yeah i don’t really know how i feel about the tapes having been part of the web’s plan all along/annabelle explaining their presence because it really was like. jon IS the narrative. he eats people just like the narrative eats people; he is a catalogue of terror just like the narrative is a catalogue of terror; he is entertained by fear and suffering just as the narrative is entertained and entertains others through fear and suffering. the whole season 5 thing of emphasizing the dichotomy between subject and object/torturer and torture victim could also be framed as the distinction between storyteller and story, between recorder and material for recordings. and we see that articulated in earlier seeasons, but i wish we could have seen jon and the others grapple with that AT ALL in the lead-up to the finale… to think about what it might mean to choose to end that violent, parasitic cycle somehow or to work to erase the distinctions between themselves as shapers of the narrative and others as its victims… AND on a more meta level for the narrative to make some kind of argument about what it means for us as an audience to be listeners and voyeurs in a similar sense and to be feeding on the fear that feeds the protagonists.. anyway
like. tape as thread is good. story as web IS good. getting tangled up in your own history and memories until you feel like you can’t move, continuing to walk along the path of a story you’re writing with your life while refusing to see the bigger picture because you know you won’t like the shape of it, struggling to decide whether the bind you’ve found yourself in was your doing or the work of someone else pulling the strings behind the scenes, and whether it even matters at all… but all that’s good about that is IN the ambiguity and uncertainty and the fact that we can never know for sure how much of our lives are up to us so. i think a lot of its thematic/symbolic power is lost by having it all turn out to be definitively part of someone else’s grand plan from day one. who’s to say