#tma meta

I keep seeing mentions of the tma asscourse on my dash are we having some kinda assiversary??? is it happening again? 

annabelle–cane:

I believe I said something to this affect in some tags ages ago, but I absolutely think jon giving jess tyrell the name of his workplace was a deliberate attempt at getting caught. parsing some timeline stuff, he took his first three victims in the first three weeks he was out of hospital, but then jess was his first after two months of nothing. I think he tried to stop, realized he couldn’t keep it up, so (maybe subconsciously) set a trap for himself while also making sure he’d be on a boat to norway for the immediate fallout.

gammija:

speaking of how an avatar gets their sustenance, another hc i like but haven’t seen discussed often, is that at least some part of Martin’s journey to avatar-dom (in s4) is unwittingly fueled by the general loneliness experienced by the regular Institute employees, after Peter takes over

bananonbinary:

thinking about how jurgen leitner went to all the trouble of adding his nameplate to the books, he literally could have added an actual warning to all of them. just a little ‘this book will make you burst into flames’ or w/e. instead, everyone had to re- figure out what each book does from trial and error because this dumb motherfucker apparently thought that he personally would be able to talk to anyone who got too close to one i fucking guess.

So I’ve talked before about how Jurgen was hunt aligned, and that his pursuit of the books wasn’t out of an Eye related need to know, but out of a personal drive to carve his name onto history (just as he did with the books). 

Leitner didn’t care how the books worked or how they could be used, he just needed to know enough about them to contain them, ala Daisy asking Jon about Mike Crewe so she knew to bury him, rather than burn him. He had reading assistants bare the brunt of the books so he didn’t have to deal with any of the messy details themselves, for him, getting them shelved and stamped with the bookplate was enough. 

He really did think he was going to keep all those books locked up personally, much in the same way as the mad explorers of the everchase all thought they would reach their goal. So yes, a dumb motherfucker indeed. 

quasi-normalcy:

TMA Hot Take: The Vast being represented as just an endless clear blue sky with no sun or earth below it is dumb because you need something for reference to gain an appreciation of how big it actually is and therefore fear it.

So I’ve always seen the infinite sky as Simon’s attempt to “share” the Vast with other people. The words he uses to invoke it are something like “enjoy sky blue” afterall.

Skydiver dude was mentioned as “wanting to do this for the rest of his life”, and if he’d been ready for avatar conversion he probably would have let himself go and enjoy what amounted to infinite flight, rather than worry about when he was coming down.

That’s why Simon and his granddaughter are so put out when he comes out of it a terrified wreck: they figured they were going to be welcoming a new member of the family.

quasi-normalcy:

quasi-normalcy:

Does anyone else find that the Fear Entities from TMA are so versatile that you start subconsciously applying them to anything you read that’s even tangentially related to the supernatural?

Anyways, Miss Finch is an avatar if the Extinction.

The thing that’s so adaptable about TMA’s taxonomy is that it gets not only into the basic iconography of fear (spiders, being chased, open spaces), but cohesive IDEOLOGY for each entity that makes it almost like a hogwarts house with its own virtues and vices.

The slaughter for instance isn’t just war, Its helplessness in the face of sudden violence and the odd beauty and grotesquery that can only come from moments of utter chaos. Combine those big moods with the trappings of any particular era’s killers and suddenly you have a winning aesthetic that you can slot nearly anything into.

Jonny ended up doing such a good job creating his horrors that it’s ended up being a guideline for horror itself.

im-the-queen-of-stardust:

You ever think about Jon and and what it means to be human?

You ever think about how small he sounded when he asked Elias if he’s still human. How much terror there was in his voice when he realised he recorded a statement that was written in a language he didn’t speak. How he tried to deny it when he first Knew something.

You ever think about him being not quite humans enough to die, but still too human to survive.

You ever think about how much he didn’t want to stop taking statements, how good it felt when he did. How he knew it was wrong but how he desperately still wanted it.

You ever think about how frustrated he became that he’s still feeling things, that he hasn’t become a monster like all the other avatars, who enjoy feeding fear to their patrons, who revel in it and he’s still a monster that cares.

You ever think about that time Jon went to Helen to ask when he would become that way, when he’d finally loose the last scraps of the humanity that he has left and she told him anytime. Anytime you want to, Jon.

You ever think about the way Jon laughed when the eye opened. How he sounded so triumphant and defeated at once. How he told Martin that he wished it felt horrible that he Saw and Felt everything.

You ever think about him sleeping with his eyes open. How he felt faint and less focused when outside the Eye’s vision, how he forgot everything that happened at Salesa’s safe house.

You ever think about how he held so much power. The power to See and Know basically everything and he purposefully held back about Looking at Martin, Basira, Helen, because that’s just the decent thing to do.

You ever think about how much it hurt him to be the catalyst for the apocalypse, how much guilt he felt over that to the point that the thought of another having to go through the same thing was unbereable to him. He was prepared to let everyone die, to stand as king over a barren world, to go behind his love’s, his anchor’s back because he couldn’t let there be even a tiny chance that somebody would have to suffer like he did.

You ever think about how on every step of the way they tried to rip his humanity away. To make him the monster he believed himself to be. How his humanity caused him nothing but grief and hurt but also love.How he clung to it, how he kept his humanity deep within himself and never gave it up. How it would have been so easy to do so. And so hard at the same time. How despite everything, Jon remained so human throughout it all?

how come I literally haven’t seen anyone talk about these parallels in mag 145 to 131 and 160???

I’ve seen a ton of jokes about how the fandom can’t agree what the statement in 194 was telling Jon that he found so obvious, which is hilarious I agree. But also I would love to spend some time cuddling up with the fact that that’s the whole point.

This is how Jon thinks now, this is how the beholding views things and speaks about things and that’s Jon!! This is a method of communication through statements that makes sense to Jon and to the Eye and not to anyone else. I bet if Martin had been there he’d have been like wait what? He’d appreciate the turnaround but the message wasn’t designed for him just like it wasn’t designed for us.

Jon and the Eye share their own private language and understanding of the world. Or rather, the eye has its own unique language and Jon is its only interpreter (who hasn’t also lost his mind somewhat). We can guess at it, but it doesn’t come obviously and natural.

And I refuse to sleep on the hilarious possibility of a Jon and Beholding buddy sitcom where like

Jon: Hi

Jon, intoning in the dread tones of the Eye: RICHARD HAWKINS COULD NOT SMILE WITHOUT THE CRAWLING CREATURES SEEPING FROM THE CRACKS BETWEEN HIS TEETH

Jon: geez, fine, I’ll get a haircut.

It has been a hot minute since I last did some meta but let’s crack our knuckles and dig right in because I want to talk about ROSIE.

And more specifically: I wanna talk about the concept of Rosie as victim.

I’ve seen some folks comparing Rosie to Jon and crew, just another victim of the institute forced into being trapped forever under the whim of Jonah Magnus, and she certainly starts out that way. When Rosie is interviewing, this is just a job for her, a way to earn a living after what sounds like a messy divorce.

(There’s an implication later that she might have had her own childhood supernatural experience, like Jon did, but it certainly wasn’t a conscious driving force that made her actively want to work at the Institute the way it was for Jon or Tim. She’s more on the Martin end of things, maybe a bit desperate to be hired but she could have fit in anywhere.)

So where does her path diverge? Because spoiler alert: this post is about why Rosie is not a victim the way Jon is, and I don’t even mean that just because she isn’t being purposefully victimized for marks by the eyeball man.

You could argue that it came up earlier, but I wanna double down on that moment in season three. Episode goddamn 92 where everything happens, my favorite episode in the world. When daisy drags jon into Elias’s office and confronts him. While this goes on, Rosie sits on the other side of that door and she doesn’t phone the police, and she doesn’t alert them of the situation when they arrive, she sends them away when Elias asks her to, and then she watches the archives folks file out of the office silent and defeated.

She says, verbatim, in her statement: “Thats when she knew…She was working for evil…and she was going to sit there and ignore that fact.”

Conveniently, Rosie learns that Elias is genuinely evil right at the same time team archives does. Just as they get to find out elias is a multiple murderer, she comes to the realization that he is evil. So we can perfectly contrast their reactions. And Rosie’s reaction is to sit there and pretend she doesn’t know. Why? Because she’s afraid. She is afraid of Elias and what he might do to her if she is a threat.

Actually, her reaction isn’t even parallel to team archive because they receive the information in that office that Elias is the heart of the institute, and they now think killing him would kill all the employees. Rosie has no reason to believe the same, her reaction is purely based in self interested fear.

Now you may have noticed (sarcasm) that fear is a pretty big thing in this show. Both the things people fear and what they do because of that fear. The decisions they make. Jonah started trying to end the world because he was afraid one of his contemporaries would end it first and victimize him. Similarly, Rosie can see how people less fortunate than her are suffering (she sees the broken defeat of the archives crew as they file out of Elias’s office and thinks if I step out of line that could be me) and so she makes the decision to protect herself because of that fear.

Now I’m not saying Rosie’s reaction isn’t understandable, or sympathetic, or relatable. It’s certainly exacerbated by her position as a woman in business. In her statement, Rosie mentions several times that she smiles just in case someone around is watching her. There is intense pressure on women, especially public facing ones like a secretary, to always be pleasant, professional, not take up space, not rock the boat, not become a nuisance. It is easy to empathize with her position. Maybe even see yourself in her anxiety.

But these rationale are not an excuse. Just because she is not Jonah, just because she is also working in this position where she is afraid, that does not make her a victim in the way Jon is. When she learned what he did, that Elias is evil and doing evil things and chose to remain helping him, doing her job, saying nothing? She became complicit. Jon and everyone else in the archives? They prove that it’s possible to fight back, even working under greater emotional duress than Rosie!! They think killing Elias will kill dozens of innocent people, and yet they never stop working to undermine him.

And not to be that guy who brings up nazis because I know it’ll make people think I’m trying to shut down the conversation, but it’s legitimately difficult for me to listen to this statement without thinking about the fact that:

I have to do it, it’s my jobandif I make a fuss about the people he’s currently hurting I might become the next target

Have inescapable real world connections.

Just because Rosie is a working class woman, who needed this job and got just as unlucky as everybody else who stumbled into the Institute, just because she is afraid for her own safety doesn’t excuse the fact that she was actively complicit in world ending levels of evil. And in an almost poetic turn, sitting by silently and doing her job while allowing evil to prevail when she is (by her own admission) potentially the only person who could have helped, leads to an eternity in the apocalypse of having to continue to sit and watch all the horrors around her. She has been passive for so long that now she is trapped by her own fear and complicity, too afraid to do the right thing. To try and make a difference before it was too late, before they got to the last verse in “and then they came for the archives crew and I said nothing, because I did not work in the archives.”

And none of this is to say Rosie is now cancelled or bad to like or shouldn’t be relatable. The whole point of her is to be relatable, especially to young women who have it ingrained in them not to be disruptive. I’m not telling you that it’s bad to see yourself in Rosie, but I am saying that it’s a good opportunity to take that introspection. Check yourself and make sure that you’re aware how easy it is to do nothing in the face of evil.

In spite of our fear, we need to be like Jon. Always making active choices, working hard to try and do good, to help free whoever we can around us. The world could certainly use it.

The idea that Melanie didn’t tell Georgie she was going to blind herself to quit the Archives before she did it is such a ubiquitous headcanon—I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fic that has them talking about it beforehand, and I’ve seen a bunch about Georgie finding out afterwards or Melanie worrying about it or what have you—and, uh, what?? Melanie “I’m trying to be more open about this stuff”, Melanie who told John and I think Basira and Dai…

image description: screenshot of 147 transcript, with Melanie saying “I’ve made a few arrangements” highlighted.

…

wow, all this time I thought it was just my reasonable headcanon from melanie’s character in general. nope!!

Canonically, Melanie had already made arrangements such that the others wouldn’t need to look after her afterwards. (And good for her. )