2023-01-04 19:07:35 ¶ ●

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I'm curious, do you view the Joshus Gillespie story the way you wrote it out, or are you looking at it from Jon's perspective? Do you think his survival was unfair?

To answer your question and to respond to several others who were upset:

It was very much written from an imagined perspective about how Jon would feel about the situation and perhaps Joshua himself, I unwisely thought this would be clear from the highly emotional language of the piece but I think a few people read it as if from my point of view, and we’re consequently offended.

I think it’s neither fair nor unfair that Joshua survived, and that’s the beauty of it! One aspect of TMA as a whole that I love is its in depth exploration of just how irrelevant what we deserve really is; we’ll get what’s coming to us either way. It’s one of the reasons I really like the episode, it further emphasises just how much our perception of right and wrong, fair, and deserving don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things; Carlos Vittery killed a spider as a child and eventually died for it, Joshua Gillespie took £10,000 from a stranger to do something he thought was illegal and escaped relatively unscathed. None of it matters, because its not about the individual, its about what those (people or fears) that are above us want.

What I was excited to dig into in the analysis of mag 2 is that Joshua didn’t do anything in particular that made him deserve to survive, this does not necessarily mean that he deserved to die. I suppose this is a good lesson in how misunderstanding can entirely shape our opinion of a person. Plainly and honestly I don’t think there’s a quantifiable way to judge who does and doesn’t deserve to live, and it’s useless to try; but often heightened emotions give us the sense that we know, that we could be that judge.

And more important than any of this they’re fictional characters! I would never impose this kind of speculation onto real living people but since neither of them are real I thought it’d be interesting to explore the nuances of the fascinating parallel in the writing, and compare information that we’re given early on to plot points that happen later.

This wasn’t an attempt to moralise or insult people or behaviors! Simply creating an interesting speculative piece of writing based upon my perceptions of how one character might view another.