it meant me harm

the magnus archives sideblog. she/they bi/ace. follows from @pandarenwrites

[thirdchildart]

First time listening to episode 159, I rewound and replayed this moment between Jon and Martin three times in a row before moving on. Wept so deeply, I barely paid attention to Peter's statement.

I've been overlooked in love many times. So when Martin vanished because Jon loved him too late, because he didn't fully believe Jon cared, it hit hard. I'm still aching that this episode ended beautifully as it did.

Full 9-min animatic is my pinned post

[mllekurtz]

I have no explanation, I was just overly committed to this.

(Click for better quality, if you really want to)

[sadmages]

Actually I take it back the only tma show adaptation I will accept is if they try to recreate the fact that we only hear what is recorded on tape by framing everything from the tape recorder's perspective so all of season 1 looks like this

[cosmicrhetoric]

yeah i really have to respect wolf 359 for priming its audience’s tolerance of insane situations so well. like the toothpaste siege was literally episode two but seeing minkowski, who’s the by the book member of the team, smash that mf neurotoxin gas button at literally the drop of a hat sure did prepare us cause suddenly the star is baja blast and whamma jamma and then its the finale and the main villain is like “i can catch bullets” and we’re all like of course he can catch bullets this makes complete sense 

[cosmicrhetoric]

forgot to mention the characters have to go thru this too after three years lovelace is like uh guys i know you won’t believe me but we’re in a time loop and minkowski just goes uh huh yeah that happens sometimes. what about it

[alas-the-void-screams-back]

I think the funniest part of MAG 23 - "Schwartzwald" is the conversation Jon and Martin have in the middle of it:

- WHY are you walking around in your underwear?!?

- WHY are you here at 6:30 in the morning?!?

[seachanqe]

#jon: Martin!! youre in your underwear in the middle of the office!!  #martin: okay and???? its my underwear time bitch go to bed ( @hotdrinks​)

[ryutarotakedown]

do you ever get incandescently furious about how utterly unquotable some of the most hard-hitting lines from the magnus archives are. how the fuck do i explain to someone without context why i—open—the door is legitimately horrifying. how am i supposed to explain why “i see you, jon. …i see you” can elicit tears without sounding batshit. how do i convey the unspeakable emotion in “helen… was that a lie?” without first giving 186 episodes of backstory

[ryutarotakedown]

absolute bangers people are mentioning in the notes:

can i have a cigarette?

the blanket never did anything

she took him from me. made us a me. and she doesn’t get to die for that

there is a wasp’s nest in my attic

i got eaten by worms because of you!

look at the sky, martin. look at the sky.

i don’t want to just survive!

i am not a brave man, but i am, in certain circumstances, a very stubborn one.

i really loved you, you know?

ceaseless watcher,

the audience is only safe when the story isn’t about them

hello, jon.

absolute bangers people are not mentioning in the notes:

perhaps i have never even seen a beach

[shorteststory]

VERY SCARY STORY FOR THE SCARY SEASON (ft. Jonathan Sims)

[filthyprotozoan]

Every other Avatar gets to have their feelings burned right out of them, but me? I’ve just got to sit in mine.

[dnptrashlikesart]

Hamid with all the people that he has lost (in order: Aziza, Bertie (i know he doesn't look much like him I'm sorry I haven't drawn him once let's pretend that that's how he looked like in college), Grizzop and Sasha. Hopefully it was worth the effort bc this was so long to make lol

open for better quality, and hope you like it!

if you want to buy me a coffee

[gertruderobinsonscat]

Look, I’m sorry Jonny Sims didn’t emerge from your speakers like an indie podcast version of Sadako Yamamura, hold you gently by the hand, look you in the eyes, and say “The Archivist kept forgetting the lighter because he was supernaturally unable to perceive it. I thought I was being obvious, what with the fact it was given to him by the embodiment of mind control and manipulation and he has been incapable of remembering it since it was introduced, despite multiple people pointing it out to him (up to and including the Big Bad’s emissary during her villain monologue). I should have realized I couldn’t compete with wannabe fandom comedians’ determination to run ‘Jon is so stupid’ jokes so far into the ground they’re starting to become avatars of the Buried.”

[gertruderobinsonscat]

Reblogging this again. (Insert don’t make me tap the sign again meme)

[gertruderobinsonscat]

You know, at this point I don’t think even the above scenario would work with some people, since there are some who still missed the obvious hints that Jon has always believed in the supernatural and his skepticism was all an act to keep something supernatural from harming him. Hints like Jon explicitly saying “I’ve always believed in the supernatural, I believe every statement that’s gone on tape, the skepticism was an act to throw off a [supernatural] being that I believe is watching me”.  Maybe if Jonny Sims crawled out of the speaker and hovered over their shoulders as the scrolled tumblr dot com with a spray bottle in one hand ready to be employed whenever a hilarious “lol can’t believe jon doesn’t believe in the supernatural even after an evil spider monster tried to eat him” post shows up. 

[agnesmontague]

ngl seeing some people be like “omg i cant believe the rq mods walked out 🤭😂 rq was always such a bad company” is cringe bc i know having to deal with shitheaded fans like them too often while being unpaid and virtually uncompensated is part of the reason the mods walked out, it’s like seeing liberal karen moms posting woke memes protesting starbucks’ treatment of baristas on facebook when they had a tantrum at the baristas in starbucks that very morning

[heir-of-the-chair]

Wait what happened? I apparently don’t have context for this… /gen

[agnesmontague]

tl;dr: the entirety of the official rusty quill discord server has gone into (temporary but indefinite) read-only mode as of yesterday, september 10, 2021, because nearly all of its mod team resigned in unison in protest of lack of compensation, lack of transparency, and general poor treatment. 

the rusty quill discord mod team was made up entirely of volunteers, who were not paid and essentially just doing it as a passion project for the community. this became more and more difficult and unfeasible as the server grew in size, and at the time of the shutdown the server consisted of ~13k members. these mods had to deal with incredibly rude, entitled discord users far more often than they should have, because people were using them as their first point of contact for any grievance they had with the RQ shows or the community, and their efforts to moderate the server by asking these people to direct their complaints to the RQ complaints page or somewhere more personal were met with all sorts of accusations and personal attacks. not to mention that some of these rude users who made the discord unusable through “raids” or public shit-flinging were just people with personal vendettas against some of the mods for the kind of fic they wrote, or from other interactions outside of the official server–none of which had any place in a discord that was meant to be an officially protected space for RQ fans of all kinds. many of these people went on to spread rumors that the mods were bigoted or that RQ supported bigotry because they weren’t allowed to be rude and accusatory towards others in a public server, go figure.

the point is, the mods had to do a lot of heavy lifting while not being paid by the company. a while ago (i’m not a former mod, so i’m not 100% on the precise timeline), the head moderator, autumn (who was paid), was either let go or resigned for reasons unknown but which clearly struck the volunteer mods as unfair. this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. all of them but one (who stayed until the announced shutdown went into effect, and also resigned after that time) resigned en masse, at which point the server had to be shut down because there was simply no way for it to continue feasibly without a moderating team. as of today, one day later, there hasn’t been any outside statement from RQ about this affair, though a corporate statement released within the server’s announcements channel was poorly received due to its vague and unhelpful wording that made it sound like the mods were the ones being accused of something instead of the other way around. this has caused some people to wrongfully speculate that the server shutdown occurred because “the mods were racist” or because of the personal vendettas mentioned above, none of which are true. the issues raised were raised by the mods who had had enough shit to deal with from entitled fans without the company doing much to compensate them or protect them. 

so it’s pretty funny to me, who was there for some of the server’s lowest moments dealing with shit-stirrers, to see some of those very same shit-stirrers pretending to care about the mod team in any capacity for a cheap shot against RQ, which they already had grievances against. they love to pretend they weren’t part of the problem that contributed to the discord being shut down and an unpleasant place for many people. it is, how should i say, cringe. 

[stopitjon]

Lottie is entirely right. I have witnessed a lot of what made modding that discord such a trial, as well as the behind-the-scenes mental health struggles it caused, and you know what? If this fandom weren’t so hellbent on tearing people down, at the very least, the situation wouldn’t have escalated to this degree.

Yes, RQ fucked this up in a big way. (I sent them a three page letter a year ago urging them to shut down the discord because of the way the mod team was being treated, so like, I am aware.) If you feel you need to cancel your patreon or whatever because of it, do what you gotta do.

But I swear to god, if you all weren’t so quick to make every desire a demand, to try and hold people with no power to account for things outside their control, to turn petty dislike into harassment campaigns, to believe every single thing that gives you an excuse to treat other people like shit (RQO is still up despite being frozen, btw, so you can start researching whether those rumors you continue to spread are actually true any time now), at least this could have been a garden-variety shitty unpaid job instead of the unpaid job from hell.

So if your first reaction to recent events is to try to use them as leverage for your preexisting annoyances with RQ or a “good” reason to whip up a mob to harass people in the company (before the full details of what happened are even made public!), sit the fuck down. You can ask for change and accountability without being a dick. The frothing hate campaigns have done absolutely nothing to date except really hurt those who had no ability to fix things anyway, and made this fandom a terrible place to exist, like, in general.

Look, it’s an ongoing struggle for all of us, but if we’re going to demand better, we also need to be better.

[bananonbinary]

tma time travel au but instead of explaining anything jon and martin spend the entire time in a heated debate over whether it’s actually time travel or dimensional travel, and whether there’s a meaningful difference between the two.

[bananonbinary]

Jon: It’s dimensional travel; that’s even what Annabelle said it was, and Anya Villette proved that different universes can be moving faster or slower than each other. We’re clearly just in a universe that hasn’t yet caught up to ours.

Martin: We haven’t seen any differences between where we are now and what we lived! if it’s another dimension, it’s indistinguishable from our past, so what’s the point in thinking of it differently?

Jon: The point is that if it’s not time travel, then we left behind another world rather than overwriting it, and furthermore-

Tim, who just asked if they wanted anything from the bakery:

[bananonbinary]

Sasha: wait did you mention something about the apocalypse? can we go back to that?

Jon, standing and pacing: -and if it were time travel then we’d be in constant danger of paradoxes, something that clearly-

Martin, also standing and red in the face: Paradoxes?! You said yourself that the entities work on dream logic, not physics! If we time traveled, which we did, we could simply assume that-

[bananonbinary]

#I can totally see this argument happening bc Martin wants to think their choices will allow them to Undo the bad#while jon is resigned to the idea that you can’t change the past but he needs to prevent harm in this new doomed dimension (via @dathen)

honestly this was written in a super lighthearted shitpost-y way but i really was conceptualizing it as an extension of their positions in the finale.

jon would be pretty against the idea of time travel just as a philosophical concept i think, because to him it would sound like an excuse to just pretend nothing ever happened. and also because if time is a Line you can move back and forth on, rather than just the way we conceptualize Stuff Happening, that opens up uncomfortable questions about “fate” and “what should have happened.”

i was also thinking that martin probably wouldn’t like to think of it as “different” if versions of their friends are there, because he doesn’t really think of the people in other universes as “real.” if he were to meet a tim that was exactly like his tim, i think he’d just treat them as the same person unless a discrepancy came up.

[artbyblastweave]

I gotta say, as someone who really, deeply gets the appeal of revenge-horror fantasies, and of the siren song of vigilantism in general, there was something deeply, deeply satisfying about how thoroughly The Magnus Archives went “No, fuck you” in regards to that “ethical murder” post going around about how vampires should target billionaires or whatever, Santa Clarita style.

I’m deeply leery of flippant attempts to brush off the moral consequences of a vampiric lifestyle with “Oh, I’ll just target bad people! UwU.” That wouldn’t be sustainable! People go to school to try and figure out who’s deserving of punishment and death on a moral, legal and philosophical level, and we all know how that fucking goes!  What, are you gonna start working your way down the twitter callout list? Kill customers who’re rude to you in the hopes that that was the extent of their whole fucking personality? What happens when eight vampires show up at the house of the same convicted sex offender? How many corrupt politicians can you kill before people notice a pattern? For that matter, do you, personally, actually pay enough attention to politicians to tell the genuinely corrupt and abhorrent from the faintly slimy, or the decent ones targeted by the media?

Broadly speaking I’m deeply leery of most media that tries to pawn off vampires and werewolves and the like as misunderstood outcasts while also having them have to eat people to sustain themselves- if X-Men aren’t an ideal metaphor for marginalized groups because they have an inherent potential to be a threat, monsters suck when the narrative shows us that they really are just going to keep killing people, again and again and again, and the best we can hope for is that all the people that they’re shown killing are set up in advance as unpleasant or evil, so it’s all fine. 

It’s a copout. If there’s anything resembling a society of these bastards- or even a small community of them, a la The Magnus Archives- then all those charming supporting characters have almost certainly done something to earn themselves the death penalty a hundred times over.

And that’s what I love about TMA- there’s no ethical way to do it, and most of the avatars don’t bother pretending that there is, or pretending that they care enough to go out of their way to find one. The handful that do either wind up repudiating their power with mixed success (Melanie, Daisy, Martin) or spending all their time working damage control (Jon) and mostly failing anyway. The vigilante monsters (Daisy, Trevor) are arguably the worst, in that they explicitly get the wrong people quite often and then just brush it off as the cost of doing business. Adelard Dekker is the only vigilante in the setting who manages to walk that line without falling off, in that he only ever targets avatars who are actively, patently engaged in killing sprees or mass murder (Throne of melted corpses, anyone?) and he, himself doesn’t have any powers.

(Compare to settings like Worm, where the superpower system is inherently rooted in a person’s trauma and damage, and the “Avatars” thus tend to circle back to it in a way that’s unhealthy, but there are still paths to be productive and ethical within the confines of the system- they’re just really hard to find, and frequently beaten down by conventional human bureaucracy. Compare to The Boys, whose major saving grace was its near complete unwillingness to play ball with the “MCU Superheroes as a marginalized group“ dynamic.)

[nureyev-steel-institute]

Thinking about Georgie asking Melanie if Admiral being a Hunt avatar makes him evil and Melanie responding "It makes him a cat." Thinking about how so many different types of people become avatars. Thinking about how being afraid can lead you to becoming an avatar. Thinking about how it's so easy to become an avatar by accident. How Jon was manipulated into it. How Jonah Magnus refused to be a victim. How Callum Brodie makes others experience his fear. How Peter Lukas grew in that fear, how fear became him, how he *is* fear. How humans don't start off more or less evil than one another. How being an avatar can be a response to fear. How sometimes you're not evil. You're human. And you're afraid.

[thekisforkeats]

Okay so all this talk has got me thinking about horror and how much I love it and what TMA has to do with that.

I was introduced to horror very young. Specifically, by being forced to watch C.H.U.D. while at someone’s house when I was maybe 6 or 7. It was awful and I still have nightmares about it. I was also forced to watch Arachnophobia when I was about 10 or 11, which combined with some other stuff gave me, well, arachnophobia that I’m still contending with.

First: for the love of the gods, do not force kids to watch stuff that scares them! It can mess them up!!

My own first active forays into horror were Twilight Zone episodes and vampire stuff generally. Let me be clear: it was Anne Rice. I was into Anne Rice. And monster movies; I loved monster movies!! I loved the Addams Family and somehow as I got older “monster movies” seemed like a natural outgrowth of that.

And then a friend of mine offered me a Stephen King novel, and I couldn’t put it down.

Ever since then, horror’s actually been my go-to genre. I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago or even ten years ago. I like science fiction! (I like SF horror a lot.) I like comedy! (I love self-referential and “funny” horror.) I like cosmic horr–oh wait.

Point being, if there’s one movie I can watch per year it’s gonna be the best horror movie. If there’s one new book I want to read it’s horror. If there’s one podcast… well.

The thing is, I’ve never tried to write horror, not really. My original work has all been more fantasy or SF, not tangling with questions of fear and revulsion. My original work has also consistently flamed out and stalled.

And then TMA came along and hit a really good sweet spot for me. I love podcasts, I love queer people, I like a lot of English fiction, I love cosmic horror. And suddenly I’m writing more than I’ve written in a long time, coming up with AU after AU, pulling it apart and putting it back together again.

The thing that keeps happening? Over and over and over?

“I can make it sadder.” “I can make it worse.” “I can make it scarier.”

Not the fluff I usually try to write, but the villains and the pain and the terror. The things that repulse and disgust. The… well, the horror.

Which doesn’t mean I think I’m a good horror writer–I’ve never really tried to do it much! But it makes me think maybe that’s what I want to write, and just… haven’t been letting myself, for whatever reason.

Anyway this is a bit rambling but I will also add–if TMA was your first horror fiction experience… welcome! We have snacks! I promise it’s okay to cover your eyes when something scary is on the screen. TMA is good horror and it’s a great introduction to the genre!

And always remember–just because it’s not scary to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t scare someone. I mean, to me “Deer That is Wrong” is inherently scary. Have you seen wasting disease? That shit is terrifying!! My spouse warned me off MAG 85 “Upon the Stair” and I didn’t find it frightening at all. That’s one of the beauties of an anthology series–it can play around with a lot of stuff and you can figure out what you actually like best.

[kalgalen]

and thus he spoke: “👁️”

[mothcqmart]

Statements end.