season 1 magnus archive squad. is a room full of ghosts
YEAH AND IM REALLY NOTWELL ABOUT IT!!! it’s like. everyone inside the horror story is always already dead. everyone inside the archive is ALSO already dead, either bc they’re a statement or bc they’re on-staff, which means they’re a ghost waiting to happen.
[ID: Archivist: Hang on, have you been recording this? [Clothing rustling.] Tim: Oh! Yeah! I – just thought it might be nice, you know, something to look back on when we’re all old and sick of each other. End ID]
it’s why THIS is one of the most ruinous exchanges of all time bc like. you’re not GONNA grow old, you’re all already dead!!! recording, which literally transforms people into stories, is in a sense killing them!!! tim thinks he is creating memories but he is IN FACT producing ghosts!!!!
wow jon and tim really were together from the start, huh. they would have started up at the institute around the same time and they worked together in research and jon thought highly enough of tim to ask him to come work with him in the archives and tim liked him enough to say yes. they were together in the tunnels when prentiss attacked they were literally eaten alive together in what marked the beginning of everything falling to complete shit they’ve literally been in step with each other from the start and then everything fell the fuck apart and they fell out of it so badly but despite the weird supernatural coma, jon died at the unknowing, too. that is some very grim, bittersweet synchrony. start to finish.
[ID: In Luisa Valenzuela’s story, a man becomes haunted by a woman who is barely there. He is searching for her, for knowledge, for himself. She is haunted by something else it takes him a long time to figure out. The search is everything to him. What does he find when he goes looking for the woman who has become an apparition? The knot of the ghostly and the real. / End ID]
ok this passage is avery gordon talking about luisa valenzuela’s book como la guerra but in a very real way she is also talking about tma <3 like.. it matters that the primary method of investigation in tma is either listening to the voices or reading the words of largely dead people… it matters that jon starts out as someone who is uninterested in and contemptuous of his deceased predecessor but eventually becomes obsessed with her disappearance. he says he won’t let himself become a mystery, but he won’t let gertrude become a mystery either, and his attempt to unravel gertrude’s mystery leads to the unraveling of others, most importantly that of sasha. the first thing he says when he discovers that sasha was killed by not-sasha is “i’m going to kill it,” and it takes him five seasons but he DOES, he eats the thing that was sasha just like it ate his friend. and it’s not enough but it’s also not nothing.
tma is fundamentally about poking at prominent absences, the holes where people once were, until that absence is filled in with statement and memory and history. it is about raising the dead, about hearing their voices filtering out of old tapes and dusty files and books made of skin. it is about figuring out who is responsible for past suffering and then making them pay. it’s about “i hope you win jon, but i also hope it hurts.” and “you can’t save him. / but i can hurt you.” and “maybe i just thought it might hurt.” it’s about jon finally taking up the blade that was carried through the seasons to the finale by tim and melanie and basira and daisy and martin and everyone else who ever tried to strike a blow against a fear and plunging it into the pupil of the eye and saying “that was for sasha; for tim; for gertrude, and all the others.” and jonah saying “i don’t want to die,” and jon saying “neither did they.”
not everyone could be saved, but it still means something that the story begins with gertrude failing to burn down the archives, and closes on the archive going up in flames; it matters that someone collected the tapes, that they read the files, that they listened to the ghosts even when it cost them. the cost was higher than anyone could have predicted, and everyone was changed by their suffering, but it matters that when sasha died and nobody noticed, the archive staff refused to forget what happened to her. it matters that they spent the rest of their lives trying to make up for it, that martin burned statements and melanie tried to poison the coffee and tim told elias to kill him if he wanted to shut him up and jon listened to jonah say he didn’t want to die and then killed him anyway. and none of it was enough to bring her back, to bring any of them back, but tma isn’t a story about bringing back the dead; it’s a story about honoring their ghosts.
[ID: There is a sense in which tragedy gives blood to the ghosts. The plots of Greek tragedy give the dead substance by recovering an heroic past. The verb used of raising spirits, psuchagogein, is employed by Aristotle, Plato, and Isocrates to describe the way poetry, the art of rhetoric, and, above all, tragedy beguiles. Whether or not ritual origins can be traced back to bloody repayment cast on the ground, vengeance again claims centrality. For revenge plays have dead pasts which impinge so urgently on the present that figments of what has been return as eidola. / End ID]
can we talk about tma as revenge tragedy can we PLEASE talk about tma as revenge tragedy
[ID: In Luisa Valenzuela’s story, a man becomes haunted by a woman who is barely there. He is searching for her, for knowledge, for himself. She is haunted by something else it takes him a long time to figure out. The search is everything to him. What does he find when he goes looking for the woman who has become an apparition? The knot of the ghostly and the real. / End ID]
ok this passage is avery gordon talking about luisa valenzuela’s book como la guerra but in a very real way she is also talking about tma <3 like.. it matters that the primary method of investigation in tma is either listening to the voices or reading the words of largely dead people… it matters that jon starts out as someone who is uninterested in and contemptuous of his deceased predecessor but eventually becomes obsessed with her disappearance. he says he won’t let himself become a mystery, but he won’t let gertrude become a mystery either, and his attempt to unravel gertrude’s mystery leads to the unraveling of others, most importantly that of sasha. the first thing he says when he discovers that sasha was killed by not-sasha is “i’m going to kill it,” and it takes him five seasons but he DOES, he eats the thing that was sasha just like it ate his friend. and it’s not enough but it’s also not nothing.
tma is fundamentally about poking at prominent absences, the holes where people once were, until thoses absence are filled in with statement and memory and history. it is about raising the dead, about hearing their voices filtering out of old tapes and dusty files and books made of skin. it is about figuring out who is responsible for past suffering and then making them pay. it’s about “i hope you win jon, but i also hope it hurts.” and “you can’t save him. / but i can hurt you.” and “maybe i just thought it might hurt.” it’s about jon finally taking up the blade that was carried through the seasons to the finale by tim and melanie and basira and daisy and martin and everyone else who ever tried to strike a blow against a fear and plunging it into the pupil of the eye and saying “that was for sasha; for tim; for gertrude, and all the others.” and jonah saying “i don’t want to die,” and jon saying “neither did they.”
not everyone could be saved, but it still means something that the story begins with gertrude failing to burn down the archives, and closes on the archive going up in flames; it matters that someone collected the tapes, that they read the files, that they listened to the ghosts even when it cost them. the cost was higher than anyone could have predicted, and everyone was changed by their suffering, but it matters that when sasha died and nobody noticed, the archive staff refused to forget what happened to her. it matters that they spent the rest of their lives trying to make up for it, that martin burned statements and melanie tried to poison the coffee and tim told elias to kill him if he wanted to shut him up and jon listened to jonah say he didn’t want to die and then killed him anyway. and none of it was enough to bring her back, to bring any of them back, but tma isn’t a story about bringing back the dead; it’s a story about honoring their ghosts.
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
[ID 1: Archivist: What? No! No, Martin, I love you. I always will. And I know you love me too. I mean… [sigh] that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the real core of it. You want to save me. Martin: I want you to save yourself.
ID 2: Martin stabs deeply; there is a single gasp; Pained sob; Distorted screech, with sound like tape rapidly unspooling amidst a rising crescendo of static. Then… click. / End ID]
yeah i still can’t decide if it’s worse to be forced to act out a tragic plot against your will or to be given the freedom to act as you wish and still knowingly make the decisions that produce the tragic outcome anyway
the thing that continues to make me the MOST unwell about season 5 is how s5 jon is essentially tim. he is preoccupied with revenge; he is desperate to sacrifice himself because he sees no way to live beyond the circumstances in which he finds himself trapped; he wants most of all to cause suffering that has meaning as a response to all the meaningless suffering he has witnessed. whereas s1/2 jon’s most prominent characteristic was that he didn’t have the stomach for the archivist position, s5 finale jon does not hesitate to kill jonah magnus when the time comes. it is not an efficient murder; it is a blow each for sasha, for tim, for gertrude, for “all the others” who didn’t want to die but did. it is not a strategic killing; it is a revenge killing. it is revenge for everyone jon has lost, including many past versions of himself. jon also didn’t want to die but did; he became something that horrified him and lived past what he felt was the point his life should have ended many times over, which is in itself a kind of death. to live on past meaning, past connection and justice, past any hope of a livable future; this is a death, and it is a death that jon is determined to make someone answer for.
as girard says above, one of the classic tragic elements is that each protagonist thinks themselves above mimetic violence only to become caught up in it as the plot progresses. s3 jon thinks of tim as a loose cannon whose unpredictability and preoccupation with vengeance is immature and inconvenient, especially when taken in context with the rest of the archive staffers’ ability to play the long game and wait for what they think is the right moment to strike. s5 jon, on the other hand, clearly parallels tim in his desire to hurt those who have hurt him and the way he approaches his own death as a foregone conclusion. s5 jon has to die because tim has already died; jon is dead from the beginning of s5 because tim and so many others have already died. s5 is simply jon fulfilling tim’s revenge arc, the same knife wielded by another.
and yet even as jon drives home the blade that is guided by tim’s hand, jonah magnus has already achieved what he set out to achieve; he has released the fears, seen as the eye sees, he has “had the most wonderful dream.” revenge never comes on time; the tragedy of jon and tim is that tim was too early, and jon was too late.
“in the transference of revenge from the dead to those who survive, questions of duty, justice, and loyalty are amplified, while a vibrant and eminently theatrical territory of ghosts, dream-visions, and graveyards opens up […] the displacement of revenge from one character to another creates a structure of obligations which modifies the economy of vengeance […] it is an observable fact that, until revenge is exacted, those close to an injured or murdered person feel the guilt or shame of betrayal. the structure of displaced agency is not free from irony. if the victim of an injury resembles his opponent in the act of vengeance, the revenger who assumes the burden of another person’s resentment suspends his own identity. his predicament is imposed on him, and to know this is a part of his plight. injured by another […] he is forced to adopt a role. his qualities colour the drama of which he is part; tragedy can mourn the waste which follows from the narrowing down of his personality to the bare demands of actions; but for as long as he remains a revenger the proportions of the acts he engages in are determined by an injury he never gave or a request he did not make.”
“those who kill in revenge are so often, in their pale and worn desperation, ‘more dead than living,’ bearers of death if not 'undead.’ their affinity with the realm beyond life is what brings ghosts [and] revengers together”
- john kerrigan, revenge tragedy: aeschylus to armageddon
the thing that continues to make me the MOST unwell about season 5 is how s5 jon is essentially tim. he is preoccupied with revenge; he is desperate to sacrifice himself because he sees no way to live beyond the circumstances in which he finds himself trapped; he wants most of all to cause suffering that has meaning as a response to all the meaningless suffering he has witnessed. whereas s1/2 jon’s most prominent characteristic was that he didn’t have the stomach for the archivist position, s5 finale jon does not hesitate to kill jonah magnus when the time comes. it is not an efficient murder; it is a blow each for sasha, for tim, for gertrude, for “all the others” who didn’t want to die but did. it is not a strategic killing; it is a revenge killing. it is revenge for everyone jon has lost, including many past versions of himself. jon also didn’t want to die but did; he became something that horrified him and lived past what he felt was the point his life should have ended many times over, which is in itself a kind of death. to live on past meaning, past connection and justice, past any hope of a livable future; this is a death, and it is a death that jon is determined to make someone answer for.
as girard says above, one of the classic tragic elements is that each protagonist thinks themselves above mimetic violence only to become caught up in it as the plot progresses. s3 jon thinks of tim as a loose cannon whose unpredictability and preoccupation with vengeance is immature and inconvenient, especially when taken in context with the rest of the archive staffers’ ability to play the long game and wait for what they think is the right moment to strike. s5 jon, on the other hand, clearly parallels tim in his desire to hurt those who have hurt him and the way he approaches his own death as a foregone conclusion. s5 jon has to die because tim has already died; jon is dead from the beginning of s5 because tim and so many others have already died. s5 is simply jon fulfilling tim’s revenge arc, the same knife wielded by another.
and yet even as jon drives home the blade that is guided by tim’s hand, jonah magnus has already achieved what he set out to achieve; he has released the fears, seen as the eye sees, he has “had the most wonderful dream.” revenge never comes on time; the tragedy of jon and tim is that tim was too early, and jon was too late.
anyway thinking about “
the tragic hero is complete. you can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. for an instant he is something like divine. and then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. the center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask.” like yeah. jon sims my beloved
reading the verison of tma season 5 me and gabby @lesbianaglaya conjured in the dms tonight really makes me feel 😭🔨
alright since people asked and we couldn’t find a way to make a bulleted list here is an “abridged” verison of our tma season 5
jon in the finale aspirational moodboard <3
The formula [I WOULD PREFER NOT TO] is devastating, because it eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any nonpreferred. It not only abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects, but also abolishes the other term it seemed to preserve, and that becomes impossible. […] I would prefer nothing rather than something: not a will to nothingness, but the growth of a nothingness of the will. Bartleby has won the right to survive, that is, to remain immobile and upright before a blind wall.
For all the chaos and terror, both within and without, I hope things will work out well.
Perhaps I shall see you again when the honeycombing darkness of the earth’s teeth gently envelops all of us, and we awaken to a new world, flush with lush new rivers, and a sky that is only black at night, and that is good, and that will not hurt.
the epic highs and lows of the tma episode where the guy befriends a huge powerful pig by offering up his life in a charged and terrifying moment and gaining its trust only to immediately betray it by filling its pen with concrete and watching as it dies a slow and painful death
Was reading the wikipedia page on trolley problems to find out whether TMA is or isnt one - I still don’t have a clear answer, but i do have this part from ‘criticisms’, which seems surprisingly apt:
Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson go even further and assert that the thought experiment is not only useless, but also downright detrimental to human psychology. The authors opine that to make cold calculations about hypothetical situations in which every alternative will result in one or more gruesome deaths is to encourage a type of thinking that is devoid of human empathy and assumes a mandate to decide who lives or dies. They also question the premise of the scenario. “If I am forced against my will into a situation where people will die, and I have no ability to stop it, how is my choice a "moral” choice between meaningfully different options, as opposed to a horror show I’ve just been thrust into, in which I have no meaningful agency at all?“
it really is like. a document of a tragedy exists as a record of the documenter’s guilt, their complicity in inaction, their choice to record rather than to prevent or alter what they witness. the photojournalists who win awards for their pictures of people experiencing starvation and sickness, ghost quartet’s photograph of the woman about to get hit by the subway train, the magnus archives’ archivist’s shelves and shelves of statements from people who came in looking for help and didn’t get any because the archivist isn’t interested in helping, but rather observing, recording, understanding. the more you interfere with a field site the more you disrupt it, the more you muddy the results. to help someone is to ruin them as a subject of study, and so you don’t help; you just watch, and wait.
[ID: Screenshot of genius lyrics that read: All: The driver zones out. The victim plays a game. The pusher screams out. The photographer doesn’t help. / End ID]
In Cowan’s handling, horror movies do not simply use religious imagery; they are, themselves, religious texts. This is not to say that horror is itself a form of religion; rather, horror emerges from the same well of human imagination.
Brandon R. Grafius & John W. Morehead, Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination (via rotgospels)
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”?
thinking about how the books stamped as from the library of jurgen leitner originally contained the fears in more concentrated forms and brought them into the world
thinking about multiverse theories and Hill Top Road and how maybe the Web used books last time to bind the fears and move them into the TMA universe for them to spread
thinking about how the tapes in TMA’s universe could be the leitners of a future parallel universe
thinking about how the new institute might refer to these horror tapes as from the recordings of jonathan sims
he wouldn’t be a mystery, but everyone would associate his name with horror for the wrong reasons :(
im really never going to not be thinking about the parallel between ch 61 of the dream thieves when adam confronts ronan about having paid his rent and doesn’t chew him out for it but just recognizes what ronan did and allows ronan to care for him without rejecting him, which for adam is huge and is also evidence that adam cares for ronan… and directly after that ronan is able for the first time to look at his night horrors and recognize them as parts of himself that are angry and destructive but not worthy of his hatred and instead of allowing himself to be killed by them, he chooses to wake up and when the orphan girl asks why he hates himself he says “i don’t”…. versus ep 3x05 of black sails when flint is planning to sacrifice himself to free the rest of the crew because he doesn’t want to live any more and feels like the reputation of captain flint has caught up to him and he should just let it take him.. and silver sits down next to him the night before he’s about to go through with his plan and tells him that it was flint who first made him care about the crew and that he cares about flint now and thinks it would be a shame if flint let himself die when silver knows he could just as easily live, and so flint abandons his risky plan, fully LEAVING THE KNIFE BEHIND so that he has no choice but to convince the maroons to let the whole crew live and so live himself… and afterwards he comes up to silver and says thank you for convincing him that life was still worth living… like HELLO?? my heart hurts
HE’S EATING PEOPLE!!! literally for a statement to become part of the narrative that jon is constructing, the statement-maker must regurgitate it and relinquish control over it, must go from person with agency living in the world to inert statement preserved in the archive… the narrative requires constant sacrifice in order to proceed, the plot is powered by the routine violence of extracting statements… when you take someone’s story for your own you do them a great harm…. archive as site of preservation only after thorough digestion, archive as tomb….
[ID: a digital comic entirely drawn in shades of blue and orange on a black background. each panel features a close-up of time jonathan sims has been touched against his will. we see worms burying into jons skin, michaels giant hand slicing into his arm, judes hand buring his, daisy slicing into his throat, breakon or hope leading a tied up jon, nikola spreading lotion over his shoulder, melanie stabbing his shoulder with a scalpel, jared extracting his ribs and helens giant hand slicing into his throat. the last panel is jon, shouting “dont touch me” at the statement woman from mag 187. underneath helens comment is written: “not so easy is it? keeping up your humanity…” end ID.]
alright tonight lets talk about [spins wheel] THEOPHAGY. can we eat god.
look this post is specifically about ancient greek theatre & myth and apotheosis. its like the way consuming something makes it Meat and places you a step above it in the hierarchy of animal-man-god that’s expressed through religious sacrifices. so if you eat a god you make it mortal.
thinking about peter lukas calling jon a “grubby jesus” and how the archivist’s job is essentially to receive supernatural confession and how in some cases jon eats the statement maker’s fear and so frees them of their burden and in some cases that fear rebounds back on them as they are exposed to the full terror of what it means to be eaten and made part of something other than the self and how he keeps dying but is resurrected not once but three times (masquerade, coffin, ritual) and how he makes the world over in his image and when he travels through this new world, people beg not for salvation but for annihilation and the freedom from watching/being watched and eating/being eaten that can come only when they cease to be and are incorporated back into the watcher and -
ADDITIONALLY: when caroline walker bynum says that metamorphosis is about process/mutatio/story - “a constant series of replacement changes/little deaths”…. to be changed is to die a constant series of little deaths - from victim of fear to statement maker to statement on paper to recording on tape all the way back around to victim again… ouroboros of horror that can only be ended through complete annihilation as opposed to the drawn-out torture of repeated consumption; the [foucault voice] perpetual spirals of pleasure and power… when you pray what do you pray for? i pray for god to crush me up into little pieces so i can start all over again….
consumption in the magnus archives - from communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation by maggie kilgour / tma ep 142 / the silt verses ep 2 / violence and the sacred by rené girard / the empath and the psychopath: ethics, imagination, and intercorporeality in bryan fuller’s hannibal by jane stadler / “your father was emperor of china and your mother an indian queen”: reverse imperialism inwuthering heights by susan meyer / “it’s only cannibalism if we’re equals”: carnivorous consumption and liminality in hannibal by michael fuchs and michael phillips
It is not the patterns that enthral me, I’m not one of those fools chasing fractals; no, it’s what sings behind them. Sings that I am beautiful. Sings that I am a home. That I can be fully consumed by what loves me. […]
Perhaps I’ve always heard it. Perhaps the itch has always been the real me, and it was the happy, smiling Jane who called herself a witch and drank wine in the park when it was sunny. Maybe it was her who was the maddened illusion that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am. Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretence that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. That love us in their way.
(The Magnus Archives 32 - Hive)
The young bride says,
“But either way I become a vessel - for your purposes or for theirs.”
The Trawler-man tells her, and his smile is kind,
“You are a vessel, no more than that; to be anything else would be in excess
of your own nature. Come. Bear me a gift, and I shall leave you something in
return.”
(The Silt Verses Chapter VI: It Winds, It Worms, It Wends)
thinking about peter lukas calling jon a “grubby jesus” and how the archivist’s job is essentially to receive supernatural confession and how in some cases jon eats the statement maker’s fear and so frees them of their burden and in some cases that fear rebounds back on them as they are exposed to the full terror of what it means to be eaten and made part of something other than the self and how he keeps dying but is resurrected not once but three times (masquerade, coffin, ritual) and how he makes the world over in his image and when he travels through this new world, people beg not for salvation but for annihilation and the freedom from watching/being watched and eating/being eaten that can come only when they cease to be and are incorporated back into the watcher and -
ADDITIONALLY: when caroline walker bynum says that metamorphosis is about process/mutatio/story - “a constant series of replacement changes/little deaths”…. to be changed is to die a constant series of little deaths - from victim of fear to statement maker to statement on paper to recording on tape all the way back around to victim again… ouroboros of horror that can only be ended through complete annihilation as opposed to the drawn-out torture of repeated consumption; the [foucault voice] perpetual spirals of pleasure and power… when you pray what do you pray for? i pray for god to crush me up into little pieces so i can start all over again….
thinking about peter lukas calling jon a “grubby jesus” and how the archivist’s job is essentially to receive supernatural confession and how in some cases jon eats the statement maker’s fear and so frees them of their burden and in some cases that fear rebounds back on them as they are exposed to the full terror of what it means to be eaten and made part of something other than the self and how he keeps dying but is resurrected not once but three times (masquerade, coffin, ritual) and how he makes the world over in his image and when he travels through this new world, people beg not for salvation but for annihilation and the freedom from watching/being watched and eating/being eaten that can come only when they cease to be and are incorporated back into the watcher and -
Tim looks back at the ground to make sure there’s no more of Grimaldi’s bits lying about, ready to twitch back together and stand her fucking nightmare of a body up again, all angles and joints in the wrong places, a jack-in-the-box torso and a stolen throat wired into a fiberglass neck, stretched out far too long. She’d be different this time, no doubt. Missing pieces, but still just as garish and twisted-
He’s moving before he registers what he sees, panic catching in his chest like his ribs are made of kindling. Jon’s face is peering out beneath a slab of drywall, beneath a supporting beam, just a dark, wet eye, a scrap of hair, and a pool of blood. - tim, jon, and the pain of trying to do your best in spite of it all. on inhumanity, love, betrayal, and forgiveness.
tim time is here. i’m horribly nervous about this one- i quite genuinely was not planning on ever posting it. but! i did. its here. and i think it might be some of my best writing. so. hope you enjoy.
