KingOfWierd

Plumboy 21XX: “retro” indie game. creator just posted something really dire on Twitter & you’re not sure if you want to keep your preorder even though they promise it’s gonna help find episodes 1 and 5 of the animated series

Gug: game released in 1999. You remember it being good. It’s not.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

(to be clear, i'm not asking about the killing-and-eating-people thing if it were just that i would be unconfused but what fear would then also act like a demon afterwards??? like?????????)

See, at the end of the day, I think that Elias was afraid of Sasha. He had just got done with dealing with Gertrude, and whatever else she might have been, Gertrude was not incompetent. And Sasha was aware enough to question why the archives were a mess; had worked in archive storage enough to know that these things were real. She would have found Elias out, and she would have tried to stop him — maybe she even would have succeeded. At the very least she could have put a loop in his plans.

And there is another asset Sasha had: her coworkers liked her. Tim was really close to her, Martin trusted her, and even Jon grudgingly likes her. She would have been incredibly difficult to isolate from the others.

Jon, on the other had, was less competent than Sasha, but he still had the burning curiosity that wouldn’t let him drop a mystery. (Let’s face it, Jon is like a dog with a bone when he’s faced with a mystery, even when the mystery bites him.) In addition to that, Jon has a nice safety blanket that is denial. A few statements might be true, most of them aren’t. And that keeps him from investgating the institute from the beginning. But he believes just enough to try and stay alive.

And Jon is isolated. He’s not really close to any of the assistants, and he’s off putting enough for them to avoid reaching out to him. Martin is the only one that might of tried, but he doesn’t have the confidence in s1, and Sasha and Tim are mad at Jon for getting a position that they rightly think should have belonged to Sasha.

However, it is 100% contradicted by canon.

Jonah flat-out says the reason he chose Jon in TMA 160; we don’t even need to guess:

I’ll admit, my options were somewhat limited, but my god, when you came to me already marked by the Web, I knew it had to be you. I even held out some small hope you had been sent by the Spider as some sort of implicit blessing on the whole project, and, do you know what, I think it was.

Jonah was looking for a trauma punch card, and Jon came pre-marked with the most difficult one to get.  It’s really just as simple as that.  Sasha didn’t have any marks that we’re aware of pre-season 1, though given that she had collected THREE before she died, it’s not a stretch to say she would have collected more just as fast as Jon did–or, given that she’s even more reckless than him (see: her running into the worms to tackle Tim in TMA 39), even faster.

But I also want to address this idea that Sasha was superior to Jon in every way, and the tragedy of the story would have been avoided if she had been chosen as the trauma punch card instead.  People take Gertrude’s attempt at predicting Sasha as who Jonah will choose next as some sort of “picking her successor” or endorsement.  She didn’t have any say!  She was expecting Jonah to kill her, and was trying to guess his next move for who he would pick next.  So instead of guessing who the trauma punch card would be, she guessed based off of who already had experience with knowing the fears were real: someone with experience in Artefact Storage.  Gertrude and Sasha barely met, so all the deep insight and mentor/protégé interpretations that are popular don’t really fall into this.  Gertrude was also barely aware of who Jon was.  

So, there really isn’t a “Why didn’t Jonah pick Sasha?” because Sasha wasn’t even on Jonah’s radar for consideration, and there isn’t a “why didn’t Gertrude guess Jon?” because Jon wasn’t even on Gertrude’s radar for predicting Jonah’s next move.  The whole Sasha vs. Jon thing is 100% fandom-made.

(It’s also 100% not due to sexism; that was supposed to be dramatic irony for our sakes, when we already knew Jonah’s reason since the end of season 4.  Tim was just being Overly Aggressive Ally, but more than a bit misguided, given that Sasha was almost as unqualified as Jon was–none of the assistants had degrees in Library Science, Sasha included.)

For your speculation on how close she was to everyone, I would disagree there as well.  In the Q&A’s, they talked about how all of the Archives employees are isolated and don’t have close connections with others–it’s one of Jonah’s prerequisites to transferring people there.  Dozens of Season 1 Archives Found Family Sleepover Parties has kind of replaced this in fandom memory, but we don’t have any evidence that Sasha would have been impossible to isolate:

She knew Martin was lying on his CV, but not from him.  She hacked into his files for the fun of it and then gossiped about it to Tim.  If they had a very close and trusting relationship, I wouldn’t see why she’d resort to subterfuge, and I think she’d know how desperate he was to keep it secret.

We don’t see them interact in season 1, and Sasha seems to have a low opinion of Martin’s competence: she thought both Martin and Jon were overreacting to the danger of Prentiss AFTER Martin started living in the Archives.  She thought it was silly that Jon was taking Martin so seriously, because if Prentiss was really a threat, there’s no way someone like Martin could have survived her, right?  Frankly, even though she’s less snappish with Martin than Jon was, it’s very fair to say she had a lower opinion of him than even s1 Jon did.

She was friends with Tim, but I think even that gets exaggerated in fandom.  She loves to gather people’s secrets, but shares none of her own: for instance, Tim told her about Danny, but when Sasha started having encounters with Michael, she kept it all secret from Tim.  She said she didn’t want to tell Jon without more evidence, but what was keeping her from giving Tim a call before she ran off to meet a monster by herself in a graveyard?  I feel that if she were Archivist, this would have been even more intensified: she would care about him, sure, but that’s nothing new: Jon cared deeply about Sasha and was devastated by her death, but that didn’t prevent him from being isolated.  

And I don’t need to put too much here for why she’s just as bad as Jon, if not worse, for needing to solve mysteries and rush into danger for information.  Just listen to her statement.  Jon spent all of season 1 hiding from the truth, while Sasha met with a creature she knew wasn’t human multiple times, by herself, without telling any of the others, all out of curiosity.  Jon started invading people’s privacy in season 2 because he was being driven to paranoia by the presence of the Not!Them, but Sasha was already invading all her coworker’s privacy in season 1…just for fun.  She was VERY suited to the Beholding, arguably more than Jon was, and would have been very easy to manipulate throwing herself into mysteries to get more marks.  

Frankly, because she only appears in 5 episodes, fandom Sasha ends up being about 99% OC and a bit of a wish fulfillment character; most examples people give for why she’d be better at Jon at everything, find out all of Jonah’s secrets, avoid losing any assistants, and save the world is just….based off of headcanons, vs. the scraps of information we get from the actual episodes.

i'm in Ireland and the search for that bastards name is still blocked and hidden... the legnths the british go to defend and protect their instruments of colonialism and violence is beyond belief. no justice for the victims and yet every measure taken to protect David James Cleary and his fellow murderers.