#tma critique

[skyeoak]

I like tma a lot, but I think seasons 2-4 get a little too hyperspecific with the fear types (which look I do headcanon as the Eye helping Jonah’s plans but still), and really wish the stories had painted a bit more instead of showing individual swatches

[aediondraws]

tmagp comic bc I'm not normal about them!!

ep 12

[yoki-loves-stars]

Martin being a mechs fan headcanon is so funny to me.

He either listened only to the songs and skipped every song that has a monologue from Jonny. Or listened to them a long time ago and never ever he thought "huh... my new boss kinda sounds like Jonny D'Ville and his name is also Jon... what an odd coincidence."

It's even worse if you hc that he actually went to their concerts because like... now he also looks like his boss😭😭

[workplacecomedian]

Ok i love any and every depiction of john sims, and we know a decent chunk of yall have him grow out his hair over the seasons, long enough to go into a nice fluffy bun. But WHERE is the awkward in between phase. Phase of 'too long to keep styling it the short way, too short to style it the long way'. Phase of tiny as hell 1-2 inch ""ponytail"" and headbands for the long work nights when he's sure he's alone. Season 2 is screaming for that mid length where some strands can hang in front of his face for optimal paranoid stalker vibes

[macaron-jester]

Content warning eyestrain!

I drew this pretty quickly without much thought because I haven't drawn fanart in a while! So I drew Michael Shelly from the magnus archives! I used arcade carpet patterns for the jacket!

[cloverjester]

Man, I just realised, what a pethetic excuse of a Fear The Dark is, I can’t even take it seriously, all Fears are terrifying in their own way and then there’s Mr Pitch, it’s just such a fucking loser, like The People’s Church of The Divine Host is fucking pathetic. Okay cool a cult of avatars, but The Cult of The Lightless Flame is right there and actually fucking slays???? They had a fucking messiah and can melt people’s skin just by touching them, tf can those church bitches do? Turn off the light? I can do that do, it’s called turning the light off with a switch, they ain’t special. Their leader is so pathetic too, he’s just Jonah Magnus with extra steps, or he would be if he didn’t just straight up die before even meeting Jon and it wasn’t even fun. Couldn’t you get obliterated by Jon like the others? Like, Jon met so many avatars but the only Dark avatars he met was that woman who didn’t even know her whole cult is dead or arrested and the 12 year old bully, I am not even joking what the hell is this shit. There might have been someone else but they were so unremarkable that I don’t even remember. Oh and don’t even get me started on Jon’s mark of The Dark, all mark’s deeply scar him emotionally and/or physically and this one was just, oh look a big black ball. Oh you looked at it, it’s gone now, what a boomer. And then the avatar who made the ball started running away from one of Jon’s pet cops and then got swallowed by Helen, like she didn’t even try to fight them she just skaddidled away, how pathetic is this. Oh and their ritual? It failed. Nobody even stopped it, it just fucking failed. Oh and their domain in the Eyepocalypse? Full of children. All Fears feed on adult but Mr Pitch is so pathetic it can’t handle that, it needs to go after minors. It’s not even surprising that The Eye is the one Entity whose ritual succeded, if The Dark is the one it has the most antagonistic relationship with.

[inbeesinblood]

Working on original story spinoff of TMA that takes places in the Usher Foundation, the canonical American branch of the Magnus institute….technically a ff bc it takes place in universe. It’s written in script format and I will be recording the stories lol. I’ve written ep1 but I need some beta readers before I record it. I have friends who will be playing various characters. I excited about this dumb fan project

[frogofshadyorigin]

Somehow found the inspiration to do this one as well. And thus concludes (for now) the drawings of Fuertisium reese.

I'll start another three-piece drawing for Gristleum patricia soon, just have to read the script again and get some ideas.

[oaxleaf]

so one thing about melanie that i think people often forget is that she's not a naturally aggresive person, at least not in the sense that she immediately goes into a situation looking to bite someone's head off. melanie, rather, is deeply defensive. i think this is most aparent in season one and two, but it's a trait that i think remains all throughout. the only time she doesn't at least try to start an interaction in a peaceful manner is when the bullet is buried at its deepest in her.

otherwise all her conversations seem to follow a pattern: trying to keep calm and civil, reaching out with an olive branch, only to at the very first sign of offense snatch it back and lash out instead. melanie's main cause for aggression is not some inate tendency towards violence or threat, but rather a deep insecurity formed by a life-time of being doubted or questioned or mocked. be the one to hit first and hit hardest, and maybe their punches won't feel as bad

[skyeoak]

Tmagp 30 thoughts

Vocal performances all slayed. 10/10

I think there’s a lot of good and bad in the finale! But overall, it feels underbaked. (Or overplotted/overplanned?)

I’ll save my finalized thoughts on the hilltop center to see if it’s developed in further seasons, because uh, hmm. Jonny said in the live drop that carousels of horrors were his favorite to write, but they sure are not realllyyyy my favorite to listen to. They’re kind of thematic scattershot. And yeah, one of my critiques about TMA is that I don’t love how we only rarely see how the fears combine and interact. Having multiple creepy things in a curiosity cabinet -com shopping center doesn’t really solve that problem for me.

The idea of a character turning a blind eye to an obviously creepy job is still interesting, especially in how it parallels the staff of the OIAR. But that’s kinda the start and end of my interest in the custodian? It feels like this story could have been shrunk to 1/3 length and had a better effect. I just feel like this should have been a midseason statement, and the finale could have focused on having some sort of action or tension. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting the finale to have a statement at all, to be structurally in line with early TMA. Maybe a full statement/story from Celia, giving the non-TMA audience some idea of why she thinks there’s nothing to go back to in her universe. Hell. Maybe she could just. Tell Sam, uncompelled. I would have loved to see her try to convince him to jump. Convince him that her new life matters more than his (perceived) failure of one. Instead… this is another episode where I feel like the double meaning titles weigh down what the statement could be. And it’s the season finale.

I wondered early on if the finale for this season would feel more like setup for future seasons, and yep. Yep it did. It just felt like there was this inherent tension between the stakes of the story, which are already at interdimensional travel, and the level of danger it feels like everyone is in. Not to mention how Celia just drops a list of alchemical balance things out of the blue. Magnus Protocol is in a tricky situation: they need to set up a new conflict and new characters, and at the same time, Magpod has already done mega-apocalypse hellscapes and so TMagP might feel the need to go bigger. (Imo I don’t think sequels always need to raise the stakes but I understand that’s industry standard). It’s also tackling alchemy, a notoriously complex subject that’s probably hard to explain to an audience in any way that feels natural. You can’t just throw murder worm lady and screaming main character in the finale and call it a day. There’s a lot going on, less time, and I don’t know if the characterization this season was consistent (/consistently good) enough to hold the full weight of it all.

OKAY, WHELMED THOUGHTS OVER, now for the good! Surprise surprise, it’s all the little character payoffs!

Gwen and Lena’s confrontation was EVERYTHING. Gwen is kicking anthills, and Lena is so content to let her stand in them while the ants crawl up her legs. I won’t lie though, I’m not sure if this plotline will be interesting to me. I think it depends on how fast the OIAR staff can get Gwen to actually be on their side.

Sam deciding to protect Celia by pushing the archivist into the void is SENSATIONAL CHARACTER PAYOFF. (This is my interpretation of the scene, audio was super unclear once again, and there was a line change from transcript to podcast that made this super ambiguous in the actual canon audio.) My poor guy has ZERO self esteem, and still wants to be a hero. He probably realized that if what Celia just told him was true, an archivist could actually kill her on the spot. My guess is that (tma spoilers) this balanced the rift not because Celia replaced her own missing soul (plenty of folks got sent through hilltop road in that same incident) but because an archivist+a person were pulled through to replace Jon and Martin. Truly excited to see where they end up, and if this archivist gets developed more as a character next season. Also the implications of interdimensional balance on what happened at the end of TMA are… interesting.

Oh Alice. Everything in this intricately balanced house of checking up on people and soothing them and deflecting tension with jokes is about to come crashing down. I’m so sorry this is happening to you.

And yes, this is a super lukewarm episode review but I do wanna say I liked this season a lot, and TMAGP is still a cut above a LOT of horror I have read/listened to this year. I’m hoping seasons 2 and 3 will either steer further into a direct TMA sequel, angle OR steer clear and become their own thing. TMAGP is stuck uncomfortably in the middle right now. Just be the good parts of her. But completely new.

[gideonisms]

I did my time in the "remember tma is a tragedy" wars...

[deaderthandoubledead]

(this is not a diss or critique, just an observation)

You can tell that TMA was written by a (I assume cis) man because none of the statements ever included any horrors connected to pregnancy/child birth

[workplacecomedian]

I LOVE all the beasty designs made for john, but where did the fixation with moths come from? Make no mistake, i love moth!johns all the same, but I don't understand why that animal in particular...beyond like. Eye shaped wings. Maybe bc nocturnal? But they eat paper, and other animals also have eye shaped patterns...

[just-an-enby-lemon]

Jonathan Crane would have the time of his life Beholding.

Like is the Eye the most Cranecore of the Dread Gods? Questionable. But the whole "tell me what you're afraid of? Yeah, you have NO CHOICE but to tell ME your worse memories, your DEEPEST FEARS! I'm EATING your FEAR, I'll be EATING YOUR FEARS IN YOUR NIGHTMARES and retraumatazing you till the day I die" is very him. Same for the "i'm watching you... where am i... you can sense me motherfucker... but am I here? no one will belive you... maybe you are insane... but you're not, they are watching you, they have to know I'm here, everyone is wathing you" (side note: only now I realized that Jon Sims has a god of paranoia in his head wich explains S2 Jon so much). Also I just think he would See and Know things just to annoy Riddler. Like "yeah, you might be a genius but did you know [insert obscure fact here]? No? Yeah, so shut up." "Well actually, Edward [corrects him in the smallest detail] oh are you sweating? Is little Riddle boy upset?"

[oneofapollosillegitimatekids]

Accurate. This actually happened

Martin: I can't believe how ableist everyone is! Jon is just doing his autistic best.

Melanie: Isn't he actively wanted by the police for murder?

Martin (with heart eyes) : His special interest is crime! :D

[assaultmystic-archive]

why do you think tma ppl shouldnt date tme ppl?

oh i dont! i just dont they should date you. or people like you. and theres a lot of you arent there? people who see transfems talk openly about how transmisogyny might play out interpersonally, and take it so personally that you turn any joke, comment, romanticisation into a social rule. who have to project transfeminity as threat even when they acknowledge terms like tma/tme. people like that. you know, who have to imagine a world where transfems have the power to impose upon, rather than describe, explain, critique, poeticise a world that defines itself by hating us. there are plenty of girls who have lost everything by people who think like you. did you know that? if, by some bad miracle youre tma, i am sorry they hurt you and none of this is for you. but i am begging you to think twice about where showing up in my inbox like this places you politically. but if youre tme, for every girl who would never touch a tme person, you have only yourself to thank. i pray you never darken any door my sisters live behind again. may we all forever be inaccessible to you and your innumerable ilk. get lost.