Watching Barbie watch as Ken takes over barbieland, takes her dream house and turn it into his own property, ruins her things whilst she cries in despair and suddenly I’m six years old again pleading my brother to be gentle with my toys as he throws them on the floor and against the walls. The hundreds of dollars in dolls that my parents spent for birthdays and christmas, told me to be careful with and showed me how to play nice destructed and destroyed as my brother grabs at anything and everything, tosses them around, stretches their plastic joints and pulls at their heads while I scream for him to stop seemingly wasted in seconds. He throws one down for another and I’m too small to grab them off of him. Easily toppled over as he pushes me aside and I’m wondering what I ever did to him to deserve it.
On top of it all, he’s still surprised when his torment breaks one of them, the legs snap out and he pauses as though he’s remorseful. I cry at the loss of my doll and despite how it was him who broke it. Him who threw it around. Him who pulled until the elastic snapped..
I am still told I should’ve been more careful with my toys.
Thinking about Jon’s self destructive behaviours because I think the gradual development of them, and how they intensify, is both very interesting and also very improtant in how the story ends.
Jon’s sacrifice in MAG200, his insistence on choosing the option that means giving his humanity up, getting the blood on his hands so no one else has to, condemning himself, it stems mostly from nearly three years worth of unchecked guilt, and his role as a scapegoat. He has to do the hard thing because no one else will, because only he, the monster, can.
The thing about Jon, is that Georgie was right, he needed a support system desperately - honestly most of the TMA characters do - but whatever support system he may have potentially had in people like Sasha, Tim and Martin had long since crumbled. Had he had that constant support, people there who saw him more as a man than a monster, who didn’t blame everything on him, I don’t think his self destructive tendencies would have gotten as bad as they did. He did have Martin and Daisy, but Martin was never around in season four, and I think with Daisy, there’s a whole other aspect to explore, especially with how she’s treated in comparison to him.
As a whole, a lot of his self destruction stems from how he views himself, as well as his position. By the time everyone else started trying to claim blame, it was far too late: the Eyepocalypse had begun and Jon was so used to being at fault, he could not see it any other way. He could not see himself as a victim.
This isn’t a jab at the others either, how they acted makes sense for their own positions, this post just happens to be focusing on Jon, and how this constant blame and dehumanisation impacted his mentality.
I think a lot about the small comment made by Basira (I believe it was?) on putting him down. It’s such a specific phrasing, that makes Jon feel less like a man and more like a sick dog that’s a danger to others and himself, and I think that summarises how he’s come to view himself, and how some view him, very well.
To summarise, if you treat a man like a monster, he’s going to start acting like he is one, and for all they tried to take that back, it was far too late to do so.
Again, not a jab at the other characters. I’ll probably be writing a post on Georgie soon honestly and how she reacts to these things, because God knows I do not blame her - I just need to rewatch some of the episodes for that.
This isn’t all my thoughts either as I am currently busy, but hey it gets the general idea across?
Someone marry me and co-own this place with me please
This bookshop
This blog is like my nest of treasures and I have no clue how I still have any of them
𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑡, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑒𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑝𝑒𝑑
By Bao Tran Trung
"What's your choice, Archivist?"👁
I know he’s kind of a polarizing character, but I have to say, Elias Bouchard truly is Iconic. When you hear the twist of “the boring middle manager was actually secretly an evil eldritch monster the whole time!” you sort of assume that the boring middle manager persona was just a facade, but no, he really does seem to just enjoy dull administrative work. He’s both exactly as boring as he seems on the surface and profoundly fucked up in ways you couldn’t imagine. He’s practically omniscient and playing 4-D chess with everyone, but he responds to even slight hiccups in his elaborate scheme with acts of extreme violence. He beats an old man to death with a metal pipe and when someone brings it up later he goes, “Yeah I may have overreacted there.” His employees are constantly trying to murder him. He broke out of prison just so he could give a dramatic monologue. He had a weird gay thing going on with seemingly every man he met in the past 200 years. He loves scheduling.
horse photography via sasha elage (@sashaelage on instagram)
I was on a plane this weekend, and I was chatting with the woman sitting next to me about an upcoming writer’s strike. “Do you really think you’re mistreated?” she asked me.
That’s not the issue at stake here. Let me tell you a little something about “minirooms.”
Minirooms are a way of television writing that is becoming more common. Basically, the studio will hire a small group of writers, 3-6 or so, and employ them for just a few weeks. In those few weeks (six weeks seem to be common), they have to hurriedly figure out as much about the show as they can – characters, plots, outlines for episodes. Then at the end of the six weeks, all the writers are fired except for the showrunner, who has to write the entire series themselves based on the outlines.
This is not a widespread practice, but it has become more common over the past couple of years. Studios like it because instead of paying for a full room for the full length of the show, they just pay a handful of writers for a fraction of the show. It’s not a huge problem now, but the WGA only gets the chance to make rules every three years – if we let this go for another three years and it becomes the norm? That would be DEVASTATING for the tv writing profession.
Do I feel like I’m mistreated? No. I LOVE my job! But in a world of minirooms, there is no place for someone like me – a mid-level writer who makes a decent living working on someone else’s show (I’d like to be a showrunner someday, but for now I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and my husband and I are trying to start a family so I like not being support rather than the leader for now). In a miniroom, there are only two levels – the handful of glorified idea people who are already scrambling to find their next show because you can’t make a decent living off of one six-week job (and since there are fewer people per room, there are fewer jobs overall, even at the six-week amount), and the overworked, stressed as fuck showrunner who is going to have to write the entire thing themselves. Besides being bad for me making a living, I also just think it’s plain bad for television as an art form – what I like about TV is how adaptable it is, how a whole group of people come together to tell a story better than what any of them could do on their own. Plus the showrunner can’t do their best work under all of that pressure, episode after episode, back to back. Minirooms just…fucking suck.
The WGA is proposing two things to fix this – a rule that writers have to be employed for the entire show, and a rule tying the number of writers in the room to the number of episodes you have per season. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. It’s the way shows have run since the advent of television. It’s only in the last couple of years that this has become a new thing. It’s exploitative. It squeezes out everyone except showrunners and people who have the financial means to work only a few months a year. It makes television worse. And that is the issue in this strike that means everything to me, and that is why I voted yes on the strike authorization vote.
Jon I love you
“Oh, Archivist.”
It’s finished! Nikola Orsinov kidnapping Jon sent me spiraling so I had to paint it. The horrors he endures😵💫🥺 poor Jon. I don’t think the creators meant to have the wax figures melting but that’s how it is in my head
Detail below:
~ Aspirer of many things ~ ~ Lover of another many things ~
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