2021-03-26 22:52:40 ¶ ●

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what did you think of the decision to walk back jon’s revenge and release the fears? it seemed disconnected from his characterization to me but i’m interested in your thoughts.

tma finale spoilers and #criticism under the cut ! so skip if ur not into that <3

yeah i thought it was a BUMMER, mostly because of how much i LOVED the revenge killing angle.. like it’s SO jon and they never really did develop him out of his martyr complex so of course he’s going to rush in first because he can’t lose anyone else and he needs to be in control of something even if it’s just the way the world ends.. i have obviously been a tma as revenge tragedy truther ever since i listened to s3 and i would have LOVED to see jon go even further on the path of leaning into his powers for revenge purposes, which we did start to get earlier in s5 with jon killing avatars and all his scenes with helen (”it’s not so easy keeping your humanity, is it?”).. like jon’s whole arc in s1-4 is about clinging to his humanity for dear life and what does it get him? manipulated into bringing about the apocalypse and losing almost all his friends along the way. so i would have loved to see him go full villain in s5 and i think it would have made sense story-wise.

they didn’t really seem prepared to let jon go full fear mode though so i’m not surprised they walked it back. i do think what they did end up doing was super rushed and it didn’t really strike me as in-character for either martin or jon to make that final decision be about their relationship after they explicitly decided they weren’t going to do that.. like “i love you but i’m not going to doom the world over it” and “i cant let anyone else feel that [guilt of releasing the fears] ever”… except oops we did both those things <3 it also didn’t really land as like a romantic move for me, which is prob mostly due to the fact that i don’t really care about jonmartin but also the fact that jon like. betrayed martin 2 minutes before lol. which again, that’s in-character, it would have been fine if he just went full power revenge regardless of the consequences, but the whiplash of “sorry martin but i have to do this” to “nvm martin you’re right, let’s romeo and juliet this bitch” did not work for me. i think for it to have been a true ‘power of love’ moment they would have had to make a decision other than. the exact decision the web wanted them to make? anyway.

i think anything other than revenge was always going to feel weird and disjointed just because of the direction they went with this season as a whole, both because setting it in an apocalypse world makes their choices seem less meaningful no matter what they do and also isn’t very high-stakes or interesting to listen to after 30 episodes of it, AND because the multiverse/web master plan thing was introduced so late in the game that it never really felt like a real choice the characters had to make so much as a clear lead-up to the finale of the podcast. also, 199 just being them talking in circles about all the different options just sort of made it feel like every choice had been made already rather than jmart doing something new and interesting out of desperation.. anyway yeah tldr can’t believe episode 200 was only five minutes long <3 so wild but honestly the right call