#drag that weight

[ispyspookymansion]

[writhe]

really fighting to accept & make peace with the ways i will never find the things i lost, or never again have them in the same way. also trying to be liberated by this

[faecaribou]

You can never go back! You can never go back! You can bite and scratch and beg but you can never go back!

[thermodynamic-comedian]

arthur and john's relationship is built on codependence and working together because there's no other choice, but it's also a lot about arthur projecting onto john. arthur considers himself a failure as a person, but now he has a chance to prove that someone evil can actively choose to be better. he believes that if john can be saved, so can he. if john can be redeemed, so can he. that's why he tries, at every possible turn, to push john to be better. that's also why, whenever john takes a few steps back in progress, it has such an intense effect on arthur. because he wants to save john.

because if he can save john, he'll finally have proven to himself that he can be saved too.

[shamblespirate]

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the reason that MTMTE remains the most defining, influential, and loved series in the IDW1 run is fundamentally because, despite its many flaws, MTMTE has the power to make you think and wonder about the world beyond what's shown on the page. The character relationships are so strongly developed that it's easy to care about the characters and easy to imagine further adventures they could go on. While the myriad dropped plotlines, underwritten/underutilized characters, and worldbuilding with weird implications are all fucking maddening at times... even if it makes you mad, MTMTE makes you mad because you care and it makes you want to immerse yourself into a world that feels like it's real beyond what's explicitly shown to you on the page. It's a sandbox of a story where there's so much fertile ground for pretty much anyone with any preferred character archetype, storyline, etc to dig in.

It's just... immersive. That's the best way I can put it. It feels like it could be real and it makes you want to spend more time in it than the constraints JRO had. It makes you want to know more about it and come up with theories on how/why things function or happen the way they do. That's why it's loved and that's why it's the best series in IDW1.

[naughtynoodle056]

Leo can be quite oblivious to how his own actions have consequences, often to a comical degree