on
And without physical evidence future generations will just assume it never really happened and that it wasn’t real. There will be historians who dedicate their lives to figuring out what natural disaster/mass hysteria/world wide gas leak caused their ancestors to believe there was an apocalypse
if jon sims made a choice that unknowingly and unintentionally ruined my life because he was scared and uncertain and wanted me to stay close to him and then desperately tried to prove to himself that he could still trust me while literal eldritch gods were messing with his head and making him think everyone was out to get him but ended up hurting me more in the process without meaning to and did everything in his power to protect me through all of it even when it put his own life in danger but even that wasnt enough and later went on to avenge my violent death by beating our evil boss to death with his bare hands i simply wouldnt get mad at him about it <3 rip to tim stoker but im built different <3
Love that tma is so traumatic constantly that we all gloss over the fact that Jon was kidnapped and forcibly moisturized while tied to a chair for a month.
Every time I think too hard about it it actually freaks me out. And Jon never talks about it again which also freaks me out
Tbh I think my main gripe about Jon being considered a monster for “enjoying the suffering of others” is that the whole reason I wanted to listen to this podcast was to be scared and entertained and I enjoyed hearing all the awful shit that happened to these characters, so basically it felt like every time anyone shamed him for, y’know, doing the plot of the damn podcast, they were also shaming me. Us. The listeners. Which. If you’re going to do that, make us feel bad for finding entertainment in a fictional horror story, then… don’t? Write a horror story?
Honestly just ONCE. I wish Jon would respond to the others being mean to him with a proper assertion because he very obviously didn’t cause like half the problems people accuse him of
Especially after the coma like. Damn.
I know why he doesn’t and I appreciate it (?) in a narrative sense but also PLEASE JON IM BEGGING STAND UP FOR YOURSELF LIKE ONCE.
- 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.)
