#but also really interesting about the differences of archives and protocol

[kristsune]

Look, I could listen to Alex talking about audio all day long, so I just wanted to capture that, and then him and Jonny talking about how Protocol and Archives are different, story wise, because it's really very interesting.

[radioactive-juice]

Okay so I just watched a video about the extinction from some guy’s Entities series and. Thoughts:

I feel like a lot of people forget that the Entities are not completely separate things. We have the colours analogy and the Giant Creature with multiple limbs too big to see that it’s all one thing. So, as much as it’s useful to understand stuff, Smirke’s 14 is canonically a very flawed explanation of something very difficult to comprehend. 

Especially with the revelation that the rituals will never work by themselves and that the entities need to all come into being at once, it’s clear that they are more connected than they are independent. 

The video was talking about the statements that are contested in terms of whether they are Extinction or whatever else. First, they can be both. Second, the point of the extinction’s Emergence isn’t so much Totally New Never Before Seen Fear but Fear Becoming More Widespread So We Should Distinguish Itself From Others. Fear of drastic change, the end of life as we know it, etc, existed before the Extinction was thought up, and will exist even though the Extinction never technically Emerged. Dekker says it is branching off from the End, but I think that’s still too rigid. 

In mag200 when we get the origin story of the fears, it starts as “Once, there was fear”. It’s one thing that starts to specialise as life gets more intelligent and learns the things to be scared of. Then, “The thing that was fear felt itself began to tear, to crack and fracture along a thousand unseen fault lines”. So, we do have confirmation that it isn’t just One Thing. But they started as one, which begs the question, where do we draw the lines between Fears?

I think a lot of us have the idea of Which Entities Are Which based on their motifs, which I think holds back our understanding. The Web is one that particularly gets me. As an Entity, it’s about control and manipulation, but a lot of the time it’s boiled down to Fear of Spiders. Spiders symbolise control because of their webs, the idea of being trapped, knowing your fate but unable to escape it. That’s the essence of the Web. Falling into a spider nest and getting them all over your face? Horrifying, but not the right psychological aspects. I’d say it’s more Corruption, feeding more on the fear of disgusting things. I think puppets would be an interesting motif for The Web, but puppets are like dolls which are basically monopolised by the Stranger. Now I’m starting to rant. In general, I believe we could have a lot more interesting interpretations of the Entities if we thought of them more as the psychological fear they represent rather than their common motifs. For example, I really like what they did with the Buried also representing debt rather than simply Dirt. 

On the fandom wiki (I know it sucks. If there’s a better alternative lemme know), a lot of the s5 domains are described as serving multiple fears, which makes sense since they cater so closely to the specific fears of the people in them, which aren’t necessarily a single Fear. Then, of course, we have Protocol. I’ve seen a few posts echoing the same point of We Don’t Need to Rethink the Fears to Make Protocol Make Sense, We Just Need to Stop Defining Everything So Rigidly. I hope Protocol continues to Get Weird with it so we’re forced to think about the Fears from a different perspective than Archives. It’s healthy. It’s enrichment. 

In conclusion, the Fears aren’t so separate, Smirke’s 14 has never been real, the Extinction isn’t a world-breaking anomaly, and motifs don’t necessarily define what Powers are actually at play.  

[lostwords-found]

Oh god. Okay. SO. The Protocol red string board is going places and I am chewing drywall.

Note: I've been working on this post for a few days and nothing in here involves episode 27--I don't talk about episodes before they're out for everyone, so no worries about patreon spoilers.

Quick recap of some suspicions about Protocolverse I've written about previously:

1. I think this universe runs on a kind of balance of good & bad luck (or suffering and happiness), and that it's possible--under certain circumstances--to pawn the bad stuff off on other people and keep the good that arises to balance it out. I suspect a big piece of Protocol's overarching plot is going to be about the different ways people go about trying to come out ahead in that bargain.

2. I think some alchemists figured out how to attach bad luck and/or other similarly abstract ills into physical form.

3. I think they were trying to use this to cast out bad luck to other worlds (including that of Archives) and get good luck back. I think this is how the Fears got to Archives in the first place.

4. I think the books and coin in the tomb from MAG 23 got there this way, probably with the involvement of Protocolverse Albertus Magnus. The year on the coin -- 1279 -- is the year before Albertus Magnus died.

We'll come back to that stuff in a bit.

There's an apparently minor detail that was nagging at me recently: in TMAGP 22 Hans Berger specifically mentions having switched to silver wires in his experiments, and this change enabling his breakthroughs. It's through these silver wires, implanted directly into Herr Schmidt's brain, that he later receives the desperate telegraph signals that appear to be from a previously unheard part of Schmidt's brain.

By itself, that wouldn't ping any alarms. Silver wires are in fact what Berger used in real life; silver's highly conductive so if you're trying to read electrical impulses from the brain, probably a good choice of material. But the writing is very deliberate about mentioning them, and coming only three episodes after another historical letter about a scientist also working with silver -- Newton's tree in TMAGP 19 was a fantastical variant of a Tree of Diana, dendritic silver -- Berger's wires start feeling like maybe they're not just there for accuracy.

If, as it appears from Newton's work, consuming silver in certain forms can cause a new kind of consciousness to arise--and also, uh, turn you into a tree--what might implanting silver wires in a human brain do? Is the silver contacting or awakening something that was already there, or is it putting something there? Was that desperate OUT OUT OUT message really from half of Herr Schmidt's mind--or from something in the wire itself that was trying to get out?

That would be weird though. I mean--what, Protocolverse silver's inherently evil or something? But then I got back to thinking about alchemists trying to transmute things into precious metals. Gold's the one we mostly think of, but silver was also of interest. Which in real life is where you got stuff like the tree of Diana--alchemists thought that was a precursor to the philosopher's stone.

So... then I start thinking, if I was right in my other post that alchemists were figuring out how to put evil / misfortune / suffering into a physical form that could be used to transfer it somewhere else, what if silver was involved in that? What if they were either turning misfortune into silver, or trapping it in silver that already existed?

What if they did that, meaning to send it away, and some of that silver made its way into use?

Then I started looking some stuff up.

Did you know silver used to be mined in the Black Forest, in Germany? One mine there had a name meaning "Blessing of God." That mine dates back to the 1200s--Albertus Magnus's lifetime.

Did you know that starting in the 1600s, the G strings on high quality violins were typically wrapped in silver wire?

Do you know why movies are called the silver screen? In the 1920s, literal silver was used to make cinema screens. This fell out of favor as other cheaper designs were worked out, BUT in the 2000s silver has come back into use a bit because it works well for 3D movies. I would not be surprised at all if the screen that Tom went to see Voyeur on had silver in it.

Did you know that in the early 90s there was a specific plant in the UK that manufactured CDs covered with a layer of silver? This later turned out to cause some problems as the silver reacted with sulfur (oh hai, another alchemically significant substance!) and slowly degraded the discs. In real life these CDs were manufactured up through 1993. Per TMAGP 10, Mr Bonzo made his debut in '96 (the interview is from 2021 and is the 25th anniversary of Mr Bonzo's first appearance). The two times Mr Bonzo has appeared in person he's been summoned by playing a CD of his theme song. I wonder where and when those CDs were manufactured...

Did you notice the caterer Lady Mowbray hired in TMAGP 15 mentions that his company did silver service events? Betcha that particular feast was served on literal silver platters.

...I'm starting to think it's a really good thing ink5oul didn't end up tattooing Gwen with that silver spoon.

Okay. This all seems like there's maybe a theme here, but let's take a step back. Some materials have just been used for a lot of things throughout history; it could be coincidence. IF the above is actually on the mark--IF these were all intentional majorly-plot-relevant inclusions of Things Wot Involve Silver--where else would we expect to see this cropping up in the story? Because the topic of silver has barely been raised directly at all; I'm extrapolating wildly here, mostly on the basis of a couple episodes.

Well, here's a thought: silver was used in everyday currency for a long, long time. If there was a bunch of Evil Silver floating around surely someone would have stuck it into some money at some point. "Ill fortune" in the most literal possible sense, or whole new meaning to the phrase "bad penny" -- there are various bad jokes there that more or less write themselves. Though whoever was doing this would have had to to mark the bad money somehow so that they could avoid it...

Hey, um, remember how the OIAR's offices are in the building that housed the Royal Mint for like 150 years?

Actually, while we're on that subject, here's a funny little tidbit: Before it moved to Royal Mint Court, the Royal Mint was in the Tower of London for several centuries--its first home after being centralized. Wanna guess what year the Royal Mint was established in the Tower of London? Go on. Guess.

1279.

The same. Fucking. Year. As was on that coin waaaaaay back in MAG 23. Which was a thing I had noticed a while back when looking at the Germany eps, but I hadn't been considering a "what if some metals can be Bad" angle at that point and had just written it off as an odd coincidence.

Which I mean, it's probably still just a weird coincidence, I'm building this entire elaborate framework out of assumptions on top of assumptions on top of -- hang the fuck on, let me look something up real quick, I've gotta be misremembering--

I'm not misremembering! Isaac Newton was the Master of the Royal Mint for the last 30 years of his life.

Cool. Okay. So that's--hm. I think I'm genuinely starting to convince myself none of this is a coincidence.

Then I start poking through Wikipedia, and you wanna know some other interesting things? One, Newton himself apparently saw his work in economics as a continuation of his alchemical work. And two, during his tenure at the Royal Mint, he put limits on how much gold people were allowed to exchange for silver, and this led to a silver shortage. Because apparently, when other countries imported goods to them, the British paid for those goods in silver coins. When they exported goods to other countries, though?

They would only take payment in gold.

And there it is--there's the exact outsourcing scheme I was looking for. Stick all your suffering and pain and misfortune into your money, use that money to pay other countries, and get only the good stuff back. That... sounds really believable for the British Empire, honestly.

So I really think I might have some decent guesses on the historical stuff at play here. That only goes just so far though, because these days, silver doesn't really get used in coinage much.

Know where it does get used? Circuits. Electronics.

Computers.

If I'm right, whatever machinery the Mint used to store the intangible evils of the world in physical coinage for exportation, I would guess the OIAR is now using to instill all of those evils into FR3-D1 instead. One all-containing artifact of misfortune.

What the endgame is there, what the government gets out of it, I'm still not 100% sure--but I can't help thinking about Jonah's line in MAG 160 that Jon is not the Archivist but the Archive. That he is the record of fear, the physical embodiment of it.

There's people wanting to outsource absolutely fucking everything to AI these days, I guess.

SO THAT'S BEEN MY WEEK this is what my brain does when I have to drive all the way across the US alone, apparently. How are you all?

[somethinginthemyste]

So I don't know much about Alchemy for The Magnus Protocol and I'm not sure how this pertains to things but I'm trying to learn and I stumbled across some interesting connections to the Seven Hermetic Principles so like, if people know more and want to share their thoughts? As I'm understanding, the Hermetic Principles are connected to or simply are also known as Hermeticism to which Alchemy was commonly regarded as "The Hermetic Art". Maybe people have already thought of this and analyzed it but I haven't been able to get to that part of the fandom for some reason so maybe this will bring me there.

Ripped from Wikipedia, take that as you will:

1. The principle of mentalism

"The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental."

This kinda fits with what Colin says that "too much mercury and the world ends" where mercury represents the spirit or mind. The universe is mental so too much of the mind, the mental, would overwhelm it and end everything.

2. The principle of correspondence

"As above, so below; as below, so above.” [...] This principle embodies the truth that there is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of being and life.

This really feels like how the O.I.A.R. operates right? There is always a correspondence between the laws and phenomena, Gwen is the correspondence between the order and law of the O.I.A.R. and the "external" phenomena.

3. The principle of vibration

"Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."

I'm still trying to find a good solid connection to this, but I also have a theory that the fact that Alice's brother Luke is in a band is going to come back in a big way. Like, a Grifter's Bones kind of way.

4. The principle of polarity

"Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."

How many doppelganger stories have we had? How many stories about the missing part of you, the better version of you, the second half? Even with Celia, if everything has poles what if her poles exist across universes. That's why she's waking up random places, because the poles are attracting or repelling each other. If all paradoxes may be reconciled, what paradox is governing her life.

5. The principle of rhythm

"Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates."

Every story we hear about gambling has this principle in place. If someone is having too much luck with the dice, the dice compensate for it. If someone is having too much luck with betting on their own misfortune, the app compensates for it. It swings back and forth, good to bad to good to bad, perfectly balancing itself despite people's attempts to keep it swinging in their favor.

6. The principle of cause and effect

"Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law."

I'm not completely sure how to connect this, but it does work sorta well with the gambling themes again? But also it fits with the things happening with Episode 7 and the random organization coming to kill the invasive species of volunteers. Not sure.

7. The principle of gender

"Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes."

Ok hear me out, this podcast is queer is fuck. Archives was queer but we have so much more representation of gender specific things like the nonbinary Ink5oul and our beloved trans girl Alice. The fact that there is legitimately a principle of gender in something connected to alchemy and we have even more gender representation is amazing. Still waiting for a genderfluid External, maybe one day. Or maybe we met them already and don't know.

Anyway that's what I've learned. If anyone has more information or ideas please share, I'm desperate for more information and ideas and theories.

[tea-moth11]

Today my dad moved out and I remain in the house.

Archives and Protocol is pretty much my first special interest where I finally understand diehards for different fandoms. My dad raised me on Star Wars and is obsessed with it.

I didn’t have anyone until recently to talk to about TMA. I had talked about it so much to my dad and my better half that he decided to get into it. He had just finished episode 49 either this week.

He loved hearing about Jane Prentiss and the worms. I would tell him to not let the worms get him as I said good night. Hearing that Prentiss was gone for good bummed him out a bit, but he is having fun trying to figure out the “monster” in the tunnels. He also loves anything having to do with Leitners funnily enough.

Every so often if I walked into a room or he would walk over to me we would yell “Statement of Joe Spooky” to each other. My dad is really digging Jon’s paranoia era. He wants to know what Martin’s secret is.

It’s nice being able to talk about it with him. I will always appreciate that he took an interest in TMA because I love it so much.

I used to hear the intro across the house as my dad would listen to an episode before bed.

Moving is a happy occasion as he is very excited about the new house he got himself.

Today my dad moved out and I remain in the house.

[noveratus]

I just finished listening to the last episode of this season of the Magnus Protocol, and I have thoughts, both for the episode and the season overall. Spoilers below.

I have mixed feelings regarding this episode. To put it short, I think it is fine as a regular episode, but I don't like it as a season finale. I think that Celia's reveal and Gwen taking over Lena's position was handled really well, but I think it was done kind of late. I will get more into this in the season review since that is where my main issues lie, the structure of the season itself. Also, the whole 'Sam being taken' thing and being shoved into this other universe betrayal would have felt more meaningful if we had an idea of what the other world looks like, because, if I remember correctly, Sam is falling into a world without the entities where people are most likely rebuilding now so it really doesn't feel that bad and he can just walk through the portal again which is why I wish this reveal had been done in a different episode. It simply doesn't feel worthy of the season finale, and the cliffhanger was very undeserved. We already know the Archivist doesn't want Sam dead. In fact, I have a theory it was trying to save Sam from Celia. Honestly, I'm more interested in whatever is happening to Collin because that guy is dead dead now. There is no way he is living.

Ok, for my season reveal: I think that this season was alright, good even! Not as great as season 4 or 5, but better than season 2 for certain. I think I might like season 1 of the Magnus Archives better simply because of the build up. Are the things real? Are they not? And then Martyn being terrorized for weeks and it all culminating with that attack. It was really cool and had an actual resolution, even if not all questions were answers, there was a sense of finity by the end of it which this one lacks. It just doesn't answer enough questions. "Oh, but Celia-" I think Celia was too obvious to be considered fulfilling, which isn't to say the reveal wasn't great, but I think it needed more. They had to at least have revealed what happened to Collin I think.

Now, for my main issue with the season, it started really well and it was pretty interesting in the first episodes, the character dynamics were really fun and I wanted to learn more about the computers, but at some point the show became the 170th love triangle this side of the pacific with a forced romantic subplot on the house. I think that Alice and Sam being exes is an interesting development, but you didn't need the romance man. You already have Alice as the foil for them just not wanting them to investigate, you don't need to make their previous relationship and current relationship be a whole thing, genuinely, who wanted this? And it wasn't built up, it just happened so that Sam would follow Celia around like a puppy dog (as if he wouldn't do that as was with him being obsessed with solving the secrets of the institute as seen with him exploring with Alice) and half of the season felt like Sam and Celia talking about how they were going to investigate about this and never really doing any investigating while the plot hit Alice like a truck.

And then there is Sam, who is probably the most boring character in his show. His personality traits are that he is into women, is obsessed with solving mysteries, and that's it. Considering that his obsession with his job is something he shares with both Celia and Gwen, that only makes him feel even less appealing. Also, Celia and Gwen have a much stronger reason for why they are who they are, which in Celia's case is her son and the trauma from being in the apocalypse while Gwen is proving herself, which is something that Sam is apparently trying to do as well, except in his case it is not really all that well built. Like I have said before in my previous posts is Gwen, while I despise her and I dream of her death every day, is a really well written character, because that is what the audience is meant to feel. They are meant to hate her, she is kind of a bitch. Alice? She is the most well written character in the show. She has nuance, you understand why she does what she does. Celia? She has potential. Personality wise, Celia is a bit flat for my taste, but she has enough of a backstory and motive to be very interesting if you just remove the stupid forced romance plotline. She is just a woman, a mother, trying to do her best in a pretty shitty situation, which I can stand behind. But Sam is none of those things. Yes, he got rejected by the magnus Institute and saw some fucked up things, cool, but compared to the rest of the cast, it just feels flat. It doesn't have the same impact as Jon retelling his story of how he came across the first book, so what you end up with is a cardboard protagonist surrounded by otherwise very interesting characters! Hell, even Lena and Colin who are meant to be secondary characters are more interesting than Sam since Colin has the paranoia Jon had and makes you wonder just what the hell is he seeing? And Lena, who is in charge of these monsters and yet still clearly cares about people is genuinely fascinating and I want to learn more, and I hope she doesn't die off screen. I want to like Sam. I really, really want to like him, but by God he feels like every protagonist ever and it is so stale and it is so boring and it doesn't help that the season drags on for too long on the later half with people talking about how they are going to do things and never doing them which is my main issue with Season 2 of TMA where there is a lot of people talking about how they will do stuff and how people will do stuff but nothing of importance actually happen. I genuinely think you can cut from season 1 to season 3 of the original show and skip most of season 2 without anything of notice and the same can be said about a solid 5 episodes of this first season of the Magnus Protocol which, since they are on the latter half. There is a lot of build up, and it is not that it doesn't go anywhere, but it is not the reveal one might think it would be. Which is kind of insane considering the writers are the same people who wrote seasons 4 and 5 of the magnus archive, which are probably some of my favorite pieces of media ever and I get that it could be a slow burn and all that, but this is just 2 seasons. There isn't a lot of time to burn slowly here, especially since they are adding a lot of new concepts like alchemy that I feel like won't be handled how they should be handled.

Another point I want to bring up regarding the The Magnus Protocol, actually starts in the Magnus Archive with how it handles its female characters. So, in modern media we have something that I like to call the Nagging Wife problem, in which writers will write women, particularly the love interest of MCs as being 'smart' so they will oppose the MC whenever they act in a dumb way or a way perceived as dumb by them, which puts them in a position antagonistic to your Main Character. Think Wanda from Fairly Oddparents or Marge from the Simpsons for example. And that is a very glaring issue present in TMA where despite not being love interests, all of the main female characters will, at one point or the other, act as Jon's 'nagging wife' at some point, leading to their nagging irrevocably affecting the plot and making Jon act as more of a whump since 'oh look how poorly treated Jon is' and hey, this could have worked, but because the cast is mainly female and none of the characters is really given as much depth as the male characters, we just get Jon's many nagging wives and entire episodes of them doing pretty much that and it can be very inconsistent with their character and very annoying and off putting. Luckily, the Magnus Protocol doesn't have as much of that. Yes, there is Gwen, I suppose, but that's her point in the narrative. She is the most morally dubious one. But I was so terrified that Celia and, particularly, Alice would fall under the 'Nagging Wife' problem, but luckily, for the most part that isn't the case because, while yes, Alice does go against Sam, I think she is pretty consistent overall and they do call her out on it which definitely helps avoiding the issue.

Overall, I like the Magnus Protocol, but I don't think it is anywhere near as great as the Magnus Archive, neither as a stand alone story nor as a sequel. I hope this changes with the next season, because, as it stands right now, I don't think it has that much of a reason to exist- as a sequel. As a standalone story, it is good, not as great as its predecessor, but good, which might sound harsh considering that I said I like this podcast, but then you need to remember how TMA ended and so far, this season hasn't really improved on the ending nor surpassed it.

Final score: 7/10, but only as a standalone story, Gwen and Alice carry it hard, with Celia being a solid character as well and the side characters being interesting enough, but not enough happened to them. Put them in more situations, please, and thank you. As a sequel, as it stands, it's a 5/10, maybe lower, but it has asked a lot of questions that could lead to something great.

Have a doodle of my beloved and my beloathed for the trouble as well :)

[hoeswater]

I'm Talking about MagPod and Archives Again

I know that those of us in the middle of the Venn diagram of “Magnus fans” and “People who actually know how archives work” have really given Jonny a hard time about the way that the Magnus Institute archives and artefact storage are shown as working (or, I mean, not working) in the podcast. Not just in terms of best practices (where) but also like… archives can be spooky, it can be a spooky job, but not really for those reasons, you know? Anyway, I think that Protocols Episode 9 actually engages with the archives’ role as an archives in a way that’s really, really interesting. Qualifications: I’m almost done with my master’s in Library and Information Science/Archives Management and have been working in actual archives of various types for a year and a half. 

Specifically, I’m really interested in how Dice Guy engages with the horror within the context of the donation process. We hear a lot about the horror that objects in this universe cause while they’re still in the possession of their pre-Institute owners-slash-avatars, and a lot about the horror that these objects cause when they’re mishandled (looking at you, Jon “It is Remarkably Easy to Buy An Axe in Central London” Sims) while being stored at the Institute, and every now and again we get to see Jon or Gertrude accept or turn down an offered object (the teeth apple, Eric Delano’s page, etc) in TMA. But this is one of the only places in the podcast(s) where the process of donation and acquisition registers as a part of the horror story for the people giving or receiving the object. I’m thinking specifically about the beginning of the “statement proper,” where the statement giver says:

“So yeah, I tell you all about them, how I got them, all that crap and you just… You take them away, right? You accept them. Good. I think. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works. It’s how it worked for me, at least. Put them in whatever vault you like, bury them, drop them in the ocean for all I care. All that matters is that they’re yours now.” 

At surface level, this disclaimer seems pretty similar to some of the other things that statement givers say in TMA: I just need to tell someone, I just need somebody else to know, You have the power to do something about this and I don’t, etc. But this statement differs from the ones we saw in TMA because it’s not just about catharsis or reaction to a terrible thing happening; it’s the actual change of ownership of the dice that gives this moment meaning within the horror story for Dice Guy. And this hinges on the fact that Dice Guy, like a lot of real-life people, sees the purpose of an archives as being locked vaults designed to keep non-expert people away from things they don’t know how to handle, rather than their actual purpose, which is to preserve things for the express purpose of making them accessible to the public. I imagine that the Magnus Institute, if it were real, would have some pretty strict access policies due to, you know, special circumstances– the stuff it holds generally having the ability to kill or maim or otherwise make people’s lives miserable– but it’s fun to think about. If Dice Guy had understood the fact that archivists and staff and conservationists and sometimes researchers interact* with the materials in their care, would he have still donated the dice? Was he at the point where it didn’t matter who got the bad luck, as long as it wasn’t him, or was he leaning on the stereotype of archives being locked vaults as a way to absolve himself of the guilt of giving the dice away to a person, because people use the things they're given and he thinks archives don't? 

It also raises some interesting questions about ownership. Real archivists think about the ethics of donation, acquisition, and ownership a lot. What does it mean for somebody to give something to an archive? What does it mean to accept it, therefore a) accepting responsibility for the preservation of the object and b) assigning cultural/historical/ideological value to it? This is where TMAGP comes pretty close to real archival theory: Dice Guy thinks that he’s nullifying the dice’s power by giving them to the Institute, but isn’t it true that to accept an object into an archive assigns it a level of power? The notes at the beginning of the statement seem to suggest that the dice coming under the Institute’s ownership lends them power beyond what they had originally, as well: “Viability as Subject,” “Viability as agent,” “Viability as catalyst,” “Recommend referral to Catalytics for Enrichment Applicability Assessment.” To me, this says that maybe the dice were in the running to potentially be chosen for the role that the tape recorders fill in TMA– to facilitate, or serve as a catalyst for, the narrative/the fears’ growing power by being passed to the “agent” (Jon or Jon-equivalent) through the Magnus Institute. We, the audience, know that, if the dice had been selected to fill the tape recorder role, that would give them the potential not just to make one individual’s life more miserable, but to fundamentally change the entire world a la TMA 160 and 200. 

*In TMA canon, the Web uses the Magnus Institute as a site for agents and catalysts to interact, just as much as the Eye does if not more. The fact that the archives is a site of interaction between people and particular objects is critical to the narrative as told by the Web, even if it seems incidental to Jon–and even if Jon doesn’t understand the archives that way. It’s an interesting way to look at the Magnus Institute and archives as functioning in a similar way to actual archives, which serve as sites of interaction between people and historical objects (in spite of Jon’s complete lack of ability to function as a regular archivist.)

[fandombead]

Sanders Sides human AU where they’re all camp counselors at some backwoods Alphabet soup upstate summer camp—

Camp Sandside

Also locally known as Camp Mindscape

C!Thomas is the newest camp director trying to keep the camp funded and running every year. He advertises and keeps in touch with people who help everything work out each year.

Logan is head of schedule and morning role call. He makes sure camp has an educational side to it, so they have something to take away. He enjoys accompanying on the nature hikes and takes their slightly older campers stargazing. You can find him usually hanging out in the camp archives and he can answer any question about its history.

He coordinates camper activities with Patton, who is the poster child for Campy Dad-Counselor™️. Patton knows every campfire song ever how to make 477 different crafts from sticks and rocks you can find in the forest. He is good at wrangling the kids and making any activity fun so everyone gets included. He’s excited to be there every day. He’s been there the longest and has dappled in every other job as needed.

Remus runs all the sport activities and Roman throws together a little theater group production for the parents at the end of the summer. Both twins help each other out for those activities depending on whose day it is. They also keep up the Canteen and craft workshop. They tell the best campfire stories. (Fun fact: they went to this camp as kids and are working here now during college)

Virgil’s shadowing Patton with first aid as a trainee nurse and handles safety protocols/checks. He’s just stressed out trying to keep everyone alive till the end of the summer. He particularly sticks around at the sport fields, lake, and obstacle course. He barely sleeps and runs on caffeine and spite. He enjoys playing guitar for the kids at campfire time. He makes sure everyone wears sunscreen, is drinking enough water, and that no one wanders off from the group.

And not least of all, Janus, who is the mental health counselor and resolves incident cases between campers. He also is someone the other camp counselors can confide in because the job is draining. He makes sure everyone is taking care of themselves and not doing too much, short-staffed as they are. Camp has run much more smoothly since they added him to their team and everyone is happier for it after getting used to the changes.

They all really enjoy the work and each other. What started as an interesting, versatile summer job that let them hangout together turned into a fun tradition they were quite invested in. Every summer is a memorable one and they look forward to it every year.

I just think it’d be a fun story setting, a series of glimpses at camp life with chapters dedicated to silly or fun happenings at the camp. For some reason all that are coming to me is chapters that sound like history event logs and just imagine it’s because the twins hijacked Logan’s documentation of them and rewrote them with more flair and drama. The Hiking Disaster of 21’. Battle at…Vine Lake (okay maybe not the name but I WILL work Vine in somewhere—maybe that’s the name of the theatre). The Kayak Wars. Surviving the Storm. Bear-ly Active.

(Actually half the chapters will be puns and you’ll know Patton had a hand at assisting the twins’ shenanigans for those retellings~)

Depending on the number of campers, they might also each be head of a cabin and in charge of 3-5 campers specifically on top of everything else that they manage to make good connections with even the most unlikely campers by the end of the summer. (I mostly thought of this just because I wanted an excuse for Logan to be head of the ‘Crofters Cabin’ bwahahaha)

I want Campy adventures!!!

Side notes expanding on the AU bc I have tons of scattered ideas:

I also had the alternative (/prequel? With a few tweaks) idea where some or all of them are campers instead and they meet at the summer camp years before they decide to work there~ ^^

I think that’d be a great story too, where they become lifelong friends in the end and grow to be glad they got sent to this weird old camp for the summer and just have a great time after getting through a few challenges. And they go back every year to see each other again.

Patton calls the campers “saplings” and other nature/tree related nicknames

Their camp shirts have a white star border in black incorporated on the front with the Camp Acronym and everyone styles theirs differently (example: Remus cut the short sleeves off of his)

I imagine they have a rival camp too that every one of them is personally invested in beating yearly, as you do in Camp media. (Alt version where it’s “light” vs “dark” sides camps)

Logan got stuck up a tree once as a kid camper and they still haven’t let him live it down. There’s a photo of it in the archives he keeps trying to get rid of but someone keeps replacing it every year. They call him Pinecone and Lookout 🤣 (Forest Watch)

Janus was someone they never expected to see again. He came to camp in their last years of being campers and joined the group through Remus and Patton. After some getting used to him (Roman and Virgil kept butting heads with him), they were tentatively friends…Roman saved him when he fell in the lake and Janus came in clutch and saved their team at the camp games! they kinda took one step back when he joined as counselor, but they worked it out eventually for good that time~

The twins have a fun rivalry they try to drag their friends into every year…even as counselors now 😂 there’s always some sort of competition going on with them, especially when they start being heads of their own cabins and take pride in their little campers destroying the other teams (but especially each others’)

I think each cabin has a little flag the campers remake every year hanging out front, featuring the animal trait and color of each counselor in charge. Tentative Ideas:

Logan’s Cabin: Team Crofter (of Discovery Cabin). Campers have dark blue bandannas/necklaces

Patton’s Cabin: Team Friendship (of Amity/Compassion Cabin). Campers have light blue bandannas/bracelets

Roman’s Cabin: Team Braveheart (of Ambition Cabin). Campers have red bandannas/necklaces

Remus’s Cabin: Team Chaos (of Endeavor/Spontaneity Cabin). Campers have green bandannas/bracelets

Virgil’s Cabin: Team Storm (of Vigilance Cabin). Campers have purple bandannas/necklaces

Janus’s Cabin: Team Serpent (of Accord/Cunning Cabin). Campers have yellow bandannas/bracelets

They collabed on these name ideas themselves~ The twins’ cabins also relate to one another.

Roman’s theme is having goals and dreams and Remus’s theme is trying ways to reach them, not giving up when it doesn’t work the first time. Together they encourage campers to find something they wanna try that’s new and going for it~

You can probably pair Virgil and Logan’s cabins + Janus and Patton’s in a similar way of their themes relating or balancing each other.

Every year you return to camp, you get a charm to add to your bracelet/necklace (typically all moved to whatever cabin color you are for the current year’s summer). Represents the overall theme of that summer, received at the end.

[the-lonely-crow]

Celia Ripley Thoughts

ok these are some observations/theories/headcanons i have about Ms. Ripley and seeing as things have started to get Crazy on podcast i figured this was a good time to write them all down in a semi organized and coherent collection.

From her first appearance i was struck by the fact that her personality is vastly different than either Lynne Hammond or Archives!Celia. At first i thought this was because she was the Celia from the Protocol universe but as Things have happened I’m thinking actually her super perky friendly personality is not really genuine.

She knows far more than she’s letting on and has no interest in telling anyone, even Sam. She actually seems like she’s trying to keep information from Sam or at least control what information he gets and when.

In the meeting with Gerry Celia kept distracting Gerry from the questions Sam was trying to ask. She interrupted Sam twice just as he was about to ask a question to ask about first his house and then the painting. Ill get more into this in a second when i talk about my theory as to what is going on with her but mostly she just seemed excited to have met Gerry Keay and to have gotten a painting out of it.

Celia recognized Jon’s voice the first time she heard Chester read a case but just now decided to mention Jon and Martin to Sam. This goes back into me thinking that she seems to be wanting to keep information from Sam.

I think Sam really likes Celia but I don’t think Celia’s feelings are nearly as genuine for him. It is possible that I’m biased but all of her flirty interactions with him have felt stilted and a bit fake in the same way that her general bubbly personality does. Personally i think she is trying to get as much information from him before she shows any of her own cards.

I saw someone else mention this as well but Celia seems to be like the audience insert for people listening to Protocol who also listened to TMA. Not just with the information she knows but with how excited she was to meet Gerry.

Couple of theories:

I think that if you travel to at least the Protocol universe you have to kill your counterpart if you want to remain stable in the new universe. Conservation of mass and all that. We see that with Darrien he’s bene fine and taken over the other Darriens life with most people none the wiser. I think Celia didn’t kill her counterpart and that’s why she keeps getting teleported in front of cars and trains and things. We know from Anya Villette’s statement that when you travel to the Archives universe you sort of merge with your counterpart (her friends still recognized her and its not mentioned that there were two of her but her friends were “distant”) so i think the kill your double thing is specific to the Protocol universe. It’s possible that this is why she couldn’t take Jack with her if she went back because he wouldn’t have a counterpart to merge with. He just fully doesn’t exist in the other world.

I think Celia intentionally dimension hopped as a favor (as much as someone does favors for their former cult leaders) to Georgie and Melanie. This is gonna touch on my general theory for what the Archives universe looked like post 200 that i wont explain further here for sake of time. Suffice to say i think it was Bad for pretty much everyone even after everything went back to “normal”. I think the hilltop road rift was still active after everything but Georgie Melanie and Basira were too busy trying to help out as the only three people alive who didn’t just spend several months in their worst nightmares to do anything about it. This is when i think Celia, as someone with no memories of any friends or family to reconnect with, volunteered to go see what was on the other side of the rift. Before she left i think Melanie and Basira (and Georgie to a lesser extent) gave her all the information they could on the supernatural including their history with the archives and important people that might be able to help (people like Gerry Keay). I think they told her mostly to gather information and maybe look for jon and martin if she could and come back. Having jack obviously would have complicated that but i do think that’s why she’s knows this universe’s Georgie.

I think one of two things probably happened to lead her to apply at the OIAR. Either 1) she was doing her own research and got to a point where a random unconnected civilian gets to the end of their resources so went to find a place where she could have more access to information or 2) after getting to the new universe she settled down and got comfortable. Like i said I don’t think things were good in the Archives universe, I’m sure a whole new world probably would have felt like a fresh start. She had a fling, had jack, had a normal job. And then ran into something that forced her to get involved again.

Anyway am very excited to see where they go with her i think she’s neat :]

[mllemaenad]

The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

Huh. It sounds rather as though Chester has some opinions about barging into other people's space in the workplace.

I must admit, I don't go in for a lot of worrying about whether a piece of information is somehow a red herring and doesn't really mean what I think it means. Mostly because I don't think The Magnus Archives really worked like that.

It had a lot of complex world building that it revealed in pieces, and its central conceit was that its protagonist was a man who had an urgent need to understand the mechanics of the world but, as the villain of the piece was actively denying him access to that information, he had to drag it out of horror stories one weird fact at a time.

I don't mean to say that there was never a misdirect: in season 3 the characters really needed to believe in the threat of the Unknowing, and so for the duration of that story arc it was a threat. It had a reasonably plausible explanation for why the rituals had always failed – that if it wasn't Gertrude Robinson blowing them up it was the servant of some other rival power – and you could just go along with it. But when the story wanted you to think about the rituals, it immediately and clearly started saying that actually, they collapse on their own all the damn time.

By and large, if something seemed weird it probably was. If you heard the same name twice, you'd probably keep on hearing it. The lady infested with bugs you learned about in episode six, and who definitely freaked John out, was in fact going to be a problem. And so on. I don't mean this as a criticism: stories with endless impossible-to-guess twists are often just annoying. Solid world building that makes more and more sense as you go on is a positive.

It's possible that The Magnus Protocol is a different kind of story, and is actively trying to mislead its listeners. But that feels like a problem for a later me, should evidence of that arise.

It does deal quite differently with the way information is distributed across its cast, though. I mean – Jonah Magnus/Elias Bouchard absolutely hoarded information, but otherwise it was fairly well distributed. If another character found out something important, John heard it on the tapes. Martin also listened to the tapes. And honestly, John was reasonably forthcoming if he knew a useful fact the others didn't. I'm not disputing the time everybody forgot to tell Tim about an impending apocalypse for a couple of weeks ... but even that got resolved by Martin realising and telling him about the impending apocalypse.

Here, though ... everyone is following a different thread, and nobody is sharing what they know. That creates a very different atmosphere.

And the story ... I mean, it's mostly about a workplace getting wildly out of control.

It's interesting that Alice seems to like Chester, but dislike Norris. I suspect that there's mostly just a meta joke there, as the episode was penned by Norris's voice actor. But still: it's hard to imagine the sense in which Norris could be a "whiny little toad" when his personality fluctuates with the cases he reads. And Chester's case, here, was definitely someone having a whine. Don't get me wrong: Dianne had a horrible experience. But she is very much here to complain about it.

You could argue, as a starting point, that the whole case reads like a broad summary of how things went in The Magnus Archives:

Got dropped into a managerial role following the long absence and eventual death of my predecessor

Did not receive any reasonable training or oversight during the transition period

Found the place completely empty of staff and had to just deal with that

Completely winged it on actually running the place

Direct line manager was unhelpful and almost gleefully unresponsive to requests for assistance

Several people just ... signed up to work there, with no process whatsoever and nothing that even had a whiff of a related skill set

Then there were monsters everywhere, which was just great

The situation was very much out of control

Was very much in peril of being actually be crushed to both despair and actual death by the sheer number of monsters and other weird crap that had taken over my world

Everything was on fire

Sitting on the floor and screaming does feel like a reasonable response to all of the above

Even Dianne's mild officiousness (she keeps ... listing her bachelor's degree. Why on earth?) is reminiscent of how John could sound when he wanted people to think he knew what he was doing.

That said, it is a relief to encounter a character who had a supernatural experience and reacted by noting that this was some horrible bullshit and leaving.

Of course the primary difference between this and The Magnus Archives is where the threat came from. The archival staff could be a cantankerous bunch, but they were never in themselves the problem.

Dianne's weird volunteers remind me most of the eerie students in Anatomy Class. Which isn't to say that they're the same – just that it has the same kind of feel to it, where the point is that their behaviour is almost recognisably human. And as the working situation spirals out of control in the story, you feel it also deteriorate in the OIAR.

It's all about intruders. Celia is the least obvious intruder – the new hire, who has a much reason to be here as anybody else. But there's the sense that she may have come here from very far away indeed, and like the volunteers in the story, she brings odd things with her:

Celia Is there any way to look up specific files? Alice Like what? Celia Oh I don’t know. Every case about being buried alive or meat or… whatever. – The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

Celia seems to be very much referencing the entity categorisations from The Magnus Archives. So you have to wonder – is that relevant here? She might operate as an audience insert here, with preconceptions about how the world works that ultimately won't help her.

I don't think it is necessary to throw out everything you know from The Magnus Archives to enjoy this story. It's hardly unusual for a sequel to be accessible to a newcomer but provide a richer experience to anyone familiar with the original. Gwen Bouchard likely has some interesting connection to Elias Bouchard that will come up eventually. If you listened to The Magnus Archives you know the name and can anticipate and be curious about what that means. If you didn't – well, they'll tell you when they get there.

But this is more about the nature of reality. Robert Smirke's fourteen was one man's attempt to categorise, explain and control a nebulous collection of supernatural experiences and beings. It continued to be relevant in The Magnus Archives because many of Smirke's associates were still around. They set up cults and organisations around their own personal obsessions, and taught younger people to think as they did. The broken world was largely the fault of an assortment of privileged men from the heyday of the British Empire literally defining the rules of existence.

Here – well, the existence of The Magnus Institute implies the existence of a Somebody Magnus, if not necessarily a Jonah. But the fact that it's located in Manchester makes it quite clear that the early events from The Magnus Archives could not have occurred in the same way. So are there different people involved? Different obsessions? Different rules?

None of the items were fit for sale. I specifically recall two large, soiled Crinoline dresses, a Chaise Longue with cushions filled with some sort of coarse sand, a taxidermied vulture, a rusty antique printing press and a collection of old medical equipment that had seemingly been recently used. There were many, many additional items but I was unable to take a full inventory as the shop floor was overfull. – The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

There's a lot going on, and it's all creepy and wrong. But how do you sort and make sense of it all?

And then there's Sam, who finally pushes his way into Colin's private space. There's the question there about relevance again. Sam has come to ask about a weird email (and as an aside, I am going to amuse myself imagining that Alice has a filter on her inbox to send anything from that address to spam, and every one of the hundreds of affected emails says "stop calling me Chester"). Colin does not care about the weird email, although he cares about being recorded enough to assault Sam and break his phone.

Sam brought something weird and unwanted – the phone with is internal microphone, and the audience can be certain Colin is right: it's listening.

While I have no doubt there are weirder things in the world than internal emails from people who don't work at the OIAR, it does seem like a strange thing to dismiss out of hand. Sam has received mysterious forms from a supposedly "automated" process, and a peculiar email from a "John" who does not exist. Alice has received a security notification regarding Sam's search activities. Gwen has received a recording of Lena attempting a murder, and apparently information from a "source" indicating that Lena hid that information from her superiors.

Someone or something is listening, and someone or something is communicating. It could even be multiple someones – but nobody at the OIAR is comparing notes to find that out. If Colin knew about the other instances, would he care more about the email?

There even seems to be disinformation being spread, as Alice explicitly told Celia the search does not work:

Alice Well, there’s a search bar, but it doesn’t actually do anything. You’d have to dig through them all manually. – The Magnus Protocol: Give and Take

But we already know that it does from Sam's research into The Magnus Institute:

Alice Apparently you tried searching for files with the terms… (checking printout) "Magnus” and “Protocol"? Sam That’s what this is about? I mean, yeah, okay, I got a case referencing the Magnus Institute and then I looked it up and found a few files on the system that mentioned using “The Protocol”. Why would that be restricted? – The Magnus Protocol: Taking Notes

I don't know why she did that, aside from her general aversion to digging into the cases she assesses, but it does make it harder to keep everybody on the same page.

And then Gwen, who both unceremoniously bursts into Lena's office, and apparently blackmails her way "in" to the true business of the OIAR. She too brings something unwanted: evidence of Lena's attack on Klaus-the-presumably-former-IT-guy-whose-fault-it-is-the-damn-code-is-in-German.

But what does "in" mean, and what does an "external liaison" do? The most reasonable assumption seems to be dealing with these Starkwall people, who were also likely the people who charged in to the Hilltop Centre and dealt with a messy situation by a) shooting everybody and b) setting things on fire. I see now why the first word Sam associated with those people was "massacre".

It's interesting to consider what Gwen might be trying to get out of this. Lena keeps referring to her as ambitious, but a managerial role on the night shift at a creepy data warehouse isn't exactly reaching for the stars. Obviously there is more than that going on here – but how and what does Gwen know about it? And if Starkwall deals with everything the way they dealt with the situation at Hilltop Centre, what could standing next to that mess gain a person?

Finally there is Hilltop Centre itself. It's interesting that in both universes the place seems to have latched on to charity as a cover: Hill Top Road's most notable incarnation was as a halfway house, and Hilltop Centre is a charity shop. The former gave the owners access to discarded people; the latter to discarded objects. It also suggests, though does not prove, that this is not the same reality from which Anya Villette hailed. Of course, the house could have been repurposed since her cleaning job in 2009, but it does seem a stretch since at that point in time it had been newly constructed as a private residence. It is also interesting that it was once again destroyed by fire.

So what was this "good cause" the volunteers were so diligently serving? And – if it was Starkwall and the OIAR that dealt with the situation there – who called it in? Dianne's report is clearly after the events, so this is not the case that summoned them.

I'd be interested to hear what did, and what they thought was going on.

[welcometogrouchland]

i'm suffering under the curse rn BUT. i am 3 episodes in to The Magnus Protocol and so far my thoughts are that it seems pretty good! on the one hand i should probably do my best to separate tmagp from tma but at the same time, i mean, the only reason i'm listening to tmagp is bc of prior attachment to tma, so it's interesting to me to contrast and compare them (though in all fairness it's been a while since i listened to tma).

the new cases are definitely cool so far in terms of allowing for more formats, i wonder if we're gonna get any future explanation for their eloquent presentation like we did in tma since idk if there's any hints so far at what the whole worldbuilding deal is with that so far in tmagp.

i will say that- do to the different formatting and immediate bigger cast who gets more focus and whatnot- tmagp feels more 'TV' in a certain way. which isn't a pejorative statement and i actually really dislike it when ppl assume something being 'TV' means it's low quality or shallow, lol. tmagp is a good example of something feeling 'TV' but it's a notable difference and is casting my mind back to the discourse/discussion about a tma tv adaptation and what that would look like back when archive 81 got one. i imagine it'd feel a lot more tmagp inspired.

cast is cool so far! i admire alice's actress for being able to pull of the extremely tumblrific dialogue (which i know is on purpose but was also VERY off-putting to me at first- it's the kind of thing that i love when written but spoken aloud in a fictional setting sometimes raises my hairs for some reason). i already love gwen, she's defs gonna be the toxic woman i get attached to and then regret it (assuming i listen to more episodes which i hope i do? i'm not great at it but i do like finishing things, my brain is just pulled into all directions rn if that wasn't already apparent). Colin you're great, i can't wait to watch you break down. Sam you're great too in a way that your personality rn makes me very excited for your potential future corruption arc (obligatory reminder i'm only 3 eps in and just making educated guesses based on what jonny and co did for tma, though i do acknowledge that there's a lot more fingers in the proverbial protocol pie rn)

in general i'm curious about the direction of the show, namely how they're gonna make it tragic in a way that's different to tma? bc i always maintain that the beauty of tma is the slowburn, and how everything happens so slowly that by the time you realise what path we're on, it's too late to stop any of it, and the more you learn about these people and this world, the more you realise it was always going to end like this, even if it didn't have to.

it's a tough feat to pull off and the inherently different structure of tmagp makes me wonder if they're gonna have to pivot what kind of tragedy this is. it's probably apparent right now to anyone who's properly caught up but as for me? i'm curious and cautiously interested. idk if i'm ever really gonna get involved with the fandom like i did with tma (bc that was a mostly great but also wild and formative experience for me and in general i'm bad at being multifandom no matter how much i wish i could be bc it would make my life sooo much easier. but unfortunately the shape of my autism (title of my new movie and/or hit single /j) does not allow for it with any ease. only struggle)

anyway i have an essay on political cinema to write so i really need to close this window lmao. will perhaps consider some kind of liveblog or sequel post to this as my listening progresses

[pennesloppy]

the magnus protocol is so good i cant

second episode's statement feels both like an expansion on the slaughter and its ties to music and arts / wild passion but it's also very focused on the flesh and the perfection of self and i'm not even at what I assume to be the big twist yet but this feels like mastery over your series' concepts. also martin and jon being the TTS is unspeakably cool but the fuckn Implications. like I'm pretty sure it's because they've opened the floodgates in MAG300 and they're like. a part of the eye now? maybe??? but I feel like it makes sense. I hope they show up in reports or something. and in person ofc

idk if sam trying to piece together the system hints to a gertrude equivalent of shtick being misfiled on purpose? colin definitely knows more about it though (hes got my name!!!!). lena definitely hits the elias vibe but feels very much less insidious. i feel like drawing parallels might be a reckless move but I can see so many of them. like, alice has the willingly skeptic vibe that jon had.

oh also I love the character focus. the original is definitely more of a slow burn in that regards which makes it very difficult for me to not gush about to the friends i'm introducing TMA to, but this is wonderful.

it feels significant that teddy is allowed to leave in the first episode. makes me think the OIAR isn't affiliated with the eye/ not as much as the archives, might be because of the lack of jonah magnus? also gwen wanting to take lena's place and stuff definitely foreshadows SOMETHING and I am scared as hell.

im still on the 'the archives failed their ritual due to the lightless flame' theory train but i'm very intrigued by the archives still fighting back against intruders.

canaries should stay above ground is very fucked, i love it, i think it's interesting the eye actually made someone STOP seeing for once though. also the dates of the posts built tension so efficiently I loved that so much. the different report formats and the heavy breach of privacy add so much flavor to the horror. also that box redcanary took is absolutely the web box thing right?

speaking of the web, the listening devices are so good. i doubt they're web-related this time, especially if the archives are not as important this time around, but the fact they're just following you is horrible.

i don't know to what extend the eye is 'stronger' because of the TMA ritual or if it's even canon to the TMP series but I feel like the eye is much more insidious and I don't know if it's because it's desperate due to the destruction of the archives or if it's a manifestation of it's dominance over the other fears? I do hope the TMP universe is one of the many made to be consumed after the fear in TMA world dried up completely though, that would be very cool and that is personally why I think martin and jon show up as text-to-speech.

i think I should do more unhinged rant posts tbh, i'm sorry it's disorganized to any hypothetical readers though, it's very much hastily typed thoughts I haven't exactly very much expanded upon. i've got doubts anyone is gonna actually see this but i do really wanna talk about it so if anything is confusing ask me about it or something. might clean this up later anyways

[m0ther-of-p3arl]

im pretty interested in the Magnus Archives....esp with the Magnus Protocol coming out ..... where can i consume it and what is it about ......

YOU LET ME INFODUMP ABOUT ONE PIECE AND NOW I'D LIKE TO HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

OKAY OKAY OKAY YOU HAVE. YOU HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA THE FREEDOM YOUVE JUST GIVEN ME. IM SHAKING IN MY SEAT. OKAY.

the magnus archives is a 200 episode 5 season horror fiction podcast that i am incredibly neurodivergent about. you can listen to on basically every platform ever- it's on spotify, it's on youtube, and i think the rusty quill website has the episodes on there as well!!

i'll try to keep this spoiler-free LKDFJLSKD especially if you end up wanting to consume it (WHICH YOU SHOULD. ITS UNREALISTICALLY GOOD). the basic premise of the magnus archives is that there's an organization called the magnus institute that deals in the statements of people who have had dealings with the supernatural. at the beginning of the podcast, all the different statements seem like individual creepy stories but once you finish the podcast and then go back and relisten?? oh my god everything just clicks into place and makes so much sense its crazy

the writing is. incredible, to say the very least. every statement *and* the episodes that aren't statements are all delightfully creepy- there are rarely jumpscares and the kind of horror that tma goes for is so EDIBLE oh my god. it's a wonderful series to binge- fair warning though that it takes a bit to get in its stride, the first 20 episodes or so can feel a bit of a slog to get through at times but once you do, you will never want to stop listening.

everything loops back in on itself and there are statements in season three that give you context for statements back in season one and LSKDFJLKDSFJ. it is SO GOOD.

i would tell you everything about every member of the archival staff but i've already rambled on a fair amount so. jonathan sims time!!

jon sims, the newly appointed head archivist of the magnus institute, is the main character. and this guy. THIS. GUY. my fave character isn't usually the main character but jon is such a STUPID WET CAT. him and his ceaseless watcher bullshit. he has a super entertaining personality and a bunch of really cool character arcs and just LKDFSJDLK. best main character of any piece of media ever.

for protocol there are only 2 episodes out rn and anything substantial i have to say about it would be riddled with spoilers but i'll just tell you that it is also INCREDIBLE and i would die for samama khalid, alice dyer and gwendolyn bouchard. and i want to kill lena.

OKAY UM THATS AS FAR AS I CAN GO WITHOUT GETTING SPOILER-Y. HOPE YOU ENJOY MY RANT LDSFJEIONC

[raine-moore]

Okay, so, The Magnus Protocol theories.

We know from the ARG that Sam attended the Magnus Institute with Gerry, since it's a school in this universe.

We also know it burned down 20 years ago.

We don't know how old any of the characters are, of course, but I'd guess late twenties/early thirties, similar to Jon and Martin.

That means Sam was actually really young when he attended the Magnus Institute and was around 10 when it burned down, which is obviously not an easy to remember time frame anyway, but considering what the Magnus Institute dealt with in the Archives Timeline and assuming its similar in Protocol, I'd guess it's safe to say it was a traumatic experience as well.

Sam started researching the Institute, which makes me believe he either left before it burned down and is curious what happened, or he doesn't remember it, presumably as a trauma response, but might be something paranormal.

All very interesting. Obviously they'll research the Magnus Institute more as the show goes on, but I think they will also "unlock" (for lack of a better term) Sam's repressed memories piece by piece and we'll find out what happened to the children at the Institute.

Of course we will also find out how the Institute burned down at some point, but what if it was a child's involuntary reaction? A young servant/avatar of the Desolation (or a differently categorized fire-associated fear)? What if it was Sam? I, for one, want to learn more about the Desolation and would love to see a main character associated with it.

[marmolita]

Magnus protocol 1&2 thoughts! Here be spoilers and also spoilers for TMA! Also fyi I'm gonna be tagging with "the magnus protocol" for tmagp stuff and continuing to use the fandom name plus "spoilers" for anything spoilery.

Stuff I like:

Diving right in with the majorly fucked up "statements," 100% here for it!!! I liked the second one better than the first because I felt like I actually understood what was going on in it better, and it was sufficiently fucked and creepy.

I like the idea that this is basically like the archive, but it's in a different form where they have to read/listen to/watch the statements and then categorize and file them

I ♥️ Sam, he's wonderful so far 😍

Gwen is fascinating and I appreciate a girl who's a stickler for filing things properly (I'm an Amy Santiago type of person myself). I'm interested to see how things go with her and definitely interested to see what goes on with her and Lena

Lena 👀👀 who is she? how did she get here? how much is she in the know? Presumably she's aware that she's running basically a Beholding archive but also presumably this universe does not have a living Jonah Magnus so her backstory is probably very different.

Jon and Martin zapped into the computer like Freakazoid is a great callback to the computer ep from tma and that they're not really alive in the same way they were before (assuming ofc it's them). I'm definitely interested to see who else is in there with them 👀

I like the way the statements start off in computerized voices and then gradually fade to normal voice and then back again 👍

Stuff I don't like:

Probably unpopular opinion: I absolutely cannot stand Alice. I want to like her and I'm hoping that the storyline will change my mind, but she's just kind of a jerk? Like the whole "go ask Colin about the app" thing was just a dick move, and the aggressive irreverence comes off as rude and irritating to me. Presumably she has a tragic backstory and this is some kind of put-on act to cover up her emotional turmoil but would it hurt to be a little nicer to people? Gwen is rude too but she's owning it, not pretending that she's nice. As a listener I feel like I'm expected to find Gwen disagreeable but I'm expected to find Alice charming, and I really, really don't.

The audio in the break room is terrible. I assume part of this is that we're supposed to be listening from the perspective of an electronic device, maybe a copy machine that's around the corner or something, and I get that, but I cannot fucking hear what they're saying. I'm usually either listening in the car or in an environment with lots of other sounds and it's just inaudible for me.

This is true for some other sections as well, though the break room is the worst. I have enough trouble just understanding accents sometimes since I'm not British (I watch all BBC tv shows with the captions turned on 😅) so when audibility is low this becomes even harder.

Some of the transitions were unclear. I loved the artist statement, but it was not clear to me who was listening to it, how it was getting played, or what was going on. I'm not familiar enough with the voices yet to identify people and for a minute I thought Lena was taking a statement in person.

I assume I'll figure this out in time, but I can't tell Lena and Gwen apart.

MY SOFTWARE PROFESSIONAL NITPICKS oh my god I know this is an eldritch abomination of a computer system but some of the technobabble is just conflicting! If it's ancient, then it can't be breaking when it auto updates, because 1) your OS and SW did not auto update back then, and 2) if it's been around and auto updating for years it would be newer and not ancient anymore! There was some other technobabble I can't recall at the moment that bothered me too, which I'll probably remember five minutes after making this post. These are all nitpicks that are only annoying to me because software is my day job though so I will accept them.

[magn-animously]

TMAPG comments! Yay!

Background: I finished listening to TMA last summer. After a few months of dealing with whatever it was the episode 200 did to me, I decided to start a relistening run. That's when I heard they were doing a sequel (ish?). I didn't get to finish my first relistening but I couldn't wait for TMAPG any longer, so I went and listened to the first two episodes.

My very first reaction was... idk? It sounds very different from TMA but it's also very similar to it. I really missed the old cast's voices and it was so confusing to hear all these people talk when I had no idea who they were or what the context was really. Honestly, I thought it was kinda boring, but that's more because I'm impatient and want to get to The Good Stuff and less about the writing being bad (it's not). I know you can't just jump into things, you need introductions first... I thought the same about TMA lol. Couldn't wait to hear the ~plot~ and not just the statements!

And oh boy it looks like we're getting statements even now! How great!! :D I learnt to love them with TMA so I'm very glad that hasn't changed even though they couldn't (didn't want to, shouldn't) copy TMA format, so I was genuinely happy to hear we'll get to get more of that!

Sam sounds like he has a Past with the Institute or perhaps with the Eye, and I'm really really curious to hear what it is. I hope it's something good. Something nasty. I trust Johnny here.

The woman who started to mold herself to have the perfect body was a funny little reminder of Jared's gym. I kinda felt nostalgic? I liked it. It was proper well that's fucked up kind of statement. Story? Can I still call them statements? I think I will.

The others were more boring. Too vague. I know I'm gonna regret saying that because I'm easily spooked but yeah. I'm currently at the episode 145 in my relistening so compared to that, some woman who saw someone who was only partially made of someone she knew and then just ran away was not that interesting.

Anyway, I think I saw or heard somewhere long ago that the new Protocol will not be exactly the same as TMA, and that relying too much on the knowledge we have from it could throw you off. I wonder if that means the 14 (or 15) Fears are not going to be the same anymore. Maybe they got all mixed up and rearranged during the trip to the new universe? It's clear these guys at least are using a very different system to catalogue the stories (Sam would love it if there were only 14 categories to memorise!) so perhaps we can expect there to be more not-clearly-14 Fears. Maybe they'll (or he'll) start to name them like Smirke did but end up with different divisions than he. I mean, we've all known there are fears that don't really fall neatly into any of the 14, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to redo it differently.

Also, I find it really funny that both podcasts started with a dude getting a new job and instantly starting to complain about the way others have done archiving.

I also found it funny how much they stressed that you CAN quit this job. Nobody is holding them there. They can leave. They can. They do. One of them already did. Kinda. I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up coming back.