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i know it’s been a WHILE since i posted on this blog but i have in fact thought about tma every single day for the past year. how y’all doing

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No one appreciated Annabelle for all of her hard work 😔

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me, a few months ago: hmm. looking at tma’s anticapitalist themes, and the fact that georgie’s fearlessness hasn’t really been plot-relevant yet, i think they’re going to kill the fears by dismantling the whole system using End-based fearlessness. georgie is both a product of the system and the single character who can see what it’s like to exist outside of it, so it would be really fitting for her to be given the chance to destroy the system. making everyone fearless - using the very tools that the system gave her to restructure the world so the system can’t exist anymore - would be a fairly satisfying resolution to the way they’ve been building up the capitalism metaphor. yeah it wouldn’t necessarily make a perfect world in the aftermath, but that’s the idea with dismantling capitalism anyway

tma finale: *does That*

me: oh, okay! well, that was emotionally satisfying but not what i expected... lol i guess not everything can cater to my personal tastes--

stellar firma finale: *does THAT*

me: ....................!!!!

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just remembered again that stellar firma. fucking stellar firma. gave me the EXACT anticapitalist “we dismantle the entire system to make space for a new world and it’s probably going to hurt a lot of people and the new world might be worse but it might also be better and the current world isn’t sustainable at all so this is the best option left” ending that i had wanted from tma. stellar firma the dumbass improv comedy show

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sometimes i still daydream abt the version of tma in my head i created between 180 and 181, where mikaele and annabelle, as two characters of color who specifically got fucked over bcos british & (most likely, in annabelle's case, but DEFINITELY for mikaele) white academics were willing to sacrifice them in the name of 'research' or 'progress' or w/e (but actually just their own status as 'The One Who Succeeded With Spooky Research')

get to actually have a hand in dismantling the Fear System that lbr was defined by robert smirke, rich white british academic from the fucking 1800s, and then used by jonah magnus, another rich white british academic from the 1800s, to destroy the world

i am aware that this version would've taken Protagonist Status away from jon and so was never gonna happen, and also it probably wouldn't have been great for jonny sims to be the one writing it due to his issues writing abt race in the past, but! but!!

...it's a nice version, is all i'm saying.

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artwork my last post is based off of!!

(i woke up one day w this idea bc i had a dream about gerry talking about how the fears are like colors and my subconscious went 👀)

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anyways. finals are over so back to your regularly scheduled posts, where i log on around once a week to say something dumb that appeals only to me, for my beloved audience of (checks notes) 12 followers,

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speaking of literary symbolism taking over real actual factual fears, consider with me the fear called 'the flesh' in the context of mag 200 saying that the fears were split apart by how humans conceptualized them, specfically

and how it may have actually originated as a very human fear of being disposable to society, used for your labor until you are worn down to nothing, chewed up and spat out by the very thing that you are supposedly a part of, devalued and dehumanized by a larger system than you

only for robert smirke, rich white british man in the 1800s, who hung out with rich white british academics who claimed the poor belonged in workhouses 'for their own good', to not only initially gloss over that fear entirely, but later to only recognize it in the fear that animals feel in the face of the slaughterhouse

and then for smirke's interpretation of things to get so widespread that it does become commonly accepted, until those two things wind up getting mixed up and conflated

'it's an animal fear that got muddled by human neuroses' gerry darling i adore you but i think it's a human fear that got muddled by some rich white man having power and influence

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current trains of tma thought:

gertrudeagnes childhood friends at hill top road au

post-post apocalypse wtgfs help rebuild society and accidentally become leaders and massively important world figures

post-post apocalypse rosie/basira

gertrudeagnes little mermaid au

au where annabelle stays in the new fear-less world and survives and figures out who she is without the influence of the web. and she adopts a dog

tapes are agnes au

jmart time travel universe hopping au where they’ve spent decades traveling between universes trying to fix shit and by this point their relationship is a looooot more strained. and also annabelle is there

gertrudeagnes goodplace-esque afterlife au

wtgfs au where melanie is in grifter’s bone and georgie is an end avatar who runs a pub that’s a popular social spot for the greater london avatar community. they have a meet-cute when georgie has to tell melanie and her bandmates to stop throwing knives into the wall and wrecking shit in her pub please. yes they are both kinda evil in this au but who cares

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I’m not even joking- has anyone ever done lovecraftian eldritch abominations that, like, go out of their way to avoid bothering humans?

 Because if you want to run with the “we’re like ants to them” metaphor, most people who aren’t total assholes are making, like, an active choice not to stomp on anthills or squash random bugs. They step over or around. And it’s not the bog-standard indifference of the genre, there’s an active thought process of “You’re not bothering me so I won’t bother you.” I want a story about people exploring an eldritch horror-city like Ryleh, and eventually it turns out that all the bizarre psychological torture and warping environs and all that are an elder god’s equivalent of trying to shoo out a fly or a spider without killing it. I want a story about how the empathy of an elder god is just as dangerous as it’s wrath.

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even though i don’t post much anymore my brain is still occupied by tma thoughts a minimum of 70% of the time. it’s simply that they’re no longer cool shareable theory thoughts and are now mostly just incredibly niche gertrudeagnes or wtgfs au concepts that cater only to myself

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I mean. I guess the Institute is haunted by Jonah Magnus.

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i log on. i say something about tma women. i log back off

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I JUST REALIZED SOMETHING:

We first heard of Manuela Dominguez as part of the crew of the Daedalus.

And her last appearance ends with her getting trapped in a maze of endless corridors, with no hope of finding a way out - one might even call it....a labyrinth...

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Miss Annabelle Cane I am still thinking about what the spiders did to you.

Anyway, i saw this post a few months ago that went in-depth about the evidence we have that the spiders kinda…ate…most of Annabelle’s fashion sense and personality. We can can say yessss fashion spider queen all day long but what happened to her was sad. I still wonder what the OG Annabelle was like.

[Image ID: A fullbody drawing of two Annabelle Canes, both facing the viewer, on a bright magenta background. The Annabelle Cane on the left is posing and winking. She is wearing a dark frilly elbow-length cape, a knee-length black mermaid skirt, and white mid calve length socks with bows on the hems. She is wearing flat-heel Mary Jane shoes, frilly white gloves and is carrying a purple handbag. Her hair is in a short poofy bob. In the center of the drawing is black, all-caps text that reads “I cannot stress this enough. What happened to me was not a glow up.” The Annabelle Cane on the right has white thread wound around her hands and is wearing tennis shoes, ripped jeans, a jacket with a furred hood and a black wide-necked t-shirt. Her hair is shorter and one side of her head is shaved. There are four stylized black spider legs that sprout from the shaved side. End ID]

Anyway if you know the post im talking about PLEASE send me a link i want to read it again. Its essay-length and pre-dates mag194

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SIGMUND FREUD?

STUPID IDIOT MOTHERFUCKING SIGMUND FREUD GOD DAMN FOOL PAPER WRITING DRUG SNORTING RAT OLD BASTARD MISOGYNIST IDIOT DOCTOR OF PROJECTION BIGGEST FRAUD IN VIENNA LAUGHED OUT OF STEM OBSESSED WITH MOTHERFUCKING SIGMUND FREUD?

STOP PINNING ME WHEN I TALK ABOUT SIGMUND FREUD I HATE HIM SO MUCH WHY DID HE HAVE SO MANY FUCKED UP IF TRUE THEORIES WHY DID HE DECIDE TO FUCK AROUND FOR MIND CLOUT JUST GET SOME PROOF WAS HE HORNY? WAS HE A BASTARD? MAN HAD SUCH A VISCERAL EFFECT ON THE FIELD OF PSYCHOLOGY NOT EVEN PEER REVIEWED NEVER EVEN SAW A SINGLE CASE AND DIDN’T MAKE THINGS SEXUAL AND WEIRD GET AWAY FROM ME.

if i wanted to do research and the PI said sigmund freud was actually right i would piss on their grant proposal for the sole purpose of ensuring it got turned down

if i have to deal with sigmund freud quoted one word in context on zoom in a lecture not only will i close the tab i will withdraw from the whole class out of spite and have to retake the entire course again for the experience of being able to skip all the times when he is mentioned or alive

i dont even know why i hate him so much. he had some good points but i am just mad because i am angy.

he better have had some fucked up backstory to explain this if was just some cis shithead who was too into greek tragedies and decided everyone wanted the irl version ill go ham

BETTER have had his own sublimated anxiety cuz if he didnt Im going to make him

paypal.com/IFuckingHateSigmundFreud

chapters not even about him. vaguely mentioned what is supposed to be maybe dream analysis and I lost it

where the fuck are the neofreudians if they are still around im going to so deeply wish they werent

horny old man

ill punch freud’s ghost and his weird frail old man twig theories will simply flake apart under my epic huge meat criticism and his legacy will disintegrate until all thats left is one final book that quotes him one time simply titled It’s Not That Deep in every syllabus

Im not even breathing im hyperventilating at this point

i hope theres a date given for when the idea of psychosexual development died or will die so i can make it a reminder on my phone

everyday once a year i will see it and do anything but pay respects to the man who had so many fucked up if true papers

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i just. annabelle had so much potential, like yeah jon was super afraid of her and ready to blame her for things but we as the audience could (if we were willing to dig deeper) see the parallels between her and jon and accept jon as an unreliable narrator who didn’t really know her, who was afraid of her by default bcos he was afraid of the web, and maybe she wasn’t in line with the web, the same way he wasn’t in line with the eye, just forced to go along with it

and then 197 comes around and she has no goals of her own, is only interested in furthering the web’s plan, is super casual with her own death as long as she fulfills her part for the web, and turns into a physically large monster (which, ok, watsonian interpretation she wanted to remind jon of mr spider, but also a black woman being physically intimidating just to talk to is not great! it’s not!!), and then later we’re told by jon that he Knew that she believed everything she said was true

so canon says yes, we are supposed to believe these awful things of her, even if the web’s plan is something our characters are choosing to go along with, her goals are not like theirs–to save the world–but like the web’s–to doom others, and to feed the fears.

and it’s so frustrating to me, still, and especially bcos obviously most of fandom is gonna take that very obvious reading of her and go along with it. i go looking for post-canon alternate universe fics and art and stuff and if annabelle is there either she’s trying to help the web still or she is, at best, the ‘villain who is never redeemed but isn’t Actively fighting our heroes anymore so they tolerate her being around’

i want more of her. i want someone who is canonically afraid of spiders and was tricked into an experiment with them to have the same consideration of her phobia and trauma, of having that a part of her life, as jon and martin do. i want someone who is clever and has interesting musings on free will to actually, like, have some free will and independent thought, beyond What The Web Wants. i want her to be someone more than a stand-in for the web itself, someone who plotted and ruined jon’s life to cause and move the apocalypse.

……………………………i got super passionate abt this and i’ve said a lot of it before, but canon was not good to her and a lot of fanworks aren’t either (oh, they’ll be like ‘sexy spider wife’ but idgaf how hot she is or w/e) and i wish. more of them were better to her.