The Magnus Archives - Blog Posts
This is actually the best thing
OKAY so on TMA twitter ppl have been making rp accounts and
and so obviously in addition to there being several rp accounts for each character theres also been an avalanche of ppl making twitter accounts for their ‘tmasonas’ who are generally institute employees which is fun but yesterday i noticed that as a general rule all the OC accounts seem pretty in the know re: the deal with the archives/entities/etc. and i started thinking like… what would a twitter account look like for an institute employee that just genuinely has NO idea. is just 100% oblivious to like an almost impressive degree. so i made one and here are some highlights
I literally fell to my knees laughing at this and i dont know why
I actually like how after every episode of tmagp some tma-listeners analyse statements like sommelier when he talks about some rich wine like hmmm this one is clearly the lonely with a slight hint of the stranger and maybe notes of the spiral and I think I can sense some desolation in here
What is your favorite colour outside of the visible light spectrum?
PINK! 'OH BUT I SEE PINK' NO, YOU SEE THE MIXTURE OF RED AND VIOLET WAVELENGTHS. ITS AN OUTLIER, A NOT-QUITE, AND I LOVE LOVE LOVE PINK :]))(]
Hey if jon feels the emotions of the statement giver do you think he was feeling jonah’s elation in 160 despite himself being beyond terrified? Hell, was he even terrified at the time? Was he even himself? We don’t know how the “briefly assuming the personality of the statement giver” works. Was he, briefly, just Jonah?
For a long time I didn’t care about Breekon and Hope. Okay, spooky delivery guys with a coffin, cool, next thing. And then Hope died and I listened to every time Breekon was around without him and augh this puts it so well
uno how aristophanes belived there were three sexes: male, female and androgynous, who had male and female sex organs, two sets of limbs and two faces. the gods believed them to be too strong and so split the androgynous humans into two beings. they would long for their other half and would spend their lives looking for the matching half of their human whole. that's what today wld be referred to as soulmates.
thats how i think of breekon and hope. two halves of a being that was once one, a long long time ago. they are two parts of a perfect whole, never meant to have been separated. and i dont think its necessarily romantic, because your soulmate isnt always your romantic or sexual interest, they are just whoever makes you whole. and love is just the persuit of wholeness.
I had a whole post planned about how the Web has nothing to do with spiders - they make their webs based mostly on preprogrammed instinct and some of them get lucky and catch something and live - but then I realized that the Web doesn’t necessarily know why the threads connect the way they do. The Web understands what strings to pull, how to manipulate the outcome - but it’s the Eye that knows.
Still, is it strategy or instinct that drives the mother of puppets?
Genuinely not sure how separate the fears are. Maybe they’re completely separate like at the end of s5. Maybe they’re all one thing like Gerry’s colours. Maybe they’re both. Schrödinger’s fears
What if the watcher wasnt ceaseless
Random thought but what if gertrude let gerry die bc she sensed that he had been marked by all of the fears by virtue of bookhunting and didnt want jonah noticing and abruptly changing plans for who the archivist is
I love when ficwriters portray michael distortion as like a weird eldritch cat. It fits his vibe so well. He says and does things that dont make sense and occasionally interacts with you or gives you things that you may or may not have wanted. Also sometimes threatens you. Weird eldritch cat.
was scrolling through my drafts and realised this unfinished shitpost is infinitely funnier as it is
The web and the spiral and the eye are all the same thing. Until the finale I kept wondering why all three of them existed since they NEED each other to exist. They are aspects of one Fear. The only reason the Web is separate is because it’s sentient in a way the others aren’t. But just as Knowing isn’t necessarily Understanding, you do need to Know to Understand. Annabelle said more deceptive half-truths than the Distortion did, but in the exact same flavour. Helen did it for fun while Annabelle did it for sneaky plotting (and… probably also fun, tbh). I see the Spiral as having a lot to do with manic 3 am creativity, which is inexorably tied to all the best schemes. The Spiral and the Eye combine to form the Web. Screams loudly
Idk if this is more Vast or Spiral coded. Depends on who you ask I guess. Or maybe it’s both!
"Hey, mom? Can you come pick me up from school? Yeah, the sky is filling with fractals again."
I had this EXACT thought about an hour before seeing this post and started immediately planning Large Art Projects That I Will Never Finish based on it because That Is What I Do
ok ok, so, I just kind of realised that Simon Fairchild is older than planes right? so, can you imagine how excited he was when they were invented? he felt the fresh fear of the wright brothers for those first 12 seconds and went insane.
OR, alternatively, he invented the aeroplane because he was bored of just throwing people from cliffs
ohmygod. he was absolutely fucking ecstatic. overwhelmed with joy. best day of his life. he would force every other avatar onto a plane immediately
Reblogs a nearly four year old post i found while looking up stuff about gertrude’s assistants. This is now canon in my mind
Hey so like, apparently Emma Harvey was the one keeping Michael Shelley completely ignorant of all the paranormal nonsense going on at the archives. And it seems everyone (including me) interpreted this as ‘‘Gertrude Robinson never spoke about the paranormal stuff openly, making it easy for Michael to stay uninformed.’‘
But consider an alternative:
Gertrude isn’t super chatty around her assistants in general, however neither does she mince words around them. When she is off to try and find a way to disrupt the Flesh ritual, she just is putting on her coat and outright saying ‘‘Alright I’m going to go and snoop around the place that evil dark monster ate some children. Please leave any statements I need to look at on my desk while I am gone.’’ Michael is like 20 years old and he’s like, uh what.
‘‘I should be back in 3 weeks. Emma, keep that polaroid of me on my desk so if a changeling comes back pretending to be me you’ll know.’‘
Michael: ?!?!?!?!?!?!
Emma just smiles gently and says yes Gertrude, of course dear. And then once Gertrude’s gone and Michael is still shooting Emma alarmed looks, waiting for an explanation, she takes him aside.
“Ms. Robinson is… quite a character,’‘ Emma says with that lilt people make when they mean batshit crazy and should probably be in a home. ‘‘The Institute has always drawn in people with… unconventional beliefs.’‘
Michael understands instantly. “Oh,’‘ he says.
Emma grimaces. ‘‘It didn’t used to come up so much,’‘ she says. “But since Fiona disappeared… well. She’s started to see spooky things everywhere.’‘
And Michael just thinks that’s just the Saddest, you see. What a poor, tired old soul, warped into frenzied paranoia by the loss of her coworker. What a Tragedy. And so now, every time he sees Gertrude cutting out eyes from magazine clippings or recording conversations religiously on tape, his heart just breaks a little. He had a friend, once, who was always half-convinced he was being followed by things that couldn’t exist.
So Michael goes into Protect and Nurture mode.
So yes, Michael does hear Gertrude talking to Emma grimly about how she’s planning to ‘‘save the world.’‘ He catches a few conversations she has about Entities or Powers or evil books that eat you. But all it takes is a few Shared, Knowing Glances with Emma and he just wants to wrap this poor old grandma in a blanket and give her some tea and tell her yes, she is Very Brave and Very Hardworking but she can take a nap now :)
Gertrude, meanwhile, eventually figures out that Michael thinks she’s off her rocker but suddenly out of the blue going ‘‘I know you think I am crazy but really there are 14 eldritch fear powers, you have to believe me’‘ is 1) incredibly undignified and 2) will not make Michael believe her. So, resignedly, she decides having an ignorant assistant probably has its uses.
Does she suspect Emma? Yes. Does she ever have enough proof to confront her? No. No she does not.
Inconsequential headcanon: Gerry Keay didn’t wear socks most of the time. He’d just put the shoes on and call it good
So i just started slay the princess and idk if the narrator has a canon design but if he doesn’t I can and will draw him as the jarchivist because it would be really funny
Hello Jon, apologies for the deception but we’ve been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty-
The ads here are all very Stranger. I like saving them to dissect their Wrongness later. I like this cake one, though. No cursed faces, no floating limbs, no almost-words, just cakes!
This ad feels like a lure of the stranger but a very innocent and new lure. Yes. That is cakes, good job.
Okay but jon is like mostly scar tissue by the end?? Counting off things that probably scarred:
- worms
- daisy kidnapping him
- michael stab
- shaking jude’s hand
- he was in the middle of a plastic explosive going off during the unknowing and no one talks about it. Like yeah he survived but also he was semi-dead for half a year, that shit probably left a mark (ha, ha) other than him becoming abruptly more avatarlike
- rib removal
- melanie stab
- i feel like im forgetting something but i cant say what
Happy bpm day btw!! I got caught up deciding which bpm post to reblog, got distracted, reblogged none of them. Uhh insert jurgen leitner copypasta here
Yee
I made a half-joke once that martin is constantly about eight seconds away from murder and the only way he keeps himself from committing violence is by making tea. I think i was right
ok, i have finally gotten to season 5, and i have got to say one thing. this fanbase infantilizes martin to Hell and back and i do NOT understand how you can do it if you finished this damn podcast, i understand hes very sweet and he has a really cute voice but from 165 to 175 i think i have heard him pretty cheerfully ask jon to kill people about twice per episode on average,
What if jonah prefers symbolic/nonmoving eyes and doesn’t look through other people’s eyes very much because he’s prone to motion sickness and looking through moving eyes is sort of like watching someone else play portal. Gerry’s tattoos also don’t/didn’t get looked through much for the same reason
the map gertrude gave to michael of Zemlya Sannikova was one of those mazes you see on kids' menus at restaurants, btw
One thing we don’t talk about enough is that michael distortion looks… basically normal. Like canonically.
Wiki excerpt: “Michael is a very tall man, approximately 6.5 feet, with a round face. His hair is blonde and forms ringlets that come down to his shoulders.”
He only looks like our silly horror guy with knife hands when viewed through reflections or warped glass. So technically almost all fanart done of michael is actually a reflection of a much more normal-looking drawing of a random blonde guy.
How many rituals were stopped with Large Explosion or Throwing People Into It
What is spiders georg an avatar of? The obvious answer is the web, but he *eats* 10,000 spiders a day. That doesnt sound like web avatar behavior. Maybe web victim? But that doesnt give us insights into what he’s an avatar of, because someone so powerful of an outliar is clearly an avatar