#melanie Maybe knows she and jon are similar! she's Definitely not happy about it! martin maybe understands Georgie. doesn't like that fact! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bluejayblueskies · 3 years

Note

Not sure if it'd be a prompt or an AU, but post-200 Jon & Georgie reunion because she still sees him in her dreams? And tries to figure out if it's really him or if she's just dreaming about him. Love your writing!

send me an au and i'll give you 5+ headcanons about it! requests closed!

i'll take it as an au for now, but i'll keep it in my back pocket as a prompt as well!

1. instead of getting sent somewhere else, jon and martin remain in their original world but get flung back to the safehouse where they were when the apocalypse started. jon's completely separated from the eye and Not Doing Well, and they spend a good few months trying to recover--jon from being stabbed, martin from doing the stabbing, and both of them dealing with a lot of lingering trauma. (i won't go into the specifics of this bc i'm already writing a fic about it haha.)

2. for some reason, even though the fears are gone, each of jon's live statement givers still have those same nightmares. maybe they're normal nightmares now and their brains are just used to it, maybe it's some lingering effects of the supernatural--i don't know. either way, that's why georgie still has the dreams. jon, however, is separated from them and while he sometimes still has those dreams (either via habit or lingering effects, as with the statement givers), he more often has nightmares of the more mundane kind, about the entities still but the kinds of dreams his brain comes up with on its own.

3. by the time jon and martin would be recovered enough to leave the safehouse, they've got a good idea of what's going on in the world re: former avatars and they make the decision to stay out in the middle of nowhere, hopefully hidden enough that nobody comes after them and keeping as low of a profile as they can when they have to go into town. the effect of this is, of course, that georgie, melanie, and basira assume that they're either dead or pulled along to the other reality. (after all, there are no bodies.) so georgie doesn't understand why she keeps having the dreams. they're a bit different in that she doesn't feel the pull of being watched so strongly anymore, it's much more similar to a regular nightmare, but it keeps bothering her. eventually, she decides that she's never going to be able to get closure until she figures out why she's still having these dreams and if it means that jon is still alive. so she starts looking for him.

4. the safehouse is, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) one of the first places she checks. she, melanie, and basira all make the trip together (basira wants the additional closure of visiting the safehouse, which used to belong to daisy) and when it comes into view, the first thing they all see is clothes hanging out on the line ('because jumpers should be air-dried, jon, and there's not enough space in the house to do it!' martin had said when jon had asked, amused, why martin was struggling to bring a basket of wet jumpers outside) and it could be things that were left there before, but it all seems so clean, and there's a garden in full bloom and fresh sets of footprints in the dirt in front of the door and there's somebody inside and somebody opens the door--martin, probably coming out to get the clothing off the line--and he nearly has a heart attack before he realizes who he's looking at

5. and it's definitely complicated, because they're happy that jon and martin aren't dead but also things ended messily and they haven't had the time together to work through things, but amidst all of it georgie pulls jon aside and asks the question she'd come to ask, which is: are you still in my dreams? and jon answers the implicit question, which is no, he's not connected to the eye anymore, it's gone, and no, he's not the archivist anymore, but yes, he does still sometimes have the dreams, but he thinks... he thinks they're just dreams now. just muscle memory.

georgie, still dealing with everything but whose best friend (alex) used to be a medical student: the brain isn't a muscle jon

jon: georgie please

over the years, the dreams fade until georgie returns to a relatively dreamless sleep. jon's never quite fade, though he doesn't return to georgie's dream anymore after a certain point, and eventually, most of his nights are consumed instead by red skies and red knives and red splotches on black-and-white children's book pages.

#ask #anon #tma #jonathan sims #georgie barker #and re: my writing: thank you!!!!#blood cw #just in case #/finally/ got to these--sorry about the wait!

23 notes · View notes

tea-leef · 4 years

Text

Ok general TMA season 5 predictions about character fates to see how wrong/right I was later

People who are definitely going to die: Jon, Daisy, Elias

Daisy already got one fake out death at the end of S3, i don’t think she’s going to get another. Right now, she feels the most dead and I think she’s going to die first. and if Basira actually has to do it I will launch myself straight into the vast i s2g

And, ok, tbh I don’t actually think Jon is going to die exactly. I think something worse will happen. I don’t know what form that will take, maybe getting trapped in hilltop road spooky dimension, maybe becoming fully a monster/becoming part of the eye, just fucking turning into a tape recorder, or worse becoming immortal and undying like that one old af skeleton archivist he was afraid of, alone and unable to truly end or live!! that would suck. idk. All I know is that this point, simply dying seems...too easy?? Like he’s not coming out of it fine and human or happy most likely so I think it’s more accurate to just call him “doomed” rather than necessarily dead. But. Same difference as far as my feelings are concerned (’:

Same with Elias, though I do hope he will actually just die. I mean he’s the main villain so I can’t imagine him not dying in some way. We’re supposed to get a bitter-sweet ending right? Every body wants to kill Elias, so if even one other character lives, I don’t think they’ll allow him to live (and I really don’t believe EVERYONE is going to die. Idk who I want to kill him, I could make a good case for Daisy, Martin, or Melanie, but he’s probably screwed Jon over the worst so I think he ought to)

People I don’t think are going to die: Georgie and Melanie

I don’t even really know why, I just don’t see any death flags around them? Melanie finally chilled out, any death flags I saw on her kind of vanished after she blinded herself. It feels like if anyone's character arc should be on an upward trajectory from here, it would be her? As “up” as one can go in this story at least. She’s the one I feel most strongly about living. and I think Georgie is going to be fairing the best in the nightmare world what with her lack of fear.

Also, Jonny promised The Admiral would be ok and someone needs to be there for him, as he IS the only truly important character after all.

People I honestly don’t know what the fuck: Martin and Basira

I have no idea whats going to go down with Basira tbh, I’ve had a hard time getting a grip on her character or predicting what her arc is going to be. Maybe she’ll die with Daisy, but if not, I have no idea.

And ok, Martin. I know EVERYONE thinks he’s going to die, because that would be the most tragic, right? Kill the positive fan-favorite fluffy character, when a writer hints sad things are going to happen, that is ALWAYS the character they kill off. Killing them is like a symbol for the death of all good things in this tragedy! but that’s kind of why I don’t think he’ll die??? it just...too easy. Almost too predictable, because Martin is exactly the type of character who you would expect to die in this kind of story. But he’s so much more developed at this point than other character’s like him usually get to be. Martin has only just started growing a back bone, after being angry and frustrated about being pushed around and used and underestimated by everyone for the whole show. They said in a Q&A they want every characters arc to be satisfying, and I’m having a hard time imagining why Martin would need to die. He wanted to die at the start of last season, because he lost all the people he wanted to live for. Then he finally started being proactive. If anything, wouldn’t it make more sense for his arc to be choosing to keep living, even after he loses all those reasons/people again? (that being Jon)

The only purpose his death would serve that I can think of rn is to hurt Jon more and further his tragedy arc. But I think if Martin’s character was just going to amount to being used as a tool to further another characters angst/motivation, then he would have been the one to die in season 1 rather than Sasha. I don’t think Martin is going to be happy, or ok exactly. Maybe he’ll lose his humanity too, maybe he’ll just fully snap and go on some kind of murder rampage. Maybe whatever influence the spider (probably?) has had on him will reveal him to not be who we thought he was. Maybe he’ll end up in a similar doomed position that Jon is (not exactly “dead” but certainly not human and with little to no hope for a happy normal future) I don’t know, I’m not sure where exactly Martin will end up, but I just don’t think (at least I hope) that he’ll simply amount to fodder for Jon angst (or audience angst). But maybe there will be some other good reason for him to die revealed later?? I guess I didn’t anticipate Tim needing to die at the start of S3 either, but it became very obvious that’s where his arc was heading about half way through that season. maybe i’m just in denial! who knows. But I still think Martin simply dying is too easy

#tma #the magnus archives #long post #personal #tma spoilers #sort of

10 notes · View notes

centaurianthropology · 5 years

Text

The Magnus Archives ‘Heavy Goods’ (S04E08) Analysis

Half a return, half a delivery, and a new story. Come on in to hear what I have to say about ‘Heavy Goods’.

Breekon and Hope’s story is somewhat what I had thought it would be, but longer and more … focused. Unlike a lot of the Stranger’s creatures, Breekon and Hope had a singular purpose that they followed without relenting. Any time they were side-tracked they were miserable. They have to deliver. It’s what they are.

Or were.

They’ve been doing this for a long time. It started out perhaps during the medieval period, but even then he described their faces as ones that could only be half-remembered. While some monsters started out human, some clearly were always monsters. That seems to have been the way with Breekon and Hope.

They also served on transport ships to Australia, as conductors on trains going terrible places. They moved goods, always, to places in which those people or goods would suffer. What’s interesting is that, although they are of the Stranger (those half-remembered faces), they would clearly work for any power. There was no obvious alignment of loyalty, but simply of existence. Whichever monster needed something or someone transported could contract with Breekon and Hope.

And that’s interesting, as it shows at least some entities to be of a power, but not necessarily beholden to it beyond their base nature. They can collaborate and work together. We saw this in the collaboration between Nikola and Jude Perry, as well, and of course Elias and Peter Lukas. When interests are similar, powers may align and work together.

But Breekon and Hope still seem different, because they weren’t collaborating with other powers toward a common goal. They had a singular purpose, and would fulfill that purpose for anyone who might hire them. That’s doing a job, and only collaboration on the most technical level.

And yet, in the end, coming back to the Stranger gave them more meaning than simply fulfilling a base purpose. Coming back to the Circus made them happy in a way that delivering for the other powers didn’t. And I suppose that says something. The being claimed as part of a power do have that innate draw, and even if they can act independently, the desire to be where they belong and amongst those of their own kind is also still there.

Breekon and Hope were always monsters, so the pull must have been very powerful. After all, they had no draw to pull them back to another life. They had no ties but one another, and they were uniquely melded into a singular being, so that they always had the only thing that mattered to them right by their side.

I wonder if the struggle is much more powerful for human avatars, people with connections. It certainly seems to be. Maybe the transition point between human and monster is simply when someone loses every connection, every reason not to fall in with their own Power for the company, if nothing else.

And yet, even that didn’t lead to contentment for them. Their purpose outweighed simply staying with Nikola to be with others like them. They were meant to transport, so they eventually did again, as Breekon and Hope. The casket ended up being their downfall. They took the wrong delivery, and the casket claimed them in a way they couldn’t break, because there was no one further to whom they might deliver it. They had to keep hold of it, move it with them, until the being that was Breekon and Hope was shattered, and only half remained. And that half was unrecognizable to the casket, enough so that its hold vanished.

And yet, Breekon, the remaining half, fading and losing coherency, had to finish the delivery. Jon was the perfect final destination, as punishment for ending half of them. So he got the coffin, and Breekon … who knows what became of it?

Jon’s powers continue to expand. He can now extract stories from unwilling subjects. Not only by compelling them to speak, but simply by staring at them and willing their story into his head. For a man trying to hold back the tide of the knowledge beyond the door in his mind, Jon is really not doing a great job not embracing all the power at his disposal. And whatever he did to Breekon (or Hope) clearly was extremely unpleasant. Does it even still have that story? Does it even exist without that story?

This is easily the most power we’ve seen Jon display, and as a means of self-defense or even attack, it seems fairly impressive, if roundabout.

It definitely left Basira not trusting him any more than she already has. Her having to reason her way out of the Unknowing has left a mark on her. Her distance is part of her focusing on only trusting herself and her own capabilities. Daisy is gone. Tim is dead. Jon was gone for months. Melanie was unreliable, and Martin seemed to have turned traitor, no matter what he said (interesting that he took her to meet Peter, and she just sat in an empty office for an hour).

She was alone for six months, and as much work as the Lonely has done on the others, it’s clearly worked on her as well. She refuses to trust the others. She’ll follow her own leads, and doesn’t want Jon’s help, and even insists he learn not to pluck information out of the air about her. She knows that the Buried has Daisy, and has ‘leads’ to follow.

I do wonder if those leads involve Elias. After all, if she’s decided not to trust Jon or utilize his knowledge, there’s only one other person she could turn to with extensive knowledge about the Buried. Elias wants something from her, and would likely be happy to give her assistance in return.

It’s good to get more of a sense of where her head’s been at for six months, as she’s the one we know the least about during that time period. And really, it seems that isolation has been working on her just as intensely as it’s been working on Martin.

She’s been waiting and watching, trying to reason through everything. But now, with a lead on Daisy, I think she’s about to act. What that action might be, I don’t know, but I fear that it’ll push her further into Elias’ gravity, or into an equally worrisome path. Self-reliance is great, but if she refuses all help then she’s in as much danger as anyone.

All the characters are repeating the same motif that Jon was last season: to protect the people they care about, they’re convinced they have to go it alone. To figure things out on their own. To refuse to trust one another, and instead to turn to far more questionable methods. It’s ridiculous and unreasonable, and I have to think it’s the combination of the trauma of the Unknowing being chased by the opportunistic influence of the Lonely. And so, once again, I have to say what I was saying all last season: they have to talk to one another. They have to trust one another and work with one another. What’s changed is that Jon’s actually ready to do all of that. He’s been free of the Lonely’s influence all this time, and can still think relatively straight. But because all the others are influenced, he is isolated by proxy.

They were all hurt. They’ve all lost friends. They have so much in common that blaming and attacking one another is either a sign that they’re all as stupid as Jon (unlikely), or that the influence of the Lonely has set in fast and hard in the Institute. Rooting that out may be the only way for them to start working together in time to prevent the next catastrophe.

#The Magnus Archives #analysis

37 notes · View notes

queerbycrs · 5 years

Text

so... i’m not finished writing this yet, but since apparently the idea is So Popular going by @iamalivenow‘s post, i thought i’d... lay out the basis of my the magnus archives good place au? vague spoilers up to current canon of tma (ep 120) and definite spoilers up to the end of s2 of the good place

my basic thought, at first, was that this isn’t a “full” tgp fusion -- it would incorporate elements of tma canon, and involve various kinds of amnesia. so, the characters are tormented by not remembering bits of their lives, or remembering things that line up wrong, or having flashes of memory that don’t make sense.

so, in this au, the characters already knew each other in ways that are similar but not identical to canon. that’s part of the reason elias-as-michael is so confident it’ll work out: that idiot michael just threw together some humans and hoped they’d click perfectly horribly. these people have history, and it’ll torment them or just be informational, as required.

so, elias is michael, obviously. pre-redemption. (my thought for this is that the torture actually works so it never proceeds to the actual plot of tgp s2-onwards, so no need to figure out how it would work with elias. alternately, the humans go off through the afterlife without architectural assistance. who knows)

i’m not set on who janet is, but i might go with the suggestion of distortion? because that sounds hilarious, honestly

and there are def soulmates in this au, because it makes things ALL THE MORE PAINFUL. from most-to-least solidly formed ideas:

basira and daisy. basira remembers a picture-perfect life on earth, fifty years of marriage, dying in each other’s arms.

daisy remembers being a serial killer and trying to hide it for years until basira caught on and daisy killed her in a fit of rage, and spent the rest of her life regretting it.

neither of them have accurate recollections. but according to their first day in the good place, basira is correct, and daisy doesn’t know what the hell is going on or why she’s here, with the love of her life, who she thought she killed in the biggest mistake of her life.

(basira prolllllllllly doesn’t belong in the bad place, but elias prolly just snatched her up for his Evil Plans. no one better to torture daisy with, right?)

next: martin and jon. they remember working together, in... an archive? or something? and martin was in love with jon, and jon was oblivious.

well, the official matchmaking systems of the afterlife have chosen! you’re the perfect match for each other! have fun!

martin is completely blissed out at first! it’s wonderful! he spent all those years in hopeless love, and now he gets to spend eternity with the man he thought could never love him back!

and at first, jon is actually... okay with it? he’s a little nervous, because he’s never had a relationship that didn’t crash and burn (okay, sample size of one, but that says a lot in and of itself) but it feels so easy, at first, and it’s... okay. it’s nice.

but then his memories start to get... weird. he has dreams of the archive where he worked, except it’s... different. he remembers worms, and running, and a man’s body on the floor of his office.

he remembers a tape recorder, and he starts recording here, too. just in case.

eventually, as jon’s paranoia starts to build and build, things start going bad for martin, too: he’s having nightmares too, of worms and crushing loneliness, and jon is retreating and won’t talk to him, and this cute older guy who works at the kayak rental/canoe group/scuba-diving-but-without-equipment-because-we’re-dead-and-don’t-need-to-breathe place keeps hitting in him and he’s kind of into it and he feels Really Bad about it

and then i get to, like, melanie and tim and georgie, and in this version of the au i don’t know what to do with them, so i would probably pair up melanie and tim -- their respective responses to stress don’t work well together, at All, so i guess if the tension started turning up they’d probably torture each other pretty effectively.

which leaves georgie. and i’m thinking, maybe elias just doesn’t know how to torture her. she was added to his carefully-planned group without advance notice (probably as a test, those goddamn suits in the department don’t understand how difficult and complicated this is--) and so he just. tells her that her soul is perfectly complete on its own, and she has the admiral for company, but she doesn’t have a soulmate.

georgie’s like, sweet. she can live her best life (afterlife) and hang out with her cat that will be with her forever! this is awesome.

(the admiral probably died of natural causes a few years before, after living a full and very happy life; it got a lovely afterlife until georgie arrived and they got to hang out again. this is how it is for all pets. don’t @ me you know i’m right and i will not take suggestions)

it’s not perfect, because elias just keeps throwing Problems at her to see what’ll stick. but she’s doing pretty good.

alternately:

basira/daisy, and

jon/tim. tim’s reaction to jon’s paranoia is probably a lot more external than martin’s is, which probably leads to some nasty fights. jon probably thinks tim is turning against him, it’s a whole big mess. tim might get seduced away a couple times to increase his guilt and add some depth to their bad relationship, because this is Literal Hell.

melanie/georgie, because Wrench Thrown Into Plan, had to make some adjustments. there’s probably some memory mismatch and external pressure, but it’s not too bad.

martin is a complete person who needs no soulmate to make his afterlife perfect. not a monk, like jason (elias scoffs at the heavy-handedness, the unsubtlety of that.) just perfectly fulfilled in solitude.

he probably gets fully seduced by peter lukas, aka mr. “kayak rental/canoe group/scuba-diving-but-without-equipment-because-we’re-dead-and-don’t-need-to-breathe place” guy. and then there’s a lot of, “oh god this was a mistake what will we tell our soulmates” from peter (externally) and a lot of “i’m going to be alone for literal eternity and even my hookup doesn’t know about it, because it’s so unusual to not have a soulmate” from martin (internally.)

looking at it now, version 1 does seem better and more thought-out, so if i do actually progress with this i’ll prolly go with that. but hey, if someone wants to run with version 2... (or one, idc really) please do, i will love it.

SO. onto: demons!

you know in the beginning of tgp season 2, when michael is doing the pep talks to the demons and one of them keeps asking if he can bite the humans?

okay, that, but with jane prentiss

she just wants to infect them. just a lil. just a few worms in their houses, even

(elias screams internally. why are his demons so incompetent.)

nikola is a mannequin in the windows of one of the stores in the cute little town. she moves... just a little bit... whenever you look away (like a weeping angel.) she probably shows up in people’s houses in the middle of the night and stands at the foot of their beds. when elias is asked about it, he assures them that it was just a nightmare.

there are so many spiders in this afterlife. martin loves it. nearly everyone else... does not.

jude perry owns a pizza place with a classic pizza oven. it’s... weirdly hot in there? (”she spent all her years on earth perfecting this pizza,” elias explains to someone who feels like they’re dying of heatstroke. “she adapted to the heat. it would be cruel to take it away from her.”)

the pizza is delicious, once it’s burned the roof of your mouth to bloody strips

mike crew runs the skydiving/flying place. the humans don’t understand why it’s so painful and weird when they do it. they’re clearly just doing it wrong! why don’t they try again. and again.

not!sasha is there, and sasha isn’t. (i don’t know, i can’t think of how it would work.) (maybe she kept throwing a wrench in elias’s plans so he didn’t want her in his neighbourhood.) she’s soulmates with some random demon and is probably out there, idk, tormenting people with weird uncanny valley.

she runs a wax museum, like the museum in tgp s2, when the gang goes to the real bad place and it has plaques for the first person to do some petty bad thing (telling a woman to smile, sending an unprompted dick pic, flossing in an open-concept workplace, etc.) the wax figures also move in creepy ways, just a little bit.

i’m sure once i write this i’ll flesh out more of the demons, but one last thing:

who is mindy st. clair, you ask?

my answer is: it’s not one person. it’s gertrude and gerry.

but how, you ask? isn’t that like, a really special, one-time thing?

well, dear reader, for one thing, points and afterlife designations work differently in this au than they do in tgp, for practical reasons of getting all the characters i care about into hell. and also, the system doesn’t make sense.

so gertrude and gerry either a) both evened out the points (and medium places aren’t very uncommon) or b) this is an au where you can be “claimed” by the good place or the bad place at random, and neither place wanted them. either/or.

the thing is, though, that the medium place is not meant to be torture. and for the vast majority of people, being alone for eternity with only the most mediocre entertainment and literally nothing to do? is torture.

for mindy, she was incredibly self-centred; being alone is fine. she doesn’t mind being around other people for short periods of time, and she probably wants to get laid, but she’s okay in her own company.

most people are not. and obviously we don’t actually know much about gertrude and gerry’s relationship, but what i’m going to guess is that they didn’t hate each other, or especially like each other, but they aren’t each other’s favourite person, either.

thus, the best person to spend eternity with for absolute mediocrity, they can both be alone when they want and also have company when they need to not go completely off the deep end.

and that’s what i have so far.

and here’s a bonus if you read this far: i also started writing a tgp magnus archives au, where michael (tgp michael) got the gang together in s3 by sending them all to the magnus institute to give a statement. i have most of eleanor’s statement written. still not sure what i want to do with it, but there you go: fusion-ception, an au both ways.

#anyway i plan to write this but also everybody should write this au #the magnus archives #the good place #nicola.txt #nicola writes things

11 notes · View notes