host to mitochondria

Breca || she/her, they/them || 19 || autistic science nerd, Transformers expert, and Magnus Archives enthusiast || reader of books & player of flutes || my saves page is @mitochondrial-bowerbird

[mitochondrial-exosymbiont]

Another notebook Gerry! I remember with this one I had doodled an eyeball that had fish-fin shapes around it in class the day before, and I wanted to play with some slight aquatic vibes because if Mary gets to be a shark then Gerry should get some cool ocean imagery too

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My Art Fight attacks from this year! Characters by @stayinsaxy, @moonchemistry, and @altforhire

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I’m traveling, so have a doodle of Gertrude and Gerry getting pastry somewhere random in America. Let them be happy and let them have a vacation for crying out loud!

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To the uninitiated observer, it seems like a pretty solid conclusion that I like Grendel from Beowulf so much because he reminds me of Gerry Keay. They have many similar traits:

Complicated relationship to their sole-parent moms, who are old and terrifying and prone to occasionally killing people but most of the time sort of hide out in a bookstore/underwater hall while their kids run around doing shit

Somehow having more concrete physical descriptions than most of the other characters in their respective source materials despite not having that much physical description overall

Invulnerability, invulnerable skin specifically: Grendel is described as being unable to be cut by weaponry, and the language of Seamus Heaney's translation specifically evokes metal and armor in place of normal skin. Gerry, while to my knowledge perfectly capable of being injured by swords, was partially immune to Desolation-avatar flame in the areas around his eye tattoos and his necklace, and later becomes memorialized directly through his skin--the last part of him to survive (thanks Gertrude) (that was sarcasm. Gertrude what the hell. That was a terrible decision on your end)

Cursed! Lineage! The von Closen family and Cain respectively.

Names that start with G

Systematic exclusion from their communities via parental situation. This one's kind of niche. I took a class where we read Beowulf, and one of the things we discussed was the fact that, as someone who doesn't have a father, Grendel essentially doesn't have an in to the patrilineal mead-hall-based community of the Danish people where he lives. His mom, mind you, has a whole hall of her own at the bottom of a large body of water, but nope. No dad means no access to the weird warrior social world, and that's one of the major reasons he hates the Danes so much. Mary, on the other hand, has her own set of complicated feelings about the entities and their world, and so she ends up raising Gerry to be Her Heir rather than just trying to get him to be an avatar in the more general sense. This kind of backfires, but what it does do is mean that he can't be part of the normal world because the normal world doesn't know shit, and he can't be part of the avatar community that we see with people like Jonah Magnus and the Lukases and Simon Fairchild, because Mary went "those ivory tower idiots" (her only valid parenting decision--do not let Jonah Magnus and co. be part of your kid's social circle please) and decided to effectively isolate her son from them as well. You know a person who would've been great for Gerry to grow up around, who knows about the entity stuff but doesn't want to be evil about it, and who in fact took concrete steps to separate himself from The Eye while still learning about that aspect of the world? Eric. And Eric is also dead. Gerry does eventually acquire an Archivist to follow around, and then another Archivist who cares about him and actually tells him that he cares (Gertrude I know you said you like Gerry but that's not actually helpful to him if you don't tell him). But wow do both of their interpersonal backstories hit way too hard.

Dead, and outlived by the mother figures they actually like

This one's more of a me thing, but my mental image of Grendel was always that river troll from the Spiderwick Chronicles Field Guide, because the description of it included a reference to Grendel and his mother, and that was my first ever introduction to Beowulf. So Grendel and Gerry both are tall and have long hair in my mind, and have sort of a green-and-grey-and-black color palette

The descriptor "grimma gæst," which translates from the Old English to something like "grim spirit/soul/guest," refers to Grendel but fits Gerry quite well if you ask me

In conclusion, aside from some major differences such as Gerry not eating people (could not let that one go unremarked upon), they share a decent amount of practical and thematic similarities. Thing is, I read Beowulf for the first time about seven or eight months before I started The Magnus Archives, and approximately a year exactly before I got to episode 111 and got intensely attached to Gerry.

So that means that I apparently like Gerry Keay from The Magnus Archives so much because he reminds me of Grendel.

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The Magnus Owlchives…

I saw a barn owl in a bird field guide I was reading and was then contractually obliged to draw a Gerry barn owl. No idea how he got like that; Gertrude resurrected him as a bird or something.

Bonus sketch of the Gertrude Robinson herself:

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In the evil timeline, Gerry has garden shears instead of a lighter. The nice evil timeline has him actually gardening with them or maaaybe using them to destroy Leitners, and in the bad evil timeline he wields them like some very inconvenient fighting tool (I’m thinking of the kind with long handles here, even though I like the handheld kind with the curved blade better in general because they look cool).

Because there really is something to the Keays and their weaponry. Like, Mary looked at the straight razor that killed her father and went “this is my prized possession now” and proceeded to use it to wreak her own brand of destruction on the world and eventually herself. And the closest thing Gerry has to that, to an item that shows up repeatedly across his timeline, is his lighter. Which also killed his dad (sort of. Not the same lighter and not Eric’s first death, but it took him out of the world for the second time, anyway) and also possibly his mom (Gertrude would absolutely have borrowed Gerry’s lighter to burn Mary’s page just because she could). But Gerry to my knowledge doesn’t use it to kill people, just to burn Leitners, and then when Gerry himself becomes a Leitner, Jon burns him with the specific purpose of laying him to rest.

Something about Mary using an instrument of murder where Gerry uses an instrument of mercy.

And so, in the evil timeline, Gerry looks at the garden shears that killed his father and goes “this is my prized possession now” and maybe he just uses them to garden and maybe he uses them to fight evil and maybe he goes on his own path of destruction but either way he follows in his mother’s footsteps.

(Also, I really just like the image of Gerry snapping a pair of garden shears the way you click barbecue tongs and going “come out come out wherever you are, monsters” in the most dry voice. It’s very funny to me.)

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I was looking for an old drawing of Gerry and I found this: my first-ever drawing of Eric Delano (and young Elias!) from before I’d even listened to his episode. At this point I knew nothing about him except that he’d worked for Gertrude, was Gerry’s dad, and was probably a decent person.

My first coherent thought about this man was that he would put Gerry in one of those little babybjorn carriers.

The rationale was that Eric would probably think that his work is safer for a very small child than Mary’s work, because at least at the Institute you’re not getting eaten by anything. Only it’s generally a good idea to protect your very small child from The Eye, so Gerry got a hat shaped like a clown because The Stranger is the most aggressive way of counteracting that.

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A Gerry from my sketchbook!

[eyedoption]

If the thing bound in the Catalogue isn't technically the person itself or it's soul or anything but a memory of it, and Gerry was bound to the book by Gertrude, what if, in ways, he looked like when she first met him?

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I’ve been thinking about this too! I imagine that Gerry-as-book-ghost shows up as this kind of disconcerting mix of how he was when Gertrude met him (this includes the coat because that man gets to have a neat coat and I will die on that hill) and her sense of what he was like once they were working together, and then he occasionally just looks dead when the light catches him right, because even for Gertrude who’s pretty used to people dying around her I think that would leave some impression on the psyche.

I also like to think he will switch back and forth between normal-Gertrude’s-memory-ghost and properly-scary-death-ghost form just to try and freak the Hunters out a little. Does it work? Maybe.

Also, the implications there for the rest of the Catalogue ghosts are interesting. Gertrude’s a whole Eye avatar, she’d obviously be very good with things like remembering how someone used to look and act, but would all the other ghosts be that accurate? Did someone with like a terrible memory for faces get their hands on the Catalogue at some point and now there’s a couple ghosts in there with super blurry features and probably a whole extra layer of identity crisis on top of the normal Catalogue Ghost Standard Identity Crisis? I have so many questions.

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So I listened to too much Hadestown again (this keeps happening) and wanted to draw Mary Keay as a self-proclaimed-death-god type of figure. So here's her if her Catalogue ritual went better. She also would have a form that looked more like the classic bald-and-completely-tattooed one, I just haven't drawn it yet.

Gerry and ghost-Eric are not amused about any of this.

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Gerry: “I would love if Gertrude and I could have the kind of relationship where I threaten the people who are bothering her and they turn to her and go, ‘call off your attack dog,’ because that would be sick as hell. Unfortunately, if either of us is an attack dog it’s her, and ‘call off your research assistant’ doesn’t quite have the same flair.”

[coupangeats]

I love the transformers fandom because someone will post something like 'omg i love spingtron he's everything to me!' and you'll go to the tfwiki to find that spingtron was a character who was in 2 panels of a single marvel comic that was only sold in Scotland on rainy days in December 1989

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Omg I love Wingthing and Squawktalk they’re everything to me!!

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Ok so I watched the new Frankenstein, and I saw someone say something about how the creature (does he have a nickname? I want to nickname him) has suture lines that mimic human musculature. And then I really wanted to draw Gerry with eye tattoos that sort of do that, and it turned into something of an anatomy practice.

I also learned that if I turn down the brightness enough when photo editing it gets cursed.

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I’m watching the safety videos for my organic chemistry lab and I think Gerry would’ve liked ochem.

Like I’ve always thought that the reason he is how he is about the fears (by which I mean the fact that he is the only person in the entire third season who actually tells Jon anything helpful) is because he’s very well-suited to categorization systems and memorizing vast quantities of information. And that makes me think he’d like all the puzzle elements of like. NMR and synthesis and stuff.

Also said safety videos were very much “many of these reagents are flammable and/or toxic” and I think that would make him very happy.

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Jonathan Sims in a dress I found at the TJMaxx

Dress in question and pose reference below:

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I went and relistened to a few older Magnus Archives episodes and I realized something.

So Mary died in 2008 right? And Gerry gets hospitalized after the whole Diego Molina Incident in 2012 and I actually have no idea when he and Gertrude starting hanging out doing very serious Institute business and research. But he was apparently discharged into his mother’s care a few days after admission, which given the previous information means one of two things:

Either ghost-Mary came and picked him up at the hospital and nobody asked any questions or thought there was anything weird about this woman who is half book and Totally Corporeal, Yes Of Course She Is (which, I wouldn’t be surprised. Like mother like son and all that, and the son in question killed a man almost immediately upon entering the hospital, so they might’ve just gone “eh, weird family I guess”).

Or this is the second time in this podcast (well, chronologically speaking the first time in this podcast) that Gertrude straight-up lied to a hospital that Gerry was her kid and got away with it.

And from a technical standpoint it’s far more likely that it was Mary, just because of the timing, but I like to imagine it was Gertrude because 1) the idea of her repeatedly committing mild identity fraud specifically to hospitals about Gerry is so very entertaining, and 2) imagine the aftermath.

Like she goes “ok fine random self-assigned assistant of mine, you can stay with me for a night so you don’t have to go back to your actual mother and so I don’t have to find a way of transporting you there,” and in the morning she’s like “fuck, I thought he’d have gotten better by now”.

Elias goes and finds her at work later that day and goes “Gertrude why is there a severely injured young man taking a nap in your office” and her response is “never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or an Archivist why there is a severely injured young man taking a nap in her office” and then “he’s one of my assistants” which clears nothing up because Elias would definitely remember if he’d hired someone with that many eye tattoos.

[ivoliven]

This is hilarious and I love it, though I can probably answer the question in the most boring way possible.

MAG 4 Page Turner, in which Mary appears, also took place in 2012 and while Dominic Swain describes her as creepy, she seems to be fully corporeal.

In MAG 111 Gerry describes her half-existance as: "I did what she asked, but whenever her form faded for a few days, I would take what little revenge I could." So it sounds like she wasn't half-corporeal the whole time, but fully corporeal half the time. However, even with that it would be hilarious to imagine her with her bald head and covered in tattoos walk into the hospital. Like, she'd be walking in the door and a nurse passing by looks at her and goes: "Ah. That makes sense. Follow me." and without asking for her name leads the weird tattoed witch lady to her weird tattoed goth son.

(This was mostly me spewing my Magnus lore because I have too much of it in my head and it has to go somewhere, please ignore if you wish and go write you headcanons, be free)

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Thank you for answering! It was not a boring answer at all, I find everything to do with the Keays to be interesting and this was very well-cited :) It also brings up even more questions about the logistics of book-ghost-Mary, if she does spend some of her time Present, Accounted For, and Corporeal On Top of That.

I have some pondering to do on my many Mary-Keay-related questions.

[mitochondrial-exosymbiont]

I went and relistened to a few older Magnus Archives episodes and I realized something.

So Mary died in 2008 right? And Gerry gets hospitalized after the whole Diego Molina Incident in 2012 and I actually have no idea when he and Gertrude starting hanging out doing very serious Institute business and research. But he was apparently discharged into his mother’s care a few days after admission, which given the previous information means one of two things:

Either ghost-Mary came and picked him up at the hospital and nobody asked any questions or thought there was anything weird about this woman who is half book and Totally Corporeal, Yes Of Course She Is (which, I wouldn’t be surprised. Like mother like son and all that, and the son in question killed a man almost immediately upon entering the hospital, so they might’ve just gone “eh, weird family I guess”).

Or this is the second time in this podcast (well, chronologically speaking the first time in this podcast) that Gertrude straight-up lied to a hospital that Gerry was her kid and got away with it.

And from a technical standpoint it’s far more likely that it was Mary, just because of the timing, but I like to imagine it was Gertrude because 1) the idea of her repeatedly committing mild identity fraud specifically to hospitals about Gerry is so very entertaining, and 2) imagine the aftermath.

Like she goes “ok fine random self-assigned assistant of mine, you can stay with me for a night so you don’t have to go back to your actual mother and so I don’t have to find a way of transporting you there,” and in the morning she’s like “fuck, I thought he’d have gotten better by now”.

Elias goes and finds her at work later that day and goes “Gertrude why is there a severely injured young man taking a nap in your office” and her response is “never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or an Archivist why there is a severely injured young man taking a nap in her office” and then “he’s one of my assistants” which clears nothing up because Elias would definitely remember if he’d hired someone with that many eye tattoos.