#MAG032

[liennalei]

Me when i can relate to jane prentiss

[grinchparasite]

Okay I haven’t finished listening to the Magnus archives yet but I cannot stop thinking about Jane Prentiss as a character because I love her. I know that it’s the case that certain avatars serve the entity they do to avoid being victim of a different entity, and I believe that Jane Prentiss, intentionally or not is besides the point, became a servant of the corruption to avoid being a victim to the lonely, or if she hadn’t been compelled by the corruption that she would have ended up a victim of the lonely. There are specific quotes from MAG032 that would lend to this

“Sings that I am beautiful. Sings that I am a home. That I can be fully consumed by what loves me.” --> she’s throwing away being human for the sake of acceptance, love and having a place where she is wanted

“I wanted something beyond myself” --> she’s attempting to avoid insignificance 

“Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretence that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. That love us in their way.” --> once again with the focus on being loved in return and being useful 

“ was lonely before. I know that. I had friends, at least I used to, but I lost them. Or they lost me.” --> self-explanatory

“I was abandoned” --> since the hive relies on her she can not be left behind again 

“I was so very painfully lonely. Was that it? Was I swayed and drawn simply by the prospect of being genuinely loved? Not loved as you would understand it. A deeper, more primal love. A need as much as a feeling. Love that consumes you in all ways.” 

[tmisaccidentreportbook]

MAG032, Hive

Case #0142302, Jane Prentiss Release date: August 18, 2016 First listen: 6th November, the walk into work. The previous morning’s walk to work; listening to TAZ:Graduation, Travis McElroy in the break tells me he is proud of me and is holding my hand, and I burst into tears. This morning’s walk into work; listenig to Jonathan Sims read Jane Prentiss’ statement, and I’m in the middle of the road going ‘NOPE’ at the top of my lungs.

So… there was a wasp’s nest in my old landlord’s attic…

- Jane Prentiss gave a statement to the Institute February 23rd, 2014. And MAG006, which I believe is the next beat on her timeline, the event occurs 20th November 2014. So, going by what we’ve currently got, we lose her for 8 months.

- ‘I itch all the time. Deep beneath my skin…’ I look down at the area of effect of my tinea incognito infection… I slowly pull my sleeve down over it.

- That’s an interesting little word choice, ‘I don’t think I want it.’ Jane isn’t convinced that she wants shot of whatever it is trapped in her. She doesn’t think she wants it, but perhaps she can be persuaded. Her state of mind seems so washed out, like she’s exhausted and not far from delirium and it is such an effective writing style. I love it, it’s fluid and disjointed at the same time. I wonder if this was another statement Jonny wrote on not enough sleep. But it’s the sort of writing style I can fall into if I’m not careful, sweeping water colour prose and not so much a focus but a vibe. Heavens preserve my betas.

- You can hear Jane’s loss of self in her opening paragraphs, as she addresses whoever it is that is stuck taking her statement. She’s vague and unfocused, like every thought it having to be made by committee. She’s a part of a greater whole, even at this point, and you can see it in the way she addresses the statement taker. The ‘you’ appears to have weight to it, like she’s referring to the whole of the institute rather than the sole person sat before her.

- ‘…it sings so sweetly, and I need it, but I am afraid.’ Oooo that sounds a mite like addiction… sounds a mite like the descent of the person and the ascent of the Avatar…

- The Entities are an interesting colour wheel of concepts, each with their own set of siblings that compliment and oppose. The Corruption, made of ‘the things that crawl and slither and swarm in the corners and the cracks’ but also a living community, sees its’ anathema in The Beholding, that pins the insect to the cork board, that traps the bacteria on the glass slide under the microscope. Whatever Jane is, she needs it to be seen.

- ‘You can’t see it’. Ms Prentiss, I’ll bet there’s some folks in this building who can.

- This podcast has introduced my to a variety of phobias that I either knew of but didn’t have the word, or I thought I was fine with until Jonny got into it and the inevitable ‘uh oh’ would occur. Trypophobia was one that I did already know of, and I think I still am not susceptible to it. I say ‘think’, because I also thought astrophobia would never be a thing for me, because when am I ever going to go to space, but thems the breaks.  

- ‘… the holes are there too, in your own brain, rotten and hollow and swarming…’ When I was in A2 Biology, I made a terrible mistake. We were looking at the human brains and my teacher ask if any of us had ever had an MRI or a CT scan. I had as a kid, I think I was about 8 and I had a scan, can’t remember which one, think it was an MRI. I’ve had a lazy eye all my life, now we reckon it is down to muscle damage sustained during my ventouse delivery, but for a time doctors were concerned there was a brain tumour pushing where it ought not to. Long story shirt, no tumour, all fine, and I’ve got pictures of my brain. So when the classroom was asked if anyone had a picture of their own brain, I thought nothing of it about bringing the images in. My teacher then proceeded to point out every abnormality and every variation he could see, making me out to be some modern day Phineas Gage. I just remember sitting there, shaking slightly with a clenched jaw as he spoken about me like I was a specimen, only the lad next to me’s hand on my elbow and his concerned face keeping me from bolting out the door. My classmates weren’t impressed with the teacher’s manner. But yeah, they were a rough few days.

- ‘This place of books and learning, of sight and beholding.’ She’s speaking directly to you now, Jonathan, this stronghold of The Eye.

- ‘I… I haven’t slept in some time.’ Is this Jane Prentiss or Jonny speaking now?

- Music comes up again. ‘They always sing that song of flesh.’ With some Entities, I think it’s to carry threat, The Slaughter or The Hunt, or the bewilder and confuse, The Stranger, or to worship, The Dark. The Corruption may fall into the worship action too, but there may just be something about many voices sounding as one. It also invokes the image of crickets and cicadas, amassing and singing.

- ‘There will be great violence done here. And I bleed into that violence.’ Like Cassandra stood in the heart of Troy.

- I wonder who it is that Jane Prentiss is talking to. Fiona Law took statement MAG029 in 1972, and she was a research assistant, so odds are it is a member of the research team. It could have been Sasha, Tim or Jon, as they were all researchers pre-2015. Unlikely to be Martin, as he worked in the library. Could have been Gertrude herself, I can’t imagine anyone else wielding the word ‘dear’ like a weapon.

- In mid 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, my live in landlord went funny on me. Got passive aggressive, or as passive as an ex-military man can get. Got to the point that I would wait until he was out before I tried to cook for myself. If I wasn’t at work, I was holed up in my room. I came to dread coming home. When he handed me an eviction letter, it was a relief, and 3 days later, I had a new place to stay. He kept hold of the deposit, which he had no real right to, but I didn’t fight it because I was spent and I still had bigger storms rolling in. I don’t know why he went funny on me, whether he just wanted to move his girlfriend in or what. But as I left, there was a wasps’ nest growing in the attic…

- ‘It is not the patterns that enthral me, I’m not one of those fools chasing fractals…’ Bit of shade on The Spiral and Ivo Lensik's father of MAG008 there.

- ‘Sings that I am beautiful. Sings that I am a home.’ So much of The Corruption seems to be about love, looking for love, looking for community. It feels like the other side of the coin to The Lonely. The loss of the self to the crowd or to isolation. I wonder is Jane was experiencing a period of isolation at this time and she reached out to what The Corruption was offering. That she will be ‘consumed by what loves (her)’ and never be alone again.

- ‘Some sweaty old man thinks he owns it, taking money for my presence as though it will save him.’ Jonny here just scalping landlords, in the more literal sense, and I am here for it. I’ve got a very complicated relationship with the concept of landlords; I have been subjected to wonderful landlords and terrible landlords, but also, my father’s a landlord. I won’t go into detail, but yeah, this series has had me examining some class and socio-economic guilt and that needed to happen. But I appreciate that housing security will be a big thing for this team, so many of who are creative living in London. Alex was effectively made homeless after asbestos-gate for goodness sake.

- ‘I would spend so long worrying about that money.’ BIG MOOD. Big Cost Of Living Crisis Mood. I wonder if The Flesh Hive could sense that in Martin as it lay siege to his flat, that he had the same worries? I wonder if some residual part that was Jane Prentiss felt a kinship.

- Sometimes, when I’m feeling a bit out of it, I will find myself thinking about the passage of time in a certain place; think about how the spot I’m in may be a building now, but it has been a field, an ancient woodland, an ice flow, a temperate forest, a boulder field, a scrubby waste, an ocean bed and all the creatures, a the ‘thousand truer owners’ of a spot that came before. Then I typically need a cup of tea and a lie down.

- ‘Have you ever heard of the filarial worm?’ I love when the statement givers ask questions directly of the reader, and in this case, specifically the Archivist. I like it as an introductory technique, but I also love that there is going to come a point that whatever the statement giver asks about, he is going to know.

- ‘… showing him what a real parasite can do.’ Oh boysies, I love it when Jonny comes out swinging.

- ‘…not nectar-sweet song.’ Bugs. Bugs bugs bugs. Pollinators, very important, thank you for your service.

- ‘We would sell the stones to smiling young couples with colour in their hair.’ This is a weird detail, why is this so clearly defined? Is it simply to highlight that Jane is alone?

- So we can assume this Oliver is our soft, tired, goth boy Oliver Banks a.k.a. Antonio Blake of MAG011. I wonder what her ‘roots’ looked like, if it was concentrated over the arm that she shoves in the wasps’ nest or if they move and crawl all over her.

- When Jane says she ‘wanted something beyond (herself)’, that’s another indicator that she is ripe for the taking by The Corruption rather than The Lonely. She’s reaching and grasping.

- I’m going to try and word this delicately, and I stress I am more than likely stepping out of my lane and definitely talking outside of my sphere of knowledge, but I wanted to look at Jane Prentiss with regards of practising Wicca and calling herself a witch. At first, unkind glance, Wicca could be seen as something rather complementarity to The Corruption; a fairly young religion, with roots in Paganism, strongly connected to the earth. An unkind link could be drawn between the colonising effect of cults and the earthy, wild aspects of practises. But as I think about it, and I’m coming for them again, I think Christianity has more in common with the aims of The Corruption. Especially when you consider the missionary bent that so many denominations are infamous for. There’s a reason that roughly 1/3 of the globe’s population is considered Christian.

- ‘Or if it is then it is a dead god…’ The notion of a god dying only when there is no one left to worship them, what if that were not true? Has that been explored somewhere? The idea of deities having a natural life span, but the adoration of followers won’t let die. They’re sustained by worship, but in a terrible twist on necromancy. I would read that book, has anyone written it yet?

- Jane being called by the singing is rather reminiscent of the old idea of a siren song, specially considering the danger that she encounters once she’s close enough. But we’ve seen it before, music beckoning and guiding, from both The Piper in MAG007 and The Calliope in MAG024. But where before it had been pipes calling, here it’s many, many voices as one.

- A few of Annabelle’s agents at the edge of things. Was The Web pulling strings to get this all in motion, turning Jane to the Flesh Hive to turn on the Institute and further the Archivist’s journey?

- ‘I used to pick at my skin...’ Yup, please excuse me while I go and find a clearasil pad or something and scrub like hell. I’ve always be fairly lucky with my skin; I get the occasional outbreak but I’ve never really worn make-up and so avoided the terrible feedback loop that so many teens fall into when they’re trying to figure it out as they go along just exacerbate the problem. These days I just have a fine layer of muck all over me at all times…

- ‘… that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am… the pretence that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. That love us in their way.’ Very evocative, very powerful, but wretch… Well, it’s getting the reaction it was after I suppose.

- I think a lot of why I like this episode so much is that it served as a little bit of a slap for me. As you may be able to tell, I was ‘going through it’ a little bit, we all were. But as I was walking along, on the way to a job that I loved and dreaded in near equal measure, I was listening to Jane’s wandering stream of consciousness and going ‘oh, yeah, no I get it’, and then realising what I was thinking and standing bolt upright and saying ‘NOPE’ out loud to no one before lengthening my stride. Because, damn it Jonny, you’ve made this walking corpse compelling. Also made me acutely aware that I was in a vulnerable state of mind at that point and that I needed to watch it. Something I’m still doing. At this stage we were, what, 9 months into COVID 19 lock downs? I was in a new living arrangement after about 5 months of my previous one slowly getting worse, I was missing my friends and family, while I saw some at work, we were a skeleton crew, the winter was rolling in and making everything harder, there was a storm coming on the horizon which hadn’t quiet broken yet, work itself was doing its’ damnedest to break me, and then I hear ‘Was I swayed and drawn simply by the prospect of being genuinely loved? Not loved as you would understand it. A deeper, more primal love. A need as much as a feeling. Love that consumes you in all ways.’ And it was all I could do not to run.

- ‘You rob it of its fear even though your weak words have no right to do so.’ If that line doesn’t just encapsulate everything I hate about Jonah Magnus…

- So we’ve got a little more information on her and Oliver’s place of work, Good Energies in Archway. Her flat was on Prospero Road, so of course my mind jumps to Shakespeare. But Jane doesn’t feel like a Prospero or Miranda figure, she feels like a Caliban. ‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices.’

- ‘… there was a fire that completely destroyed the flat, and killed the landlord, Arthur Nolan.’ That name rings a bell, that’s an agent of The Desolation if memory serves. ‘No signs of trying to escape’ means he did it himself, didn’t he. We haven’t got a date yet for when exactly that happened, unless Jane Prentiss gave this statement and then went immediately home and stuck her arm in the wasps’ nest that same day.

- Ooof, medical staffers, I’m so sorry.

- ‘The Institute was consulted … she had claimed that she was being possessed … decided the situation was medical in nature and our involvement was dropped in favour of, what I can only describe, as a cover-up’. Who made that call? Was it the hospital? Elias? Annabelle?

- ‘It could just be an unknown, aggressive parasite. There are weird things out there that are perfectly natural. It’s not, though. I know it’s not natural.’ Thank you. Thank you Jon, you agree the fact that your work place being besieged by worms is not natural. We’re making progress.

- ‘I’m… I’m going to go lie down.’ Me too babe.

[beetleboyoart]

‘I itch all the time. Deep beneath my skin, where the bone sits, enshrouded in flesh, I feel it.’ - Hive, MAG032

———

To be consumed by what loves you, to give pieces of yourself,

To be a home.

Sing to me your hymns of woe.

———

A little bit about Rhys for those who don’t know. Rhys is an undead treant he struggles with concentration on using necrotic magic to keep himself alive while his body slowly crumbles away. Since he is an undead Treant his insides are hollow making it a home for unwanted guests, which slowly becomes wanted. Rhys has a hive living in the sick, hollowed and crushed cavern of his chest. They sing to him but not in ways of words, but hum their sickly sweet tune, telling him he is beautiful telling him he is loved. Even though they slowly consume his body, to be fully consumed from what loves him.

[neonparades]

It thrums with life and malice.

MAG032 - Hive

[autoneurotic]

normal feelings about jane prentiss and mag032 in general

[bugsinthebayou]

thinking abt mag032 again

[noenergyjustworm]

jane prentiss! i love worm wife (not to mention mag032 is the only statement that's genuinely unsettled me. not because its scary. but because it hits so close to home)

trying to take some data !!!

what's your guy's ONE favorite tma character that isn't jon or martin? please reblog for a bigger sample size :)

[lyrebright]

I posted 500 times in 2022

That's 187 more posts than 2021!

62 posts created (12%)

438 posts reblogged (88%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@lyrebright

@starcrossed-sky

@causalityparadoxes

@vaspider

@rinastray

I tagged 250 of my posts in 2022

Only 50% of my posts had no tags

#xbc3 - 34 posts

#lyre does tma - 31 posts

#lyre rambles - 19 posts

#niafic - 14 posts

#lyre writes - 11 posts

#laugh tag - 7 posts

#critically acclaimed mmorpg - 6 posts

#tma - 5 posts

#inspo - 5 posts

#lmao - 4 posts

Longest Tag: 137 characters

#first of all his almost breakdown centered in around having to read the ones that need the tape. thinking about what i observed in mag032

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

niafic wordcount progress

10k! 

23 notes - Posted September 5, 2022

#4

i am going to finish this noelfic chapter for pride month i swear on all that is good and gay

27 notes - Posted June 2, 2022

#3

I think a lot of people online these days that consume media and participate in fandom completely misunderstand and disregard the value of tragedy

59 notes - Posted May 30, 2022

#2

Season 2 of The Magnus Archives was an experience.

Season 1 was fun and atmospheric, but even as the plot outside of the statements became more and more prevalent, the vibes of it were still very anthology horror. From the start, S2 diverged from that with the addition of Jon's supplementals at the end of each statement--with the meta plot and the statements being far more tightly interwoven. The mystery is no longer whether or not what is going on is real, or Jane Prentiss: Prentiss is dead, and we know the supernatural is real for certain, and more to the point, so does Jon, and he always has.

Hearing that in MAG039 that Jon has always believed the "real" statements--the ones that would not record on modern equipment, only on tape--but had pretended not to because he felt watched was something of a reframing of everything for me.

Until then, I hadn't really thought about how, oh, yeah, they're still doing the bogus ones that record easy peasy as well as the ones we hear.

Maybe it would have been easier to keep it in mind if I was listening to the episodes as they aired (like one a week, I believe?) instead of binging them. Like...that would have really sold the toll you can hear them take on Jon. Once a week, you encounter a statement that won't record like the rest, and the dread creeps up on you as you know, you know, what is written down here on these pages is different to the vast majority of what fills the archive, and you desperately do not want to think that means it is real, but you sit down with your tape recorder and you do your job and as you recite those awful awful words you can Feel you are not alone. Something Is Seeing You.

It Really makes the accidents he makes re: dates and names in some statements more understandable, actually. And explains why he doesn't want to re record them to fix those mistakes--sounds exhausted at the very idea.

I was keeping this in mind as I went through S2, using it to inform my new understanding of Jon's character and the progression of his arc and development--

--and then the finale, and perhaps more pertinently, the first episode of S3, broke that understanding once more down to its foundations.

(Keep in mind that I have not seen past MAG081. I stopped myself from progressing further so as to not give myself even MORE backlog on my liveblog posts to finish, and to write out my thoughts on Jonathan Sims as he and they stand right now, before canon gives me more to work with.

I reiterate: I have only seen up to MAG081, 'A Guest For Mr. Spider;' please do not spoil me for anything further along in canon.)

The revelation that MAG081 gave me is both very layered and very simple (and, I'm sure, has been discussed to death already because I am very late to this party :P): Jon's character is best understood through the lens of his trauma.

Of course, it makes his hatred of Leitners make so much more sense, as well as his hatred of spiders--I think it personally even made some things click as to why he was so quick to believe Jane Prentiss as Real when he denied other events with similar amounts of evidence; while I have since come to the conclusion that whatever the spiders are, They ARE Their Own Thing, I was initially lumping them in with the other bugs, and Jon, encountering a worm woman, could very well have done the same--these are things he has survived, and thus fears all the more intently, because he knows them.

What's quite a bit more telling about Jon As A Person to me, though, is the things he says in his own statement that he seems not to think much of. Jonathan Sims was, by his own words, a "deeply annoying child," and I can't begin to explain how much that hurts me, as an ND adult who related to a lot of how he explained his reading habits, though in the other direction (I would fixate on only one thing and read it and only it for weeks).

It opened up my eyes to the fact that Jon definitely sees himself in a negative light. I'm not sure just yet how deep that self hatred runs, but there's no denying it's there. Somehow, he buried his pessimism under his mask of skepticism and snark, but it's almost more real than either of those things, and it's only aggravated by the survivor's guilt he carries even to this day.

It's a lot. This man--I don't yet know Jon's exact age, but from context clues of his personal timeline he has to be around thirty, I think? Maybe just before or past it?--underwent a severe trauma at the age of eight. It's very much understood that the first decade of life very much does inform a lot of who you'll grow up to be, and Jon didn't undergo anything so easy to explain as a car accident or physical abuse. No, on top of the already damaging record of being an orphan and being raised by a grandmother he knew resented having to do so, Jon's greatest childhood trauma came in the form of watching a bully twice his age getting taken by a giant spider that had initially been aiming for him.

That's...not something you can explain, and have believed, and Jon knew that. But it also means it's something he couldn't get support for; it means that even as he knew it was real and remembered it as real he was likely asking himself: Was That Real? and that sort of doubting of your reality is damaging for anyone, let alone a child under ten!

Is it any wonder, then, that he found himself drawn to puzzling out the paranormal? Is it any wonder, then, that when encountering more cases of true encounters, that his idea was equal to the childish and simple ideal of If I Can't See You, You Can't See Me?

And is it, then, any wonder, how spectacular a mental breakdown he has in the lead up to the S2 finale?

Going into TMA, I was told by almost all my friends who have listened to it that I was going to like Jon. "He's your type," they told me, "total blorbo material," and listening to the early episodes I could only think...surely not. What do they think of me?

But I first started to change my mind around the time of his first live statement; Naomi Herne. Maybe I read this differently than most, but for all his bluster and terrible bedside manner (which actually got him a complaint, which is still hysterical, I'll be more lovely, he says, like this is something he's been harped on at before, in those exact words), I sincerely do think that when he suggested she reach out and maybe speak to someone: he was being sincere. She just took it poorly, because Jon had spent the rest of their time together acting poorly.

This is a running theme as time goes on--even more so throughout S2, to be honest. But it doesn't just start after the trauma of the S1 finale; Martin is being menaced by Jane Prentiss, because he encountered her trying to prove himself to Jon's exacting standards, after Jon has spent the rest of the season thus far being hypercritical of him? With MAG081 in mind, it's easy to see how Jon's survivors guilt immediately kicks into gear and berates him for how he's been acting when he knows, he knows that the supernatural is out there and it's deadly.

He immediately tells Martin to stay in the archives, where he thinks it will be safe. And this compassion continues as a core part of his character, even if that's really all we get to see of it--the core, under the mask. He's gentle and concerned with Sasha in her live statement, too, and immediately goes to argue with Elias about better "defenses" for the archives with new knowledge in mind. And it doesn't end there! He's still a snarky little bitch about it, but each interaction with Melanie throughout S1 and S2 made me :D. And, one of perhaps the most standout moments in my mind, currently:

Helen Richardson. God, I'm still having so many feelings about that episode.

Imagine you're Jon. You've spent all this time thus far trying desperately not to see the things you are seeing so as to not be seen by the thing you are sure is seeing you, but then a worm woman attacks you, and you're badly scarred, and your predecessor was murdered, and there's an itching sense of Something Is Wrong, Someone Here Is Lying To Me that you cannot shake, and it is only aggravating your paranoia. On top of that, you can no longer hide your head away in the sand; you have admitted your skepticism was an act, you are throwing yourself headfirst into chasing after the spooky things you've only been reading about up to this point because you need answers, and even when you're not running around in creepy tunnels, you cannot escape the new reality that you have found yourself a part of because it is now choosing to intrude on you directly.

Jon's instant connection with Helen--and his recognition of Michael and, no doubt, his subtle, unconscious fear that Helen could have very well been Sasha--is currently one of the most tragic things that have happened in TMA, outside of Sasha herself (don't worry, ha, I am Bracing For Worse).

Jon's history with the live statement givers isn't the greatest; outside of Martin and Sasha, they all seemed to find him short or abrasive at best, even if they didn't all lead to a formal "knock it off" from Elias. But with Helen, he's sympathetic, he's empathetic, he's gentle, he believes her, and when she's taken once more by the very monster that she had managed to escape, right from his office--well, he attacks that monster. Give her back, he says, of a woman he's known for five minutes, and gets stabbed for his trouble.

I am not a brave man, Jon says of himself, but I think that's more of his negative self framing, because you can be brave and still afraid, brave and still a coward; the antithesis to bravery is not fear, it is antipathy, and if there is one thing Jon is firmly good at it is feeling things, deeply.

Helen, I think, is the real firestarter to the pinnacle of this part of Jon's development, that culminates in all that Sasha was. When he was a child, a monster snatched away a life right before his eyes, one he can't help but feel like should have been his own.

And when he was an adult, two monsters did the same to two women he felt a connection to--though he didn't realise the first one had happened til much, much later.

S2 had me riding a highwire of tension. I've mentioned in my liveblog posts that what happened to Sasha struck at a personal, deep-seated and fairly irrational fear of mine, so I was waiting, the entire season, for something to happen with Not!Sasha. Hearing Jon later muse that his paranoia was aggravated and worsened by the presence of Not!Sasha was honestly highly validating, because it was doing that to me, too.

See the full post

74 notes - Posted July 9, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

so! you want to rip a fic from fanfiction dot net?

I’m sure at this point we’ve all seen the posts about FFN’s inevitable demise. Not to downplay how much that would suck, for all we riff on FFN--but people have been saying that for literal years at this point, and while I do not doubt that FFN is dying, it’s probably not going to up and vanish on us in the next week. It’s got some good time of chugging and wheezing along left yet.

But among the panic there are people asking sincere questions about what can be done to save fics from FFN in the case of the site going down and taking literal decades of fandom history with it, and I’m seeing a surprising amount of people saying that the only way to do it is to either screenshot the fics or type them out yourself because copy/paste does not work on FFN. And that is just blatantly not true. There are many ways in which you can save fics from FFN. Here are just a few:

You can copy/paste directly from the mobile site. This is probably one of the easiest methods for anyone to do. Just click on the URL of the chapter you’re reading, and change the www. to m. Hit enter and the page will reload in mobile mode. You can now copy/paste the chapter right into a word document. You will have to go chapter by chapter.

CTRL+S. Go to the fic you want to save, and hit ctrl+s. Save the damn webpage. This will keep it in the exact format of the webpage, which you could see as a pro or a con, but it will also keep the ads, which does suck. You’ll also have to go chapter by chapter with this method but it does go a lot faster than manually copy/pasting the text.

HTML to PDF. This method I’m admittedly a little less sure about, since when I used it it was like, 2013 and I was in highschool so I’m not sure how viable it still is, but--just a quick google search should find you a website that will let you save a webpage as a PDF file. I have folders and folders of fics I saved back in highschool using this method. It will again have to go chapter by chapter and just like saving the webpage will keep the format of the site intact--down to keeping the ads.

Use a fanfiction downloader. Two I’ve been using for years are FF2eBook and FicHub. You put in the link of the fic you want to download and it converts the entire thing into a file for you. Yes, the entire thing--you don’t need to manually go through chapter by chapter. By default, both sites download in epub format, though FicHub does have a few other options. I’ve never really experimented with them though because I’m personally fine with epub, and there are a million epub to pdf (or other file type) converters out there.

And there you go: a handful of ways for you to save your favourite fics before FFN goes under. Again, I don’t think it’s something to be too worried about, but the best time to do your part for fandom preservation was yesterday. The second best time is to get started right now. There is no reason to wait for FFN to be on its death bed to start saving fics. I’ve been doing this for years just so I have fics to read offline. 

I’m a little too young to have been around for livejournal, but I was one of those weirdos that posted their first fics on quizilla. I remember when quizilla just...changed. And so much was lost. Looking back, almost none of what was posted on quizilla was actually good, but it was still something that someone put time and effort and passion into creating, and it was important.

There is almost no way that when FFN inevitably goes down that its entire archive will be saved. But we can do our best to save as much as we can. Stop panicking and start saving.

1,129 notes - Posted September 20, 2022

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[feojpeg]

i itch all the time.

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[martinbabywood]

jane prentiss is nasty but she’s OUR bug girl 😌

[tma-latino]

MAG032 – Caso 0142302 – Colmena

Testimonio de... Jane Prentiss, sobre... un avispero en su ático.

[Disclaimer/ Aviso]

[MAG031] | x | [MAG033]

[webtable]

dreams and the corruption 

mag016 // mag032 // mag153 // mag184

[ID: Four screenshots of various transcripts, with teal text on a pale yellow background. The first image says: “My dreams that night were crawling and many-legged, but there’s not much unusual in that.” The second image says: “My dreams are crawling and many-legged.” The third image says: “Claude announced at evening meal a few days later that he had been dreaming of the Eleventh, and there were going to be some changes to help spiritually prepare us for their arrival.” The word “Eleventh” is a proper noun. The final image reads: “Once, so long ago now that it seems almost like a memory of a dream, he knew these creatures, and they had known him.” /ID end]

[martinsteacup]

Y’all ever think about someone in the archive walking in on Jon voice acting for Jane Prentiss’ statement

[horngryeyes]

These dreams have been a regular part of my sleeping for about eight years now. Even as life improved and I found a new job and place to live – believe it or not, I now work selling crystals and tarot cards in a “magic” shop – they continued to crop up a few times each month. If there’s one advantage to working where I do, it’s that I’ve been able to read every book on esoteric dreaming ever written, but none of them even come close to what I have experienced.

MAG011 Dreamer

I had a job. I sold crystals. They were clean, and sharp and bright and they did not sing to me, though I sometimes said they did. We would sell the stones to smiling young couples with colour in their hair. I remember, before I found the nest, someone new came. His name was Oliver, and he would look at me so strangely. Not with lust or affection or contempt, but with sadness. Such a deep sadness. And once with fear.

MAG032 Hive

[pumpkin-cowboy]

A few of my favorite lines from The Magnus Archives that are related to this very amazing post from @olreid

mag165//mag032//mag148//mag089//mag163//mag021//mag195//mag142//mag183