#abellasks

[ID: A digital sketch of Jonathan Sims fondly cradling the Admiral in his arms with a joyful expression on his face. Jon is a thin British-Indian man with medium-length hair tied up in a high ponytail, a moustache, and a beard. He wears rectangular glasses, a black turtleneck, and a loose sweater. The Admiral is a fluffy cat not of any specific breed with a lazy tongue-out expression on its face. The piece is roughly shaded with loose yellow and red inks. /.End ID]

POV: You are Georgie Barker who just came home to find that your cat has betrayed you w/ your ex (you don't particularly mind)

Thank you for the suggestion Ama! This was really fun to do :D

aaaaaaahhh thank u sm for the compliment!!

AHHHH this was meant to be a response to someone’s doodle request for happy-to-be-in-love JMart, sorry to whoever you are (i remember you had a cat pfp but i forgot your name) but tumblr deleted the ask when I tried to save the draft T-T

Anyway it ended up less happy-to-be-in-love and more happy-that-they’re-together :’D Please enjoy!

[ID: A digital drawing and short digital comic featuring Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood. Both are done in a loose sketchy style but the comic is sketchier than the drawing. Jon is a thin British-Indian man with long dark hair, a thick moustache, and beard. Martin is a fat British-Filipino man with short hair and stubble.

The drawing features Jon and Martin together with a large towel over their shoulders. They’re both wet from the beach. Martin looks fast asleep with his eyebrows knit close together and his mouth slightly parted. Jon is awake and looks at Martin with nothing but love and adoration on his face. He grips Martin’s side of the towel. Martin wears his rectangular glasses, a dress shirt, and a tie. Jon wears a sweater. The drawing is coloured with yellows radiating from the center between Jon and Martin turning into pinks then dark blues.

The comic takes place in the Scottish Safe house, it’s the middle of the night and moonlight streams from a window into a bedroom. Inside, Jon and Martin sleep in the same bed. Their glasses on a bedside table and both just in t-shirts. They may be on the same bed but they both turn away from each other and are physically very distant. Suddenly, Martin sits up from the bed and leans on his pillow.

He sleepily turns behind him to look at Jon who’s deeply asleep.

He tries to gently reach for Jon using his other hand, as if to wake him, but stops.

He looks as if he’s reconsidering, and he lowers his hand with a gentle smile.

He lies down again but this time facing Jon’s back. He stares at him with a look of love and adoration.

“Thank you, Jon” is written in all caps, underneath it is a small “I love you” in lowercase between parenthesis.

There is a shot of Jon, still asleep.

“Of course, Martin” is written in all caps, underneath it is a small “I love you too” in lowercase between parenthesis.

./.End ID]

There’s still one other ask I want to answer but that may take a while since I accidentally got carried away haha ^^’

Martin, who loved Jon when he stalked him, accused him of murder, refused to go to therapy for his obvious extreme paranoia, was framed for murder, actual murder, both of them being slowly stripped of humanity and most things that formed their identities, and general assholery: I genuinely don’t think there is anything in this world that could make me stop loving you. It worries me sometimes.

Jon: Would you love me if I were a peach?

[ID: A digital sepia-toned sketch of Elias Bouchard from the Magnus Archives checking himself out in a mirror while seemingly unbeknown to him a person is gearing up to slam him with a steel chair from behind. It is in the style of a "to be continued" meme. Elias is a thin middle-aged white man with partly slicked back hair and a thin pencil moustache. He wears a rectangular glasses with rounded out edges, a dress shirt, tie, waistcoat, and jacket. The person behind him has long hair, wears rectangular glasses, a jacket, a shirt, and pants. /.End ID]

GLADLY. He's so fun to hate lol. Well-written mess of a man. Thanks for the suggestion, S! Very fun and cathartic.

OUCH that's painful. Idk who you are or why you sent this but please know it hurt right where you wanted it to hurt :') /lh "His mother speaking kindly to him" REALLY gets me. Extra ouch actually.

I kind of doodled a thing based on this. Let's call it "The Ghosts of Martin Blackwood"

[ID: A dark blue monochrome sketch of Martin Blackwood from the Magnus Archives hugging himself while crying. The are cut-outs on his silhouette which are accentuated by watery ink strokes. One is a brush of fingers on his right arm with no defining features. Another is a pair of elderly hands, the left one with a ring on its ring finger, gently holding the top of his head as well as the nose of a person giving the crown of his head a kiss. The next is a pockmarked hand coming from behind him, gently holding his shoulder. Martin's heart has also been cut out. Lastly, there is another pockmarked hand with black nail polish holding the crook of Martin's left arm. Martin gingerly touches this hand with his knuckle./.End ID]

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

Oh hmmm genuinely hard because I like to mind wipe whenever I see a bad take. The *one* that I remember was from twt too. I'll describe it anyway even if I have talked about it here before. It was something implying that Jon wouldn't take another character's trauma seriously. Since it's the violence ask I'll mention that the other character was Martin. The first time I saw it I genuinely blank-screened in a negative way because it did NOT compute. It was set in S1 but even then I can't imagine Jon not having at *least* an "oh, shit" moment. Especially since Martin's trauma in the thing was childhood trauma. Got me going 😒

10. worst part of fanon

Originally, I had three whole paragraphs about aspects that I dislike but I realized they all just point to one thing— flattening.

Flattening of characters, of morality, of the concept of the entities, yadda yadda. This has happened in every fandom since time immemorial for either comedic purposes or sorting purposes. We love putting things in neat little boxes because it just makes things easier to digest and communicate. Martin is the sunshine one, Jon is the tsundere, Tim is the flirt, Sasha is the Girl™️, Elias is the Ad Campaign Villain with a twirly moustache. It's easy to understand but just less...interesting? I don't want to rag on stuff made for fun/memes, I like funny haha fandom memes. It just feels like a lot of fights about the characters boil down to ignoring the multitudes they contain. The contradictory aspects which make them who they are.

Everyone has probably already said their piece about character flattening so I'll go about the morality thing and how people really like to fight about who's in the right and who's in the wrong. Guys, this is tma, they've all done bullshit. No one is ever going to be completely in the right in this show they've all been shitty people to each other at one point, that's what's *fun* about it. My favourite part is that how, even though I may disagree with a character's actions, I can understand *why* they do it. It makes them feel more like people to me. For an easy example I'll just choose the Gertrude-Michael thing. Yeah, Gertrude sacrificing a human being to an entity who tore his who from his what is pretty shitty. One strike in the wrong. However, from how Gertrude and literally everyone else understood the world at that point, her actions can be considered heroic because in their mind, she just stopped an apocalypse! Saved billions of people from becoming Fear Food. One strike in the right. However, as we soon will know it was basically useless. Gertrude will find out that the Ritual would have never worked anyway so all the sacrifices she did (Michael, Jan, who knows who else) were in vain! Yeowch! Two strikes in the wrong. Ain't it fun? Yet I still see Gertrude interpretations that act like she just did it for fun or something, not that she thought the whole world would end if she didn't sacrifice this one dude to the Distortion.

Honestly I'm not satisfied with this ramble and I think there are plenty of flaws in it but I don't want to write anymore and I don't want to think. Yeah, flattening stuff is fun sometimes but not when it seeps into serious-ish discussions.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

Look hear me out– Basira and Peter Lukas.

Basira to me is compelling to me for so many reasons. She's the most mentally....secure? character in the show, like she logic'd her way out of the *Unknowing*, and it's implied that she's had to be like that from a young age. Based on her S3 pre-Unknowing statement about how that's how her father raised her. But, she's also so controlled by her emotions. Most clearly and notoriously with Daisy, but another example is when her fondness for Jon in S2 overrode her goal to catch him for potential murder. Her emotions matter to her but also calm logic. Which can lead to a lot of interesting and *frustrating* contradictory moments. Again, notoriously with Daisy and how she treated her vs Jon in S4. She's so incredibly flawed and I love it. She's so secure in her own mind that she doesn't even challenge her own biases and instead present them as fact. It's *such* an interesting character trait and it would be so fun to dig into. However, I also realize that probably also the exact reason why people dislike talking about her. She's a hypocritical murder cop accomplice and that can give anyone an incredibly sour taste in their tongue thinking about her (it gives me a sour taste rn like, should I really be writing about her?)There's just so much I want to pick her brain about though. Insert thing here about liking her as a character does not mean I like her as a person.

Peter Lukas is a piece of shit, but he's a funny piece of shit and I like that. He's living apathy and he's so useless and skfjejcjsnnd

Hmmm to be honest, I don't quite know. I myself have not yet started Season 5 so if there's an answer from there then I don't know it yet. I'll answer with my personal interpretation instead.

It's pretty darn long so if you want to skip, I put a short tl;dr at the end of the thing under the conga line of equation marks. Also spoilers!

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I think it was an act of impulse and rebellion. A moment carried by emotions. From what we know of Agnes's story based on secondhand accounts, she was seen and praised as the chosen one. Weighed down by the title of messiah from the moment of her birth to the hour of her death. The one who shall carry the Desolation through and bring about the Scorched Earth. And...that's it. We don't know much of her personality beyond that, since to the people around her (The Cult) a messiah was simply what she was. Arthur Nolan reflects on this in MAG 145 when asked about what Agnes was like. Arthur Nolan, one of the cult members who practically raised Agnes *didn't know what she was like*. All her life, Agnes Montague was merely an idol for her people. A leader to follow until their destined day. She was following a path laid out to her before her time. She wasn't a person. Not to them. She was something greater than herself.

Enter Coffee Boy Jack Barnabas, a nobody who knows nothing about Eldritch gods and destiny or fate. A guy who looked at a woman who can boil coffee with her hands and went "Yeah, I want to date her.", even when warned that she was dangerous. A guy that just saw her as someone. Someone that he wants to get to know better and form a personal, non-eldritch, connection with.

And that's exactly what they did. They went on dates together and got to know each other. They talked, walked at the park, went to the movies, and just generally acted like a couple of young people hanging out. Agnes "Ms. Aloof and Above-it-All" Montague was just hanging out with this rando from the coffee shop. We even get a bit of information here of what she thinks of her grand destiny and from the looks of it, she didn't like it. In the statement, Jack recalled Agnes doing behaviour that would normally be considered bizarre and just...laughed fondly. Jack truly and genuinely liked *her*. And it seemed she liked him back.

Then, of course, the tree fell during the middle of their date and Agnes had to die. Jack helped Agnes walk back to her flat where the rest of the cult were. Once more, Agnes is the Desolation's messiah, here to have one last goodbye with her followers before she returns to the cosmic entity she is, was, and will be eternally bound to. Then as she bids farewell to Barnabas, he looks to her and asks her, against all logic, if he could kiss her.

On her deathbed, as one final "fuck it", Agnes Montague did not what Agnes, the messiah, was supposed to do, but what Agnes, the person, wanted. She kissed him back.

And yeah I guess she didn't think it through and burned his whole face off which was...not great? But it was a decision that was all Agnes. It was not something she needed to do, not something asked by the cult, not something asked by Gertrude, but something she *chose*. Choice is a pretty big theme in TMA though I don't know the conclusion yet because *waves at not having listened to S5 yet.* Agnes chosing to kiss Jack is a really big thing for her and I think is one of the only things she was truly able to choose for herself. The theme of choice is added on to at the end of the episode as well with Barnabas. He mentions that though the facial burns did a huge number on him and his life, he says he's not sure if he would have done anything differently if given the chance, the choice, to. He says that he's like a moth, drawn to the flame.

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