#MAG71

[belleisnowhere]

"That was when I finally decided to sit down and wait it out. Either it would arrive somewhere or it wouldn’t, and if I had managed to wander into some grubby ghost train then there wasn’t much I was going to be able to do about it."

MAG 71: Underground

[ceaseless-bitcher]

I’m literally obsessed with how victims’ differing feelings about said ambiguous fears pre-encounter impacts how they are affected. Because we only hear the survivors, it’s kinda implied that a massive piece of the sample population is lost to us!

Also, there appear to be large differences between the people who die soon after giving a statement and those who have an experience, survive to give a statement, and then go on after. The latter group seems to have a better grasp on their relationship with the specific fear tormenting them; episode 71, statement #0172501 from Karolina Górka comes to mind, as she was able to reach acceptance of her death before The Buried fully trapped her. It realised she wouldn’t be worth it because she wasn’t feeding it anymore. The survivors almost always seem to “let go,” or are otherwise incapable of feeding the entity further. Nathan Watts is suspicious of the Anglerfish, and is able to notice what is wrong with it before he gets into its range of attack. Because of this, it relents and he’s able to escape.

However, there seems to be another class of statement giver: those who only have a tangential encounter, or those whose fear is reliant on limited exposure (like the Not!Them). In MAG30, David Laylow survives because his experience was mostly a result of Tom Haan’s avatar-ness, not his fear drawing in The Flesh on its own. In MAG97, Jackson Ellis escapes from the pit in Bucoda because he wasn’t a part of the town or their attempted ritual. Even in MAG12, Lesere Saraki, the nurse who treats Gerard Keay and Diego Molina, is only a bystander in the Desolation avatar’s death throes and general lashing-out.

I would love to see some statistics of victims of entities that isn’t inherently biased by the fact that only some live to give a statement, want to, or are able to recognise that what happened to them was supernatural. I don’t think it’s coincidence that the highest proportion of statements given throughout TMA are attributable to The Stranger (although data is, again, disrupted by the fact that they were gearing up for a ritual)- the Uncanny Valley (lol) is one of the most recognisable tropes in horror. The only statement that Jon took from someone who wasn’t willing to give it (MAG142) was a woman who was trapped by The Buried, and enough of the fear was “natural” claustrophobia, or deniable, that she was able to brush it off.

JONNY GIVE US THE STATISTICS

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.

[several-ravens]

episode 71 was very interesting, i think she was able to get out of that train because she wasn't scared to be crushed to death

dunno what to make of it though

[symphony-calamity]

Listening to MAG71 as a New Yorker is hilarious. British horror will literally go "what if you were on the train... and it was dirty" meanwhile NYC doesn't have a single clean train

[astranauticus]

MAG71-80

what on earth is with the lady from mag71 like nobody just shows up at the magnus institute of all places being like hey here's a yarn. goodbye

the setup of mag72 is so fucked but the idea of a takeaway with a sign that just says 'FOOD' is SENDING me

'like i didnt want my last thoughts on earth to be lowkey racist' fucking wheezing this has got to be the FUNNIEST way for that orientalism content warning to pan out

'yes i know what a meme is' brb CRYING

damn this whole sasha conversation wouldve been so much easier if jon wasnt so good at antagonising people DJFHKSJDHFKJHDS

ok but shouting match aside 'is that another sasha? are you collecting them??' why are all of jon and melanies interactions this specific brand of unhinged

somehow the turn of phrase 'travel freely, sowing random terror' is sending me. i too would like to sow random terror

'if i had a nervous breakdown and i just misremembered a cousin i dont know well it couldve been a lot worse' is such a FUNNY train of thought

'it is remarkably easy to buy an axe in central london' ???

i fucking LOVE michael so much

'what are you doing here??' 'probably watching the archivist die :)' PLS

honestly this exchange is even funnier in text form

kinda cool how both michael and notsasha fuck up the tapes but in different ways

'i was almost beaten to death by an angry goth!' that is the FUNNIEST possible way to phrase that sentence

'we dont have time for you to have a breakdown archivist!' oof

...wanted to see how the transcript described leitner's death bc i couldnt figure out what the noises were for a second and shoutout to the transcript for this hysterical phrasing

[tauremornalome]

[mag200]

MAG71: Underground

charcoal & ink // kofi

[magnusmemes]

[incandescent-creativity]

Jon: “someone is... living down there. In the tunnels.”

Me: ?????

[rainwritings]

listening to MAG71: oh, the Night Vale Transit Authority expanded their services to London!

[several-ravens]

is not!sasha living in the tunnels?

[otacringe]

WAIT IS THAT WAKELY IN MAG71??? I THOUGHT HE WAS ONLY IN ONE EPISODE Y’ALL???

[throatofdelusion]

karolina górka is an avatar of the buried

she doesn’t escape her fate in the collapsing car in MAG71 (underground), she lies down to die and is crushed, then she wakes up covered in dirt lying on a platform. after giving her statement 19 days after this incident jon comments:

I should probably mention this to Sasha. I believe she takes the Victoria line to work and has a tendency to stay later than she should. Aside from that, all that’s left to do is sweep up after Ms. Górka. She left the place rather dusty.

in 120 (eye contact), when elias describes jon’s dreams he mentions that karolina górka does not feel pain or bleed and that she trickles dust:

The passenger is there, though she is, as always, stationary. Dry dirt trickles between her teeth as she smiles mirthlessly, seeing the Archivist has returned. She is relaxed, suspended from a dozen broken handrails and shattered, jagged seats. They cut her flesh, but she does not bleed. There is no pain in her eyes. There is nothing except the certainty of her fate.

[garden-ghoul]

Other Powers

Most avatars are either afraid of their patron, or before they became an avatar they were already making other people afraid. Jude Perry having fun throwing away people’s money; Mike Crew’s ‘ecstatic horror;’ Hezekiah Wakely’s dirt comfort/loving threats combo. 

Hunters are an interesting exception. Who’s afraid of them? Out of all the episodes starring the Hunt, only one of them is from a person who’s actually afraid of it (MAG31). Even in MAG133 Dead Horse, the narrator isn’t being hunted, and his fear of the Hunters turning on him is kind of secondary. Nobody is at ANY point scared of Trevor Herbert, certainly not before he became an avatar, and I doubt that Lisa Carmel and friends were terrifying enough to her roommates to be invested with the power of the Hunt from that alone. So the Hunt isn’t associated with fear--what emotion IS it connected to, then?

@gerrykeay proposed that it’s closer to adrenaline, something that both the hunter and the prey feel. Certainly for me excitement and anxiety are the same thing! It makes sense that for the purposes of the Powers, adrenaline would be close enough. Whether it’s avatars or prey that feel it, it all works out in the end. So, we have at least one Power that isn’t exactly about fear.

Now let’s talk about a sixteenth power I’d like to propose: the Anchor.

One thing that stands out to me, looking at all the statements in aggregate, is that pretty much all of them are from people who are kind of isolated, without any real community. I just went through the full list of episodes and arguably only in MAG1 Angler Fish and maybe MAG71 Underground did the narrator clearly have a robust support network, just temporarily absent. The people who give statements are habitually lonely (MAG27, 48, 74, 90, 144), have recently lost loved ones (MAG11, 13, 24, 58, 93, 150) or just don’t have a lot of people they can talk to about it (basically All the other statements). And we have quite a few textual examples of people using the bonds with their loved ones in a literally magical sense (MAG13, 48, 100C, 129, 150).

So we have this emotion-based magical thing that can manifest protection against other Powers (not quite the same way they protect against each other, eg in MAG46 Literary Heights, but comparable). Have we seen any direct manifestations of it? Well, no, because the Institute focuses specifically on collecting statements where fear is the dominant force. Have we seen any avatars of the Anchor? Arguably Evan Lukas was giving it a good go.

I’m not saying that it’s the same kind of thing as the Powers of Fear; they’re not any specific kind of thing at all. I just think it’s an interesting framework to use to examine the world of TMA. Join me, friends. #16thPower

[not-yet-usernamed]

(episode 71!!! Jon seems to actually want help now. Our blorbo may be climbing back up the spiral of paranoia, but I doubt it. Also #73 is called "police lights" and I'm slightly worried Jon's going to get himself arrested lmao) -[𝟺𝟹𝟸]

(Mag71: about to get crushed to death? Just sleep it off!)

(he’s getting there..? Maybe?)

(oh police lights is a fun episode heh)