#I've never seen magnus archives

[avacoadohater]

Hey, I know I've gotta repent

All of your patience has been spent

I put you through hell and back

Honestly, common sense is something I lack

It's quite a big issue

They're not even good.

Though neither of you retch bile

Even when I've been at it for a while

And neither of you throw food

And sometimes even smile

But your support is finite

The end is in sight

If I continue, the bark

might just become bite

You confronted me on my behavior

And I've realized I'm not a savior

I'm simply making humor

Worse than that of a boomer

She says that's tight

She says that's hard

Now all of y'all are very scarred

If for each instance I had a tissue

Then I'd have a giant pile

*It would honestly be pretty annoying

Like what would I do will all those tissues*

I'd have to contemplate for a while

And in the end

I'd figure out, without a doubt

The right course of action

for this large infraction

Would be to make...

babies with your mom?

no, scratch that,

an apology song

So here I am

With a whole hearted speech

And some apologies that I preach

Will I change my ways?

"Yeah, of course, he says"

I promise it's not a scam

But changing the way I am?

It's harder than you'd think

Just like my dick

So do I feel bad,

Yeah, I'm sorry

for making y'all sad

for being within earshot of this mad lad

I can try my best to reduce

the amount of harm I cause

If we choose to make a truce

The dirty jokes will pause

So what'd'ya say?

Do you want the jokes to stay

Or do you want them gone

Just like the break of dawn

I'm willing to listen

I'm willing to adapt

So tell me now, while I'm rapt

[hemi-demi]

I've seen it said in places that Jon and Martin's relationship (specifically Jon realizing he has feelings for Martin) feels rushed and out of nowhere, and there's a perspective here that I want to share.

I think some people see them as explicitly a gay couple and expect them both to react a certain way to each other, but I have some thoughts as to why Jon is different and their relationship might not look like a traditional MLM story.

I feel that Jon's affections for Martin are absolutely there and growing over time, but with him being acespec, possibly autistic (the "I feel...sad" moment screams alexithymia to me. He doesn't fully understand his internal feelings until they're too big to ignore), and trying very hard to not get murdered for several seasons, I think it's perfectly reasonable his feelings for Martin would take time to develop.

We do see him softening to Martin over time. We see him thinking about Martin unprompted when he's alone. We see him going from "this man is going to ruin this delicate facade I've put up to seem professional, and I want him gone immediately." to "Oh, you're actually capable. So capable you might be trying to kill me." To "I don't want him to get involved or he might get hurt. I need to keep my distance so he's safe." To "I'm going to make myself tea out of nowhere because the guy who usually made it for me all the time isn't here and now it's part of my routine and I want to keep that part of him around while I'm hiding out for murder."

But once he identifies his own feelings, he overcorrects right into hopeless romantic. He's pining hard all S4, because he finally realized himself that he's in love and it's at the worst possible time. It is abrupt. Dude only just figured it out and he's throwing his whole ass into this.

I think even without the autistic headcanon, the acespec nature of how he views relationships and his whole "I feel...sad" moment indicates clearly that he was just oblivious to his own feelings for a very long time.

I know it feels sudden, but some of us are oblivious, okay? I was friends with a girl for 2 years before my brain flipped the switch and Jon's reaction felt so familiar, and I love it. I just hardly ever get to see "me" in media, and it's a bummer when people say it feels unrealistic. It's not, it's just not the norm.

[pillowspace]

I've come across multiple AUs where Jon was raised by Jonah before, but it surprises me that I've never come across a single AU where Jon was raised by Gertrude, considering she's voiced by Jonny's actual mother. Or even Jon raised by Jurgen Leitner, considering he's voiced by Jonny's dad. Could you imagine a friendship between Jurgen Leitner's #1 Hater Gerry Keay and Jonathan Leitner? That would be such a fun dynamic to play with

[lucidstarlet]

If your favorite podcast(s) had a catchphrase, what would it be?

[thermodynamic-comedian]

thing is i don't really feel bad for any tma character. i get disappointed when a character i like dies, but i can't observe the series from an "i feel bad for these people" perspective, because it's so damn fascinating to observe it from a thought exercise perspective instead. not "would i feel bad if this bad thing happened to this person", but rather "would this person be bad if they did this thing?" or "if a bad thing happened to a bad person, would they deserve it? is pain something you can deserve?"

which is why malevolent is fucking destroying me because it's not a thought exercise or a philosophical ramble, it's a story. and i'm viewing it from the perspective of "this is a story that i am being told about awful things happening to people".

all of this to say, i feel genuinely bad for arthur lester and i don't know how to deal with that

[artsybi]

okay this thought has been rattling around in my brain for like. two days now

so like, killing elias kills all the institute employees, right? heart of the institute whatever, we been knew. hard and fast rule, excluding ppl powerful in their own rights who could maybe weather the connection being severed

and the only way to quit the institute is to stab out your eyes, and sever the connection to the beholding that way.

so like. what happens if you stab out elias's eyes? if you steal jonah's eyes out of his skull after taking a knife to them? would that free all the employees? would that sever jonah's connection to the beholding, perhaps give og!elias his body back?

personally i think melanie should have gotten to at least TRY that. as a treat.

[ghostlypinkbiscuit]

i DEFINITELY saw them and OBVIOUSLY lived 🙄

[disruptivevoib]

Gerard Keay was born in the 1980s where is the Gerry Keay in corpse paint. where is the traditional goth wearing Gerry Keay?

[mildcicada]

Hehe

[fridayyy-13th]

holy shit i'm an idiot

so i've been Thinking About Web!Martin, particularly about how the little foreshadowy bits jonny dropped still appear in canon because that particular plot point was changed mid-series, and when i got to thinking about the letter jon found, i had to stop for a second

because writing about being afraid of losing your job is a strange thing to write to your mother, especially a mother like martin's who he did his damnedest to please and make proud, to no avail. since web!martin didn't become a thing i've always interpreted it as martin almost admitting his fear of losing his job to himself, and trashing the letter in an attempt to keep the thought out of his mind.

but, in the context of this being another hint towards web!martin, writing about worrying about being found out makes much more sense if he was reporting back to someone. and, well.

the letter was addressed to his Mother, after all.

[kjzx]

"Yes, for you, better Beholding, than the Lightless Flame"

Gerard Keay, MAG-012 - First Aid

[the-polls]

For my fellow lovers of pushing buttons. I just wanted to have a post to shout out different poll blogs that I can link to and add to. If you want me to add your blog or shout one out, let me know.

EDIT: I've reached the tag limit and realized there is a link limit so I have a carrd I'm using as a poll directory so continue to let me know of poll blogs! I'll add blogs here as links but there's also a link limit, so the carrd will probably be most up-to-date.

I've crossed out the ones that seem to have been deleted/deactivated, but if it's still there and just changed urls let me know.

General Polls ● the-polls (this blog) ● incognitopolls ● apolladay ● anonymous-polling ● anon-polls-for-you ● justcuriouspolls ● oddpolls ● swarm-of-polls-in-a-trench-coat ● thisthat-ortheother ● yesornopolls ● parttimepolls ● reblogforsamplesize ● whatcha-thinkin ● i-reblog-every-poll-i-see ● augmentedpolls ● polls-drugs-etc ● lamp-polls ● pollforthesoul ● poll-boy ● curiositysavesthecat ● anonpolls ● just-a-blog-for-polls ● yayornaypolls ● pollsforpondering ● themostrandompolls ● poll-position ● anonym-polls ● pollsgalore

NSFW (18+) Polls ● spicypolls

Poll Adjacent ● poll-stats ● seeresultssweep

Identity Specific Polls ● aspecpolls - Aspec ● aro-polls - Aromantic ● asexualpolls - Asexual ● gaypolls - Gay/Lesbian ● lesbianpolls - Lesbian ● mspecpolls - MSpec (Bi, Pan, Omni, etc.) ● transgenderpolls - Transgender ● nonbinary-polls - Nonbinary ● gnc-polls - Gender Non-Conforming ● queer-questions-and-polls - Queer ● queer-polls - Queer ● plurality-polls - plurality / systems ● plurality-polls-2 - plurality / systems

Fandom Polls ● pollsnatural - Supernatural (TV) ● tmapolls - The Magnus Archives (Podcast) ● onepiece-polls - One Piece (Anime/Manga) ● anon-scp-polls - SCP ● middleearth-polls - LOTR, The Hobbit, Tolkien ● bts-polls - BTS (Kpop) ● swiftpolls - Taylor Swift (Singer) ● dragonagepolls - Dragon Age (Game) ● sdv-polls - Stardew Valley (Game) ● tally-polls - Tally Hall (Banad) ● loonathepoll - Loona (Kpop) ● dungeonmeshi-polls - Dungeon Meshi ● animalcrossingopinionpoll - Animal Crossing Character Opinions ● nether-have-i-ever - The game "never have i ever" but for Minecraft

"Do you know..." or "Have you seen/played/etc" Polls ● haveyouseenthismovie-poll - Movies ● haveyouseenthisqueerfilm - Queer Films ● haveyouseenthis90smovie - 90s Movies ● haveyouseenthishorrormovie - Horror Movies ● haveyouseenthisromcom - RomComs ● haveyouseenthismusical - Musicals ● doyouknowthischaracter - Characters ● haveyouheardthispodcast - Podcasts ● doyouknowthisanime - Anime ● do-you-know-this-youtuber - YouTubers ● haveyoureadthisbook-poll - Books ● haveyoureadthistransbook - Trans Books ● haveyoureadthispoem-poll - Poems ● haveyouplayedthisgame - Video Games ● haveyouplayedthisirlgame-poll - IRL Games ● doyouknowthistmntau - TMNT AUs ● doyouknowthisdisabledcharacter - Disabled Characters ● areyouthisidentity-polls - Gender/Sexuality ● haveyouplayedthisttrpg - Tabletop Role-playing Games ● doyouknowthisactor - Actors ● doyouknowa - Names ● fictionalfoodpolls - Would you eat [x] fictional food? ● watchlist-poll - Movie Watchlist

Tournaments ● whoishotteranimepolls ● chuunibyou-showdown ● hotvintagepoll ● vgtrackbracket ● mlmshipbracket ● spicymalepolls (18+) ● which-is-the-very-best ● does-it-like-women ● adaptations-polls

Other ● which-item-poll ● rate-a-spam-bot ● daily-oc-polls ● horrorpolls ● hypothetipolls ● trivia-polls-daily

[sharklovingcriminals]

I've just finished episode six of the magnus archives for the first time and i feel absolutely betrayed. I was so used to the formula, that the main character lived and was fine that i didn't even think about someone dying after they gave their statement. I feel the same way i did when i first saw Halloween and realised Michael was immortal and jamie lee curtis was never going to be safe, suddenly I'm worried about the protagonist of all the other stories so far. I thought (for an embarrassingly large part of this episode) that the woman was going to have been possessed by a snake and I've decided that parasitic worms are one of the worst monsters ever to be on this podcast because they actually exist. horrifying. excellent. love this show. people keep telling me it's going to get wild but doesn't seen to have happened yet idk we'll see

[guybitesatgames]

The Magnus Protocol Speculation (spoilers for TMAGP episodes 1 and 2 and general themes from TMA):

I've seen a few posts about how Protocol's introduction seems thematically opposite of TMA's introduction. Naturally I can't find them now, but the ideas that stuck out were: -the notes from Protocol's theme music being an inversion of Archive's theme -MAG 1's Anglerfish luring someone in, vs. the case of RedCanary, where something is decidedly trying to keep people out. -Alice's firm stance that Sam needs to stop digging and mentally dump everything he hears from a case might indicate a connection to The Dark (if anyone can find the posts I'm talking about, I'll happily edit them in. Tumblr's search is AWFUL)

All of this has me thinking about how the mission of The Magnus Institute and the mission of the OIAR could be complete opposites. The public-facing service the Institute provides, is this: if something inexplicable happens to you, you can come to the Institute, tell us about it, and we will investigate. The Institute will send a team (even if that team is just Martin with a flashlight), they'll try to figure it out, and you (the public) can be at ease. From what we've seen so far, the OIAR inverts everything: if something inexplicable happens to you, the obscure OIAR will find out, regardless of how private that information should be. The OIAR will take that information, and send it to… well, Alice seem to think "no one". It gets labelled and filed away to never be seen or acted upon. The people doing the labeling can be at ease - it's no longer in their hands, they don't need to worry about it. In fact, those who do worry about it and think too hard - Sam and Gwen - face backlash from the other workers. Someone Else Is Handling It.

MAG 01 sees a new boss charged with cleaning up and organizing the old boss's mess to bring order. TMAGP 01 sees a new grunt worker being told to tiptoe around the mess and embrace chaos.

I don't subscribe to the idea that Smirke's 14 will be the same and relevant to Protocol. But if they were, I wouldn't be so quick to align the OIAR with the Dark alone. I see some high concept elements of the Buried here. Information isn't being concealed the way I'd expect with the Dark; it's being given a neatly informative headstone in the form of a DPHW index code and put Forever Deep Below.

And our team is going to have to DIG.

[copperbadge]

Supposedly, people with Anphantasia don't get scared reading scary stories, or at least not much. Is that true with you if you ever read Horror?

You know, I'd never thought about it, but I suppose it is. To an extent, anyway.

Follows a discussion of my relationship to horror prose and media; if you don't know what aphantasia is, as many people coming to this tumblr don't, I have a tag for it here that may help -- it's basically the lack of a "mind's eye", a visual imagination, so I hear/read things and don't see an image of them in my mind. If you are scoffing right now that nobody actually has a mind's eye, congratulations, you may also have aphantasia. The articles linked in the tag will be useful to you.

I have definitely been scared by prose before but it's very rare, and not much since I was a child, when the stories I found scary were preying on fears I already had. I loved the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books, and I think it's not unusual that I found the illustrations more frightening than the prose, but the only story that ever scared me was the one about the vampire who kept trying to grab a kid through a window -- because I had a window over my bed in my childhood bedroom and I was terrified I'd look up to see someone looking down at me through it. Likewise, as an adult, the only content in horror I find scary is what I think of as "mind horror" -- the loss of faculty or the loss of awareness of faculty (think the end scene of the novel Hannibal with the brain). Which is one of my biggest fears.

I don't read much horror because generally I get bored, which has in the past made me feel faintly appalled at myself, but which now makes more sense. Certainly I have no interest in slasher-style gore in prose, because I find it uninteresting and it goes on a really long time, while I don't watch it in movies/TV because the visual is upsetting -- so if I was getting the visual from the prose I might react more emotionally. I am a fan of Stephen King but mostly his early work where he was shorter on suspense, and I was reading it because I liked the ideas and the characters. Carrie is super interesting because of the personalities involved, not because of the violence or the horror aspects. But I've never seen a movie adaptation and I can imagine I would be deeply unsettled if not distraught by certain scenes if depicted visually. Although I didn't find the Hannibal TV series super upsetting (I mostly was put off by how bad I imagined Will smelled) so perhaps body horror just doesn't do it for me.

This may also explain my hard-no on zombie media, because I'm not scared at all of zombies, I just find them boring and gross, and that leaves the post-apocalyptic humans. My hard-no on post-apocalypse anything is an aversion to imagining the end of my world, though, which isn't visual, it's conceptual, and not scary, just upsetting.

Like, people kept suggesting Zombies Run! to me when I was taking up running and -- well, one, I needed the music to keep my pace, I didn't want it interrupted. But two, I didn't see why a bunch of random groaning noises would make me run faster. If you could see zombies chasing you in your head, yeah, that'd probably be more motivating.

It kind of explains too why I haven't written much horror. I used to be very curious about how people worked out what's "scary" in horror prose and I guess part of the curiosity came from not experiencing it myself. It's tough to know how to write a scary story when stories don't scare you.

To be clear, I definitely experience fear. Reading Stephen King's "It" didn't really scare me, but there were scary moments in the film adaptations. I startle at jumpscares. There's plenty of stuff in real life that I'm scared of. And even podcasts -- I don't get mental images during podcasts like apparently most people do, but Magnus Archives got me with the "digging into your pre-existing fears" thing once or twice, and while I didn't finish The Left Right Game (I just got bored) the hitchhiker scene definitely got me. But I think, unless it's playing on something conceptual that already existed, yeah, I don't find prose particularly frightening.

Huh. This feels like the kind of thing that could have a significant impact on my creative output if I could crowbar my way into it. Knowing that I as an aphantic don't need descriptions that other people do has already, I think, impacted my editing process, but this feels like it maybe would somehow have an effect on the whole thing -- the fact that I don't experience emotions when reading in the same way other people do because I don't get the visuals is something to meditate on.

How the fuck did I ever even become a writer. Like what's up with that.

(Ironically it was X-Files fanfic. X-Files, a show that very much did scare me, for which I wrote and read a lot of fanfic, none of which did...yikes. Well, that's something to meditate on for the weekend.)

[laora-ryn]

So I've been rotating TMAGP in my head like a rotisserie chicken and. You know what happened in one incident report, I never thought about it too hard, and it hasn't come up again?

In the Voyeur episode, after Tom arrived at the movie theater, his audio started being corrupted. But not in a way that... Really makes sense? It's just that every so often, Chester would read out "[UNINTELLIGIBLE]" instead of whatever words Tom wrote and/or said into his phone

And I'm like. Where and when and why did the distortion happen? Was it during the recording itself, because of the supernatural nature of the theater? Was it when he uploaded it to the internet? Was it when Freddy archived it? Or was it when Chester read it out?

Because we have audio of Needles, Mr. Bonzo, Lady Mowbray, and Ink5oul recorded off a modern cell phone. We have audio recorded in Ink5oul's various hunting grounds, and in Mr. Bonzo's house. Hell, we have audio recorded from Sam's phone in the Magnus Institute. It only switched to the tape recorder when they got to the archivist's office

So it's not necessarily a supernatural creature, or a place steeped in the supernatural, that's distorting it

And I don't know, maybe this is a reach, but the other time we've seen bracketed all-caps text within otherwise normal transcript stuff is with our good friend [ERROR] from episode 10

So now I'm wondering, what made Tom's incident report special? More special than RedCanary's spelunking in the ruins of the Magnus Institute? More special than universe-hopping Darrien, who very likely ran into some version of Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood in his therapist's office?

The distorted lines below the break, with a best guess of what might've been there:

Is it a private screening just for me? The contest didn't mention *that.* That's, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], cool, actually. I'm going to head on in... Hang on a sec.

Possibly: "uh," "really"

Snacks acquired! They're obviously short-staffed, since it was the same guy working the concession stand. I feel bad. He looks super old and they're really putting him to work. He seems in good spirits though. Okay... [UNINTELLIGIBLE] find my seat!

Possibly: "I'm gonna," "time to"

So I'm almost done with my popcorn and the film hasn't even started yet. No previews or anything... Do I go talk to the old guy? I really hate [UNINTELLIGIBLE] bother him. I'm just going to wait for now.

Possibly: "to," "having to"

So it's been a minute, and the screen is still black. I can hear what sounds like... beeping. It sounds so familiar but I can't quite place it. Medical equipment maybe? There's something [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the screen... Looks like it might be a flashback or something, handheld... looks like it was filmed on an old camcorder...

Possibly: "appearing on," ?

I know that room.... How... How did they get [UNINTELLIGIBLE] This was after the accident. Mum wanted to film it for my brothers... Dad... I... [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Wait. Who is that? In the corner of the screen, there's... _(soft, more shocked than anything)_ Who the hell is that?

All of the other breaks were inconsequential, basically. Dropped helper words, filler words, easily inferable verbs. It's just this last paragraph that we're actually missing information?

So no real... Revelations here, I guess, I just think it's weird that this is the only time we've seen this kind of thing happen and wanted to type it up??