#marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

I'm fucking hollering. apollo socked me square in the nose with this one.

#tmagp spoilers #tmagp #id in alt text #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

vocabulary note for US based listeners: when the case subject says he went to public school but got there on a scholarship, the meaning of "public school" in the UK is basically the exact opposite as in the US, they're flossy fee-charging schools. (in scotland, "public school" means the same thing as it does in the US, but given the context I'm guessing darrien went to school in england or wales)

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

having said that, and also acknowledging that unplanned pregnancies from casual sex are a real and common occurrence and it is very refreshing to see a never-married working mother portrayed without stigma, celia's exact word choice when talking about jack seems very deliberate. she doesn't know who his father is, she had "a couple of wild years," and she came out the other side of it with a child. none of those statements actually confirm that she was the birthing parent, and if jack is about a year old then he would have been born at the same time as the TTS voices started reading out cases at the OIAR. spooky baby question mark? celia is the adoptive mother to the antichrist?

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

sam scored a date with his crush, started drinking during breakfast, trauma dumped, went to work, filed a case about a guy self harming for weeks in exchange for cold hard cash before getting eaten by a weird metal bug or something, told his long term friend who saved his ass from destitution that he would prefer if their relationship were professional from now on, and then discussed committing treason at his government office while being recorded. king.

#sitting at his desk kinda tipsy while listening to this fucked up guy get eaten alive: #damnnn that's crazy. I womder if celia will let me hold her babby... #tmagp spoilers #tmagp #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

I love that sam canonically ventposts lmao

34 notes

☕ skhalid90 Follow

I know the situation isn't that dire but I kinda feel like I'm at the end of my rope. if it comes to it and I can't make rent I can just move back in with mum and dad, I know I'm not going to die or anything, but I just. really don't want to have those conversations. probably just being dramatic about it but. aaaaaaaaaaaa.

💖 bigfootgirlchesthair Follow

oh my god mate just check your dms I can't take this anymore

☕ skhalid90 Follow

🥺

3 notes

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #I lied when I said that last post was my last post #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

samama I am no longer asking but simply begging for a brief on your overall gender situation

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #id in alt text #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

one more magpost before I have to get back to doing things (😔).

guys. guys it's fears and desires. or, well, to use lena's terms, it's malevolent and benevolent. you can use the powers to your advantage to get what you want, but watch out! if you reap too much joy then you will offset the scales, and, well. you'll roll snake eyes.

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #id in alt text #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

thinking about the person in class the other day who went on at some length railing against offensive and inaccurate portrayals of DID in fiction and then two sentences later used "schizo" as an insult. like mate. what are you doing.

#??? #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

was going to make a joke about how jon in theory is a leftist and objectively believes in "power to the people" and all that but fundamentally he simply finds people at large to be dumb and annoying and every time someone disagrees with his opinion in a way that ticks him off he briefly becomes 100% supportive of complete authoritarianism, ideally with himself as the dictator of the known universe, and then I remembered that wouldn't actually be a joke because he did canonically do exactly that.

#never give jon political power. he'd hold votes to try and be fair and then just say 'uhhh you voted incorrectly <3' and do whatever anyway. #tma #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

sam and alice have such a beautiful relationship. it is clearly a dynamic based on long term deep-seated genuine care and intimate knowledge of each other, which is why it is just so heartwarming to see that they still manage to constantly say just bordering on friendship-endingly cruel things to each other because they have matching cases of late stage foot-in-mouth disease. <3

#tmagp #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

my anecdotal observation is this is the preservation and restoration website but I recognize that I am literally in the archives fandom so my pov might, perchance, be biased

#tma #tmagp #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

placing my hands out placatingly, asking everyone to please be cool and not reignite og!elias burnt out gifted kid discourse. okay? okay. I think this is setting up some more sam and gwen parallels. from mag 193, we know that elias bouchard (original flavor) was told from a young age that he was smart but lazy, he was squandering his advantages, and he was wrong to envy other children because they were meaningless and he was better. he seemed to internalize this to some extent, because by the time he was in his early twenties he had no friends and no family and no real life, just the certainty that he was destined to deserve better.

I think it is reasonable to assume that gwen received similar messaging during her childhood, as she seems to be treating the OIAR the same way elias treated artefact storage (as a stepping stone job to a bigger career waiting for her up the ladder), and she takes a lot of offence when she feels disrespected. from magp 03, we know she's reticent to tell her friends that she's still working this same job, especially because the friend's party she was going to was to celebrate making partner at a law firm.

from this episode, we know that sam was declared "gifted" as a child and his parents rigorously enrolled him in every program they could find, and it started going down hill when the magnus institute rejected him (did they reject him outright or was he there for a bit and then kicked out? what he said to celia doesn't quite fit his earlier statements, but moving on). he has a lot of pent up and fixated feelings about not being chosen by them, he didn't get into oxford, he just missed the highest grades, and he's reticent to tell his parents that he's working this job, especially because he used to be at a law firm.

we know the bouchards are a wealthy and influential family, and as sam speaks with a south asian accent I think it's safe to assume that his family immigrated. of course, there's a massive amount of variation in the socioeconomic statuses of south asian immigrant families in the UK, and I don't know enough about how british gifted kids programs work to know if sam having been in a bunch of them would imply anything about his parents' disposable income, but nonetheless I still think their different backgrounds potentially say a lot about how they handle these feelings of not meeting the high standards that were expected of / promised to them. gwen is fighting to be on the same level of social status and power as her peers, and sam probably felt like he was he had opportunities for upward mobility in this brand new place but kept failing them. it's causing both of them to be very active characters, they are the two people pushing the story forward the most by far, but the ways in which they are active diverge greatly.

gwen, until recently, had felt like she was unfairly stagnating, like she was "not most people" and was cut out for better, and being constantly barred from climbing the ladder made her both resentful of lena and extremely paranoid / insecure about her own worth. now that she's starting to crack it into the "real work," it's obviously taking a great toll on her, but she doesn't want to back out, she wants to prove herself and take what's rightfully hers and not show herself to be unfit for real power. her actions appear to be guided by an ethos that her life hasn't been wasted yet, she still has time to make good, she just needs to ignore that weakness masquerading as a conscience, please god don't let her fail.

sam feels like he's made mistake after mistake after mistake and led himself to his own desperate state where he only just managed to avoid destitution because his ex was kind enough to hook him up with an emergency job that is actively destroying his physical and emotional health, and he has pinned all this frustration on trying to figure out what the magnus institute was all about and why it didn't choose him. like gwen, great things were expected of him, but unlike her he doesn't seem to still be striving for them, that dried up when he had a breakdown at his last job. now he just wants to figure it out and make sense of it, as if solving the mystery will let him fix it and undo all that time and un-waste his promised potential. his actions seem to be guided by an ethos that, even though he's already screwed everything right up, solving the ghosts that haunt his life will some how lessen their burden and maybe, just maybe, give him closure on the Flaw That Doomed Him and allow him to move past it without dragging it still forward.

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

jon's biggest crime wasn't even assaulting strangers or the serial killing or the attempted omnicide, no, his real sin was overturning a fairly held election

#tma #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

I get that this is probably inevitable but it does suck a bit that every new piece of queer media that gets moderately popular immediately accrues a sizable queer hater fanbase. like infinite amounts of middling normie straight movies, tv, music, etc comes out all the time and goes mainly unremarked upon by queer people but if there's a nonbinary person in a 6/10 show or a lesbian puts out a kinda nothing song then there will be thousands of queer people who make it their job to constantly reiterate how much they hate it and how boring gays are a blight on the land.

#marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

I think I'm particularly pleased about the celia reveal because, as someone who was raised by a single mother, I don't think I often see single mothers in fiction who are reasonably well adjusted and actually care about their kids? I feel like I see happy couples, tortured but loving and soulful single dads, and unstable/abusive single mothers. which isn't to say I think any of those situations are invalid to represent or anything, but when single mothers are always shown as uniquely awful in comparison to married mothers and single dads, the message starts to feel very "women are irresponsible and need a strong man to balance them out."

#I had a similar reaction to alvita form thirteen storeys actually #harm does come to her son but the narrative makes it abundantly clear that she is doing everything she possibly can #she doesn't resent and abuse him; she spends all her free time with him; she is always thinking about how to meet his needs #and the moments of neglect result from poverty and capitalism; not anything that she could have ever avoided and it's not her fault #tmagp #tmagp spoilers #marina marvels at life

[annabelle--cane]

breaking news: big research paper that has been making me sick with nerves to think about and is due soon is actually Fine and I've casually written three pages in the last two hours. bombshell revelation that has only happened to me a mere few dozen times before.

#marina marvels at life