anyway will probably never stop thinking about how both the magnus archives and the terror make explicit the fact that in order to go on living in the context of empire, you must constantly sacrifice and consume others.. whether you are embedded in the machine of the archive or of the navy, your survival means someone else’s suffering. for the surviving members of the terror and erebus crews to go on living, they must eat their sick; for jon to go on living, he must eat the statement makers - not literally, but rather in the sense that he is consuming their life stories and rendering them dead objects, no longer living and breathing but inert and available to be studied and dissected. more broadly, the respective projects of imperial exploration and imperial scholarship/knowledge-production are built on mass graves, both of the indigenous peoples whose lands and histories they violate and destroy as well as of the sailors and workers whose labor powered the continued forward progression of each project. the terror underlines this symmetry by conflating the consumption of imperial knowledge with imperial materiality. it doesn’t matter whether the consumption is literal or metaphorical; the effects it produces, both on consumer and consumed, are quite real, and the terror in particular argues that it is this dynamic of constant consumption that characterizes the english imperial project.

additionally, because tma and the terror are both horror stories, continued sacrifice is required not only so that individual characters can survive, but also so that the narrative can continue to provide entertainment to the audience. the story needs deaths to keep the plot moving; violence and brutality to shock the audience and to produce an emotional response. the impact of one death only affects spectators 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.

stories that foreground the violence at the heart of both narrative and political projects and aren’t afraid to explore the fact that survival within empire will always come at a cost… yeah