had about a week and a half to throw this whole thing together for my production 2 class! lipsync + cleanup/color + comp. now i can lie down in a hole and rest
hang on I’ve just connected some astoundingly obvious dots. what the ghost is so silly and has such hammy production because georgie “no fear” barker decided to make a podcast in the one genre that she physically cannot understand. basira said it took a “weird turn” in season three, I bet georgie got a bunch of feedback on early episodes that some content was genuinely too scary to really enjoy so she dialed it way back and landed firmly in the silly zone, unable to detect the pleasantly spooky sweet spot.
WAIT HOLD ON I was doing some research into name meanings for a story I was writing and I just realized Sasha’s full name was Sasha JAMES??? James meaning “supplanter” supplanter meanings “TO REPLACE”???? God this series is truly a podcast
in ep 104, in his statement about danny, he beats himself up over the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to move when he saw “danny” up on the stage in the covent garden theatre
[ID: A transcript screenshot reading “I always tell myself there was some force there. Something that held me in place and meant that all I could do was watch. But sometimes when I think back, I remember how my legs shook, and maybe I could move. Maybe I’m just a coward.” end ID] ~~~~
and then in ep 39 sasha had to Tackle Him to get him out of prentiss’ way after his whole joe spooky bit because he just Didn’t Move apparently
[ID: A transcript screenshot reading:
SASHA: Behind you! Run! TIM: Oh… PRENTISS: [Slowly intoning over worm sound] Do you hear their song? SASHA: TIM! [IMPACT, WORMS AND SCUFFLING]
end ID] ~~~~
worm sounds and a full sentence after going “oh” and sasha STILL needed to tackle him.
i don’t really have anywhere i’m going with this i’m just thinking about it really hard
Jonathan Sims has got to be the only character who could try to become God in order to kill everyone on Earth and still have me believing in his fundamental goodness as a person.
I’m watching Puppet History and I think there’s a bit to be said about the similarities between The Professor’s hologram and Nikola Orsinov but I’m too tired to try to put it into words right now
it’s fascinating to me the way that different social media platforms result in different types of fandom behavior. while s5 of tma was airing, I spent a good amount of time on tma tiktok (I log back in about once every two months now, going back to in-person school after a year a half of lockdown seem to re-blanace my brain and made me once again not really enjoy the format) while still using tumblr as my main socmed, and while there was a lot of overlap in the fan culture, some things were notably different.
tumblr tma fans had near-encyclopedic knowledge of the source material, but it was kind of an ongoing joke for tiktok tma fans that everyone binged the whole show in a week-long fugue state and lost memory of about 35% of it. tumblr has virtually no character limit and allows posts to be passed around by users indefinitely, which lends itself to fairly in-depth meta analysis being made and shared until most any fan could say “the time and space discrepancies at hill top road? psh yeah, I know all about them, I’ve read seven scrupulously cited posts that lay out all the details.” for the entire time that s5 was airing, tiktok videos could still only be a minute long, and I know from a lot of personal effort that there’s only so much you can fit into a one minute script that you also have to memorize and record (and cc manually with tiktok text stickers, as they didn’t add the caption feature until april 2021) if you want the process to take less than four hours of your one mortal human life. and then you only see the video if your following or fyp algorithm shows it to you. there were a few tma meta-ish videos that got popular because other people would make their own videos referencing them and tag the account so their followers could see what they were talking about, but it’s much harder to circulate content you like there. several times I saw people post videos saying “I got into cosplay to film some [agnes or annabelle or gerry or another secondary character] and I just realized I have no idea what their deal actually is 💀”.
a thing that tiktok tma fandom was definitely better at than tumblr tma fandom was accurately remembering certain pieces of characterization and the flow of certain scenes. I’ve seen a bunch of posts on here where someone is trying to argue a point with excerpts from the text (“x character is nicer than you all give them credit for” “x character is so mean to y character in this scene” “z theory can’t be true because y character said a line that disproves it”) where the argument only holds up because the poster has gotten these excerpts from a transcript dive and hasn’t listened to the episodes they’re from recently, because while the text alone can be construed to mean one thing, the way it’s delivered on-podcast clearly intends another. tiktok, being an audio and video based medium, allows audio clips to be shared around a lot, and cosplayers would often all make videos acting along to the same show clips of juicy interpersonal drama, and so tiktok fans, though they may have had less overall memory of what characters said, always had a better grasp on how they said it. an average tiktok tma fan might not have remembered melanie’s subplot about war ghosts, but they would know the nuances of how the way she talks to jon changes between mag 28 and mag 155.
jon learning that you need an anchor to get out of the Buried and immediately interpreting that as “a literal severed body part” and not, you know, something with emotional significance or connected to a particular person. is so funny. but especially so when Melanie is also like “yeah that tracks”
kulbir shakya is like “yeah I only got out of the Buried by clinging to my grandfather’s sentimental knife and thinking about my grandfather and how much I love him”
Jon, unwell: cool cool cool I’m going to cut off my fingers now
Melanie, also unwell: Jon stop. there’s a better way. ….. come meet the meat man
I love how the lesson Salesa learned from Leitner was not “Supernatural things are very dangerous, maybe don’t try to find them” but very specifically “don’t fuck with books” AND. IT WORKED FOR HIM
binge watching supernatural, assigning fear entities (from TMA) to different episodes- do i even need an official autism diagnosis or is that close enough
I love to imagine Gertrude as a small, chubby old lady with a cute lil bun and a cardigan with her laptop on her lap googling “c4 best prices” and “where can you buy potent explosives” while there’s a cup of camomile tea with honey on her desk. Just a very dangerous old lady doin’ old lady things yk?
