#TMA Scrutiny

[ethereal-w0lf]

Me when I’m about to explain why Scrutiny is the most important episode in TMA season 4 and how it’s not just a one off to give us an excuse to know how far gone Jon is.

And how it’s actually a parallel to how Jon was when he was first touched by the eye to how he is now which also give a good look at how terrifying this all is to a normal person because none of the cast are normal anymore and we the listeners aren’t either.

It’s a gateway to John needing more fear to live and an in depth look on what would happen to a regular person if they dealt with this which foreshadows the world’s reaction to the eyepocalypse.

And no I’m not insane or justifying my favorite season 4 episode and I’m not biased just because I love when supernatural shows give an outsider perspective so we can see how sane people in world perceive it:

[cyborg-empress]

I really wanted to make a post about The Magnus Archives because I'm going crazy about this podcast and need to share my thoughts. Season 4 spoilers under the cut!

Ok so this is about Jon in Mag 142 - Scrutiny.

I love this episode. The voice acting is amazing and the statement/complaint is super well written.

First off, what Jon did is awful. He completely ruined her life and that's so not alright. The statement giver said she was doing fine and he took that away from her. Like dude, not ok, what the hell.

But the problem is I just go so dang excited when I listened to the episode. I like Jon so much he's totally my favorite character and this episode actually just made me love him more. Not as a person, cuz he's getting more morally grey by the second, but as an amazing character.

I realized that this is the first statement we got where Jon is actually the "evil" force of the episode. It's always him taking the statements of the horrors of the Fears and Avatars but now it's a statement about him. And I just ahhhh I love it so much. Horrifying? Absolutely. But I love the fact that he's losing his humanity to the point where he really is becoming a monster! It is just so interesting and exactly where I was hoping the podcast would go from a story perspective. Like oh no my poor guy but also just yessss. I just love slow corruption arcs (not the fear, the moral kind) so so much. I think villains are so interesting and seeing Jon go in that direction a bit makes me very excited, even if it's really not good for him as a person and I do actually want him to be happy.

Also the fact that he is using his powers? Just so cool!!! He's so freaking creepy I love him. Just sitting in the corner like a weirdo?And "He's all eyes" ? I am kicking and screaming. (To be clear I am in no way excusing his actions I just think it's neat).

The Martin and Daisy convo about Jon's trauma response was also just so *chef's kiss*. Him being reckless to feel in control and because he's self destructive due to guilt is simply amazing character development that makes me just feel worse for Jon. And make me love him more of course.

From what I've read under the tag for this MAG, this episode made a lot of people like Jon less but it just made me love him more.

I know I'm super duper late to the podcast but I'd love people's thoughts! I'm totally aware that I'm just rambling on and being a Jon apologist. I just didn't feel the need to do any super insightful media analysis because so many other people have done some excellent break downs of this episode.

No spoilers please tho I'm only on MAG 157 as of writing this (but I hope to finish the season really soon).

Thank you so mush for reading my ramble! I'm so obsessed with this podcast. I love Jon so much.

[underratedgrapeju1ce]

mag 142

[dspd]

You know how fanart always makes Jon's eyes glow when he uses his powers? I always imagined he has these nearly unremarkable dark brown eyes that turn to tiger's eye if the light hits right.

Before his transformation, when he witnesses a real statement, it's like a nicotine hit. As he gets stronger, it's less innocuous as nicotine and more like heroin. That soft brown that Martin fell in love with is the tiniest ring around the black of his blown pupils and, after the transformation, nothing really changes physically. He still stares the statement giver down with this hungry look, drowning them in the black holes that used to be his pupils. But now the statement giver feels the icy, oppressive energy, the claws that hook deep and drag that fear out for anyone to see.

Like in MAG142, Scrutiny, when the woman is talking about how he's sitting there, gulping down all her terror. It's like when you stare at something so hard your field of view distorts like fishbowl POV and she was forced to sit there under that.

for anyone who doesn't know what I mean by fishbowl, I've attached an example below the cut

[nectardraws]

john having a normal one

aka. that one scene where he unleashes an eldritch being of dread on some random woman in a coffee shop

[landscaping-your-mind]

JONATHAN SIMS DID NOTHING WRONG

ever

he never did anything wrong

@a-mag-a-day

[themagnustournament]

Redemption Round 3 - Match 7

A rather even match if the stats are anything to go by! Dig comes to us with 153 Redemption votes and is against Scrutiny's 161 Redemption votes!

MAG 088 - Dig | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Enrique MacMillan, regarding the act of digging.

MAG 142 - Scrutiny | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of an unknown bystander regarding an encounter with The Archivist.

[fractal-voidling]

MAG142 - #0181206 │ Scrutiny

John

John

I can't believe I'm the one who's saying this, but John

that's not how you communicate

you can't just eat people's trauma

bad John

spit it out

I swear to the gods, Daisy's need for company's gonna save Martin's stupid ass

or John being a suicidal idiot, lol

[divorcemotif]

thinking about the context & format of scrutiny as a literal harassment complaint—delivered to jon's workplace with all the official language of one—with the kind of unavoidable suggestion of sexual violence this episode, given jess' initial impression of him; the gender dynamic, his presence being an incursion into a specifically romantic setting; and what follows being an incredibly violating abuse of power. interested in her decision to go to the institute to complain, and ultimately the trauma & relative futility of that complaint from her perspective, as part of a wider commentary about the sort of. trap that is the idea of the institute's professional academic authority as a legitimizing force. i think there's this interesting angle to what the show has to say about power dynamics and abuses of power in general—and how they are acknowledged and framed by the systems that maintain them—within the depiction of the experience of this kind of corporate interaction on a more abstract horror level.

like the beginning of the show kind of satirizes the way that academic institutions police the value of information and the legitimacy of ppl’s perspectives, through jon’s insistence on his own rational objectivity in the face of all the supposed liars and mentally ill drug users he has to deal with: his entitlement, the fact he has the power to classify and dismiss the statements however he likes and the obvious unfairness of how he does so. the institute’s claim to objectivity & rationality is established early on as something jon is (to an ultimately limited degree) able to hide behind: his need to be taken seriously, his temporary comfort at the price of the arbitrary dismissal of the statement givers' experiences and the demonization of already stigmatized demographics, lol. and like. in scrutiny, I do think at least subconsciously, jon introducing himself with his position at the institute is a way of lessening the apparent severity of what he’s doing to assuage his own guilt, for the moment at least. invoking his position at an academic institution introduces a cover of professionalism to his purpose that serves to distance him from any personal or emotional implications of his actions—he’s not just some creep who’s accosted her at a cafe, he’s from the magnus institute, and he wants her story. what we hear of his pre-statement spiel, in this episode and to floyd matharu on the boat, is an echo of what he’s always said to the live subjects: the polite, professional coerciveness of his language—“whenever youre ready”, “thank you” at the end—made horrifying by the new context; suddenly almost “it is polite to knock”-esque in the way his words foster the illusion of free will while paving only one possible path for the victim. the horror is that the politeness doesnt seem in line with what he's doing, or what it feels like he's doing—a big part of jess' distress is self-doubt, that for all it felt creepy there’s very little concrete about it to justify how much she's been affected! she'd never even heard of the institute before this, but the job is done: she hopes that filing a complaint through an official channel with them will validate her experience as necessary to prompt some sort of action. she says she’s come because she doesn't think the police would take her seriously.

there's a kind of parallel thing in a lot of the early seasons statements where the subject's coming to the institute desperate for protection from whatever horror is threatening them and/or their loved ones. piecemeal, burnt offering; even when people have some preconceived disdain for the magnus institute (it's a running thing that the institute is widely held in some ridicule), it is the respectability & objectivity it purports that ultimately draws them in in their desperation. spurred by the idea that having their experience legitimized might elicit help, or just desperate to be heard and believed by someone in their isolation. but the institute doesnt actually help people, doesnt even explicitly claim to (what's the point in outright lying when you can manipulate people's assumptions with set dressing to achieve the same effect?). the purpose and design of the whole thing is fundamentally self-interested: there's no incentive for them to extend you any understanding or respect. the venue the employees are given to engage with visitors is as subjects, sorting through their most vulnerable moments for useful information and discarding the rest. like in terms of the vibes, it's always struck me that it's when martin tries to get her info down on a form that being at the institute gets to be too much for jess and she runs. consistently at the core of the eye's portrayal in tma is the passivity of the watcher: specifically as an individual in this kind of institutional context the horror becomes not just of having the details of your life known but of having them displayed through that dehumanizing academic lens, stripped of sensitivity and personal significance, presented completely dispassionately. you're sacrificing something of your personhood in pursuit of legitimacy and aid that you'll never be granted. scrutiny like all the statements ends with no closure or explanation for the statement giver, and the dramatic irony of the whole episode is that we know from the start the futility of trying to engage with the institute on its own terms. the consequences jon ultimately faces are all personal: there is no mechanism for him to be professionally punished in the way she imagines, and the institute she is coming to for help is the structure within which he gained the power to do what he did to her

[neosfstrut]

went tag/search browsing for certain butch-related content and

1) oh god i saw so many posts filtered for being tagged "radfem" it made me more depressed than i already was and

2) if you make a big long positivity post for butches and have a line like "i love butches who don't identify as women fully/at all" with the text at the bottom telling men to not interact... like i know that isn't a full contraction, but boy, it sure made me go from feeling seen to invisible

like i hate lgbt ppl and spaces getting fixated on trying to cut out the "intruders" i hate it i hate itt. being bigender makes it feel like I'm at ground zero for other lgbt people (including other trans people sometimes) making shit weird for trans people because they're addicted to making spaces theoretically meant for us that often exclude us.

[spooksier]

hmmmmmmm now i really want to do an updated version of that scrutiny piece hmmmmmm

[optimisticrunawaygalaxy]

MAG 142 Scrutiny

[creature-from-unknown-orgins]

Jonnn what did we say about stalking people and asking for their stories?

[gaogaigoatgrrl]

i hope that in the wake of predstrogen/predesterone's back-to-back deletion we don't forget about the ongoing building wave of seemingly organic transmisogyny from the userbase leading up to it, some of which may or may not have been the result of terf psyops but all of which certainly wouldn't have been possible without the eager participation of a significant proportion of users, including but probably not limited to:

the entire concept of transandrophobia (if this offends you, think long and hard about why you want so badly for it to be real)

the ongoing backlash against the terms tme and tma (if they offend you, think long and hard about why they might have practical value to trans women and people with similar social positionality)

the ongoing trend of trans women's blogs getting flagged on the flimsiest of pretenses and generally receiving far more scrutiny for "adult content" than anyone else's

the seeming unironic revival of "baeddel" as a slur for outspoken trans women, on the basis of a long-dead clique that, ironically enough, self-applied the long-dead (and tbf, etymologically questionable) slur from the middle ages to reclaim it

the entire "trans women should be fucking trans men instead of complaining about transmisogyny" genre of post

the backlash when tgirls finally started calling out the aforementioned bullshit

the copypasted anons sent to several trans women (many of whom were lesbians) sexually harassing them and threatening corrective rape for calling out the aforementioned bullshit

the backlash when tgirls called the aforementioned bullshit sexual harassment

the expansion of flexible queer label use (which to be clear, i am generally all for) to include "afab trans women", muddying the waters and making transmisogyny harder to articulate

the backlash when tgirls started calling out the aforementioned bullshit

the aita incident in which a trans woman described a cis woman claiming to be a trans woman in a group chat and giving other trans women terrible medical advice based on no actual qualifications or experience, and got a huge backlash for warning them about the aforementioned bullshit despite the stakes of, you know, following terrible medical advice

everything from the sixth point onward happened within the past... week? two weeks? my sense of time is a bit fuzzy. who knows what the rest of this week has in store?

people on this website are so incredibly hostile to trans women even being able to name our own oppression, let alone resist it in any concrete way. and i know it's not just this website. don't you get tired of the crab bucket bullshit? holy fucking shit.

like, i've been lucky, i've overwhelmingly managed to dodge it (probably on account of frankly being a pretty boring and inconsistent poster). this time last year, i was actually bored that i didn't have anons in my inbox to argue with. but i've seen it happen to so many other women now, it's absurd. even if it never hits you personally, you can never shake the awareness that it's happening to so many of the cool girls on here, people you like and whose posts you laugh at and who you look up to. they just kinda seem to drop like flies over time. don't you get tired?

[annabelle--cane]

fun fact: the first time I heard mag 142 scrutiny, I half thought that this was some sort of jon doppelganger going out and harassing people, like maybe it was a pseudo not-them situation, and I think that mistake speaks to something interesting that tma does with the nature of shifting identity and the not-them.

this is most explicit in distant cousin, where the statement giver muses for a while about how if you don't see someone for long enough then when you meet them again, you aren't really talking to them, you're talking to someone who existed years ago and the person before you is actually a complete stranger. when daisy gets out of the coffin, basira asks jon if she's been replaced, because this person is so unlike the daisy basira has always known. in contrast, the only person whose identity tim can ultimately be sure of is jon's, despite how massively the two of them have both changed and despite how people will specifically come to doubt jon's selfhood in the near future. I think about that one behind the scenes round table episode where alex says the directing note he gave to mike for later seasons tim was "you are not playing tim anymore, you are playing a completely different person who is still called tim." man.

[lttleghost]

no but thinking this again - if your positivity posts for gnc transfems needs some sort of dig at other transfems you think are "conforming" your support is hollow, if you do not think that tma people face increased scrutiny of their gender and presentation your support is hollow, I don't think you actually support gnc transfems I think you want to use them as a prop