once upon a time in the multiverse

iasip carol dot gif

For a hot second, I didn’t think I was going to have anything to write about this week but then I got to thinking, which is always an ordeal. One of my favorite places to settle in is the Venn diagram overlap that only has room for one person, or maybe just a handful of people, and I think today is one of these days.

A Brainworms Thing: MAG196 - This Old House (in conversation with another pandemic-fueled interest)

As I’ve said before, I am not at all plugged into the greater TMA fandom, but I feel like the worldbuilding established in this episode might be fairly controversial. But as I am on my own little island, that doesn’t concern me in the slightest. I love it. I love it. Is it because the concept of web!Martin got explicit canon legitimacy? Maybe. Is it because the idea of Hilltop Road offering an interdimensional gateway gives me more ammo for my personal favorite tinhat theory? Maybe! Is it because Annabelle Cane effectively said she was going to kill Jon and Martin until their gay love proved too much to mess with? Maybe!!!!!!!!

This episode was just exciting! And in a way that didn’t make me throw up! I got to eat lunch right after, no problem. What a gift!

But really, though—my tinhat theory heavily involves the mind-of-their-own tape recorders that started popping up out of nowhere seasons ago, and with Annabelle casually ending the episode with, “you have no idea who’s listening”….okay.

TMA is, among many other things, a commentary on the nature of fear itself, as exemplified by the Entities which boil down all possible phobias and fears into fifteen distinct categories. The Magnus Institute and its employees, especially the Archivist (its Avatar), work for the Eye. The Eye deals in the fear of being watched, everything from peeping toms to stage fright to government surveillance. The Archivist uses tape recorders to record both statements and the current events around him, and it is that record that comprises the podcast.

The audience may not be the Eye as it exists in the current hellscape world Jon & Co. inhabit, but we serve the same purpose. We revel in their fear and misery, feeding on it as entertainment. And now with the multi-dimensional possibilities offered up by Hilltop Road and Annabelle’s cryptic message, it seems even more plausible that this could become explicit rather than heavily implied.

Which I honestly find really exciting! I am so curious what could be said in-narrative about this possibility—the audience as an agent of the Eye, or what the Eye looks like in a dimension without the Entities, is a really interesting way to further explore the nature of the horror genre itself, how it relies on a voyeuristic exploitation of fear and pain, and how that same sort of instinct plays out when engaging with events outside of the realm of fiction—i.e., reality.

Not to cross streams, but I’ve spent the last week or so really digging into the OJ Simpson trial as depicted in the deep-dive episode series on the podcast You’re Wrong About and the Netflix limited series The People v OJ Simpson. YWA as a podcast is doing fantastic work empathetically delving into the events and the backgrounds of key players, but that also means it took them about eight or so episodes to get to the Bronco chase—plus, they’re not done yet. I was in preschool as the events unfolded in real time and thus went in only with the knowledge of the acquittal, so it’s been fascinating, and I guess I was overdue for a new pandemic-fueled fixation.

But back to the point, and how it’s relevant to TMA: those murders were a real-life horror. The abuse Nicole Brown suffered at the hands of OJ was real-life horror. The agony that Ron Goldman’s parents had to contend with, as the trial for their son’s murder so often ignored him as a victim while they sat in their grief, was a real-life horror. And famously, the entire ordeal became a media circus which acted as entertainment for the entire country throughout its entire duration. OJ may have been a celebrity, the ticket in, but the average American was so far removed from Nicole and Ron, the teams of lawyers, all the witnesses that they stopped feeling like real people. To be at the center of a media frenzy is all about the glut of eyes on you—the reporters staring and hounding you, the dead eyes of camera lenses, the eyes of every viewer or reader their work eventually reaches. The lawyers, who in the terms of the early 90s, were not public figures, suddenly found their private lives and pasts on the front page of the tabloids and leading talk show interviews. The whole country was staring at them, into them, and it hurt. Fame is the result of being on the receiving end of The Public’s Eye, an analog of the supernatural dangerous Entity within the world of TMA—and as YWA cohost Sarah Marshall has said in a number of other episodes, fame is abuse. The OJ trial was reality’s horror voyeurism at its finest.

To get back to TMA proper—Jon and Martin and the rest of them are fictional, which is why it has been a neutral act to use their suffering as entertainment, just as we do for any other fiction. The audience-as-Eye angle as bolstered by MAG196 turns it on its head, asks the audience to consider their actions in the light of these people being real, albeit in an alternate dimension—and thus asking the audience why that pain and suffering is entertaining in the first place. After all, what is fiction but a glimpse into one of the possibilities of an infinite multiverse? What is the suffering in the news, in the documentary, in the hastily-shot iPhone video but the agonizing truth for your fellow human?

An Olive Thing

This isn’t a good photo but it does capture one of Olive’s moments of transcendent peabrainedness, so.