mereley subobtimal @sparkles-and-trash - Tumblr Blog

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𓆩♡𓆪 welcome 𓆩♡𓆪

current main fandoms: the magnus archives & protocol ~

but also! art, crafts, embroidery, sims, sso, plants and pets!

✦ I follow, like etc from @sparkles-main but the blog is NOT in use otherwise ✦

ao3 ko-fi about me wishlist the magnus university au bnha masterlist my other socials

my ask box and dm's are always open, I love talking about fandoms, fics and headcanons!

#pinned post #masterpost #wishlist #ao3

wreegis

fuck it, Tim’s turn to be Head Archivist!!

#the last panel is way too fucking funny

Less than a week until I pick up my ldr best freon from the airport and take him to NärCon to glamp and con and then stay at a cabin in Sweden for a while with a bunch of our other online friends what is my lifeeeeee

#he’s coming here from AMERICA #and Cheryl is coming from CANADA #I’ll be having them right in my HAND #and lurch and rik and rook and Milo and robin and and and #AAAAHHHHHH #irl tag

sparkles-and-trash

Jiro being so excited to come with Tokoyami to meet Hawks and Tokoyami keeps being like… «he’s literally not cool at all, please be prepared» but Jiro ignores him bc ofc he’s cool, he’s Hawks, only for Hawks to fucking dab when he sees them or smt lmao

#this still makes me giggle unfortunately

themaidenofwords

Jon: Wow look at all of these Freaks and Weirdos in these statements. Good thing that I'm unlike them and always logical and intelligent.

Also Jon: Supplemental-- I am in the walls.

themaidenofwords

Happy two year anniversary to Jon "in the walls" Sims

archival-crypt1d

A hammer fell down on me and i decided to start a Jon chain.

So yeah. @tea-moth11 you are up next.

tea-moth11

@too-many-eyes-and-teeth your turn! 💛

too-many-eyes-and-teeth

@rat-in-a-cloak the next Jon is up to you!!

rat-in-a-cloak

a new jon enters the ring!

passing it on! to!!! @mice-and-moonbeams!!! <3

mice-and-moonbeams

And suddenly a Red Shirt Jon is spotted! Tagging @schiwalker for our next Jon!

schiwalker

Hello Jon, apologies for the Incept-Jon, but i felt an older, be-sweatered Jon was needed.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST....

@occudo !!! For the Final Jon!

occudo

📢 It's the final Jon time! Tu-ru-ru-ruu~

#I LOVE THIS

sparkles-and-trash

꩜ The Magnus Archives University AU Masterpost ꩜

‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊ AU Synopsis ‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊

This is a new au that focuses on the daily life of students at a University on the outskirts of London, especially those on special scholarships form the elusive Magnus Institute.

It will mainly consist of a mix between little posts on here and a series of fics on ao3.

The characters that are on scholarships will have to work for five years minimum at the Magnus Institute post graduation, and their research and fields are usually connected to what the institute researches in some way or another.

Jon, Sasha and Tim are already friends, and as they're all going for their PhD's they've decided to get a house share together, as well as with Martin and Melanie, who both come highly recommended from Georgie, Jon's ex and good friend of all three.

The other major characters lives on or near campus as well, and will be relevant to the story as it goes on.

This will mainly be a slice of life story without any of the tragedy of the sourced material, but there will be plenty of canon typical spooks as the au goes on!

The ships will come as the story goes, the main ones are in the tags on this post, but some background ones may pop up here and there!

if you happen to have any questions, ideas or thoughts about the au, or just TMA or TMP in general my inbox is always open!

‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊ Major Characters ‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊

Jonathan "Jon" Sims (23) PhD in occult studies, MI sponsored

Martin Blackwood (23) Masters in historic literature, MI sponsored

Tim Stoker (24) PhD in occult literature, MI sponsored

Sasha James (25) PhD in occult studies, MI sponsored

Melanie King (22) Masters in filmmaking

Georgie Barker (24) Masters in journalism

Gerard "Gerry" Keay (23) Masters in occult studies, MI sponsored

Danny Stoker (21) Bachelors in psychology

Basira Hussain (25) PhD in political science

Daisy Tonner (26) masters in sport science

‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊ Writing ‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊

collection of random facts and headcanons

‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊ Misc ‧₊˚ ⋅* ‧₊

coming soon

sparkles-and-trash

I’ve actually been writing on this again, but I’ve changed some of the ships around and now I’m nervoussss lmao

#the magnus archives au #tma #tma au

kairos-polaris

it's so funny that people actually think Jonah didn't make Sasha the Head Archivist because he is sexist. not only do we know the actual reason but also. who do you think hired Gertrude in the 60s-70s in the first place lmao

legendarycollectionjellyfish3

Y’know, I’ve been thinking about why Jon got the archivist position as opposed to Sasha. And I know that the common idea is more of less that Elias is a sexist bastard — which I don’t disagree with — but I think that it’s more complicated than that. I think, from his point of view Jon fit the bill better. Not because he’s more competent than Sasha, but because he’s not.

See, at the end of the day, I think that Elias was afraid of Sasha. He had just got done with dealing with Gertrude, and whatever else she might have been, Gertrude was not incompetent. And Sasha was aware enough to question why the archives were a mess; had worked in archive storage enough to know that these things were real. She would have found Elias out, and she would have tried to stop him — maybe she even would have succeeded. At the very least she could have put a loop in his plans.

And there is another asset Sasha had: her coworkers liked her. Tim was really close to her, Martin trusted her, and even Jon grudgingly likes her. She would have been incredibly difficult to isolate from the others.

Jon, on the other had, was less competent than Sasha, but he still had the burning curiosity that wouldn’t let him drop a mystery. (Let’s face it, Jon is like a dog with a bone when he’s faced with a mystery, even when the mystery bites him.) In addition to that, Jon has a nice safety blanket that is denial. A few statements might be true, most of them aren’t. And that keeps him from investgating the institute from the beginning. But he believes just enough to try and stay alive.

And Jon is isolated. He’s not really close to any of the assistants, and he’s off putting enough for them to avoid reaching out to him. Martin is the only one that might of tried, but he doesn’t have the confidence in s1, and Sasha and Tim are mad at Jon for getting a position that they rightly think should have belonged to Sasha.

So Jon gets the Archivist position — ironically because Sasha is the one better suited to it.

dathen

This is the most common fandom interpretation: that Sasha is superior to Jon, more qualified, and more connected, and that Jonah selected Jon instead of her because he was afraid of her and knew his plans wouldn’t work without her. It’s what you’ll come across more in fanworks, so I don’t blame you for coming to those conclusions.

However, it is 100% contradicted by canon.

Jonah flat-out says the reason he chose Jon in TMA 160; we don’t even need to guess:

I’ll admit, my options were somewhat limited, but my god, when you came to me already marked by the Web, I knew it had to be you. I even held out some small hope you had been sent by the Spider as some sort of implicit blessing on the whole project, and, do you know what, I think it was.

Jonah was looking for a trauma punch card, and Jon came pre-marked with the most difficult one to get. It’s really just as simple as that. Sasha didn’t have any marks that we’re aware of pre-season 1, though given that she had collected THREE before she died, it’s not a stretch to say she would have collected more just as fast as Jon did–or, given that she’s even more reckless than him (see: her running into the worms to tackle Tim in TMA 39), even faster.

But I also want to address this idea that Sasha was superior to Jon in every way, and the tragedy of the story would have been avoided if she had been chosen as the trauma punch card instead. People take Gertrude’s attempt at predicting Sasha as who Jonah will choose next as some sort of “picking her successor” or endorsement. She didn’t have any say! She was expecting Jonah to kill her, and was trying to guess his next move for who he would pick next. So instead of guessing who the trauma punch card would be, she guessed based off of who already had experience with knowing the fears were real: someone with experience in Artefact Storage. Gertrude and Sasha barely met, so all the deep insight and mentor/protégé interpretations that are popular don’t really fall into this. Gertrude was also barely aware of who Jon was.

So, there really isn’t a “Why didn’t Jonah pick Sasha?” because Sasha wasn’t even on Jonah’s radar for consideration, and there isn’t a “why didn’t Gertrude guess Jon?” because Jon wasn’t even on Gertrude’s radar for predicting Jonah’s next move. The whole Sasha vs. Jon thing is 100% fandom-made.

(It’s also 100% not due to sexism; that was supposed to be dramatic irony for our sakes, when we already knew Jonah’s reason since the end of season 4. Tim was just being Overly Aggressive Ally, but more than a bit misguided, given that Sasha was almost as unqualified as Jon was–none of the assistants had degrees in Library Science, Sasha included.)

For your speculation on how close she was to everyone, I would disagree there as well. In the Q&A’s, they talked about how all of the Archives employees are isolated and don’t have close connections with others–it’s one of Jonah’s prerequisites to transferring people there. Dozens of Season 1 Archives Found Family Sleepover Parties has kind of replaced this in fandom memory, but we don’t have any evidence that Sasha would have been impossible to isolate:

She knew Martin was lying on his CV, but not from him. She hacked into his files for the fun of it and then gossiped about it to Tim. If they had a very close and trusting relationship, I wouldn’t see why she’d resort to subterfuge, and I think she’d know how desperate he was to keep it secret.

We don’t see them interact in season 1, and Sasha seems to have a low opinion of Martin’s competence: she thought both Martin and Jon were overreacting to the danger of Prentiss AFTER Martin started living in the Archives. She thought it was silly that Jon was taking Martin so seriously, because if Prentiss was really a threat, there’s no way someone like Martin could have survived her, right? Frankly, even though she’s less snappish with Martin than Jon was, it’s very fair to say she had a lower opinion of him than even s1 Jon did.

She was friends with Tim, but I think even that gets exaggerated in fandom. She loves to gather people’s secrets, but shares none of her own: for instance, Tim told her about Danny, but when Sasha started having encounters with Michael, she kept it all secret from Tim. She said she didn’t want to tell Jon without more evidence, but what was keeping her from giving Tim a call before she ran off to meet a monster by herself in a graveyard? I feel that if she were Archivist, this would have been even more intensified: she would care about him, sure, but that’s nothing new: Jon cared deeply about Sasha and was devastated by her death, but that didn’t prevent him from being isolated.

And I don’t need to put too much here for why she’s just as bad as Jon, if not worse, for needing to solve mysteries and rush into danger for information. Just listen to her statement. Jon spent all of season 1 hiding from the truth, while Sasha met with a creature she knew wasn’t human multiple times, by herself, without telling any of the others, all out of curiosity. Jon started invading people’s privacy in season 2 because he was being driven to paranoia by the presence of the Not!Them, but Sasha was already invading all her coworker’s privacy in season 1…just for fun. She was VERY suited to the Beholding, arguably more than Jon was, and would have been very easy to manipulate throwing herself into mysteries to get more marks.

Frankly, because she only appears in 5 episodes, fandom Sasha ends up being about 99% OC and a bit of a wish fulfillment character; most examples people give for why she’d be better at Jon at everything, find out all of Jonah’s secrets, avoid losing any assistants, and save the world is just….based off of headcanons, vs. the scraps of information we get from the actual episodes.

The reason why I dig so deeply into all of this and care so much about this interpretation is it changes the entire nature of the show if oversimplified. If Sasha really is this ultra-superior being who would have fixed everything with her mere presence, the tragedy gets whittled down to a pretty uncomplicated “everything would have been fine if this Hypercompetent Woman was in place instead of this loser man.” But that’s not the story being told. The tragedy we have is that whoever was doomed with the Archivist position would have been lied to, manipulated, tormented, afraid, isolated, hurt and hurt and hurt again. If Sasha had been chosen, she would have been the one suffering through all that instead of Jon, and that’s the narrow miss that we’re left to realize from Gertrude’s tape.

spacecat24-7

THANK YOU

amarryliss

It’s good to hear some actual canon facts. I mean, I LOVE a lot of headcanons about Sasha’s as a character but sometimes it feels like people forget what we *really* knew about her.

#I wanna tattoo the add on to this post on my forhead #also it’s WHY I LIKE HER #she’s NOT perfect

baleful-meat-worm

they will be boiled

#THIS AU IS EVERYTHING TO ME

baleful-meat-worm

stupendously coherent and high effort polished rendition of my awesome incredibly serious idea for an au subplot where jonah's eyeballs get scooped out and put in a jar in the breakroom fridge and elias himself handles the trauma of being like 45 suddenly and having everyone hate you and probably back pain too im not sure i haven't reached that age yet

chainmail-butch

Hi, its me. The warmest creature in the world. I love you. Im the warmest creature in the world and I love you so much and I need to be in your lap right now. Yes, I know about the heat wave. That's okay though because I was already the warmest creature in the world so I don't mind. I love you and you need to let me sleep in your lap right now. I'm soooo warm and I love you sooo much. If you say no you'll be saying no to a thing that love you. Let me sleep in your lap. When I fall asleep I get warmer. I love you

#Zelder core #and she’s never in my lap normally

sancte-gabriele

I just wanted to say that I'm so madly in love with your art....your JonTim is how I see them too and it makes me want to frolic in the fields to see your art on my dash

TYSM TYSM 🥺 art for your kind words!