The Eye being fond of Martin is really strange because it implies the Watcher has Jon’s wellbeing in mind.
This kind of reasoning contradicts everything we were told about the Fears before that. If Martin hadn’t been with him, wouldn’t Jon have given in to his urges more and therefore been more useful to the Eye? Why would a man that constantly bashes Jon’s avatarhood be in any way worthy of appreciation of an eldritch being that feeds on the very fear Jon extracts? This just doesn’t make sense.
This bit feels like it was tossed in to patch up the whole “the Fears won’t hurt you as long as you’re with me” thing. It’s just there to make the ship seem cute bc “the Eye approves of it! The Eye is a JMart shipper haha!”
taking a break from being a hater: I LOVE Jonathan Archivist Sims. I love him so so much, my blorbo. I am kissing his forehead and putting him in my chest pocket as we speak
the reason why I say Jonathan Archivist Sims and not just Jonathan Sims is for two reasons. one, to differentiate him from Jonathan Sims the writer. and two, to show that I love every part of him, including him psychologically traumatizing innocent people <3 (unlike his boyfriend. who said that)
I hate Basira. I HATE HER. I been not liking her attitude for a couple of episodes in season 4 but MAG 146 was the last string. I loved her character so much at beginning, why is she turning into such a big hypocrite.
She’s able to excuse police brutality and even murderers, but she constantly judges Jon—who, at worst, gave people nightmares just to survive. It’s incredibly disappointing to watch her twist the moral high ground like that.
And honestly, why is everyone so hostile toward Jon? Why is everything suddenly his fault? Melanie joined the Institute when Jon wasn’t even there. Basira was the one who approached him. He didn’t drag any of them into this—they made their own choices. It’s so unfair how they act like he’s to blame for everything, when all he’s ever done is try to survive and protect people, even at the cost of himself.
Why does Jon have to put up with their crap and just quietly accept all their jabs? He literally just woke up from a coma—after being trapped in a looping nightmare. He went through hell, and instead of giving him space or support, they treat him like everything is his fault. It’s exhausting watching him carry the weight of everyone else’s trauma while they act like he’s some kind of monster for surviving.
And then they had the audacity to say he was better off dead. After everything he’s been through—after all the pain, the sacrifice, the literal torment—that’s what he gets? Not concern. Not understanding. Just cruelty. Jon didn’t ask for any of this, and yet he’s the one who keeps fighting, who keeps trying to do the right thing. And somehow, they still treat him like he’s the villain.
Being human isn’t about weakness. It’s about compassion. About surviving what should have broken you—and choosing to keep going anyway. That’s real strength.
Jon is so much stronger than me because if everyone I knew including my boyfriend were telling me that I’m better off dead then I would’ve caved in and killed myself for real
Jon is so much stronger than me because if everyone I knew including my boyfriend was telling me that I’m better off dead then I would’ve caved in and killed myself for real
Grr. @sparky-is-spiders I get what you mean. But I got two reasons for not counting him as a true Jon liker. First of all, Elias is one of the people, if not THE person, who caused Jon the most anguish. And second of all, I see Elias’s appreciation of Jon as something inseparably tied with the goal he wanted to achieve through him. He doesn’t appreciate Jon as a person just because. He appreciates Jon’s personality because it goes perfectly with what he wanted to use Jon for. It is, in some way, conditional; Jon is appreciated as a person because he is a perfect tool, a ‘willing’ peon. He can just “wind him up and watch him go”; he just needs to give him a little nudge, and Jon will go exactly where he wants him, do exactly what he’s supposed to do. In the end, Jon the Archivist is just a glorified plaything. Does that make sense?
i thought martin’s reasoning for being the one to kill elias sounded weird and didn’t really make sense, so i went back and read the transcript of mag 193 and i can confirm it’s dumb because
1)
Text ID:
ARCHIVIST
I could kill his body, sever the link, break The Eye’s power, and Jonah Magnus would die.
MARTIN
Okay, that sounds good but…?
ARCHIVIST
But, that wouldn’t actually harm The Eye itself. And with him gone it would… it would choose a suitable replacement.
“With him gone” / “If we kill Jonah Magnus” : there is no indication that it’s jon killing jonah that will make him take his place, in fact it seems pretty clear that it’s more about jonah being dead and leaving a void that needs to be filled
2)
Text ID:
ARCHIVIST
His body is vulnerable. At least to me.
“At least to me” : the probabilities are high that jon is literally the only one who can kill jonah? i honestly don’t think martin could do it and as they need to be perfectly coordinated they really can’t afford to take that risk
And finally
4)
Text ID:
MARTIN
You’re not listening. I mean, if he kills Jonah, then knowing our luck he’s just going to end up taking his place in the Panopticon, isn’t he?
GEORGIE
[Sighs] Good point.
MARTIN
He can come up with me, but when it actually comes to Jonah…
BASIRA
You’ll have to be the one to do it.
MARTIN
Yeah.
ARCHIVIST
Martin… I don’t –
BASIRA
Have you got this? We can trade if you don’t think you can do it.
jon immediately raises an objection, but i guess we will never know what it was because everyone just ~looves~ ignoring his imput on decisions that directly affect him :))))
Oh my god it’s been years why is this fandom repeating itself why are you still reheating jokes and things that have been told a million times already. Yes I get it Dev Patel is fancast Jon and Harvey Guillen is fancast Martin. Haha omg guysss this podcast has scary doors haha we are shipping a door and a book it’s hilariousss the people outside this fandom think we’re degenerates. The NotThem is racist bc I headcanon Sasha as black and the NotThem as white. Jurgen Leitner stupid idiot motherfucking Jurgen Leitner amirite. Jon has negative rizz my sopping wet kitten old man he’s such a paranoid dumbass why is he so mean to my sweetie Martin. My beloved Martin deserves a gun he deserves to kill everyone who’s ever been mean to him. For the love of god can you think of something different. It’s not even about repeating things that are in the podcast you guys are endlessly parroting fanmade content too. If you have nothing to say then just don’t say anything it’s okay
Tell me why every time I see a tma related video on tiktok half the comments are paragraphs copied from transcripts that have no relation to the video itself whatsoever. “I do not know why the hive chose me but it did” “I am not a who, archivist, I am a what” “Hello Jon apologies for the deception” jesus christ I know the video might not be incredibly insightful or whatever but why do you feel the need to be annoying under every single tma post that you come across???? It’s okay to not have anything to say you don’t need to be interacting with people on the internet 24/7
I am actively trying to not crash out rn cause they once again implied in podcast that Jon could have not become the Archivist prior to, like, season 3, and it’s so hard. I am fighting so many battles rn.
Also let’s talk about how they flat out said that Melanie was ‘protected’ during the Eyepocalypse because of her employment at the Institute.
It’s giving ‘I mean they did also kill jesus she did quit working at the institute. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus she very much did quit working at the institute.’
Far be it from me to criticize how illogical the whole Eyepocalypse situation was vis a vis Georgie and Melanie (which is a lot. a lot a lot) but. C’mon now.
Jon the type of guy to lie about his eye color if he could get away with it. Type of guy to think you’re being too personal if you ask his height. Type of guy to like that he’s going gray early because it means people can confuse his hair as being salt and pepper instead of naturally brown. Type of guy to not tell his girlfriend his grandmother died until a month later. And she still doesn’t know he’s an orphan.
I hate the Web’s “actually you ARE the chosen one!!” bullshit so so much like not only is it Nonsense but I keep seeing posts of people like?? Trying to reverse-engineer a way to make it true??
Like projecting all sorts of bad qualities onto EIGHT-YEAR-OLD JON for why he could be assessed as “the person most likely to end the world” when Jonah could have used pretty much anyone for his fear punchcard as long as he kept them ignorant enough. There didn’t need to be anything special about Jonah’s victim–it was just “someone he chose”
And yet I have seen *multiple* posts saying it’s because EIGHT-YEAR-OLD JON “clearly didn’t care about anyone but himself” and “doesn’t care about other people” when:
- He was able to sense his grandmother’s resentment for raising him and feel guilt for burdening her
- He was regularly physically and verbally abused and stolen from by a GROWN MAN and still ended up feeling survivor’s guilt over his death? and felt that he should have done something to help?? and said “some people deserve to be remembered”????
- He grew up to care about people to a self-destructive degree, no matter how much he pretended otherwise
- He’s EIGHT YEARS OLD?! Give me a break!! Like even if eight-year-old Jon was selfish or mostly cared about himself–which we didn’t really get any evidence of–that’s kind of?? How kids are???
Like why are people so eager to justify the words of an evil spider god that they’re not only flat-out inventing up bad traits for its victim, but signing up for the “you can predict what a person will grow up to do from what they’re like as a child” school of thought.
After thinking about it a bit I think that for me this was actually the most horrifying episode in the entire series. Despite the lack of blood and gore this is the one that disturbed me the most. The tragic horror of Jon’s complete victimization, dehumanization, and loss of agency is so profoundly and upsettingly felt here.
The way Martin decided in his domain to ask Jon to kill him so he wouldn’t have to keep existing like this, even though that would leave Jon alone forever, but then in this episode he won’t even entertain the idea of allowing Jon the freedom to make a similar choice. The way Jon is basically begging to die and they are all denying him that choice while talking over his head about what fate they will choose for him, even though he has said he prefers death to some of the options being discussed, all the while speaking dismissively like he is a child who can’t make his own choices and needs others to control his life for his own good.
Jon already feels responsible for having destroyed one world. He can’t bear the thought of potentially being the instrument of destruction for countless more. But it’s not up to him. His fate isn’t his own. It hasn’t been for a long time.
And this is where we leave him. Because even if he doesn’t physically die in the end, the person he is now almost certainly will; if he does survive it will be in some unrecognizable and diminished form.
Jon has been systematically dehumanized throughout his life and he’s spending some of his last time alive and as himself literally begging for death while the people closest to him discuss plans to use him as a tool to bring harm to other worlds, not even feigning interest in what he wants, and silencing his introjections into their conversation. And Jon has been so beaten down that he just accepts it.
The understated quiet of Jon’s broken acceptance of his place in the world as a tool to be used, whose strings are always going to be pulled by the hands of others, makes it all the more chilling.
Everyone: We have to consider that one option is to just leave things as they are and watch as everyone suffers horrifically for thousands of years before dying.
Jon: If we go with that I could at least speed things up and give everyone a quick death so they don’t suffer as much.
Everyone: WTF is wrong with you??! How dare you suggest that?! What a monstrously cruel thing to suggest modifying our idea to let the whole world die an agonizingly slow death so that the whole world instead dies a quicker and more painless death. This is why we don’t let you have input in our discussions or make decisions.
in a story where fear and love are so closely entwined, I don’t think Georgie should have gotten away so untouched by her ‘can’t feel fear’ gimmick. her relationship with Melanie should have been much more contentious, not for lack of compassion but simply because Georgie is missing something fundamental to the experience of being alive; her lack of fear should have been a loss felt more consistently.
my preferred interpretation is that she hasn’t lost her fear, necessarily, but that she is living past the usable part of her life. basically, a more literal sense of foreshortened future. she’s already faced death, she knows it intimately, and now she remains detached from life.
she too is trapped in her own domain. she is witness to others’ experiences and suffering, but unaffected in the same way. she’s able to help, but only to a limited degree. and unlike pre-apocalypse, where she played arbitor of who was deserving of help as a way to wash her hands of the responsibility to get involved (as opposed to choosing her battles, which is what she said that she was doing), Georgie now has absolutely no escape from the consequences of her actions (or inactions.) all while still lacking the power to meaningfully change anything.
OH ALSO when everyone was like “we survived the fears for hundreds of years before” i really kind of expected jon to be like “no we fucking didn’t you as an individual just got lucky. you didn’t have to listen to the tapes of hundreds who’ve lost lives and sanity and family like I did” but he. Didn’t really bring it up? Despite the fact those archival tapes are a good 3/4 of tma’s content so you’d think it’d have meant a bit more considering how the whole “all we hear is what’s recorded on the tapes” meta is stressed to the audience :/
ok not to be a hater or anything but there’s this one episode of the magnus archives that drives me up the wall because the premise is based on just… a complete misunderstanding of how mosquitos work
mosquitos, like most winged insects that consume mammalian blood, don’t primarily eat blood
(examples of insects that do primarily subsist on blood are bed bugs, fleas, ticks or lice. insects that consume blood but not as their primary source of nutrition: horse flies, black flies, mosquitoes etc)
mosquitos are pollinators. they eat nectar. only female mosquitos drink blood and they only do so when they are laying eggs
they don’t even prefer human blood—any mammalian blood will do. they use the proteins in mammalian blood to develop their eggs
so no lab has ever tried to develop a blood substitute to alter mosquito feeding habits as a means of disease prevention because (a) that’s insane and (b) it wouldn’t work
if you put a whole swarm of mosquitos in a cage and offered them only blood (or a blood substitute) to drink they would die. that’s all that would happen. a day later your entire population of mosquitos would be dead
mosquitos don’t eat blood any more than humans eat prenatal vitamins
oh, also, john says at the end of the episode “any solution to the issue of malaria that doesn’t concentrate on wiping them out is not one i have much time for”
which like… isn’t a bone i have to pick with the episode. obviously Jonathan Simms, head archivist at the Magnus Archives is entitled to his stupid and misinformed idea
but like. getting rid of mosquitoes entirely would collapse whole ecosystems (and it annoys the fuck out of me when people talk about exterminating them for this reason)
anyways if i was going to propose a scientific study to find a solution to viruses and parasites carried by mosquitoes i would try to find a way to genetically modify mosquitoes in a lab so that they were resistant to being pathogenic carriers and then release them into targeted local areas where the rate of transmission was highest so they would interbreed with wild populations and transmit the “no malaria, west nile, etc” genes to future mosquitoes
alternatively you could try to develop a substrate that would be the most attractive place for mosquitoes to lay their eggs and then cull a population with a high rate of disease carrying at that stage before the eggs hatch
(this would be a reasonable project for a lab like the one in this particular statement to be conducting—especially because supplying a “hemoglobish” that would help mosquitoes develop their eggs would make sense in this context)
I’ve already said on here multiple times how Martin’s season 5 development was all over the place. But now that I think about it, Jon was also underdeveloped.
Some time ago I’ve said that it felt like Martin was needed in s5 so that Jon, as an all-seeing being, could explain things that he knew to him and the audience. But besides the fact that he’s all-seeing and barfing up horrors and it feels even more awful than reading the statements, there isn’t much said about how it impacts him as a person. We don’t know exactly what is it that he sees, all we get is brief glimpses of horror that he describes aloud when overloaded with information.
The audience stays in the dark in regards to Jon and his thought process. He doesn’t talk to the tapes about anything other than the horror surrounding them which is only needed so that the audience knows where the episode is meant to play out. and it doesn’t really have any importance to the plot other than to set a scene. Plus since Martin actively shuts him up whenever he tries to say something about the Fears themselves, we can’t even know any of the more basic info that Jon is said to be aware of. The audience is just suddenly locked out of Jon’s pov and instead we got the Jon-Martin relationship treating them as a singular entity, with Jon only filling the role of the “inhuman” partner.
It’s like. Up to this point, the audience got to consistently witness Jon’s development. When we met him, he was putting up the skeptic act. Then we saw his fear-induced paranoia. Then he was staying over at an ex-girlfriends house and frantically searching for clues. Then was the whole operation to stop the Unknowing. After that there was Jon’s coma, and the audience got to see him be slowly consumed by his patron and be abandoned and hated by nearly all his coworkers. We got first row seats to whatever he was going through at the moment.
But for the majority of season 5 all that we are presented with is the JonMartin apocalyptic hike, Jon slaying some of the avatars they come across, and Martin complaining about how scary it all is and how the avatars are evil. Maybe I’m wrong, but the only few moments the audience got to actually see Jon’s point of view and the self-hatred that being the one who started the apocalypse have forced upon him was when he got repeatedly ignored during the discussion regarding his life and the fate of the universe.
Idk maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s just because I dislike the way season 5 was written. But I feel like in most of the episodes JonMartin were reduced to just being a couple.
Looking back at my live reactions to season 5, watching myself bend over backwards to try to justify the frankly strange dynamic between Martin and Jon, how Martin treats Jon in such an uncharacteristic way given his whole development up to season 4, how everyone gets more than a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment of serious sympathy and time to explain themselves, while Jon is left to apologize and be interrupted. Again. And again.
Only to realize from the post show’s creators multiple retrospectives that this was just an accidental result of a deviation of plan that gave him an attempt at a sympathetic route while the creators themselves couldn’t muster up the sympathy to do it properly, because they were already partially influenced by the previous, abandoned direction of the show.
honestly slept on how much martin’s attitude in relationships is clearly shaped by his mother and it makes him awful in them but fandom doesn’t wanna talk about it because jmart cute 🥀🥀
Holy fuckkk I’m trying to buy some yarn for my lil project and I checked on google maps to try and see where I could buy it and omg. There’s a yarn store that has over 400 reviews and overall rating of 1.7 and the reviews are telling stories of incredible verbal and physical harassment from the owner and employees?????? I’ve been there once and the guy working the register was super rude but one lady said she got ripped off, yelled at, and physically shoved out the store onto the street I’m crying
Holy fuckkk I’m trying to buy some yarn for my lil project and I checked on google maps to try and see where I could buy it and omg. There’s a yarn store that has over 400 reviews and overall rating of 1.7 and the reviews are telling stories of incredible verbal and physical harassment from the owner and employees?????? I’ve been there once and the guy working the register was super rude but one lady said she got ripped off, yelled at, and physically shoved out the store onto the street I’m crying
Holy fuckkk I’m trying to buy some yarn for my lil project and I checked on google maps to try and see where I could buy it and omg. There’s a yarn store that has over 400 reviews and overall rating of 1.7 and the reviews are telling stories of incredible verbal and physical harassment from the owner and employees?????? I’ve been there once and the guy working the register was super rude but one lady said she got ripped off, yelled at, and physically shoved out the store onto the street I’m crying
This isn’t normal omg
And the stray 5 star reviews calling the owner a nice and helpful guy….. genuinely what’s this guy’s problem??? Why is he supposedly nice to only, like, 10% of his customers
A very popular thing that I despise is the certainty of some fans that in season 1 jon was cold and unempathetic, and that he treated the people who came to give their statement heartlessly and cruelly.
And that’s just not true??? He tried to provide them with whatever comfort he could in his position as an archivist, which amounted to him giving them space and cautiously offering to refer them to a specialist. He was meant to record, research and categorize their stories into little boxes. What was he supposed to do, say “of course I believe that you found yourself in an endless foggy field and the only thing that brought you back to reality was your dead husband’s voice” like that’s anything other than logically impossible???
He wasn’t a therapist. His job wasn’t to try and make these freaked out people feel better. His job was to literally pick apart, sort and categorize their experiences into little boxes, which he dutifully did. He was actually quite a decent archivist, with enough curiosity to research the statements carefully, and enough cautiousness to not get killed in the process. That’s why he was doomed
I’ve really grown to dislike how most of the people approach s5 Jon (and Martin) time travels back to season one AUs. Because it can be sum up as “no one likes season one Jon, he’s so stuck up and grumpy and repressed opposed to future Jon who is much more chill and more fun”.
Because I don’t think Sasha or Tim disliked s1 Jon? All their conversations seemed always quite friendly and relaxed? They throw him a birthday party. And Jon liked them and thought highly of them as well he asked for them to be transfered to Archives. He understandably disliked only Martin for lack of skills he should have had but did not.
All the negative feeling Sasha and Tim had against him came literally from them thinking Sasha should have been given the position of Head Archivist but that’s it. They were even not so much annoyed with Jon but with Elias here honestly.
I would like to see some take when they are all weirded out by s5 Jon. I want season one archival crew bond over how they think s5 Jon is secretive and says ominous stuff all the time (And if s5 Martin is present as well I want them to be annoyed with his bitchy attitude.) Because s5 Jon and Martin could not anymore see the world through lenses on normal human and they would be all “We know what is best for you” while s1 crew would be more “No you don’t. Not if you refuse to give us proper explanation. Stop acting like you know better, stop acting as we cannot take care of ourselves.”
Would you rather Martin be watered down to only “little uwu tea ball” or “evil gonna Get Your Ass manipulation malewife”, I’ve seen people in the community do both and I’m curious about what you think about it
Well if *I* got promoted to a higher position and there was no one available to train me and my colleagues were whispering behind my back about me not being qualified for the job so I felt like I had to prove them wrong somehow, and I got an assistant who had worked there longer than me and very clearly had zero clue about the job he was supposed to do, then I too would’ve despised him. How was Jon supposed to come off as a responsible archivist if one of his assistants refused to read the statements because they “spooked him”. I’d have felt like I was being sabotaged
i step onto the stage. “jon and gerry should kiss” i say into the microphone. the entire crowd boos and throws tomatoes. as i sadly turn to leave, a figure in the back row stands. “no, she’s right,” they say. it’s gerry keay himself.
Having one-sided beef with one specific character is so funny. Like I can see a million characters who do terrible things and be like “whatever.” But then there’s one specific motherfucker who pissed me off so bad that I’d run them over at a red light if given the chance.
Some of y'all like to make posts that are like “What if cosmic horror was neither cosmic nor horror and Cthulhu was my friend?” Like. That’s nothing. You’ve removed the two elements of the thing. Y'all gotta start realizing that stories are made up of conflict.
Some of y'all like to make posts that are like “What if cosmic horror was neither cosmic nor horror and Cthulhu was my friend?” Like. That’s nothing. You’ve removed the two elements of the thing. Y'all gotta start realizing that stories are made up of conflict.
Hey, I'm someone with actual Learned Helplessness (and it's a thing I have talked about in therapy). And I love projecting that onto Jon. Please continue. You're doing great.
Okay 💗 yay 💗 (I’m gonna be honest when I saw the beginning of that ask I thought you were gonna tell me to kms so this is a pleasant surprise)
Anyway, since this is not something I myself have experience with, and the information about it that I do have is very limited, then I might as well be wrong. But here is how I see it:
Every single time Jon tried to do something with good intentions, it either didn’t change anything at all or made things worse. Trying to get rid of NotSasha resulted in freeing a dangerous entity from its imprisonment, got him falsely accused of Leinter’s murder, and cost him his job and apartment. The first statement giver whose story he directly acknowledged as true, Helen Richardson, didn’t even get to leave the Institute’s building before getting “eaten” by the same door that had been haunting her. He tried his hardest to stop the Unknowing only to find out it would’ve collapsed on its own, and that Tim sacrificed himself for nothing. There are probably more examples but I can’t really recall any more rn
Anyway, after trying his best to change anything then repeatedly failing, plus (in the later seasons) being hated by literally everyone he knew, I imagine Jon developed a belief that nothing he could do would ever change anything, and so he stopped trying entirely. I don’t really remember any of the s4 metaplot but I think this best applies to the Jon from that period.
Of course later he found out that every singe action he had taken was influenced in some way by his boss or some cosmic being and that none of his choices were truly his own and that trying to fix things caused him to be the main sacrifice in a world-ending ritual. (There was also something in s5 about Martin insisting that they help the people trapped in domains and Jon refusing because it’s impossible/it wouldn’t change anything but he was implied to Know™️ that through the Eye so I dunno)
This is probably all wrong but I don’t feel like digging through the transcripts right now so just take it
The Jon and Martin relationship has a lot of issues caused by their respective traumas and worldviews, as established in season 5. But one frankly important issue that stems from the very way of their functioning is that Martin is the kind of person to whom “caring for someone” is tending to them (like a mother would), and sitting them down and listening to them talk about their problems. Meanwhile Jon is very self-sufficient, and as good as he might be at identifying other people’s problems, is completely awful at talking about himself and finds it hard to open up. Tell me how are they meant to get along in this situation
Remind me to talk about how every person Jon interacted with lead to him being marked.
OKAY. So. To start. Let’s point out that these marks are mostly caused by, ostensibly, people who could be considered his ‘friends’. A debatable word, but. Here we are.
Tim literally got him killed in his suicide, so: The End. I will blame him for this because he literally didn’t care that he was going to kill not only the Circus/Nikola and himself, but Jon and Basira and Daisy. But whatever. He’s dead. Moving on.
If Sasha hadn’t talked to the Distortion then Jon wouldn’t have been marked by The Spiral and in her death he was first touched by The Stranger. I suppose I can’t REALLY blame her for them, as who knows if the Distortion would’ve left the Archives alone and there was still the matter of the Unknowing later. But whatever. She’s dead. Moving on.
Martin also caused two marks! The Corruption cause he was trying to prove a point (yeah, I said it, it wasn’t cause of no 'due diligence’, bite me) and then The Lonely. Which. Duh. Similarly in this case, who knows if Jane Prentiss would’ve left the Archives alone. HOWEVER. As I’ve said before. Jon should’ve left his ass in the Lonely. But whatever. He’s dead. Moving on.
Basira lead him to The Dark! She was guided there by fucking Elias and we know that they didn’t have to fucking deal with it! Like! Even before knowing that no other ritual would’ve worked! Manuela said as much! And the People’s Church of the Divine Host were all but dead after that raid that killed Maxwell Rayner. But whatever.
Daisy and The Hunt and Melanie and The Slaughter don’t need much discussion. One did it cause she could and one did it cause of self-defense. One is dead and one is alive. One can be blamed and one cannot. I won’t debate this. But I am still going to point out that these are people he had no qualms against – in Daisy’s case cause he had barely met her before going on the lam, and in Melanie’s case there was some contention but nothing worse than clashing personalities. But whatever.
As I said, we can view Jude Perry’s marking him with The Desolation and Mike Crew’s marking him with The Vast as his 'fault’. He didn’t have to talk to Jude who had him talk to Mike. The only reason, though, that he did, was because he was being dangled a carrot that told him he could prevent untold tragedy. But it was still his choice, as it stands. But whatever. They’re dead. Moving on.
I suppose we could also 'blame’ him for Jared Hopsworth marking him for The Flesh and for going into The Buried, which are connected. He didn’t HAVE to get an anchor or go into the coffin to get Daisy. The only reason he did was because, at that point, everyone already hated him and bringing Daisy back might’ve made Basira hate him a little less. That and the possibility of suicide by cop. But whatever. They’re dead. Moving on.
Could you blame a child for being marked by The Web because he read a book? Could you blame an adult for being marked by The Eye for wanting answers about that experience? The show certainly does. But whatever. He’s dead. None of this matters.
What I’m saying, I suppose, is that there is only one* person Jon considered a friend who did not, in some way, contribute to his suffering. And that’s cause Gerry was already dead.
Martin’s a fine character but it’s tragically looking like I’m always going to align myself more with the haters than anyone who likes or defends him. I’m tired of watching people like Martin get away with his kind of shit just because they’re Cute and Soft or whatever.
Addendum: Martin is a bitch I no longer stand by the first line of this post fuck that guy
randomly got annoyed again today at fandom portrayals of elias as a luddite. you think the world’s most powerful avatar of beholding would be…. behind the times? ignorant to the progress of technology? even if you choose to ignore the fact that the digital age revolutionized beholding as a dread power (going from something tied much more closely to the hunt to something so much more exestential and all-consuming… the surveilance state! online surveilance! wiretapping! data gathering! predatory privacy policies! the zoom boom! etc!!!) and that the evolution of recording technology is how the institute was able to function as efficiently as it did to tell us its story… why would it ever make sense to you that the world’s most powerful beholding avatar would remain wilfully ignorant of… anything. let alone wilfully ignorant of how the vast majority of the world functions and communicates. plus his greatest fear is death!! you think he isn’t up to date on all the most prominent medical advances? that’s just a willful misreading of the text.
i do agree with OP here but i also think the people going off that luddite interpretation aren’t conjuring it from thin air. and this is, unfortunately, one of the disappointing aspects of the show, in that it leaned heavily (and illogically if you ask me) into the “stupid eye” thesis. it sees but it does not understand. which negates a big part of /why/ the eye is scary in the first place.
the eye is scary because the thing perceiving you has the capacity for judgment, derived from which are shame and punishment, self-imposed or not. i’ve made this point before but this cannot be accomplished if the entity in question has no capacity for discernment. no one cares if their aquarium fish is “looking” at them eating a whole cake when they’re supposed to be on a diet vs what that same person might feel eating in public.
the second consequence is, of course, that a “dumb” entity like the eye would have no understanding or ‘passion’ for technology. and, indeed, the web has been canonically shown not only to be technologically-inclined, but also to beat the eye at its own game, so to speak, not only (!! this drives me nuts) by infiltrating tape recorders, devices that, by rights, should fall into the eye’s portfolio but also by, essentially, taking over the very institute, i.e. the eye’s place of power. but, then again, you have the eye also canonically being characterised as the purveyor of knowledge. (?) at the very least, the eye and the web should have been fighting over technology. there are some examples of camera manipulation by the beholding, but overall you can’t deny that the web is shown to be the more technologically-inclined of the two, which i personally think is such a sham. rendering unto caesar, the eye should have been the patron saint of social media, influencers, celebrities, reality tv, zoom meetings, the surveillance state etc.
and i am sorry to say, but taking away fear domains that should logically fall into the eye’s purview, just to prop up and overpower another entity, takes away from the quality of the storytelling. the web can be very scary and powerful, too, on its own, there’s no need to cheaply and nonsensically declaw the eye to do it
sorry for hopping into ur inbox but i dont wanna jump onto the post itself..... i think they defanged the eye in general bc of not wanting jon as its avatar to feel "too" morally grey to the listener. even though that feels like it should very much be the point and his status as an unwilling agent of the eye would be a lot more impactful if it wasnt the most non-threatening entity thats just there doing fuck all. well at least thats what i think 🫡
I have zero clue what you’re talking about and I don’t know which post you are referring to. And what do you mean by “too morally grey”. He was already morally grey. All avatars are morally grey since they need to harm others in some way in order to live. He was just absolutely crushed by guilt cause he’s not a bad person.
Also what’s the point in setting up this elaborate thing about your protagonist being the lynchpin of the apocalypse just to then say “surprise! He’s actually weak and borderline useless!” Ok. So you’re telling me I just wasted several hours of my life listening to the last season
I feel like all the Michael Distortion fanart made people forget it canonically looks human and normal and Sasha only saw him Distorted through glass and she several times says he looked normal
Oh my god it’s been years why is this fandom repeating itself why are you still reheating jokes and things that have been told a million times already. Yes I get it Dev Patel is fancast Jon and Harvey Guillen is fancast Martin. Haha omg guysss this podcast has scary doors haha we are shipping a door and a book it’s hilariousss the people outside this fandom think we’re degenerates. The NotThem is racist bc I headcanon Sasha as black and the NotThem as white. Jurgen Leitner stupid idiot motherfucking Jurgen Leitner amirite. Jon has negative rizz my sopping wet kitten old man he’s such a paranoid dumbass why is he so mean to my sweetie Martin. My beloved Martin deserves a gun he deserves to kill everyone who’s ever been mean to him. For the love of god can you think of something different. It’s not even about repeating things that are in the podcast you guys are endlessly parroting fanmade content too. If you have nothing to say then just don’t say anything it’s okay
Tell me why every time I see a tma related video on tiktok half the comments are paragraphs copied from transcripts that have no relation to the video itself whatsoever. “I do not know why the hive chose me but it did” “I am not a who, archivist, I am a what” “Hello Jon apologies for the deception” jesus christ I know the video might not be incredibly insightful or whatever but why do you feel the need to be annoying under every single tma post that you come across???? It’s okay to not have anything to say you don’t need to be interacting with people on the internet 24/7
I just stumbled upon a really good tma cosplay video on tiktok and half the comments are lines from the podcast. Again. Only difference is that there’s a new variant, and that is “nice lighter. You a spider freak then?”
I just think it’s rich that everyone in the podcast and fandom says that Jon needed to rely on people and ask them for help but also shame him for doing those exact things because of his abrasive personality and worse actions making it hard for people to empathize with him. Saying he needed to listen to others and heed their advice while also saying that those people weren’t required to give that advice or help him. Contradictions upon contradictions. And no where is this more exemplified in how Georgie tells him to ‘find an anchor’ for his humanity then tells said ‘anchor’ to cut him off immediately for that ‘anchor’s’ safety. Make it make sense.
And it’s like. It’s not as if he doesn’t eventually flat out ask them what to do. And what do they say? What do they do? Nothing. They don’t have any more knowledge than he does. But his choices are the ones that mean anything. His are the ones that have weight and the minute he makes the wrong one they’re in the right to shame him for making them. For acting at all.
For someone who is said to have such a vice like grip on his autonomy and control over a situation, he sure ends up quick to relinquish all of it when trying to make amends for things he never could have prevented.
