#and genuinely i've always liked the fact that in canon jonathan and jonah both share the first three letters of their names

[fridayyy-13th]

for the anti-honesty hour: explain season 1 of tma

okay so like there's this guy, jonah magnus. everyone calls him jon. they're his archives. he's specifically categorizing not-real scary stories. all of them are fake, they're supposed to be. it's like an archive dedicated to human creativity, and to learning what trends occur in people's fears.

and he's got some assistants to help him! there's jimmy magma, jonie magnum, and john sims. the h is very important. there's a running gag of someone calling "jo(h)n?" and both john and jon responding, since their names are phonetically identical.

and it starts off very silly and fun, your typical workplace comedy, with jon and his assistants cataloguing these spooky tales. but one day, everything changes...

early one morning, jimmy bursts into the archives in a panic after nearly two weeks of being out sick. jonie's the only one in--she's always been the workaholic of the gang--and she calms him down with a cup of coffee as the other two arrive. by then, jimmy's composed enough to explain that he wasn't out sick at all, he was accosted by one of the monsters from the statements, jane prentiss, a lady made of parasitic earthworms who kept him trapped in his flat with no way to call for help. it sounds absolutely absurd, and jon and jonie express their doubts, but john believes him wholeheartedly, and lets jimmy crash at his place for the time being.

this trend continues as time goes on, with everyone starting to encounter more and more of these stories that were supposed to be fake, as the worms jimmy described--shaped like regular earthworms, but cartoonishly pink instead of dark pinkish-brown--start showing up around the archives building. the group learns how to get rid of them with a fairly simple solution: water, like the wicked witch of the west. it's almost laughable. the lightheartedness of the first half of the season has taken on a bitter tone, but it's still chiefly a comedy with some spooky shenanigans.

one day around noon while the assistants are working, john's doing that thing where you throw pencils at the ceiling tiles to get them stuck. he does it enough that the tile he's aiming at cracks and collapses, showering down an absolutely ridiculous amount of worms, and they just keep coming. turns out prentiss has been hiding in the ceiling, and now the assistants have to trigger the fire sprinklers to stop her. why they kept a water-based fire supression system in a chiefly-paper archive? who knows. it was an old building. jon almost gets eaten by worms, but he's fiiiiine. the four make their way to the manual release, jonie flips the switch, the system goes off, they save the day! a happy ending for everyone. nothing bad happens ever again. don't think about the other monsters they encountered from their supposed-to-be-fake statements, it's fine! everything's fine. the end. maybe.

(ask game)