#i love jon and georgie and martin and basira they're probably my favorites

[halfdeadwallfly]

I love the magnus archives so. much

[bubonickitten]

Who’s your favourite character in the magnus archives?

Ooooh that's a tough one. Probably sounds like a cop-out but I genuinely found things to like about all of the main cast?? One of the things I latch onto the most is character development, and they all had some really amazing journeys in that way.

My favorites to write and analyze in depth are Jon and Martin, so I might say they're my favorites...?

[TMA spoilers below the cut]

Like, Jon's ADHD ass is first of all very relatable but more than anything I love the GROWTH he goes through?? This man went through so much trauma and faced such unimaginable cruelty and he STILL never stopped caring. He hurt people, yeah -- p much everyone in the podcast does at one point or another -- but he acknowledged it when he did, and even when it would've been easy to just... give in and be monstrous, to just say "fuck it" and live up to the expectations everyone had of him, he made a concerted effort to do better, even when no one acknowledged his progress, even when no one was willing to support him or encourage him or believe he was worth saving.

And I can never say enough about Martin's diehard "so what if the universe doesn't care, that just means we have to pick up the slack" stance towards nihilism. It's not even toxic positivity, it's fully "yeah shit's fucked, the heat death of the universe is inevitable, but I'll STILL fight Jon's shitty self-esteem AND all fourteen, possibly fifteen cosmic evils on the hill of Our Experiences Matter, and the entire time I will be delightfully bitchy about it, no I do not take constructive criticism', who wants to go first?"

Of course I also love Georgie and Melanie and everything about WTGFs. And Gerry, my beloved. And, god, I love Tim and Sasha (I thrive on S1 before-shit-hit-the-fan archives crew content!! and everyone lives/nobody dies AUs, and literally anything involving reconciliation btwn Jon and Tim).

And Basira -- as much as I'd get mad at her sometimes, her words and actions always made sense to me within the context of her characterization and situation, and I love how she and Jon are sort of on the same wavelength re: dark humor and being incorrigible nerds. (I'm having a lot of fun writing them in my current time travel AU, because given the time to heal and the space to actually communicate, I feel they could be friends. Not outwardly affectionate per se, but like... idk, their platonic love language would probably be something like picking apart the flawed methodology of a shitty study and half-jokingly writing a scathing letter to the editor about how wrong the authors are until Daisy gets bored of being the third wheel and demands they all play Mario Kart or something.)

And I'm obsessed with Jon and Daisy' weird post-Buried friendship and just... they were literally the only two people in the Archives who really understood the struggle to resist feeding their respective patrons, but they also didn't make excuses for each other, and -- I genuinely loved the confirmation that Jon never actually forgave her and didn't sugarcoat her past actions. They probably never would have become friends under any normal circumstances, but given what they had to work with, they built something based on mutual support and accountability and a refusal to engage in the sort of denial that the people around them occasionally did.

In terms of side characters, I still maintain that if Adelard Dekkar knew Jonah's plans from the start he would've astrally projected himself into Elias' office and strangled him to death with his own tie, pseudo-immortality be damned. Replace every Chuck Norris joke ever written with Adelard Dekkar, I s2g.

I also must give an honorable mention to our second ever statement giver, the trope-subverting MVP of "I Am Not LOOKING, I Do Not See It", the king of NOT fucking around and finding out, our gentleman of perpetual staying in his own lane: Joshua Gillespie, gold medal winner of NOT being the first to die in a horror story. What a legend.

aaa I'm rambling. Basically there's a lot to love, both in an 'I am fond of this character's delightful quirks' way and in a 'wow this is good character development from a writing perspective' way.