VERTIGALA

[brightfiction]

made this in response the wiki saying this:

“In Alan Wake 2, Rose writes a zombie post-apocalypse fanfiction featuring herself, Alan, and Scratch in a love-triangle. Despite writing a piece of fiction, it does not come to reality. It's possible that one needs a certain level of artistic talent to achieve actual changes in reality, or the Dark Presence chooses what comes to life or not.”

[vertigala]

TMA Season 5 funny moments part 1!

[bethfuller]

i love dropping my pen putting my glasses on my desk and rubbing my face like an exhausted divorced academic in the 1980s who is greying and sexily tousled and has been up for hours digging through the yellowed pages of old obscure treatises about etruscan pots

[gem1ny]

baby nico!

[thealogie]

The thing about standing ovations is that they are like after care for actors: it’s ok that you dressed up and played pretend for two hours! Everyone liked it! No one thought it was weird!

[vertigala]

Season 4 funny moments part 2!

[vertigala]

Part 1 of S4 TMA funny moments!

[radioactive-yuri]

i've seen a few people theorize that redcanary is this universe's jonah magnus host because of the whole "canaries should stay above ground" thing and the objectively funny thing about this theory is that it implies that jonah magnus knows how to post. it implies he logged into redcanary's account post-possession (unless they were already logged in), took an image of their torn out eyes, managed to upload that image into the right thread, captioned it, and then posted it.

he might be 200 years old but by god my girl knows how to blog!!!

[grxygreenrain]

real pic of jonah magnus captioning his gore post

[tmagpposting]

So, about TMAGP Ep 4

Some theories based on this newest episode. Major spoilers under the cut, so please go listen to it first.

I know there have been a lot of popular theories up to this point that Augustus would be Jonah Magnus, and episode 4 puts a lot more evidence out there that would seem to support this idea.

Here's what I thought was relevant to this theory after listening through the episode twice this morning:

Augustus is voiced by an older man who I don't think we've ever heard before, and we've never heard Jonah's actual voice either, since he's using Elias's voice throughout all of TMA as far as I'm aware. He sounded vaguely like Jurgen Leitner to me, although I think this is just on account of the fact that the VAs sound similar and not indicative of them being the same person or being meant to voice the same character (I didn't catch who voiced him in the credits and I couldn't find it online, if you all know please tell me and I'll update this)*

The incident report is a very old document, with a writing style and tone reminiscent of the old statements/letters to Jonah in the early days of the institute. It seems like it'd be right up Jonah's alley.

The episode revolves around a man succumbing to a dark power and eventually dedicating himself to it (the freaky bloodlust violin vs the Eye) and recruiting a younger man, in this case his relative, to serve this violent power (though probably after his death in this case, unlike with Jonah), which has some parallels to Jonah's recruitment of Jon and the rest of the staff in TMA.

We don't know much about the universe of TMAGP yet, but we know there is a Magnus institute that has aldready been linked to Eye-esque characteristics like paranoia, suspicion, (fatal) curiosity, and eyes as of Ep 1. It is possible that Augustus could be a version of Jonah from the TMAGP universe, rather than the same Jonah we dealt with in TMA.

.JMJ error could stand for some combination of Jon, Martin, and Jonah's initials, given that Chester and Norris also have Jon and Martin's voices.

In the TMA finale, Jon, Martin, and Jonah (though I assumed he was dead at that time) were close to where the fears were sucked out of the world and sent somewhere else, and Jon and Martin may also have ended up in the OIAR's computers in some form.

On the other hand, here's some evidence against Jonah being Augustus:

The other Jonah theory I've seen posits that Jonah took over RedCanary's body when they went down to investigate the ruins of the magnus institute, assuming that "canaries should stay above ground" and the gory photo of eyes was meant to represent RedCanary's eyes having been ripped out and presumably replaced with Jonah's. If you interpret things this way, it makes it less likely that Jonah is in the computers, unless you think both TMA Jonah and a hypothetical TMAGP Jonah are both around at the same time, though this theory is also a little shaky itself since it seems to be based on only a couple pieces of evidence so far. I first saw a post about this from @thermodynamic-comedian though that post says she saw other people discussing it, so please lmk if you know any major contributors to this theory and I will add them in here too.**

The fact that, to take over as the Eye's pupil, it was implied that Jon had to actually kill Jonah, and he was seemingly dead as of the TMA finale. Death was usually a very hard line in TMA except for a few avatars of the End and near-deaths where characters lost some of their agency (and/or humanity depending on your interpretation) to become an avatar instead (which Jonah already was), so him being back after seemingly already having been killed off isn't super plausible unless it's revealed that he didn't actually die in the first place.

It seems like there's enough evidence at this point that this theory definitely feels viable, though there is nothing definitive that I'm aware of, and there are some things that point to other explanations.

I personally (this is now entering pure opinion territory, tread lightly) don't love the idea of Augustus being Jonah, because I'd prefer it to be someone or something new to the series or something otherwise more surprising, rather than the same central antagonist as last time. There certainly are ways they could pull this off well, and bringing him back definitely doesn't tarnish the story on its own, especially since he was a pretty great villain with a lot of his character left more or less ambiguous or untouched by TMA, but it still feels a bit like relying on nostalgia for TMA to flesh out TMAGP's plot and conflict, at least to me. However, all the evidence pointing to it being Jonah could be some kind of red herring to specifically mislead past fans of TMA and set up for a later twist, or we could just be running our minds in circles and drawing conclusions that won't turn out to be relevant to TMAGP so early on. Only time will actually tell, and regardless, I'm really eager to see what happens.

* UPDATE: Augustus is voiced by Tim Fearon, thank you to @lokicat5 for finding that out! We haven't heard him before on this podcast, so he could be either Jonah Magnus's original voice, or a new character entirely.

** UPDATE: I found and reblogged what seems to be the original theory that Jonah killed and took over RedCanary, it's by @vertigala and @doomatix, check out their post it's pretty cool.

[vertigala]

Yes!! Very good points OP. I find it hard to imagine that Augustus isn't Jonah (specifically the one from TMA), personally. To me that's the most solid piece of speculation for the new series yet. But as for RedCanary being Jonah, that was mostly Doom and me putting on the tinfoil hat and going crazy, and while I think it's definitely possible, it would need a lot more development in the narrative for it to seem like it will actually come to fruition.

These are my two current speculations for how the Augustus/Jonah thing will develop:

1. Augustus is Jonah from TMA, and the Jonah Magnus of this universe is dead. In this case, I think some new group rising from the Institute's ashes or the OIAR itself will be the main antagonists, with whatever "The Magnus Protocol" is being the Big Thing that ties the two series together, plus the computer voices. I think the JMJ voices will play a part in the development of the story, but will take a backseat to the new cast. With Jonah in the OIAR systems perhaps gaining some agency plus Sam kicking off the plot with his curiosity, I think a target will be painted on them, as we've begun to see already, and conflict from the new baddies will ensue.

2. Augustus is Jonah from TMA, but the Jonah Magnus from this universe is ALIVE. Whether or not this turns out like our crackpot RedCanary theory, the idea of having two Jonah Magnuses in the story is absurd and in order for it to work I think they would have to converge and Become One again. With this I think things would largely go the same way as the first point, but it would place greater emphasis on the computer voices and their importance to the plot, and would have to be handled very carefully to not be too pandery to the previous series like you feared OP.

All of this speculation is purely focused around Jonah and I think there's going to be SO much more in the story that will enrich it far beyond him. If any of this does turn out to be true I'm certain that it will only be a part to a much greater whole of new and wonderful content that we just have to be patient for.

ALSO-- according to that RQ stream celebrating the launch of Protocol, in episode 10 we'll be seeing Sam and Alice "go to a place"... and I think we all know where that place will be. I suspect we'll get some answers about the current state of the Institute and possibly what the conflict will be.

Great points OP, thanks for tagging me so I could behold them 👁👏 I've been having a lot of thoughts about the RedCanary theory since I posted it and I guess I've used this as an excuse to ramble some more.

[bernard-the-rabbit]

Oh alice..you would have loved Tim pls don't end up like him <3

[vertigala]

I've been making these little text edits for funny moments from TMA and I thought I'd share the link to the latest one here! The rest from S3, S2, and S1-era are uploaded there as well.

[sydneighsays]

The Magnus protocol has awakened something unholy back up in me

Not that Jon being my favorite isn't unholy in the first place

[vertigala]

You thought you could just hide this in the tags huh @the-dumb-smart-friend

You caused this 🫡

From this post.

[1st image ID: two furbies are sitting on the desk before a 1995 computer monitor. One says "Jon, this is NOT what I was expecting when you said you found 'bodies' for us." The other one says "Well... at least we can blink now?" Jonah laughs at them from the monitor. End ID.]

[2nd image ID: a screenshot of a tag from user "the-dumb-smart-friend" says: "#I think it would be funny if they uploaded their consciousnesses to like #furbies or something." End ID.]

[tmajournals]

grampapaw elias When

[vertigala]

Clone baby 🥺 I kinda want to get into making animatics, currently thinking for Stellar Firma, so this is me practising my Davids

[vertigala]

Felt like drawing these boys when they was fresh

[deathapartment]

nightmare blunt rotation in the windows 95