I think a lot about how badly the "I lied on my CV" scene would go with Archivist Sasha. A LOT. Now this is based on some things:

a) The paranoia

• A lot of Archivist Sasha AUs act as if she would be imune to the paranoia arc and here is why I disagree:

1. By being the Archivist and feeding the eye you are automatically dealing with an extended feeling of being watched all the time. Not to mention the Eye is literally a paranoia entity (between it's other areas).

2. While Sasha doesn't appear to have Jon's trust issues she has a need to know at least equal to him and a tendency of theorizing. She was of course right when assuming Gertrude kept the archieves messy on purpose but that also shows that between being very smart she is very doubtifull of any behavior outside the person's normal.

3. In that same conversation ahe mentions how everyone has a mask and says to Tim, likely her best friend, that he is as honest to her as he is to Jon it is just different masks. She is fine with this. She is okay with the masks. But that is before things go wrong.

4. She KNEW Gertrude. That means solving her murder is more personal.

b) Sasha knows her shit way to well

• This one is the real fascinsting thing: Sasha is a master in figuring out people's secrets and keeping them for herself. She knew from the start Jon lied about his age and that Martin lied on his CV. To the point that for her this knowledge about Martin is a fun fact and irrelevant, a thing she keeps from because she knows he would be anxious if he knew she knows. The thing is that translating to the "I lied in my CV confession" we have:

• Paranoid Sasha found Martin's letter to his mother (likely writen as a diary with no intencion to actually send it) and thinks that Martin lied about Trevor being dead.

• She knows Martin lied on his CV and it's meaningless to her to the point she might suspect he knows she knows.

• She knows Martin has a complicated relationship with his mother and that means she would assume it to be very unlikely he would ever write this personal of a letter to her.

Conclusion:

Sasha would probably think Martin is using the fsct he lied on his CV as a diversion and truly has an awfull secret. She would also likely tell to his face she knows it isn't it because Martin's mum would never read or care about his feelings or letters and Martin should know this enough to not even bother to write "so this is likely a codename".

TMA begins with a lure, but TMAGP begins with a warning.

Just got to Daisy's first appearance and I forgot how violent their first interaction is. Jon's fledgling beholding powers emerging, and Daisy so clearly disturbed that she told him her story. Daisy keeps saying she's done answering questions, Jon disregards that completely and keeps asking, and she keeps answering!! Even though she's so disturbed! Even though she doesn't want to!! And it's the first time in season 2, maybe even in the whole show thus far, that Jon sounds sooo completely happy. Like. He's delighted, he's well fed, he's ENRICHED, he's having fun!! And he doesn't know he's even doing it, consciously. But also. He must, deep down. He doesn't even know about The Eye and yet he's already flexing his wet little newborn Archivist wings. AAAAH Haha Jonathan a darkness is unfurling within you from which you can never escape 🤪

Yes, of course I have a thing for the rich lady that sets up elaborate games to hunt and eat people for sport. She’s British she’s posh she’s old she’s commanding and she’s morally revolting. How the hell am I supposed not to have a thing for her

More of my OC the Witness!

He has a name now :)

Continuation here

Finally got around to a re-listen of TMA and with the benefit of hindsight Jon’s initial hostility towards Martin is so ridiculous! In the very first episode he says he doesn’t even count Martin as an assistant as he's "unlikely to contribute anything but delays" but based on what? They barely know each other at this point so is his entire vendetta against Martin - to the point where Jon idly wishes for him to get chopped up by Angela the jigsaw witch - just because of The Dog Incident?

There's no way Martin is so terrible at his job that Jon could have valid criticism of his work that early on, and Martin came down to the Archives from the library, he’s probably the only person down there with the vaguest idea of what archivists are supposed to be doing! He's been working at the institute for 10 years or so and no one other than their mind-reading, eldritch horror boss ever twigged that he wasn't qualified, so there's no way he wasn't at least capable.

And if Jon does already think he's useless, it's probably because he's acting as though he's still in research and Martin is actually doing something adjacent to archiving.

Martin gets the transfer and he's kind of nervous cause a new boss means someone else to potentially be scrutinising his CV but he figures - it's archiving, it's cataloguing and filing and documenting, it's not so different from what he’s been doing in the library for a decade, he can handle this. It's only when he meets Jonathan "wtf is an archivist?" Sims and hears "okay so Tim is sleeping with the lead police officer on this murder case and Sasha has already hacked the guys home and office computers, I need you to harass this witness to make sure they don't want to refute their statement" that he thinks he might be in over his head.

It really only gives you three possible options:

1. He really is determined to never get over The Dog Incident.

2. He actually recognises that Martin seems to know a fair bit about archiving and is so afraid that at least two, possibly three of his assistants might actually be better qualified for the job than him that he’s lashing out.

3. He took one look at Martin and thought, "I've got a jam-packed schedule of stapling priceless documents, bitching about statement-givers on tape and running away from the spiders in my office, I cannot afford to get distracted by that guy's cute face and big sad eyes" and immediately did everything possible to push him away.

Podcast episodes feel so short when you don’t have another one to instantly consume :(

The tma season 1 finale is rattling my brain…Gertrude….the tunnels….Sasha…..Jon….all of the connections….uuugghhhh

tma au where everything is the same except the Eye doesn’t let people say swear words in their Statements. As in, it censors them. You get your trauma ripped out of you and, to add insult to injury, The Eldritch Horror of Not Minding Your Own Damn Business forces you to describe these viscerally awful things that you’ve experienced using the word “unalive.”

a little thing I like about this episode is the way it sets up Jon's injury to his hand:

first it shows us the consequences of hand + molty wax person in Jude's own statement ("It would be a long time before I was able to use the hand again,") then it shows us Jude is also a molty wax person, and then of course Jon shakes her hand anyways and screams.

So afterwards, we don't need a scene of a doctor/hospital telling us, 'yup, this hand is seriously burned alright and will hurt to use for a long time', because we already know that and can just move on to the interesting scenes

@a-mag-a-day

something something, each person in the statements fixing themselves, changing themselves, into something new, something better, and having glee in that change, narrated by the echoes of people who were once changed against their will, whose descent into inhumanity was unwilling and fought against the whole way, told to those who will either push too far until a change is forced upon them, or who will embrace it.

Subsisting off of the written records of people’s fears, call me a statement junkie 👁️

This little wool shop is a favourite of my moms and I’ve successfully made it so that she couldn’t figure out the meaning of the name because the only statement she remembers is Statement Begins… lads I’ve infected her well

rb and put in the tags what comes up when you type:

fuck

fucking

motherfucker

shit

bullshit

asshole

damn

Relistening to tma s5 has made me realize that everyone who was saying it was paced badly was right. It really is paced badly

Statement of Vera Crisostomo, regarding the disappearance of her friend while on vacation.

Link here Warnings: agoraphobia, disappearance of a friend, death of a friend, friends turning on each other, don't know how to put warnings

Word count: 1559

Lots of thanks to my beta reader: @bluehoursofmorning

Author's notes: this is my first published work, so please excuse me if I forgot a warning or if the writing is cringy ;-;. Anyway, please enjoy! :)

Hi! I’m here suffering from lack of good Archivist!Sasha content as well 😭 On that note, do you have any fic on that topic you would recommend? Or just good Sasha fics in general, (or Jonsasha, if that’s your cup of tea)? Thank you in advance 😊

Tragically, I think there is a general dearth of good Archivist!Sasha content (and just about none of it Jonsasha content, as far as I can tell (and not only is Jonsasha my cup of tea, but the ONLY thing standing between it and the #1 OTP spot (currently occupied by JE) is the fact that the Jonsasha that I desperately crave exists in my brain and nowhere else)). Admittedly, I haven't looked very far into her tag yet (I should rectify that at some point tbh) but I've dug around the Jonsasha tag when I first got into it, and I know at least one fic where Sasha drifts towards Beholding through an interest in office gossip.

In terms of Jonsasha Ao3 has:

This very good Sasha lives fic where Jon shows up to Georgie's with an unconscious Sasha and everyone involved is very confused.

These two fics are cute also. The former is by @/suttttton and is them getting together, the latter is established Jonsasha from @/dickwheelie.

Eyevatar Sasha might actually be thinner on the ground (outside of fix-its where she solves everything and her canon reckless curiosity is completely ignored). Ao3 has:

This fic, which is Jongerry with outsider PoV Sasha. Just barely has the implication that she might be shifting towards the Eye (via prying into the lives of her coworkers) but gets a mention through sheer force of Excellent Sasha Characterization. I read this and I feel like I'm reading a fic from a Sasha Understander.

There's also this fic, which looks very promising but which I haven't actually gotten the chance to read yet, so I can't speak to its quality.

Unfortunately I've only gotten into Sasha fairly recently (especially as compared to Jon, who my brain latched onto in a deathgrip from the start), so I haven't gone through her tag yet. A scroll through the Archivist!Sasha or Beholding Avatar!Sasha tags pulls up a lot of fix-it and J//mart, which isn't really what I'm looking for from the concept. I'm sure there's more out there, and if/when I find them I'll come back to this ask probably, but I lucked into Reverse Nighthawks (I was on a Jongerry kick).

But god every day I wish that I could write romance and/or longfic, because about a year ago I read a Jonmichael fic that, when discussing alternate universes (where Jon ended the world) it's revealed that he once did an apocalypse out of love for his Archivist, Sasha James. And it was one (1) single line, but it struck me so hard because god. A perfect concept I think. The potential dynamics of Archivist!Sasha/Assistant!Jon are enthralling to me. Jon destroying the world (or helping her destroy the world? Cute date night I think: bringing about armageddon with your eldritch monster partner) for Sasha... anyway mostly I mentioned that one because My God if I have to live with that tantalizing AU rotating in the background of my mind 24/7 so do the rest of you.