“Will the audience please take their seats! The show has begun!”
with TMP out i felt it was time i go back and relisten to all of TMA and honestly being reminded of Nikola was the only inspiration i needed to draw this :) she’s just so creepy i felt like i needed to capture how i saw her in my brain and push my purple stranger agenda. alt text + alternate color version under the cut :D
it’s been a bit here’s some tma hot takes. elias is and always was a more compelling character than martin. martin is a heartstopper boy to me he’s inoffensive but pretending elias made-his-own-messiah (that paprika the novel quote about his protege as christ with female genitals) anthropomorphised fear of the voyeur three overlapping psychosexual relationships bouchard wasn’t a standout is absurd. don’t give me any of that ‘but what’s interesting about martin is he stayed nice and dull despite despite despite’ i don’t care !! i do not watch the owl house. also sims especially towards the end had one way he wrote female supporting characters (Strong, exasperated, decent chance of being either a lesbian or a cop or both) that causes a lot of the cast to blend into a slurry of quips and powers. despite this i do consider him an actual genius of shortform horror i have yet to find another podcast that hits anywhere near the same as good magnus archives
[VD: A Magnus Archives animation done in orange and teal titled “Pusryčiai” (meaning: “breakfast”). Mellow music plays as Martin cracks two eggs into a frying pan. He turns away to throw the shells while the pan sizzles, and when he returns with a spatula, a “boom” sound effect plays as Martin recoils with comic disgust.
The egg yolks have been replaced by human eyeballs. Martin stares at them for a moment. He then pokes at the egg with the spatula, producing a squelching sound, and one of the eyes blinks with another gross wet sound. Martin goes from disgusted to comically sad and disappointed, and he fades away before the setting does. The video ends on the words “darė Skaistė” (meaning: made by Skaistė) and a quick shot of an eyeball. End VD]
“Martin matched Jon’s freak” Jon didn’t unwittingly pledge himself to the same patron as Elias and keep bones in his office and admit to the beauty of the apocalypse and spend an entire season obsessed with killing him for you to say that Jon’s freak is being matched by, of all people, Martin why are you enjoying killing people after I pushed you to kill people, you weren’t supposed to go against my cottagecore fantasy :( Blackwood.
Fascinating that in a narrative where one character sculpted another, the sculptor himself was, on a meta level, modelled after his creation. They are so similar, by intent.
eugh blugh anyway anyway. elias like talks to jon completely differently than he talks to anyone else. if jon is the room he is talking exclusively to jon regardless of how many other people are in the room. if jon is not in the room but there’s a tape recorder running he’s talking to jon. if he thinks jon might have this conversation relayed to him at a later date he’s talking to jon. mag 92 is hysterical because why did you pack this office with as many people as possible for this conversation and then audibly not break eye contact with one specific guy for twenty minutes. well this is because jon is the only person that actually exists to him in this situation. or most situations. elias knows he’s in a podcast but as far as he’s concerned he and jon are the only characters in it and everyone else is set dressing and he gets so cranky about it when the set dressing starts expressing free will. jon is aware that other people exist 95% of the time unless he is actively talking to and/or yelling at elias and then he kind of forgor. mag 102 when elias is like melanie is coming to murder me with a knife for like .25 seconds jon is like the fuck is melanie and then returns to reality and remembers he has a life outside of “weird thing with elias” and is kind of embarrassed. like uh whoops sorry got kind of intense there for a second (elias continues to be kind of intense unabated) (forever)
Thinking about Jon and Elias hunting together in the most brutal, synchronised, and methodical fashion possible 🥰🥰🥰
I do have a weakness for the scarce moments of complicity we glimpse in the show. I wish we could have seen Jon realise that understanding Elias is both possible and inevitable to him because they are the same… and Jon would hate himself about it afterward, but that doesn’t change much now, does it?
randomly got annoyed again today at fandom portrayals of elias as a luddite. you think the world’s most powerful avatar of beholding would be…. behind the times? ignorant to the progress of technology? even if you choose to ignore the fact that the digital age revolutionized beholding as a dread power (going from something tied much more closely to the hunt to something so much more exestential and all-consuming… the surveilance state! online surveilance! wiretapping! data gathering! predatory privacy policies! the zoom boom! etc!!!) and that the evolution of recording technology is how the institute was able to function as efficiently as it did to tell us its story… why would it ever make sense to you that the world’s most powerful beholding avatar would remain wilfully ignorant of… anything. let alone wilfully ignorant of how the vast majority of the world functions and communicates. plus his greatest fear is death!! you think he isn’t up to date on all the most prominent medical advances? that’s just a willful misreading of the text.
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