2021-03-19 18:20:26 ¶ ●

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Ok wait how is tma about being eaten

OH BOY. well first of all,

so jot that down <3

even just on the fundamental level of writing/dialogue, tma is preoccupied with consumption - as a font of horror, as a method of violence, as a type of metamorphosis and transformation. it’s “you always said you were helen.” “i am. i also ate her.” and “his eyes were drinking in every fragment of my misery; he looked at me like he’d just eaten a perfectly cooked steak.” and “they were normal people before, but now they’re meat for the grinder.” and “desperate for one last morsel of terror from us?” and “ceaseless watcher, turn your gaze upon this thing and drink your fill.” but the preoccupation with consumption is present thematically and formally too; tma layers consumption over itself until you get what is essentially a matryoshka doll of cannibalism.

we can first think about the medium through which tma is produced as a process of consumption, the recording equipment eating the actors’ performances and jonny’s writing until such time as we consume the podcast by listening to it. media as consumption is an image we get in-world as well; gerry, eric delano, and many others are consumed by and trapped within the book of the living dead. in binary, sergey ushanka eats the computer and then the computer eats him; he finds it difficult to think because “the angles cut me when i try”. etc. all of this reinforces the image of different mediums consuming, expelling, and/or feeding on those they contain and represent.

the reading of podcast as vehicle of consumption is furthered by the fact that tma is a fictional podcast, i.e. a narrative. i think an argument could be made that narratives of any genre are inherently cannibalistic; happy endings bury you alive in the story as soon as the book closes or the poet stops speaking, while tragic/fatal endings bury you dead in melville’s stoneless graves, whether those graves are the pages of the book or the episodes of a podcast. the story needs to keep eating people in order to continue being told; it needs people to be sacrificed to the past and to the page in order that the person holding the pen might still have a story to tell.

i think this holds true for the horror genre in particular; horror stories are cannibals both in the sense that people need to die for the story to continue and that horror is cyclical/mimetic as protagonists often become the very monsters they are afraid of, so that their humanity is consumed if not their life. the impact of one death - whether literally through loss of life or symbolically via metamorphosis from man to monster - only affects the audience for so long before the spectacle has worn off and a fresh horror is needed to keep their interest. thus, for every episode or chapter that a horror story continues, additional violence is required. and, because repeated tropes become predictable and because audiences expect the stakes to be raised as the story goes on, the horror story gets hungrier and hungrier the longer it’s told.

the specific structure of the horror narrative(s) that make up tma is also consumptive in nature; that is, the conceit of the podcast is that jon reads a different statement about someone else’s experience each episode, and we learn as time goes on that what jon is actually doing when he reads a statement is feeding on the fear of the statement-maker. for jon to go on living, he must eat the statement makers, both in the sense that he is consuming their life stories and rendering them dead objects to be stored in the archive and in the sense that he is consuming their fear in order to gain health and power. jon himself explicitly compares the act of statement reading/recording to cannibalism when he wonders if “reading a statement of the ceaseless watcher counts as some sort of autocannibalism […] re-consuming secondhand terror.” so, each individual episode is itself a record and a product of consumption as individual statements are consumed by the larger meta-narrative, which in turn is being constantly devoured by the archive and the audience.

when we look at the concepts and characters that actually exist within the world of tma, we see that a lot of these are fundamentally consumptive as well. yes tma as a horror podcast is obviously full of death, but when we pay attention to the specific types of deaths that victims experience, we notice that people get eaten quite often. they are consumed by caves, skin-stealing monsters, masses of insects, doors that entrap, and webs that ensnare and encase. the victim in an early vast-centric statement is literally “eaten by the sky.” even those who are favored by the fears are consumed by them; daisy becomes the hunt embodied, melanie is filled with unbridled rage, jonah magnus becomes the very pupil of the eye which kept him alive for so many years.

sometimes, if a person is lucky enough, they are eaten in such a way as to allow them to continue the cycle of consumption by eating others. daisy in her true hunt form eats her way through the apocalypse; jane prentiss infects and consumes anybody she touches, the archivist consumes the fear of statement makers and later in s5 their bodies as well as he incorporates other avatars back into the body of the watcher. this consumption allows avatars to feast and gain power even as their humanity is consumed. for jon specifically, the majority of his arc constitutes a struggle with his own monstrousness and what he feels as a loss of humanity, highlighted by the fact that his powers rely on one of the most taboo and violating acts anyone can commit in modern-day society: the consumption of another person. we see him attempt to quit extracting statements from live people and instead read only those statements that exist already in the archive, but ultimately fail to abstain from the consumption of human horror as the apocalyptic world that he unleashes is compared to a “meat grinder” which is designed to extract and process human fear for the entities’ and avatars’ routine consumption.

in this new world, according to jon, you can either be object or subject; watcher or watched; inflicter of torture or torture victim. we see both jon and martin struggle with the idea that their only two options are essentially eat or be eaten, but ultimately accept their role within this new social order. at the end of the day, tma is interested in questions of transformation and agency not only in the sense of what choices you make, but how those choices might be shaped by their contexts. does it matter what you choose if you are trapped in the stomach of something far larger than you which has its own ends in mind? are your choices even yours at that point? it’s martin saying that distortion-helen ate people because she “couldn’t help what she was” and jon saying “she didn’t even try.” obviously being literally consumed by another completely annihilates your agency and sense of self, but what about supernatural or symbolic consumption? what about incorporation into the capitalist workforce, the machinery of knowledge-production, the “meat grinder” of society? are you a being with agency who has the power to change your surroundings or are you simply more “meat for the grinder”?

in summary:

you know ?