i'm so happy for your haterposting can you spew more criticisms about tmagp. i was rrrrreally obsessed with the original tma circa 2020 but something about tmagp puts me off --- to be fair tma s5 wasn't great either i think it's just the tma. TWO!!! -ification of the everything or overestimating how into jmart the audience is
my core criticism of tmagp is simply that they are trying too hard. i think that the show is almost too self-aware, which i realize is kind of a stupid thing to say about the perpetual omniscient awareness podcast but it has thrown me off so genuinely that i am having such a hard time getting into it. a lot of that has to come with the conceit of the story; the mystery cannot kick off 40 episodes in, drawing off of the seeds planted in those first isolated episodes, because there are only going to be 90 or so episodes total, in comparison to 200. also, by virtue of tmagp being a sequel (and don’t try to tell me it’s not a sequel) we are entering with more questions than we were when starting tma for the first time—these questions are not organically raised during the show; we are consuming the show for answers to these specific questions.
and, to be perfectly honest, i don’t want these questions to be answered. i was not a fan of tma’s 5th season, but the best part of the finale was the ambiguity! i don’t want to know what happened to jon and martin (especially not martin, i’d be happier if i never had to think about him again) because the entire point of the whole thing is that we, the audience, don’t get to know. this is so important especially for tma because us as listeners have been cast as antagonists within the text of the show for listening in the first place. we have been privy to everything, so for us to be barred from that final closure is the entire point of the ending. to then make a sequel series where the intrigue of the story revolves around ‘what happened to jon and martin’ undermines the themes of tma and the purpose of the finale.
aside from all of that, i don’t care about a single character and actively dislike more than half of them, i am not invested in a single relationship, i think some of the voice acting is definitely wanting, i am not compelled by the creepy office job cubicle haunted excel vibes of the whole thing, and it just feels, well, dumber than tma, maybe because they’re working with fewer episodes to tell a complex story. the new statements don’t inspire near the level of emotion and fear that i felt while listening to tma, and they make me listen to martin’s whiny little voice do a text-to-speech impression. because of WOKE!!!!!!