#Just how Jonny Sims likes it

[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

I accidentally lost my mind in the tags of this post. So I’m breaking Tumblr law by posting a screenshot of my own hashtags. Because now the idea of the Archivist as Hamlet is eating my entire brain.

They both have a mother figure named Gertrude.

They both spend monologue after monologue about the morality of decision-making and action.

“Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”

Hamlet argues with himself about whether action or inaction is better when you can’t possibly know all the variables of the outcome. 

Tell me you don’t hear The Archivist

Is the more noble thing to endure suffering like a martyr or too fight back and end the suffering, perhaps by Ending the suffering. This is literally the argument of MAG 200.

Because to both, death would be preferable than the fight, because it would mean an end to the suffering. But you can’t kill yourself. Hamlet promised God by being a Catholic. Jon just promised Martin. So what both of them do instead is to make shitty decision after stupid, idiotic decision, and get all of their friends and loved ones murdered instead, by accident. Hamlet didn’t mean for Ophelia to kill herself. He didn’t even mean to kill Polonious. And Jon is gutted over the deaths of Tim and Sasha. But they were the direct result of his mistakes. 

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all: The Jonathan Sims story.

God it’s not just that monologue, it’s the whole damn character. 

“And in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.”

“I don’t wanna be another goddamn mystery”

[jazzically]

i cant believe i forgot to mention this IM CRYING I MISS THEM SO MUCH

[phrogee]

žonathan so wildly different every time i attempt to draw him, gah

(sketch under the cut and alllat)

no speedpaint this time, have misc screenshots

this singular jon sketch convinced me to pick a display tablet over getting an android for digital art , for i could never leave my one and only love, my darling dear,,,,,

my cracked copy of clip studio paint

also i cannot for the life of me figure out why the colours look so off when i export outta csp?

singular google search uh something to do with embedding the something something uhg ICC profile.... uhmh.... its good now!

why didnt i google that months ago.

[just-an-enby-lemon]

Silly TMA X MECS fanfic where Jon and Jonny look basically the same and are switched and the Mecs automatically know that some shit happened to Jonny because he isn't in the ship and still there was no repports of mass violence and only of Jonny asking random questions and are worried about him (even more when the found Jon because he is definitivally not Jonny, no eye shadow, no alcohool close and he tried to stop a bar fight? "Ew who is this nerd?" mutters Gunpowder Tim) but the Archieve Crew just looks at Jonny and decides Jon finally went murderhobo insane for at least a whole ass week until Martin is just too distressed over Jon having a totally different tea taste now that they have to consider that maybe this really is a different guy.

[coconut530]

👁️Movie Night👁️

[deaderthandoubledead]

I'm about to finish Magnus Archives for the very first time today and I'm filled with so much sadness. In a weird way this show has been so comforting for me (despite all the horrors) and it pains me that I'll never be able to experience listening to it for the first time again. Jonny and Alex and everyone did such good work and this is definitely one of those fandoms that will stay with me forever, hyperfixation be damned...

Well, off to cry my eyes out at the finale and then jump straight into Protocol

[ashpkat]

edited the transcript to TMA in order to fit my AU

told in ss since i have no clue how to work HTML (everything is taken from the transcript of ep 39 of TMA and adjusted to fit my AU)

[walterdecourceys]

i love that post that's like "when heterosexual authors write two characters as a self-insert for them and their friend and then the fandom decides they're in gay love" and then someone comments "jonmartin" one million times. like none of those descriptors actually apply to jonmartin

[mississpissi]

smirke is so so cute and silly. he built an underground tunnels system with a tunnel dedicated to each of the fears. theme park ass architecture. “it’s all about balance” sure ^_^ that’s really cute! did it work?

[jonnywaistcoat]

Hi Jonny, if you don't mind I have a question about the TMA TTRPG! So I noticed that on the player's guide there's this guy, who my friends and I assumed is probably Jon. If it is him, is this a canon design, or more like some of the non-canon stuff that's in the merch?

So, I hope you don't mind if i use this ask to go a bit off on one. I'm not specifically dragging you (I'm actualy glad you asked, as I've thinking about posting on the topic), but all the discussion around the RPG art and how "official" or "canon" it might be is, to my mind, slightly silly.

First up, is it "official" art? I mean, yeah, its art for the officially licenced Magnus Archives RPG. This means Monte Cook Games have commissioned someone to do a beatiful illustration broadly based on some aspect, episode or character from the podcast and it goes in the book. But that's kinda all it means. "Official" is a legal distinction, not an artistic one. The fact that it's in an official product doesn't make it any less one artist's cool interpretation of a character that has only been vaguely described in audio.

Second, is it Jonathan Sims the Archivist? I mean, it's probably based on the idea of him, but it's certainly not set in stone. When we were first discussing art with MCG, we advised that character pictures be more vibes-based and not explicitly tied to specific people (ie. a portrait inspired by Tim wouldn't be captioned "This is Tim" and wouldn't be placed opposite a profile for Tim Stoker, archival assistant.) This was mainly because we wanted the artists to have plenty of freedom to interpret and not feel too tied down by the need to know everything about the podcast. But, to be frank, it was also because we know that there are a few fans out there that are kinda Not Chill about what they've personally decided these characters look like and can get a bit defensive over depictions that differ.

It strikes me as particularly strange to be having this discussion about art that's for a roleplying game book. Something that's explicitly and solely designed to give you the ability to play in your version of the Magnus universe. The idea that this is the thing where we'd for some reason try to immutably establish unchangable appearances for these characters would be pretty funny if some folks weren't taking it so seriously. Similarly ridiculous is the idea we could reasonably have said to MCG "We'd love for you to make a huge beautiful RPG book of our setting... Just make sure you don't depict any of the iconic characters or events from it!"

But... is it "canon"? Now, to my mind, this highlights a real weakness in a lot of fandom thinking around "canon", which is that it generally has no idea what to do with adaptations. All adaptation is interpretation, and relies on taking a work and letting new creatives (and sometimes the same ones) have a different take on it. Are the appearances of the Fellowship of the Ring in the LOTR movies "canon"? How much, if at all, does that matter? Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere was originaly a 90s BBC series made with a budget of 50 pence; is anyone who makes fanart of Mr Croup that doesn't look like the actor Hywel Bennet breaking canon? What about the novel that describes the character differently? Or the officially licenced Neverwhere comic where he looks like neither of them? Which is his "canon appearance"?

Canon is an inherently messy concept, and while it is useful for a creative team trying to keep continuity and consistency within a creative work, for thinking about anything beyond that it tends to be more hinderance than help.

Anyway, all this is to say that the above picture and all the others in the RPG are exactly as canon as every other picture you've ever seen of the Archivist.

[lightsauce9999]

There's a lot of valid reasons to like TMA but I'm kinda surprised at how little the horror aspect is brought up.

I started listening because someone told me it was sad and horrible and I jumped at that alone. I love horror, I love tragedy. I didn't even think about shipping until season 3 when Jmart first occurred to me. I love listening to those terrible statements because that's some good quality horror.

Just. Where's the love for the horror aspect? I have so much for it. Just. AAAAHHHHH

And Jonny Sims as a horror author doesn't uses the commonly used tropes that I can't stand and safe horror is such a wonder. I can get my grubby little hands on something he wrote with zero research and I know it will be good and won't cross any lines.

Anyway this is a Jonny Sims and his horror writing appreciation post.

[chaoskid-deer]

today’s episode has so many GREAT (heartbreaking) moments but one thing that really struck me was how Seward is doing. He uses a lot of clinical language that could easily be interpreted as him being more emotionally removed but jonny sims’ performance makes me think how much of that is a coping mechanism to try desperately to keep it together so he can do his job as Lucy’s doctor, as well as how much he is straight up UNABLE to process his own feelings.

Especially during the part where he’s comforting Arthur, and talking a lot about Masculine Grief, it doesn’t feel like someone trying to assert how tough and manly they are, it feels more like he’s grasping at straws trying to figure out how to comfort his friend and trying to justify that him mostly just standing there holding Arthur was Ok and A Good Job. Arthur is telling him that he doesn’t know what he has to live for, and as we know from Seward’s opening lines, Seward doesn’t know either!!! He’s basically standing there wanting to die listening to the strongest, best man he knows ask him how he’s supposed to go on and has NOTHING to give Arthur. But for some reason just holding him and crying together seemed ok? So maybe he did something right? Must have been because Arthur is so Manly and Perfect that he didn’t need a lot of comfort to pull through. (Oh Seward, it’s because you’re his BEST FRIEND and you’ve been there for him at great personal cost this whole time, give yourself some credit)

This ties in to a lot of @see-arcane ‘s excellent analysis of how Seward likes to hold up his friends as Better People than him, and take cues about how to act from them, and uses performing masculinity and clinical distance as a crutch because he thinks there’s something inherently wrong with him that he’s afraid of.

And right now, he doesn’t even have the time to process his own feelings. Lucy has died, and on top of grieving the woman he loves, he also feels as though he’s failed her as her doctor. But Arthur need support and is busy with his fathers death, Lucy has no nearby relatives, van helsing is busy with his own mysterious quest, and all of the administrative work of death still needs to be handled by someone.

Arthur gets to lay his head against the sofa and pray. Van Helsing gets to beat his palms and sob. But for Seward, there is work to be done, and he won’t let himself break down until it’s done. And his work is never done.

[nerdypixel]

Both, but I already think both are great!

[the-lonely-crow]

so. Slay the princess huh? Genuinely kind of funny just how much My Taste In Media this game is. It’s got time loops. It’s got eldritch romance. It’s got a bird themed protagonist. It’s got multiple dimensions. It’s got a cool unique art style. It’s got contemplations on life and death. It’s got romanticized body horror. It’s got Jonny Sims.

[Image ID: digital drawing of the protagonist of Slay The Princess. He is a bird-like creature with at least two large sets of wings on his back that come forward and loosely wrap around him. Another much smaller set of wings stretch from the center of his face, extending out and up and obscuring all of his face put a shiny black beak. His arms are covered in the same slightly iridescent deep blue feathers that cover his entire body and his hands end in sharp clawed fingers. His left hand is resting lightly in the center of his chest and his right is held slightly lower and is loosely wrapped around a pristine blade. He wears a deep red tunic that drapes loosely over what we can see of his torso. A shining gold halo frames his head. Around the edge is a simple red frame. /End ID]

[bananonbinary]

goddd i love tma so much i love how each episode has thematic relevance to the fear that's about to attack the person, they have to be SUSCEPTIBLE first. im relistening to piecemeal and in addition to just being a literal murderer who presumably deals a lot in Meat, the guy keeps using phrases like "waste of skin" and "human garbage" and all this other stuff that clearly feeds into the more esoteric stuff behind The Flesh, about feeling like a body in the machine, only as valuable as the pieces you can cut off of yourself are. he was ripe for the flesh long before he met angela.

and ive gone on before about like, Do Not Open, and how joshua was feeling money pressure and all this ambient stress unrelated to but definitely feeding the coffin.

10/10 good shit jonny sims knows how to do a horror.

[charlies-tma-blog]

just listened to tmagp 26. jonny. mr jonathan "terrible at coming up with names so i will have mc named the same as me and also like 5 michaels" sims. he heard us complaining about how he pronounced jared and gerard as if they were interchangeable and said : haha ok bet. and made this week’s statement about jarrod smith. the mix of dread and hysteria i felt when hearing that name in today’s episode… can we ever know peace