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I took a break from my commissions to make a DoorKeay piece that's been clouding my visions

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The Magnus Archives MAG 85 || "Antigonish" || Michael Distortion

🚪 word art for a student project 🚪

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portrait of the archivist

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*person chewing through plastic wrapping to get to the cucumber inside it* I wonder how I'd do in the Magnus Archives

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okay so some immediate disclaimers!!

- please do not make any fanfictions or anything similar without permission! fanart welcome

- michael is ONLY with gerard in this au. im an anti micheal^2 household /lh

- this au is very very personal to me so id prefer it to not be a “take it and run” thing

- everyone is around the same age, michael is the oldest

- questions and speculations free :)

- DO NOT USE AS FACECLAIMS

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"Elias, am I still human?"

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I keep seeing posts that are like "season 1 Tim would be friends with this character" or "season 1 Tim would make archives team watch trashy movies with him" or "season 1 Tim would do this, or this, and season 1 Tim is so friendly and nice with everyone!". And like. There is nothing wrong with headcanons. But I feel like it's very demonstrative of the larger fandom problem of completely ignoring canon to favour a carefully crafted, wildly spread and completely incorrect fanon.

Because believe it or not, season 1 Tim is.... not like that. When I first listened to TMA, before I had any interactions with the fandom, I didn't perceive him like this. Then I started interacting with the fandom, and I, too, saw this interpretation and said, "Oh! I'll add that to my belief system!". But I recently relistened to season 1, and realised how wrong that was.

Tim is "the hot one." Sure. That's canon, Basira said it in season 2. However, Tim is also an incredibly closed off and secretive person. And actually, canonically, he doesn't have many friends at the Institute. Which makes even more sense than him being friendly with everyone. He arrived at the Institute traumatised by The Stranger of all things, making him very distrustful of everyone. Yes, he became friends with pre-season 1 Jonathan "don't talk to me I'm busy" Sims, but Jon was also a traumatised person who was desperately looking for answers.

Sasha (who, by the way, I find is way too often ignored by the fandom) is the friendly one. Sasha became friends with Tim and Jon, Sasha tried her best to make Martin feel accepted in the Archives, Sasha is the nosy one who gets into everyone's business. Not Tim.

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Just wanted to share a little notebook page I did, while we wait for tmagp to continue

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I need feminism because when i get angry they always ask "Are you on your period?" and not "Do you have a ghost bullet in your leg thats affecting your mind from that one time you went on a ghost hunting mission abroad?"

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Me: dude, I should draw TMA art of Martin in The Lonely and make it look super depressing

Also me: ✨shapes and colors the likes of which I’ve never seen✨ Haha oops

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The scariest thing that ever happened to me would have to be experiencing delusions.

Delusions are defined by the Oxford dictionary as “a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions.” It isn’t just that you think something that isn’t true, it’s that you know something that isn’t true. It’s difficult to break out of a delusion because the false idea is embedded in your mind as though it is a simple fact, like how one and one make two and water makes things wet.

Some of the scariest delusions I have experienced are knowing that everyone around me, including myself, is dead, and that the building I am in is filling with colourless, odorless carbon monoxide and we are all going to suffocate and die.

Knowing these things is horrifying. You are aware that you are dead or dying and can do absolutely nothing about it, while nobody else will believe you. If you breathe, you will die. If you hold your breath, you will die. If you tell someone else that they are dead, too, they will just think you’ve lost your mind, and whatever higher power is in charge of your ignorant afterlife will be upset, and who knows what they will do to you.

You are living in a horror movie while everyone else is frolicking about like they’re in a Hallmark Christmas special, and nobody believes you. 

Nobody will ever believe you. 

Too many people remember the Spiral as bright impossible colors and fun doors where they shouldn’t be and shifting mazes. It’s almost seen as the wacky Entity. Even the name is too often associated with the aesthetic of the shape. That’s not what it represents. It’s a spiral as in downward, as in mad obsession, as in cyclical thoughts you can’t break out of. The colors and the shapes and the incomprehensible geometry are glitter over the horror of it. This is the fear of It Is Not What It Is.

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Love how in TMA/protocol the whole thing is like

"here's the humanized concept of insanity , known to take it's victims and change them so much they can no longer be identified with themselves. Here's the humanized concept of the origin of children's horror stories, who changes and morphs and grows to ensure he always represents what children fear the most, and eats the parents of the children who don't believe to sew a blanket of fear into the hearts of as many children as possible"

And then we all (including myself) go "OH MY GOODNESS JUST A SILLY LITTLE GUY WE LOVE HIMMMM" and decide they are the most innocent, goodest bois (they are. I mean he bought her a chair)

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The Magnus Archives, Ep 1: Anglerfish

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the hound is humming you a lie

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PRETTY COLORS AND MICHAEL FACING WHAT HE IS TO BECOME AH I LOVE PAIN!! THE DESIGNS ARE BY @blackberreh-art

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what compels me the most about jmart in TMA is how they’re the exact contrary of the “fall in love in every universe” trope. no, they’re not fated to meet, much less to even remotely like each other. they met under these extremely weird and specific circumstances from their world, and as jon himself said, if weirder circumstances didn’t happen they wouldn’t even get along. tmagp furthers this by making a point to showcase how, in protocolverse, they lived and died without ever knowing of each other’s existence.

they don’t fall in love in every universe. they only have this one. this one chance to make it work.

and they’re not perfect! they’re fucked up! they’re messy!

their communication is flawed, martin is jealous and manipulative, jon is too emotionally distant, they are each affected by their own traumas and it bleeds into their relationship, and they keep trying! and failing! and trying! until their tragic end. and you know what? that makes them EVEN MORE COMPELLING both as a couple and as characters!

we don’t need to ignore these aspects of their romance to make them interesting, and i’d argue that these complex factors and their flaws are the exact things that DO make them interesting. they had one shot, and it was flawed as hell, but they did their best to make the most of it under incredible stressors, such as the literal apocalypse. is that a less interesting kind of romance story than the others, just because they’re flawed and not always healthy and not at all fated? do we have to pretend they’re something they’re not to be enjoyable?