The Magnus Archives - Blog Posts
Unrelated to the last post but what if the distortion was actually like. The output of one of the early machine learning image generators trying to make a person. Like hear me out ok. Struggles with hands, never looks quite right, tends to go a bit crazy with colours, may or may not be one with the background. Plus have you ever watched one of those timelapses of a ML program generating an image. Thats exactly how the distortion moves. Also fucked up geometry
I had a really gut wrenching realization about tma and opened a new post to write it and then i forgot help
It was like. The worlds saddest fanfic concept or something. Like i hated it and loved it in equal measure because it hurt in a good way, you know what i mean? Like when you really like something and you know its gonna hurt but you cant stop. Wait im just describing the experience of being a tma fan now
This is why we dont let the cicada ruminate on fandoms after 2 am. Their attention span decreases to about a half second
If he hadn’t been sacrificed, I feel like Michael would have been more a victim and/or avatar of The Web.
I highly doubt Michael was stupid. To be honest, he strikes me as neurodivergent of the “if I just go with what they say, they won’t hate me” variety. He trusted gertrude to not… y’know. Kill him. I feel like that’s a pretty low level of trust, all things considered. He probably knew she was planning *something*, though he grossly underestimated the scale. Consider also that Gertrude was trying to intentionally deceive pretty much everyone so that she could go around obliterating Rituals and being a general pain in the ass to Jonah. It’s not a mark against someone to have been tricked by Gertrude. Hell, he was in an echo chamber designed to keep him ignorant!
Point is, Michael wasn’t stupid. He was scared. He was scared of being hated and left behind and not being enough for others. He was scared of failing people. He’d fall into anyone’s schemes, take any number of hits, whatever it would take to have people stick around and hopefully, maybe, protect him in return.
If it hadn’t been Gertrude and her assistants specifically, if it hadn’t been Fears and supernatural entities and attempts to end the world, he would have been manipulated, rather than lied-to-and-manipulated. He could break the Great Twisting because he *had* been lied to, not because it was the core of his fear. (Ignore for now that the Twisting wouldn’t have worked anyway, if 160 is to be believed.)
And every fear has a bit of manipulation in it, Gerry’s colour analogy rant and all. But The Web relishes in manipulation, in telling you true things that will lead you to the wrong conclusions to do what it wants. Michael was told he could stop a great evil. True! Sort of!
Anyways, Web!Michael when
The Magnus Archives is genuinely so funny from an objective pov because for four full seasons it’s this really tense horrifying portrayal of losing yourself to your fears and then the last season is just two very grumpy British boyfriends, one of which is just a regular nerd who loves tea while the other one is literally the antichrist, taking a road trip through a post apocalyptic wasteland during which the nerd constantly complains about his eldritch boyfriend’s habit of needing to sustain himself via recording his emo slam poetry.
He’s the one that made that “tma fears as cats” image set
If Gerry was the Archivist he would make a slideshow presentation full of 2015 memes to explain the fears to his assistants
I think Michael and Helen would have different colour schemes. Michael is like a walking pansexual flag to me while Helen leans more polysexual flag
This is food for my tma and proseka obsessed brain
I could be working on Certain Other Things but my brain said Archivist Miku. So here, Archivist Miku. From TMA (The Miku Archives)
Daily TMA 110 - Two Paths
The fact that if Michael hadn’t become The Distortion he could have very well become The Archivist
More tma posting and also somewhat to the side, but a good example of “i saw it coming and it still hit me like a truck” is tma season 4. I knew EXACTLY where they were going to go with Martin from the moment they started laying the seeds, and I also knew it was going to emotionally obliterate me, and I was so excited to see how they executed it. Knowing where something is gonna go sometimes adds to the suspense and anticipation.
I love catching where something is gonna go. It makes me feel smart, and then it makes me feel excited to read/watch/listen to the rest of whatever it is, see it play out.
that some people respond to any well-foreshadowed reveal with “ugh that plot twist was so predictable” proves bad faith criticism has rotted their brains to the point they think it’s bad writing if they can correctly identify information the writers were intentionally giving them
Fear of losing things that are important to you and it’s called The Loss but most of its iconography looks like | |l || |_
The Magnus Archives but the Fears have broken up into even weirder and esoteric and specific fears like a fear of breakable objects (The Breaking) the fear of disappointing your dad (The Failureing) and the fear of long lines at the fast food joint (The Lengthening
I audibly laughed at this
What if when Michael got Distortioned he/they/it/(?) had just kept showing up to work? Imagine Gertrude comes into the archives and finds a bunch of paperwork filled out in yellow highlighter and folded into impossible shapes, and then Michael-Distortion just walks into the room door-style and sits down at his work computer so it can email Gertrude a phishing scam.
Back with more Michael angst!
The Distortion hates cold temperatures. It didn't used to, but then it became Michael. Typically, the Distortion takes whatever form it likes, though the pattern of something-that-looks-like-Michael is one of the easiest, the least complex. (It's very complex, actually, but Michael Shelley was so good at being this one specific human that, if the Distortion wants to look like something other than a door, that pattern is so close to hand.) But the instincts of Michael are interwoven into the instincts of this endless Concept, and when it's cold, the Distortion is reminded of Russia. It's reminded of a place that doesn't exist. It's reminded of a map. It's reminded of words, that he wouldn't die if he was careful. And he was careful, and he hadn't died. But what happened was worse. It remembers the last time he was betrayed before he became betrayal.
And somehow, lost in all the memories of something that both is and is not itself, the Distortion finds itself wearing a heavy coat and scarf, in muted earthy browns and greens so unlike its preferred aesthetic. Sometimes, it finds that it's crying something that could arguably pass for tears. It never quite remembers how it got to this shape.
That simply cannot do. So it avoids winters and cold temperatures and Russia. Or at the very least, it leaves the door outside, and hides inside where temperature and space mean as much as time and colour and truth.
I wonder if Michael Shelley got a grave. I don't think Gertrude would have made one; she's not sentimental enough for it. If you make graves for people you lose, you might think too hard about sacrificing them. If he had living family, they probably would have been at least a little estranged by virtue of how much time he spent at this job that, frankly, would make him sound like a lunatic to most people. I also doubt Gertrude would report his death in any official way. He would just disappear, never to be heard from again. Anyone else might not know he was gone for months.
The other assistants... they would know he was gone. Some silent acknowledgment that he wouldn't come back and shouldn't be spoken about. Maybe one of them would give him a grave, maybe. Or maybe not; after all, burials generally involve digging in the dirt, and they all knew about the Coffin by then. Who would want to tempt fate that way, and all for one dead man that cared too much?
No, his only grave is a labyrinth of doors. And even that twisted, painful testament to who he was and what he did, is taken from him when Helen usurps him.
Btw i havent listened to tma s5 yet so I’ll be a little late to tmagp. This also means: my posts will be 100% tmp spoiler free until such time as I finish tma!
Im having sad doorkeay thoughts about this and i dont know if i will elaborate on this or not but if i do it will be in the form of a 1k+ word fic published at 3 am on a random tuesday
I love the "came back wrong" trope but from the opposite side.
Imagine you are dead. And then you are RIPPED from the embrace of decay into the world of the living again. Your memories are hazy and you don't recognize any of these people, but they act like they're close to you? Like they love you? So you try to get your memories back, to act like you belong here, but everybody tries to forget you died. And you can't. It is omnipresent. And just trying to grapple with that fact pushes the people who "love" you away, and they're incapable of understanding, and they're so confused, what's wrong N̶̄̀O̶͛͗T̷̉́ ̷͋͝Y̴̎̌Ȍ̴̈U̸̓R NÄM̴̃͑E̵̾̇? And you just need them to understand, you aren't that person! You aren't! You don't know who that person is! You don't know why any of this is happening, but they're unwilling to bend, they keep insisting you are that person, your memories will come back, everything will be normal again, and you want to scream and cry and claw yourself open to show them you're different. Your existence as a being wholly separate from whoever you "used to be" is a sin unto itself. All you can do is scrabble for life and to them, you're killing whoever they loved to do it.
just. lots of fun in that concept, you know?
The corruption (rotten fruit) got on my collection of stickers with eye vibes. This means something
I remembered what it was about ten seconds after posting
Anyways if the distortion can be summoned by knocking on a wall and wanting to talk to it, that implies that it’s constantly aware of all walls and the emotions of the people near them. Distortion would probably vibe with the web in an alternate universe
I was having complex thoughts about the distortion, truly expanding my concept of reality by way of the funny gay door thing, and then i got distracted and forgor
I was having complex thoughts about the distortion, truly expanding my concept of reality by way of the funny gay door thing, and then i got distracted and forgor
Someday im going to appear here with like ten long ass essays about tma and you will all realize just how autistic i can be. Anyways jane prentiss and michael shelley are very similar characters, the stranger has more sense of self and identity than the spiral does, the buried and the vast are the exact same thing, and will wood is the avatar of literally all of them. Cya
Hi everyone im in the tma fandom now. Help me
Anyways jon Knows how to speak klingon whether he wants to or not, and i will die on this hill
Dude chill out nobody wants your loser you can keep him
Why is Martin on my sponsored adds??
Can’t like Jon just give me one of the multiple tape recorders he has following him? I’d love one.
Maybe if I give him my statement 🥺🥺
The lonely fog :00000000000000000
Idk if I posted this
Martin’s such a cutie
