#like my 30th relisten lmao

[mamahersh]

TMA Retrospective

At last, it is time for me to sit down and pen my opinions about TMA. Now, I’ll start by going over the timeline of my listening as you’ll see why it might have colored my opinions the way they did later; then I’ll try to segue into opinions about last 10 eps of S4 and all of S5 and how that compares to my opinions about the rest of the series, particularly MAG 001 through MAG 111; and if I don’t get too deep into the weeds or get wrapped up in the series summary I’ll try to touch on my feelings on the evolution of Jon and Martin’s relationship.

Warning, this will probably end up being my longest post about the whole thing, so here’s a read more to make sure I’m not cluttering your dash with a post the size of that one “color of the sky” post lmao.

To start out, I’m gonna briefly go over the order of events to give some context, as it really altered my opinions of S5 versus if I had gone in blind I think.

A few months back I heard about TMA through the Hermitcraft people and binged the first 111 episodes in less than a week. I had been hearing some spoilers at this point, and I was also beginning to look into fanfiction for the series which led to me accidentally spoiling 160 for myself. At that point I wasn’t sure I liked where the series was going and started reading time travel fix it fics and basically spoiled myself to the rest of the series. then over the next couple of months I sporadically listened to 112-150 and “reminded” myself why I enjoyed the series so much. The hangups I had weren’t panning out in the way I had dreaded, but S4 was honestly pretty heavy listening and it was a struggle. However about 2 weeks ago or so (around the 13th I believe) Rusty Quill started dropping hints about their announcement for the 30th (later today and I am still intrigued). I decided that since I was watching Soul Eater on a schedule, why don’t I see if I can’t set up the remaining episodes of TMA on one too? And thus my 3 eps a day was set in stone and I steadily listened to 150-200 over the course of the last week and a half to two weeks in preparation for the TMA 2 announcement.

So as you might imagine, “giving up” on the series a little over half way through because you spoiled yourself so well you knew all the major story beats of the first 4 seasons would definitely cause some interesting effects when listening to the rest of the series “for the first time”.

To dig into the meat and potatoes of my thoughts, I think I’ll start with subversion of my expectations. After all, I thought I knew what would happen ahead of time but honestly I really only knew the major story beats and over arching themes from S1-4. S5 was mostly still a mystery beyond: Jon and Martin walking through an apocalypse to get to London and eventually ends with Martin stabbing Jon in a bid to release the Fears to the multiverse. So yes, I knew kinda what to expect, and I knew S5 would be bleak after what a friend told me about what he had listened to through around ep 190; but I wasn’t quite prepared for how... blunt? the messaging was? The different domain metaphors were generally very transparent and admittedly it did bother me at times, but for the most part it was rather tolerable. Also, some of those big reveals in S5 about the Web and Jon’s part in it’s plan were still very impactful despite knowing about those concepts ahead of time. I’m still reeling with the implications from eps 196-200 for the earlier parts of the series, and it doesn’t help I’m participating in the a-mag-a-day relisten of TMA.

Something I’m realizing as I was listening to the end of the series and the beginning of the series at the same time, is just how different the podcast became? Personally, I loved S1. I loved the self contained nature of the statements, the personality of S1 Jon, the implied background office drama that was never spooky enough to get on the tapes. Not that I didn’t also love that the Statements were a puzzle, clues to help you guess that there was a wider world out there, that these things that went bump in the night still had it out for the Archivist. Nor did I dislike the broadening in scope that came with the end of season 1 and lead in to season 2. I noticed the voice actor change for Sasha right away, but I thought it was something meta: like they needed to get a different voice actor for S2 because the one for S1 could only be there for one season. Or even that I was misremembering. However when the reveal came that it was the not-them, my mind was blown.

I will say, that perhaps I preferred S1-3 to S4+5 in that S1-3 were far less bleak. Which is a silly thing to find preference in, seeing as it is a horror podcast and that’s how horror works. I dunno, I just enjoyed the S1 archival crew, what little we saw of them, more than the later iterations of the group. Although Jon and Daisy did have a nice dynamic in S4, I will admit. But I think too (and again with the ridiculous preferences of mine), the stakes seemed more realistic in S1-3? Don’t get me wrong, Jonny did a fantastic job of working up to “hellish nightmare apocalypse whose only solutions are either extinction of humanity or spreading said apocalypse across the unknowable multiverse” from “guy at a ‘normal’ archival job reads spooky campfire stories for his paycheck”. But when Jon was still human (and admittedly still fairly ignorant) the stakes seemed within the realm of something like Lovecraft: unknowable horror terrors from beyond operate through their agents of chaos on earth and we need to keep them from being awakened by their acolytes through their heinous rituals. You still had (to some extent) “good guys” and “bad guys”. Jon was slowly turning into something, but he hadn’t Become yet, and no one else in the Archives other than Melanie were on a similar trajectory.

Some (or a lot, it’s rather hard to tell actually) of my qualms with S4-5, I think, would be from how the show tries to evolve Jon and Martin’s relationship. By having a 6 month gap, there’s a lot of things that happen off screen, and a lot of character regression/development that went with it. So, Jon and Martin’s relationship in S1-3 is on a relatively stead uphill trend. Sure, S2 Jon is paranoid and distances himself from literally everyone, but hilariously enough once he gets past it after finding out about Martin’s CV he allows himself to trust Martin again. And outside of that (admittedly) rather large set back he goes from being a pompous dick to actually making an earnest effort to be Martin’s friend; even going on lunch dates in the lead up to the Unknowing. Martin, of course, struggles with a crush for much of S2-3 and possibly as early as S1 as he’s constantly trying to prove himself to Jon which leads to his getting trapped by worms in his apartment for almost 2 weeks. They both are heading towards the first soft somethings off screen for a short bit there near the end of S3.

But then S4 happens and Jon’s in a coma for 6 months. And then Martin’s mother dies, Martin himself falls into a deep depression, and Peter brings him into the Lonely. S4 is definitely good for Martin’s character development in the long run, seeing as it eventually broke him out of his shell, and it did allow Martin the isolation to get some much needed “self reflection” time to develop him more as a character in his own right, seeing as his character normally tries to stay in the background as much as possible.

However, part of what was sacrificed for this was all relationship progress between Jon and Martin up until this point. Martin leaves Jon after Jon “left” and stays gone after Jon “comes back”. They never see each other and the few times they do Martin is explicitly antagonistic, pulling a bit of a role reversal card to their relationship in S1. They are back to square one for almost the entire season till Jon pulls Martin out of the Lonely and it’s implied that Jon and Martin basically rekindle their entire relationship after mutually pining for over a year in the course of about 3 weeks. Then the apocalypse happens, there is no hope, and even a healthy relationship would be strained to the max. But, and here’s the bit that keeps putting me off kilter, they aren’t in a healthy relationship.

Between Jon’s being borderline omniscient and omnipotent (and thus the obvious power gap there), and Martin struggling to trust Jon on top of Jon being incapable of communication until about episode 190; we have a recipe for disaster. All of the personal faults that are still lingering from before the apocalypse and would normally be relatively simple relationship hurdles are exacerbated and used as weapons during it. They didn’t have time to get to the point in their relationship where it could be remotely healthy and while I disagree with Martin that they never would have worked out if given a chance under different circumstances, I do agree that what they have at that moment in time was born from trauma and just connecting with anyone who would think they were human and worth loving.

But to drag it back to a point, this is where the: I took a hug break from the podcast and read a bunch of fanfiction came in. As I’m sure you’re aware, those of you who read TMA fanfiction, particularly JMart on AO3, would probably agree that Jon and Martin a generally depicted as being a relatively healthy couple, particularly in the apocalypse. Even the clips from S5 of them having their silly moments are picked usually because it’s the one silly moment in that episode or couple episodes. Being as I hadn’t listened to that part of the show previously, I was still on: Martin pining and Jon finally warming up phase of their relationship, and generally assumed that eventually the pining on both sides would eventually give way to them actually dating (even if only mentioned in passing off tape). Of course, silly me, even after I knew that wasn’t quite the case, I was unprepared for how exactly their relationship unfolded during the course of S5. I think where the rub lied with me was that I was introduced to the OOC version of their relationship before the in character version, and it frankly caught me wrong footed enough that it was a perpetual bother.

That, and spinning back around to why I enjoyed S1-3 better than S4-5 was because there wasn’t really a sub-genre to the horror? Or if there was it was Mystery: Who’s the worm woman trying to get into the archives? Who killed Gertrude Robinson? Why is Sasha acting weird? What’s the Unknowning? What are the Fears? Are there other Rituals? What is Jon turning into? ect. Versus, S4-5 which suddenly transitioned to “supernatural office drama, pining edition” and “JMart couple counseling, Apocalypse edition”. We went from Horror/Mystery to Horror/Romance in the course of one coma and while don’t get me wrong I do appreciate Romance as a genre, even in Horror (see current Dracula Daily obsession), there is a way to pull off sudden sub-genre change but I don’t think I liked how it was done in TMA. Alas I’m not good enough at literary criticism to say how it might have been done better, and perhaps it couldn’t have and it just wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but I just found I enjoyed the intrigue of S1-3 better than the bleak existential musing of S4-5.

I kinda want to talk about the Web and how it was used throughout the series, but I feel like that would be better in a different post when I either have more thoughts about it or more to say that wasn’t already somewhat covered in my ep 200 post from yesterday.

And with that, I think I’ve covered most everything I wanted to cover. You’ll still see me posting with some frequency about the “A MAG A Day” posts and I’ll cover different themes and minutiae there that would have been out of place or I didn’t think to cover here. If you have any thoughts on this feel free to leave a message in the replies and reblogs as I’d be curious what y’all agree or disagree with in here.