The Magnus Archives - Blog Posts
S1E3 The Unquiet Dead: The End
Okay, I know this looks like the simple option, but it fits. Corpses and zombies (obviously). Dickens wondering if he wasted his life. Rose confronting the fact that she can die in the 1860s. Gwyneth never really having a chance to live or be known but saving the world from the End regardless. Rose and the Doctor’s conversation right before the credits about how Dickens is dead in Rose’s time but they could bring him back via time travel (and emotionally). Gwyneth herself is Eye aligned (reminds me of the Knowing in later seasons) and being forgotten may also lend itself to the Lonely but overall this episode is very End.
Starting my first “long thread of me watching a thing”
The thread?
Assigning tma fears to every doctor who episode (starting with the 9th doctor and going onward)! I plan to watch every episode basically chronologically but we’ll see how it plays out.
S1E2 The End of the World: The Lonely
You’d think an episode with that name would be the End or the Extinction, but it reeks of the Lonely. Rose is surrounded by aliens. The only other human around is Cassandra, and she’s no prize. Rose realizes everyone she loves is dead. The Doctor talks about Gallifrey for the first time (not counting Doctors 1-8, this is all going to be 9 onward). The extremely Lonely scene at the end where Rose is standing still while a crowd of people walk around her. It’s got elements of End, Corruption, Vast, and Desolation, but the Lonely truly rules this episode.
Starting my first “long thread of me watching a thing”
The thread?
Assigning tma fears to every doctor who episode (starting with the 9th doctor and going onward)! I plan to watch every episode basically chronologically but we’ll see how it plays out.
S1E1 Rose: The Stranger
This one’s easy. It’s the Stranger. Of course it’s the Stranger. It’s mannequins. If that weren’t enough, Mickey gets replaced by one and Rose doesn’t notice for a while. It’s got Stranger written all over it. Nikola never watched Doctor Who or the Unknowing would have been wayyyy more dangerous.
Starting my first “long thread of me watching a thing”
The thread?
Assigning tma fears to every doctor who episode (starting with the 9th doctor and going onward)! I plan to watch every episode basically chronologically but we’ll see how it plays out.
Starting my first “long thread of me watching a thing”
The thread?
Assigning tma fears to every doctor who episode (starting with the 9th doctor and going onward)! I plan to watch every episode basically chronologically but we’ll see how it plays out.
I can't reblog two posts at once so you get a link instead. PROOF. PROOF YOU CAN KICK IT. FROM MR NEWALL HIMSELF
The Eye is a symbiote with all other fears, the Spiral and the Eye equal the Web, all of the fears are Vast-coded, the Stranger needs to rebrand to avoid just being the Hunt again (same with the Spiral tbh), and the Dark needed more attention. send post
I wonder what the Web has to do with Old Things. Because it has spiders for some reason (spiders should be corruption or hunt imo. cellar spiders are so hunt and stranger coded i love them), which means it probably also has cobwebs for the same "the theme demands it" reason. and cobwebs are associated with old things. so what does the web have to do with that? seems more lonely to me personally. but i could see something being untouched, almost like everyone instinctively avoids it, leaves it undisturbed... hmmm
The Eye is a symbiote with all other fears, the Spiral and the Eye equal the Web, all of the fears are Vast-coded, the Stranger needs to rebrand to avoid just being the Hunt again (same with the Spiral tbh), and the Dark needed more attention. send post
So we don’t REALLY know how much of an avatar Mary was (assuming that, like Jon, there’s a transitory period where you kinda sorta feed on fear but also kinda sorta are alive and need people food and such, before you die and go full avatar) but wouldn’t it be interesting if Mary was constantly feeding on Gerry’s fear of her
So an archive contains stories right. But it doesn’t necessarily destroy other copies. So
Idk where i was going with this actually. Something something tapes something paper copies? I know it was inspired by a drawing of jon eating tapes.
Also what would happen if you typed a statement into a google doc or something with automatic non-local saving. Would it just explode
I realized something about michael last night that i haven’t converted from “rant in friend’s dms” so I’ll just put the conclusion here and elaborate later: michael distortion’s horror is mostly Hunt-oriented actually (fair bit of Eye too), not Spiral
i think what michael shelley wanted more than anything was to be loved or even just appreciated, but in the neurodivergent way where you think that the reason you aren't recognized is because you haven't done enough rather than because the people you want recognition from won't give it to you
the distortion reflects this by being bizarrely overt, making campaigns of terror against specific people, being the center (or at least a very hard-to-ignore presence) in the lives of its victims, rather than eating them outright or befriending them like helen does (which reflects a much more businesslike "get the job done, make some connections, and move on" attitude that likely reflects her job when she was human)
I need to confess something
I’m actually of the Vast
hey magnus archives fans i know yall got a lot of mikes… you may even know a mike who isn’t in magnus
consider send one in?
The lonely wants to be seen and so it chases the eye demands its focus because it has not been truly seen in so long
I love how opinions on s2 jon are either “he’s way too paranoid in s2 it’s almost hard to listen to” or “he’s so silly in s2 i love him he broke into gertrude’s flat and thought he was sneaky about it even after hearing sirens s2 jon is the best” no in between
I started headcanoning jon as tall (taller than martin at least) at some point. When did i become a tall jon believer when did this happen what
The Distortion would have become Helen regardless of if it had ever become Michael or not.
Think about it. Real estate is a pretty fun place to be an erronious door. Helen Richardson would probably have walked through as in canon, even without Michael to lure her in, and we know that her reaction was to make a map. So she makes a map, gets taken back after giving her Statement, (Jon never gets the “do you even know they’re lying to you” warning,) and she Becomes. Ta-da, Helen Distortion, no Michael involved at all.
I had a VIVID mental image of what the extinguished sun looked like after the eclipse. Nothing directly related to thinfs i saw during the eclipse, but mmm. So many thoughts. Colours
Late but this is me when I hear about an eclipse
The tma fandom seems to have unlocked our psychic capabilities. Let me explain.
If you’re on the tma tag, or just have a lot of tma art on your dash, you see art of characters you have only heard the voices of. And you go “Oh, that’s Jon!” “Oh, that’s Melanie!” “Oh, that’s Tim!” And only a handful of these characters have distinctly described traits (like Gerry’s eye tattoos), and fewer still have recurring appearances, or that we hear the voices of. And yet we all agree, roughly, on what they look like. Even if someone has a different design, instead of going “who the hell is that”, you go “well, that’s not what I think Georgie looks like, but I know it’s Georgie without having to check the tags”.
This gets even more interesting when you look at Sasha. Because she gets *replaced*. And so many drawings of not!Sasha label her as Sasha for the bit/for spookiness, but we all somehow *know* when we’re looking at not!Sasha, even when the drawing has no other spookiness.
Ive seen this extend too far sometimes, with a lot of Malevolent art being inadvertently assigned to tma characters, but rarely have I looked at a piece of tma art and gone “who the hell is that??”
Some of this comes down to a collective agreement on designs that happened before I got to the fandom - by the time I got here, pretty much everyone’s designs were largely nailed down. Even so, art where the designs deviate from The Socially Agreed Design are still readily recognizable as the characters. I’m getting to see this with Alice, too - I can look at almost any Alice drawing and go “yep, that’s Alice” and she’s only existed in our collective consciousness for like three months and her design isn’t solidified yet.
Being jurgen leitner the day that gerry almost killed him was probably really surreal. Imagine you’re minding your business, collecting fucked up books, and out of nowhere this goth guy covered in eye tattoos shows up and beats you half to death, then stops, goes, “no you’re too pathetic to be jurgen leitner” and leaves without further elaboration. And you dont correct him, you like being alive after all, and after that you just… continue with your life. And then several years later you tell this to some random guy in the tunnels you’ve been hiding in, and he not only knows who the goth was, but seems somewhat fond of the goth. And then you get brutal pipe murdered by the random guy’s boss. Oops
I was trying to express something about jon’s eyes, but unfortunately the mental word processing crashed and it came out as “imagine having a glow in the dark boyfriend”. So there you go that’s the new post
A friend just called him michael delusion. How do we feel about this
I just noticed that at the beginning of mag 106, Melanie does a clap. I haven't confirmed if she does that in other episodes yet or not, but assuming she does, I love that little nod to her being a youtuber. I remember Tom Scott making a video about the little clap he does at the beginning of his videos, and anyways now I'm imagining the clap is a reflex from her time working with audiovisual medium rather than just audio. I also love the metalevel of a tma character doing a clap to sync audio, while the actor playing said character is surrounded by sound guys who (based on the bloopers) spend a lot of time clicking and clapping to get the audio balance right.
I’ve regularly seen takes that post-Lonely, Martin runs really cold. But consider: he actually runs ridiculously hot post-Lonely and enjoys being in cold areas to cool down because his thermoregulation is a bit screwed. Am I projecting? Yes, yes I am.
The more merge mansion ads i get the most convinced i become that “grandma” is actually gertrude. What is she hiding? Leitners. Information about the fears. Tapes
Maybe this is just the sleep deprivation but what IS the difference between the desolation and the slaughter when you get down to it? Both deal with indiscriminate destruction. Is destruction of humans so far removed in the public conscious from destruction of property? Or is it that the slaughter tends to deal with war, government mandated destruction, and the desolation deals with smaller scale/less overseen destruction?
Aaa
"Jon and Martin are in the computers" I hear you, I hear you. So then walk with me. A lot of people quote Jon's "I will not become another damn mystery." when they discuss why him being trapped in the computer is tragic. But I think you are all missing the even more devastating quote and the episode it comes from.
“Supplemental. It looks like my posting on a few of the more tech-savvy boards appealing for statements has worked. While the incident itself seems ultimately inconsequential, I was able to convince Tessa to have a look at Gertrude’s laptop, claiming to have locked myself out,”
From MAG 65. And what is MAG 65? Tessa Winters' statement about Sergey Ushanka. The man who tried to upload his consciousness to a computer and got trapped in it.
"While the incident itself seems ultimately inconsequential" Jon, you truly cannot stop being a self-fulfilling prophecy, can you?
This is what ends me about tma s4. And s3 for that matter. I understand all the assistants. I know why they’re acting like this. I know why they’re keeping secrets and blaming each other and clashing morals and needs as jon slowly goes avatar mode. BUT ALSO I WANT TO SHAKE THEM ALL FOR IT. I understand all of them and also NOOOO
‘A good tragedy is always both preventable and inevitable’ is one of my main hills to die on. It’s literally so important to me. I’m fucking correct
i would love to hear more of your thoughts on michael shelley!!! 🌀🚪✨
you're in luck because i've sat on thoughts about him for years and i finally feel like i can articulate them. because michael shelley is such a well written case of tragic horror in the horror tragedy podcast. and, despite my criticisms of season 5, it really did do an excellent job in concluding his character arc with the gertrude backstory episode. in a podcast where a common in-universe theme is that knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge, is dangerous, michael is a subversion in that his ignorance of the horrors of the world he lived in not only didn't save him, but was intentionally engineered to make him vulnerable to exploitation and harm (which, on a broader scope, emphasises the futility of the world of the magnus archives - regardless of whether you participate in or turn a blind eye to the systems at play, involved or uninvolved, you are not safe).
furthermore, i really appreciate the subversion of traditional tropes of the sacrifice as a typically female figure taken advantage of by a male father, brother, or lover, whose tragic and horrible death is used to motivate him (whether to greatness or self-destruction), with michael being a son sacrificed by his mother (or grandmother) figure, who never actually loved him and whose 'frail' and 'nurturing' qualities were weaponised incompetence used to gaslight and manipulate him - and who continues to operate successfully (at least in terms of what can be said to be 'success' in a world like the magnus archives) without being haunted by any apparent doubt about the decision she made, or any hesitation to use others in similar ways, following this betrayal. which makes the fact that he's sewn into the fabric of a being that represents lies in their most insidious form, used as a weapon to devour people and destroy their lives, all the more abhorrent in hindsight - he is forced to not only relive his trauma in an endless loop (or spiral, if you will), but to become the mechanism which enables it. michael is taken to the edge of something evil (at least from a human perspective), and pushed over the threshold with no hope of recourse. there's almost a reverse orphic quality to it - he descends into terrifying other world, one which exists side-by-side with but fundamentally seperate from his own, against his will, and looking back will only cause him pain as he's assaulted by memories of a life he will never be able to reach.
i think a lot of people forget to look past the surface with michael, despite there being an entire episode dedicated to doing so. which is understandable, he's a very outwardly expressive character - but this is intentional obfuscation to hide an incredibly damaged victim whose hatred of this part of himself is integral to his entire reason for being, and which the rejection of causes him to be unmade, incapable of existing as this contradictory nightmare any longer. it's a mercy killing, and yet it is violent and painful, because michael cannot and should not exist, and excising that graft used to muzzle the distortion is as agonising as latching it into place was in the first place. when michael-the-distortion says about michael shelley "he was born. he was pointless. and he should have died." there is an implicit longing there, a rage at the way he was used, his decisions made for him and used to imprison something else instead of ever being allowed to exercise any measure of free will. because michael shelley probably would have died for the archivist, given the opportunity, but he never got the choice.