[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.