fuck it i might as well promote some of my other fics
so i’ve mostly used this blog for casual purposes and promoting homestuck fic - but i’ve never really ‘advertised’ fics i’ve done for other fandoms. but hey, this is my tumblr and my rules and it’s not like this is just a homestuck blog, it’s multifandom. And I’ve been on a huge TMA kick lately. So here - if you know my writing and like it, and you *also* like The Magnus Archives, here are the fics i’ve published for TMA so far (with more to come, probably):
Children Should Be Seen is my only multi-chapter so far for TMA, and is currently ongoing. It’s a divergent AU set before the beginning of the series, in which Elias Bouchard fathered an illegitimate child before being body-snatched by Jonah Magnus - and horrible things ensue when said child goes looking for her dad.
if elias loses to whatever the fuck “”“robbie rotten”“ is im rioting. literally who the hell is that. wheres the swag. wheres the pathetic smug cat energy. wheres the [extended sounds of brutal pipe murder]
not to spread my Web!Martin agenda but people pleasing is an unwitting form of manipulation.
It’s a well-intended trauma response, and the people doing it often don’t have that intent, but it’s very web aligned. Martin wanted people to like him, because he felt who he was intrinsically was detestable thanks to his mother. So he crafted a persona he thought would be easily liked and get the response he craved from people. WEB WEB WEB WEB WEB
and to add some thoughts from a chat with friends, i also LOVE that s1 jon didn’t fuck with him, because it’s so romantic when you think about the fact that the person jon was annoyed with was martin’s people pleasing FACADE.
it wasn’t until that started to crack that jon fell for him
@hezekiahwakely ‘s comment needs to be immortalized. i couldn’t have said it better myself
I’ve been re-listening to the Magnus Archives a ridiculous amount lately, and I just have to say, I never fully appreciated just how well they wrote Jon and Martin developing feelings for each other, like, it wasn’t just, they suddenly are madly in love, like, Jon started out hating Martin, but then you start to see Jon and Martin bonding during like, the worm attack, and your like, Nooooooo!!!! Jon why are you so closeddd offfff??? And then around the unknowing when Elias makes a dig at how Martin feels about Jon, and then when Martin is slowly pulled away by the lonely how Jon still goes and looks for him to see how he’s doing and because he’s worried about him, and then just the whole scene their in the lonely and your like, OH MY GOD IT’S HAPPENING and then on the re listen, it’s painful to see the moments when Jon hurts Martin because it’s like, Jon whwhhhyyyyy….??? Noooooooooo!!! (yeah, this relationship is so flushed-out it gets two long drawn out Nooooooooos)
Here’s the thing, I absolutely agree with the fact that the way Jon was treated in S4 was awful, dehumanising and often cruel. It impacted how he viewed himself in harmful and permanently damaging ways that then bleed into every choice he makes after, because his self-worth is never going to recover from that.
However, if you end this point with ‘and he was treated like this for no-reason at all’, I am going to have to sit you down and have a long talk about nuance, and how every character in TMA has a reason for what they’re doing, even if it’s not right. Engagewith the material at hand. I am begging you.
And Jon being a victim, particularly in S4, does not absolve him of the consequences and harm his own actions have done. There’s a very twisted irony to me in the fact that the harm Jon does to feel a sense of control — a common C-PTSD response — is often stripped of that agency and nuance. Please, the Web does that to him enough.
The above also applies to pretty much most TMA characters, especially the S4 Archive Crew. It goes without saying that yes, Basira is a hypocrite, that Melanie clings onto Jon as a scapegoat before she takes steps to improve herself etc. All these characters have been hurt in some way, and they are reverting back to what gives them a sense of safety, even if it means hurting others people or each other. It’s not good, but you can, at the very least, understand why it is they’re acting this way.
I think it’s easier to understand S4 when you go in with the mindset of ‘these people are all victims, and they are not perfect ones’, rather than the mindset of it’s Jon Vs Everyone, even if it feels that way at times.
I think the tma characters generally Know about contemporary queer labels and identities, they’re really not that old and jon uses language like “male presenting” and georgie and melanie have jobs that require them to be very on social media. it’s not out of the question that any of them might have pride stickers on their laptops or would introduce themselves with their pronouns if they thought the social situation was relaxed and gay enough. the important and beautiful thing to remember is that this does not preclude any of them from having extremely weird internalized queerphobia and very repressed relationships with their gender and sexuality, because I am a young adult in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty five and I know plenty of people with those exact problems. jon can know what the colors on the asexual flag mean and be casual friends with trans people and still turn around and say “well my issues with sex and my body are because I’m uhhh a fucked up little freak? probably?” and that wouldn’t be any contradiction. you don’t need to temporally lock him into a mid 90s understanding of queerness, he can be the pinnacle of a modern man and have issues aplenty. x
I think melanie has been extremely clockable as queer since she was like seven and it pissed her off so bad that she avoided coming out until her mid twenties just out of spite
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