every single time (template from @mhuyo)

I really love gertrude robinson bc how often do you get an older woman character who just really sucks? She sacrifices ppl that trust her. She is so focused on keeping the world from ending that she completely doesn’t notice one of her assistants routinely torturing the others. She dismembered a guy. She does her job badly on purpose. She’s cunning and sneaky. She dares her murderous, immortality seeking boss to kill her. She gets murdered by her murderous, immortality seeking boss. She’s not particularly friendly. She somehow had access to plastic explosives. She’s a manipulator and a liar. She’s bound to the avatar of destruction. She helped a guy get rid of a pig by telling him to put it in conk crete. She is like the opposite of a sweet little grandma and that’s beautiful.

Was anyone going to tell me that Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London, was the one who narrated Slay the Princess, or was I just supposed to feel bad for thinking all British guys reading horror sounded the same by myself?

If I had a nickel for every time I listened to a silly little podcast about a guy named jo(h)n solving silly mysteries…

Jon Sims is like Twilight Sparkle if she had to experience the unfathomable horrors from the edge of our universe and also if she was missing 2 ribs

It's kind of unfortunate that the only bit of characterization for original! Elias that's widely talked about is him being a stoner. It's true that for a long time that's literally the only thing we got. One funny throwaway line. But we do learn a bit more in mag 193 (one of my favorite s5 episodes incidentally) and it makes him a much more interesting and tragic character.

Elias was an aimless rich kid trying and failing to live up to his father's high expectations for him. He was raised to believe that he deserved success and power simply because of the family he was born into. It's implied that this alienated him from his peers leaving him incredibly isolated. It probably also meant he didn't have a lot of control over his own life, following the path he was expected to rather than what he acctually wanted. Even before being marked by the Eye he probably felt like was constantly watched and judged, and found wanting.

The statement draw heavy parallels between original! Elias and Jon. In fact the line between them gets very blurred as Jon "plays" Elias in the statement and Elias's VA plays Jonah in the body of James Wright. Jon and Elias are both parallels and opposites. They were both marked and drawn to the Institute by that mark.

Elias had the conviction that he was destined to be important and he was right the most perverse, twisted way possible. He was only ever there to be used and used completely. To the point were he ceased to be, leaving only his body to puppeted by Jonah.

Jon had no such conviction, and yet he became literally the most import person in the world. But that was only after being moulded and completely reshaped by Jonah. He in a way lost almost as much autonomy and control of his body as Elias did. Though he at least got to keep his mind, for the most part.

This has gotten away from me a bit, but the point remains. Elias, like a lot of TMA characters, is a fascinating person who we only get to see brief snatches of. I think about him a lot. I especially think about how horrifying it must have been to realize, for the briefest moment, that his mind and body were being completely taken over, right before his consciousness was snuffed out.

I don't think we talk enough about how Elias set Jon up so that everybody in the archives would hate him. It's that classic upper management move. Mr. Bouchard is the real problem, he's the one actually calling the shots, but he offloads all of his attention and expectations onto Jon and forces him to play the messenger, who is then expected to tread the line between pleasing the other employees and the big boss. Jon is an example of middle management getting crucified from both sides; from their peers who can't trust them, and the exec who's thrown them to the wolves

I was just thinking about how much Melanie in particular blames Jon for everything that happened in MAG 123. This has to be partially due to how Elias prominently favored Jon in front of the others (despite Jon not wanting ANYTHING to do with it) and how that seemed to make him aligned with Elias in their eyes. Elias had to have known how this would affect Jon, and he did it deliberately to drive a wedge between them and his precious Archivist, who he needed to keep isolated and friendless so he could get his marks.

I gotta be honest if some random guy approached me in the street and asked me to tell him my paranormal trauma I'd literally just tell him? Like he wouldn't have to compel me I'd like to share. Free therapy for me, free story for him! Not my problem if it feeds an otherworldly overlord.

I doubt it'll happen, but it'd be super funny if all the things we're focusing ourselves on were actually red herrings? Like, many of us are looking for the keywords we know were important in the Magnus Archives so any mention of fears or "Bouchard" or anything we knew is immediately pointed out and focused on? Imagine if those things just don't matter though. Like, they're there because they know it'd distract us from the real danger of the Protocol.

tmp - tma connection theory

i do not claim full credit for this as @anthonyampersand and i were bigbraining it (and screaming) in chat together but our current theory for how Archives and Protocol connect are as follows :

tl;dr : TMP and TMA are a setup for each other's premise respectively, feeding into each other like an ouroboros. we know that TMP is on some level a "sequel" to TMA (i.e. celia may possibly "remember" events from TMA that we know to have "already happened", such as the eyepocalypse) but it's entirely possible that events in TMP will influence those in TMA in turn, without much concern for actual temporality.

more specifically : it appears, at least so far in the canon, that fears in the TMP universe haven't really split themselves into categories the way they do in TMA. we've seen a case that sounds an awful lot like a Slaughter statement (the bloodthirsty violin), with others that overlap across several Smirke Fears (the very first one read by norris is a healthy mix of Stranger and Lonely, it appears to me), and others that don't strike me as being any particular fear (a malicious, hungering liminal space...? Spiral, Lonely, Extinction...?).

this is ironic because, well, the protagonists' very job is to do that kind of categorization. Dolls comma Watching, or Dolls comma Skin? it's the very type of job that smirke himself seems to have tried to undertake in TMA-verse (and ultimately succeeded). which means....

maybe there ISN'T any fear-categorization in this world prior to the OIAR. maybe, in the end, the way to "defeat" whatever Fear(s) stalk this world is to split it up into little parts that antagonize each other, and then send them away. in short, the OIAR crew are who will send the Fears into the TMA-verse in the form we see them in TMA.

there are some other indications that time may be a flat circle here. why did lynne hammond suddenly change her name to celia in s5 of TMA? why would it suddenly "feel right" to her out of the blue, unless it was the name she vaguely remembered using Elsewhere? of course, since TMA was written before TMP was even conceptualized, it's not extremely likely that it was some kind of deliberate foreshadowing back then ; it is however possible that they took this little detail to build TMP to fit "retroactively" with it. the archives of the magnus institute in TMP-verse being pristine and free of papers could indicate a sending-away or timeline-wide interference as well. and to say nothing of hilltop road, of course...

the tagline for TMP is "Fear takes many forms". sure, it's a pun (fear receives a lot of paperwork). but perhaps it's also a warning for what's to come. fear takes on many forms, in TMP--perhaps even as many as fifteen?

Logging into Tumblr and playing my favourite game:

Who is this fanart of??

Where the options are:

Jon Sims from The Magnus Archives

Bruno from Encanto

Simon Petrikov

Loki

Carlos from Welcome to Nightvale

Edward Teach (Blackbeard) from Our Flag Means Death

"i want you to understand, even if it does go against my nature"

oh distortion... you could just kill him but instead you gotta tell him michael shelley's silly little story first

kinda fruity of you, door

In mag 22, Jon says that "Tim really outdid himself" in the research for the statement. The statement where a man gets 'eaten' by the sky, because he was always interested in dangerous hobbies/sports. He "outdid himself" in the research into a man who was killed by an entity due to his hobbies.

One thing that I really appreciate about martin as a character is how you can observe him becoming more open over the seasons. Specifically with how he expresses himself, I like the way he noticeably becomes more vocal in his anger and pettiness by season 5. There are several things that I think contribute to this, and all of them make me varying levels of sad and happy all at once:

Obviously being part of the magnus archives in any capacity is enough to make someone more openly angry (as evidenced by pretty much everyone), and martin isn't excluded from that general "I'm being held captive by an invisible entity and the world is on the brink of collapse" rage.

Job security. This one is probably silly, but I can imagine that part of the reason that martin's season one, people-pleasing personality eases up slightly as time goes on could genuinely be because he literally can't lose his job. He's canonically stated to be manipulative, and I'm sure that one of his main reasons for him being so is that it was one of the only ways to assure that he and his mother were taken care of. Once he has the assurance that the only way he'll lose his job is via Death or Dismemberment (and also maybe once his mom died oop) I'm sure it was a lot easier to ngaf.

Comfort!!!!! Again! Martin is a manipulative guy! Not maliciously! Maybe not even consciously sometimes, but to me it feels like he's more likely to put on the gentle, friendly face with people he doesn't trust or isn't comfortable with. Come season 4 and 5, though, he's actively more petty towards and around jon (notably in how he reacts to Jon's gouging suggestion and just his general demeanor come apocalypse times). Part of this could certainly be bitterness leaking over because of The Circumstances, but I also feel that it has a lot more to do with the fact that he isn't necessarily trying to impress jon any more. In fact, at this point jon is the one actively seeking him out. He's beyond the point of needing to prove himself or make himself smaller for jon. By season five it's clear that jon loves him and that he'd go to the ends of the earth for him, so martin lets loose. He holds a grudge and he makes jealous requests and he snaps at times. He's a little bit bossy, and he ignores requests, and he sets boundaries. And all of this is so so beautiful because this is a person that, for years, has had to make himself as passive and small and as serving as possible - if not to appease his mother (who hates him) to keep her taken care of. So slowly watching him find people that he doesn't feel the need to act small around or to act as a caretaker to (unless he WANTS to) is a wonderful wonderful thing that I love.

i haven’t interacted much with the fandom since tmagp dropped, but like. is me doing a heel-face turn from martin kinnie to gwen kinnie completely out of the blue, or is there a pipeline here

Full of love