#and i want to prove that im not a useless parasite. i can do some work. so i might as well give my all | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blookmallow · 4 years

Text

goin through tma transcripts again making some more observations

i think im picking up on another potential thread here i didnt notice before

- in Growing Dark, natalie becomes obsessed with darkness. the lightbulbs appear to be going out because she’s intentionally unscrewing them, so it doesn’t seem to be the exact same as what was happening around montauk, but there’s a clear connection anyway (and mark bilham says the streetlights and the car headlights and everything all seemed darker than they should be when he went back to confront natalie, as well) jon suspects this but says it’s only a suspicion, and he isn’t sure. not sure why two different names were given (”the peoples church of the divine host” and “the hither green dissenters”) but it could just be two different names for the same group. jon doesn’t seem to know either

- Why Didn’t Kathy ASK Her What The Food Was and i also cant decide if i really want to know what it was or really DON’T want to know but i dont think it was spinach

- if it IS the same cult: if they were trying to summon the darkness, or worshipping it, or something, it doesn’t quite fit that montauk himself was apparently trying to keep this darkness away

but then, his killings began after his wife left, and she left the pendant behind when she did, so maybe she left the cult and that’s what made the darkness angry, but. julia doesn’t mention having ever seen her father wearing a pendant like that so it doesn’t seem like he himself was part of the cult before, and if his wife was the one involved/the one who left, why would the darkness be coming for him

or if she was... protecting him from it and now that she’s gone it’s coming after him why would she have left her pendant behind like that, if “I’m leaving the church” was something personal to her and wasn’t intended as a statement to him

- seems like there may be two rival cults clashing here, could be some kind of Fire/open eyes/Seeing vs Darkness/closed eye/Listening happening. the clown doll in Strange Music also had eyes painted shut, and that was centered on. strange music. and the darkness cult emphasizes losing sight but there’s that discordant singing

this is a theme i didnt pick up on until just now and i dont really want to go back through and search for Sight vs Sound in everything else right now but, hm. seems like there’s been a lot of creatures that don’t want to be Seen, things that resist all attempt to Prove them, things that don’t show their true forms visually. things that don’t show up on cameras even though they were there. things that you can only see properly when you’re not looking directly at it

the strange blonde man sasha encounters says “How would a melody describe itself when asked?” his appearance distorts in reflections and he describes himself as sound

something something magnus institute trying to cast Light and Understanding and Truth onto things that don’t want to be seen and don’t want to be understood. prentiss says in her statement - “I need it to be seen. To be seen in the cold light of knowledge is anathema to the things that crawl and slither and swarm in the corners and the cracks.”

so prentiss appears to be on the Darkness side/that makes the most sense but sasha notably discovers she can kill the worms with a fire extinguisher, while martin had noticed a partly burned worm that had apparently not been killed by fire before (and. timothy clearly did not escape the worms, regardless of whether he killed some of them or not). after prentiss was found the first time the complex burned down. i cant quite make sense of whats happening there

- there were screams heard in the abandoned chapel on the day gertrude died so something’s definitely going on there. the guy with the dream about her believed something unspeakably horrible was coming for her it doesn’t make sense that she was just shot, and “the unspeakable horror was Betrayal” seems like a cop out to me so i dont think thats it

- the guy in Burnt Offering was. under the effects of some kind of Burning Curse so that’s. pretty clear, but why were there pictures of gertrude in that clearing. the fuck is happening there

- I’m still trying to figure out what’s happening with Written Word vs Speech, maybe related to Seeing/Silence too, like. all these statements are written. jon is speaking them and at first i just thought he was really into the storytelling but now I’m starting to worry that the reason he sounds so different when he’s narrating the statements is that they’re. getting into him. somehow. like he’s some kind of a conduit for something. i don’t like that at ALL and i REALLY hope im wrong lmao

anyway then there’s Cheating Death, where nathaniel thorp says that his story is folklore which has never before been written down, so we have... oral tradition being spoken by an illiterate man, copied down in written word for the first time by the magnus institute (not sure if it’s relevant Who transcribed it, jon says it was a research assistant named Fiona Law, who died from what seems to be completely unrelated causes like 30 yeas later, so) and now being recited/spoken again by jon. and there’s probably something to the fact that thorp says it’s a legend/folklore but it turns out to have actually been his statement all along, so im not sure if he was... saying that the stories were about Him, or if the concept of “people who try to gamble with death become something stuck between death and life” was a story he grew up with and then discovered to be Real, or if none of it was folklore in the first place and just talking about it in a detached third person way was the only way he could do it

prentiss describes the magnus institute as “This place of books and learning, of sight and beholding” and seems not to trust in Words,

“There is no right word because for all your Institute and ignorance may laud the power of the word, it cannot even stretch to fully capture what I feel in my bones. What possible recourse could there be for me in your books and files and libraries except more useless ink and dying letters? I see now why the hive hates you. You can see it and log it and note it’s every detail but you can never understand it. You rob it of its fear even though your weak words have no right to do so.”

that also speaks to jon’s skepticism, everything “verifiable” about these statements does not make sense to the person’s actual experience, things keep happening that for whatever reason cannot be explained and understood, people who were THERE but theres no record of them existing, cave systems that are heavily mapped and documented but the actual experience of exploring them doesnt follow the documentation at all

after reading prentiss’ statement jon says “There are weird things out there that are perfectly natural. It’s not, though. I know it’s not natural.” which is... the first time ive noticed him actually looking at something that could be explained rationally (prentiss is a mentally ill woman with a very aggressive currently-unknown-to-science parasite) but instead follows his feeling that theres something more underneath it

he also. says this after having read the statement and remarks that “something in this statement has got to me a bit” and the... way he read it was very alarming and very..... Not His Voice. it worries me a LOT that something about these statements seems to be getting into him and ESPECIALLY that one

#lucy liveblogs tma #i found this in my drafts apparently i never posted it i think i was trying to get thoughts more coherently put together but #i think this is as good as its gonna be for now :')#i am so behind... i am so behind. one day i will catch up

0 notes