#the magnus archives ramble

[dafukdidiwatch]

I adore The Magnus Archives! It was actual a pandemic podcast for me. I got into it during the beginning of spring I wanna say, a little bit after I finished Homestuck actually. I kept seeing posts on tumblr about it since I think it was hitting the final season during then, and there were 2 Specific Posts, both crossovers with TAZ, that got me interested in it. I listened to it every day after work trying to get me to take daily walks so I wouldn’t feel so cooped up, and I even got to listen to it during work (perks of working remotely). Sometimes I even just go to sleep listening to it, it was soothing in it’s own way.

The Magnus Archives is absolutely a top tier podcast. I love everything about it. I love anthology series and stories, always have, so it just spoke to me. The deep and smooth voice of Jon Sims, and his range in voice acting is just so good! I love how it builds and keeps building and the little details were all around to figure out what the specific Fear entity is, and how it relates to a much larger plot. Normally shows sort of lose my interest if they start to completely focus on a larger storyline and lose that monster-of-the-week style they had initially, but TMA just has a brilliant balance between the two. I get my statement, the statement gives hints to the larger story, and we hear the talk and discussion of the nonsense around recording the statement. Best outcome all the way around.

Jesus I literally can just go off about it there really is nothing that I won’t talk about for The Magnus Archives. I clearly remember listening to Episode 7: The Piper while working and it changing my opinion of it being a Good Podcast to being a Great Podcast. I found the episodes about Micheal Crew and the Episode 19/20 two parter to be pretty boring. I discovered I got a new fear of Cave Diving from Lost Johns Cave, and specifically the ones dealing with Space freak me the hell out 100%. I remember that listening to Episode 25: Growing Dark trying to fall to sleep actually got to me, and I had to pause it to finish in the morning. I love the Michael (the Spiral man lol) as my favorite monster. And I actually love the Jared episodes dealing with The BoneTurner’s Tale. Elias sucks ass. Love Martin and Tim. I actually didn’t catch that Sasha’s voice changed going into Season 2. The Jorgen Leitner book episodes are a hit or miss to me. Depends on the book.

I’ve actually been writing some TMA fanfiction on the side. The one TAZ/TMA crossover post of the Starblaster Crew as Avatars inspired me actually write it. HERE’s the link if you’re interested. I’ve also donated to The Magnus Protocol kickstarter as one of the higher ranking tiers, so I’m going to get an episode dedicated to me however that works. I’ve talked to my friend and I think if I was an Avatar it would be for either The Spiral or The End.

Seriously, you can just deadass give me an episode and I can go off about it. It’s just so good.

The only thing is, I do know spoilers and endgame (roughly) for the end of the series, but I’ve never actually finished listening to the series. I’ve only gone up to part way in Season 4. I have a, how you say, weird thing about finishing things sometimes. Would sort of stopped listening in the middle of things, got distracted by other things/hobbies, then just picked it back up again like a few months ago. So I have like, 3 waves of listening to it if that makes sense?

First Wave was during Pandemic where I got up to the beginning of Season 4, maybe like 10 episodes into Season 4, somewhere like that. Second Wave to intently listen was when I just listened specifically the statements and only the statements. Like the outside story is great, but sometimes I just wanna get the anthology part of the series ya know? Got up to Season 3, but I definitely skip around them to the good stuff lol. Then it’s the Third Wave which is my Journal Wave, because to keep track of all the small details I’ve been writing each episode in a journal to pick up the clues and hints of each episode and how they connect. Really it was just to focus on key words and phrases to figure out what entities were tied to each episode. I’ve actually just got well into Season 2 of my Journal Wave listen, just started listening to Ep 48 as of this morning.

I finally got my friend to listen to TMA and now she’s gonna finish the series well before me lol, oh well. Tho I think we are gonna lowkey start a Magnus Archives Book Club, so that’s going to be fun.

So yeah, I’m pretty obsessed with The Magnus Archives, I think it’s a brilliant source of stories and narration, where it can be enjoyed singularly or as a whole. I 100% recommend it to anyone I can, and absolutely one of my favorite bouts of horror. Feel free to ask me anything about it, tho keep in mind that I’m not yet finished with Season 4 as a heads up. 

[fox-guardian]

Jon is 100% the type of guy where Martin says something normal and chill and he just responds so sincerely that it takes Martin aback like 5 times daily. Martin will say something like "I'll be in the other room if you need me" and Jon will look him dead in the eye and say "I always need you" with 100% earnestness and sincerity and Martin is down for he count

[soupdwelling]

ok au where after becoming archivist jon starts getting into the habit of making vent tiktoks in his car after work because tim showed him how and at first he was like “this is stupid” but then it genuinely started helping him decompress so he just kept doing it in secret. and he eventually he gains a minor following who are becoming increasingly concerned because it goes from “the most INSUFFERABLE statement giver came in today” to “i got fucking KIDNAPPED AGAIN!!!”

[red-archivist]

SOMEONE APOLOGIES-JON'ED MY LOCAL BOOKSHOP'S POST-IT WALL i'm going to get you

[therealdistortion]

I find it funny the way Jon blames himself for the apocalypse. Cause essentially what happened is that Jonah put a nuke in his lunch and he blames himself for it.

Like, imagine you got a sandwich for lunch. You’ve been looking forward to eating this sandwich for so long, you haven’t had one in weeks. Your friend got it for you from a restaurant and you are so so excited.

It looks amazing, it smells amazing, you are so excited. Then, you go to take a bite and there’s a fucking nuke in it. It explodes and kills everyone around you, except for you. Then you blame yourself.

You didn’t put that nuke in it. You didn’t know there was one there. You were just trying to eat lunch.

It was the guy from that restaurant, he put a nuke in your sandwich! And it wasn’t even like he put it in a random sandwich and you just happened to get it. No, he put it specifically in your sandwich so when you try to eat your lunch it will explode.

And you know that he put the nuke in your sandwich. Cause he wrote you a note explaining to you exactly why and how he did it. He told you it was so it would explode and kill everyone, and he told you that he put it specifically in your sandwich. And he hid the note so you would only see it after you started eating, at which point it was already too late.

And you still blame yourself. Even though you had no idea. How does that make sense?

Jon, it is not your fault there was a nuke in your sandwich

[project-icarus]

gertrude "i thought it would hurt more" robinson is hands down the best character in that whole podcast she never did anything wrong in her life except for maybe all the atrocities but they were kinda slay so it's fine

[morganmnemonic]

I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!

Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.

And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.

Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.

So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.

And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.

And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.

This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.

When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.

[ilovepodcastladies]

THE TMA THEME IN THE BACK OF THE INSTITUTE SPELUNKING STATEMENT AAAAAA

[mifink]

theres this pipeline from being a gravity falls fan as a kid to being a malevolent/tma fan as you grow older and im not even surprised by it. you guys had to enjoy nerdy weird shit when you were kids to enjoy whatever the fuck happens in these podcasts. me included. my fate was sealed when i saw bill cipher at age 10.

[dyke-in-crisis]

drop your most self indulgent magnus protocol prophecy. mine is that gwen will be mentioned to have a wife and then in one ep casually drop that said wifes surname was Lukas before they got married. this will have no plot relevancy at all, just a little treat for the lesbian lonelyeyes ogs

[cinnatwirls]

So I visit the Little Free Libraries near me almost everyday and- please- someone tell me-

WHAT IS THIS FUCKASS BOOK I FOUND.

WHY DID I FIND WHAT LOOKS LIKE A LEITNER IN THERE-

....I took it home of course

[fox-guardian]

I've seen a few "Tim and Alice would be besties" posts and I love it so much cuz like. Tim's sense of humor canonically is mostly pop culture references to movies and stuff, there's no real indication that he's particularly online. Meanwhile Alice speaks like she's been Very active on tumblr for longer than she's been at OIAR CONSTANTLY, she just says the strangest shit all the time. So I just keep imagining a conversation between Tim and Alice constantly having to stop because Tim keeps cracking up unable to breathe over the Shit Alice Keeps Saying and he's never heard any of that kind of shit before, especially not with such a casual, nonchalant delivery. And Alice is laughing because its hilarious how offline Tim is. Hearing the phrase "none pizza with left beef" would incapacitate him.

[soupdwelling]

my favorite somewhat underrated jarchivist moments

“a COMPLAINT? i could just as easily COMPLAIN about her WASTING MY TIME”

“before i address the central point of this statement, namely the question of…. whether the sky can eat people .”

melanie: “i should have known this was a COMPLETE waste of my time” jon: “probably 🙄”

“you don’t seem like you’re in your fifties?? or- or burnt to a crisp”

“you’re serious? you’re going on a date with… the dullard of skull mountain just so you have an excuse to eat a shopska salad?”

“another startling insight from the piercing investigative mind of georgie barker”

“WHAT is my metaphorical pit???”

melanie: “i mean it’s not like you have any reason to kill me” jon: noncommittal sound

martin: “melanie seems okay but i get the feeling she’s planning something?” jon: “i- i got that feeling. Too.”

“so. kidnapped. Again.”

“like colors, but if colors hated me. got it. christ i need a cigarette.”

“MARTIN. STOP trying to TOUCH the PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE. just PUT YOUR HANDS in YOUR POCKETS or SOMETHING-”

basira: “so would you say this was supposed to be churchill or alfred hitchcock?” jon: “jowls like that, could be either”

“coma! great! let’s rearrange his office! sleeping people don’t need. pens!”

“police brutality lawsuit? :)”

[picture of edwardian offense] “I what?”

daisy: “it’s a joke, jon.” jon: “oh! hAha! yes.”

“i mean you’re not suggesting that santa works for the people’s church..”

long-suffering sigh “fuck.”

“i’m starting to feel a little. Self Conscious being a post apocalyptic google !”

martin: “did it stir any feeling in you?” jon: “Yes! Nausea! Because of the Horrible Things In It!”

“Yes the Colossal Web stretching down into an Endless Pit is a Significant improvement😑”

“‘free will’ she says, as we stand in the middle of her FUCKING WEB”

[travalerray]

choose your horror denier: Alice "it has nothing to do with us" Dyer or Jonathan "it's all nonsense unless it's about two very specific people I hate very much" Sims

[twentyonefirstmates]

i just cannot stop thinking of jon trying so hard to grieve for the real elias after he Finds Out because elias died scared and alone to the same power that destroyed jon, because elias was also forced to watch his own body become entirely alien to him as he became Something Else, because elias and jon have both been tortured and Changed by the same man, because jon might be the only person in the world who understands what happened to him and is definitely the only person in the world who cares.

But also, jon can't think of elias' face without having to choke back a scream, cant utter elias' name without wanting to cry, cant think about elias' body without the feeling of being watched, worms burrowing into his skin, the agony of not being able to remember his friend's face, his mind being broken, hellish flames on his hand, falling from a great height, a knife against his windpipe, plastic fingers against his skin, dying, coming back wrong, darkness beyond everything hes ever known, dirt in his lungs, losing everyone hes ever loved, strings controlling his every move. He cant grieve for elias without grieving for himself. And he know, he knows, he Knows that none of it was ever elias' fault. Elias was just some poor stupid idiot who ended up in an evil place and had his life stolen by an evil man, just like jon. Jon knows elias never actually did anything to him, but he cant forgive him for the things done by his body. He wants to grieve, he tries to grieve, he does grieve. But he can never grieve properly for the man who was lost because he is inseparable from the man who took him.

[bottlecap-joe-spooky]

Alexander Newall and Jonny just KEPT COMPLAINING about how they made the most unfuckable monster, leading to the great Tma twink event of 2024, and then they put mr bonzo into a strip club. They are literally the funniest people ever I think.