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hedonistbyheart · 4 years

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I need to add my own post to the one I reblogged a few days ago about characterization in tma, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot and while I largely agree, it doesn’t quite fit with how I see it.

The thing is, tma’s characters are tropey in the same way the rest of tma is. The other post made the point that they are ‘flat’, because they are obviously made to serve the narrative, but I think the reason they are still engaging as characters is that they do that so well.

Let’s use Gerry as an example, because he is surprisingly fleshed out for a minor character. Gerry is full of clichés: A goth named Gerard (Jonny please) and he hunts cursed artifacts, has a troubled past and no social skills. Pretty run-of-the-mill goth-character, but the thing is, he is also an absolute sweetheart, who could have had a loving childhood if not for the evil central to tma’s story.

Gerry has more to him than what is immediately obvious, but we are only offered tantalizing morsels, just enough for some of us to go “tell me more!” and then we start producing fanstuffs.

Same thing happens with the main character(s). We get one episode of sequential backstory for Jon (enough to establish his ties to the Web) and the rest are morsels, in behavior and tiny tidbits (why do you find carousels thrilling, Jonathan? What rough time were you going through? Breakup? Existential Crisis? What??) Martin has ep. 170 and that still just leaves us with more questions than answers.

The characters aren’t new, they are build on familiar tropes, but Jonny says “you think you know what this is, you think ‘ah, I know this character-trope!’ and that makes you ripe for surprise”. A good example of that is Martin: Everyone was like “oh he’s the shy, incompetent assistant with a crush on his boss, got it!” and yes, he was that in season 1, but he is also fully ready to cut a bitch at all times, including in season 1.

The characters do serve the narrative first, I think, because Jonny has a passion for creating ttrpgs, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting and I do in fact think they are great to explore as a fan exactly because they aren’t that fleshed out in canon.

#tma #tma meta #the magnus archives #I'm not sure this makes sense I have a lot of thoughts and no organization skills orz #I like conscious tropiness #that's basically what gothic fiction IS #literary chatter

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haberdashing · 3 years

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What A Tangled Web We Weave (14/?)

TMA AU diverging from canon at the end of episode 92. Jon is forced into an arranged marriage by Elias; Martin does what he can to help.

on AO3

Martin stopped bringing Jon tea daily after the last time, after he’d had every opportunity to confess and he just... couldn’t bring himself to go through with it. He couldn’t make himself tell the truth around Jon, clearly, and he didn’t want to just go in everyday and lie to him, so... so he was better off just avoiding Jon altogether, he figured, at least until he made a capital-P Plan for how to deal with the situation.

Given how small the Archives were, though, Martin not going out of the way to spend time with Jon didn’t mean the two were entirely isolated from one another.

Jon still dropped by to assign new workloads, for one thing, though as time went by it felt more and more like this job was just a giant pretense, like it wouldn’t make one bit of difference if they just sat at their desks and did nothing for several hours a day rather than actually helping out the Institute during their time spent on its premises.

(Martin still attempted to do his fair share of the work around the Archives, but he wasn’t terribly inclined to read any more statements out loud, not after the calamity he’d very nearly avoided last time he’d tried it. If Jon noticed either that Martin had been doing it before or that he’d abruptly stopped, Jon didn’t mention it.)

But even besides that, just being in such close proximity made interacting with one another downright inevitable (at least so long as one party wasn’t actively avoiding the other, anyway, and Martin wasn’t willing to go quite that far himself).

They bumped into each other in the break room this time. Martin had just retrieved the sandwich he’d brought from home (an attempt to save money, especially given how expensive all the restaurants clustered around the Institute were, but as he looked at the sandwich he could see how poorly-made it was, how sad it looked compared to what he could have gotten elsewhere) from the office fridge when he noticed that Jon was sitting at a nearby table, a half-eaten granola bar in his hand as he stared off into space and...

For a brief moment, when Martin looked at Jon and saw his neck wound half-open and streaks of red on his hand, he honestly thought that Jon was in the middle of tearing his body apart, that if he waited a few minutes longer there would just be a bundle of unformed flesh on the chair where Jon was sitting. Anywhere else such thoughts would be absurd, but given what Martin had read in the statement files, given what Martin had seen in attack after supernatural attack within the Archives, it really wasn’t all that farfetched.

But then Jon pulled his hand away, taking with it only a tiny fleck of the scab that had formed over the wound on his neck, and Martin realized he was just picking at the wound absentmindedly. Not ideal, certainly, but normal enough that Martin breathed a soft sigh of relief even as he approached Jon.

“Christ, Jon, don’t do that, you scared me for a bit there...”

Jon blinked rapidly a few times before redirecting his gaze up towards Martin. “Don’t do what?”

Was he seriously not aware of it? His hands had blood on them--not in some fancy metaphorical way, but literally, his hands were streaked with blood! And he was eating, too, the wrapper of his granola bar still cupped in one of those same hands... maybe Jon had stopped eating before picking at the scab, but the odds of that weren’t as great as Martin would have liked...

“Don’t-” Martin waved his hands vaguely in the direction of Jon’s neck. “Don’t pick at your bloody neck wound! Do you want it to get infected? Because that’s how you get it infected, Jon!”

“Ah. Right.” The hand that had been hovering near his neck dropped back to Jon’s side, and Jon looked at his hands for a moment, as if seeing them for the first time. “...I suppose I should probably get a napkin, wipe off my hands.”

“You should probably wash your hands, Jon, certainly before you take another bite, doing that while eating’s really not hygienic--maybe get some plasters while you’re at it-”

Jon got up, thankfully, apparently taking Martin up on the idea of washing his hands at the nearby sink, though he added a quick “I don’t recall asking for your medical advice on the subject” as he turned away from Martin.

Jon probably didn’t mean much by the passing barb, but it hit Martin unexpectedly hard. Maybe he was sticking his nose somewhere it wasn’t wanted. Maybe he shouldn’t be shaming Jon for a bit of mindless picking at his body that he clearly hadn’t even been aware of until Martin pointed it out to him.

Maybe Martin’s connection to the Web, to manipulation and controlling others, was deeper already than just giving out a few commands. Maybe it wasn’t really Martin, or at least Martin’s human side, that had thought to order around Jon, order around his boss like that...

“...I’m sorry.”

Jon finished rinsing his hands, drying them on a nearby towel before turning back towards Martin. “Sorry for what?”

“For, uh... bossing you around like I’m your boss and not vice versa, I guess? Not that that means that much, really, I mean we’re all stuck down here together, regardless of who’s in charge of who on paper...”

Jon gave Martin a strange look, and Martin gulped before continuing.

“And for- for everything, really. For this whole situation we have to deal with together now. For all the parts I’ve played in making it worse instead of better.”

“None of this is your fault, Martin.” Jon’s voice was calm and level as he looked up at Martin.

“I mean... maybe not, but I feel like I could have done better? Should have done better, perhaps?”

It wasn’t just his turning to the Web that Martin had in mind with those words; he’d made a few missteps along the way at the Institute, had his fair share of regrets even before that particular turn of events. His investigation into the Vittery case had been what brought Prentiss to the Institute’s doors in the first place, after all. He’d been tricked by Michael into entering its corridors, had wanted to help Jon but came back just in time to find a man dead in his office. He hadn’t been able to convince the cops of Jon’s innocence, hadn’t been able to save Jon from getting that neck wound from one of them in the first place...

So much had gone wrong so fast, and if Martin had only been able to do more... maybe things wouldn’t be in the state they were now. Maybe Sasha and Leitner would still be alive. Maybe the world wouldn’t be in danger. Maybe Jon wouldn’t have had to marry anyone in the first place...

Jon let out a soft laugh as he shook his head. “Well, that makes two of us, then.”

#tma #tma au #tma fic #tma fanfic #the magnus archives #the magnus archives au #the magnus archives fic #the magnus archives fanfic #web martin #web martin blackwood #personal #my writing #martin blackwood #jonmartin #jmart #jonmartin fic

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