#julia montork

[cornfieldsrambles]

I love Trevor and Julia so goddamn much, the way they're utilised in TMA season 3 is my actual favourite thing.

Like. Right smack in the middle of the Everything Wants To Kill Jonathan season, they just. bring up these two recorded statement givers from season 1 (they were both brought up maybe one (1) time each after their initial statement eps but you'd be forgiven if you fully forgot they existed).

And they honestly picked the perfect two, like you can't go wrong with "serial killer's daughter who lives in his shadow" and "homeless guy who has apparently been tracking and killing vampires his entire life. Also there are vampires in this universe."

(more t&j rambles under the cut - it is LONG lmao)

Which is its own thing, tbh - vampires are such a footnote in the grand scheme of tma that it's hilarious. They're not connected to anything, we don't meet any, no one else ever mentions them except Daisy like one time, I'm not even sure which entity they serve! The Hunt? Slaughter? Stranger, even? Fuck knows. Trevor Herbert sure doesn't. He doesn't even know what the fears are! He and Julia think they know what they're doing but they are so far removed from the actual Plot™️ despite having a literal Exposition Machine in their back pocket. The only problem of course being that the Exposition Machine hates both their guts.

Anyway yeah Jonny just took these two characters and slammed them into season 3 like "they're a found family now and became cross-country monster killers. This is a problem because now, technically, Jon is one of the monsters they like killing."

They straight up hijack the plot, which. It's so fun watching them storm in like they're such an intimidating force. They really think they're main antagonists. Scratch that, they think they're the main characters of their own show. Some supernatural-esque dark gritty monster of the week series. Yeah, sorry, that spinoff ain't happening.

They weren't even gunning for Jon specifically. They don't know who the Archivist is or why he's important. All they know is "eye guy bad". THEY DIDN'T EVEN KNOW HE WAS IN AMERICA. Jon just had the Supremely Rotten Luck of walking into the vicinity of Julia Montork. I cannot get over it.

And honestly they're so weirdly endearing. The way they pass the story back and forth while giving their statement, the way it just devolves into banter by the end? Julia calling him "old man"? Come on, it's cute as hell. Meanwhile Jon's there like "yes I'm sure this is very nice but can you maybe untie me from this chair please"

oh and by the way. These two fucking C-tier villains just so happen to be in possession of the book containing GERARD FUCKING KEAY.

You know. Gerry Keay? The extremely plot relevant (and fan favourite) character that fills Jon and the listeners in on all that juicy exposition we didn't get from Leitner? The guy who's been teased and seemed to be involved in basically everything since season 1? Gertrude Robinson's protege? That Gerry Keay?

Yeah, they just. Have him.

They don't know why he's important, they just use him as a monster manual and he tells them as little as possible because he hates them. Also this is unrelated but at one point he refers to Trevor and Julia as the Van Helsings and I just adopted that as my go-to name for those two because I thought it was fun.

And then in season 4 they pick the Actual Worst Time to show up. Right at the height of the single most packed episode of the season, these two clowns break into the institute in the most melodramatic way possible:

Like who the fuck do they think they are.

AND THEN THEY JUST RUN STRAIGHT INTO NOT-SASHA. WHO IS ALSO INEXPLICABLY HERE.

They really thought they did something. They really thought they knew what they were getting into, the grizzled rogues taking down the monsters one kill at a time. They were marked by the Hunt - ironically they WERE becoming the same monsters they set out to kill. Exactly the same monster that killed them.

And then Trevor spends the last few months of his life running like prey from the thing that killed his surrogate daughter. Fuck, what a way to end it. TMA is so good at getting you attached to characters with barely any screentime or impact on the larger plot, and these two are my go-to example.

I really love Trevor and Julia is what I'm saying

[two-crows-in-a-trenchcoat]

if Trevor Herbert is an mp does that leave the possibility for

now hear me out

Julia Montork pm

imagine

[mommy-snatcher]

JULIA MONTORK?

ITS "MONTAUK" RIGHT?? IM NOT JUST GOING INSANE?

[oh-shit-i-spilled-my-genderfluid]

My friend you are a genius

i would kill for a tma spinoff thats just julia, trevor, and gerry monster hunting in america. its a horror comedy with a few close calls and some genuinely bone chilling moments, but pair that up with julia and trevor arguing over "whats the best way to kill this vampire" but its slowly creeping up behind them, and pair that with really awkward gas station stops and gerry complaining the radio station's ass and julia saying "what do you care you're dead." trevor complaining julia's driving too slow and she says "why dont you drive then....yeah thats what i thought"

[pidgeons-cliffbirds-love]

julia montork they could never make me hate you<3

[robert-smirke-official]

Hey, hope you’re having a good day, and if you’re not, I’d like to share with you my favourite bit of useless TMA trivia: Julia Montauk’s name got retconned.

MAG 9 - A Father’s Love: “Statement of Julia Montork regarding the actions and motivations of her father the serial killer Robert Montork.”

MAG 109 - Nightfall: “Statement of Julia Montauk, regarding her initial encounters with the hunter Trevor Herbert. Statement taken direct from subject, June 29th 2017.”

I have no clue why they seemingly changed the spelling of her name halfway through the series, but I just find it interesting

Interesting! I wonder if the references to Robert in the in-between statements keep the original spelling. I was always hearing it as Montauk when Jon said it (like I was hearing Jared Keay until Elias started saying Gerard). Montork just feels like a misspelling by someone unfamiliar with English accents.

Either way, probably the Stranger at work.

[lostwords-found]

Poking at the German episodes of TMA again, and I don't know how many times I listened to MAG 23 before it sank in that there's a Becker family mentioned to have been living nearby:

"Well, apparently, the parents of these children found out about [the game of Johann's Steps] and one of them, the mother of Tobias’ friend Hans Winkler, decided to put an end to it. She stormed into the cemetery and, seeing Hans entering the mausoleum for his turn, she ran inside after him and down the steps. None of the children saw what happened, but they all heard the scream." She was never seen again, and "Hans went to live with the Becker family out on their small farm."

The transcript does spell it Becker, not Becher, but:

(a) This was close to 300 years ago (TMA 23 was from 1816 but the story about playing Johann's Steps was from an old man speaking of his childhood). Spellings were a little variable back then and also changed over time, especially if your family was, say, immigrating to another country.

(b) This was as far as we know in a different universe from TMAGP! Spellings might well also change across universes.

(c) The early TMA transcripts also spell Julia and Robert Montauk's last name as Montork, so.

We all know how Jonny Sims is with names, it could very easily be coincidence, and if there was nothing else I'd write it off as such. But given that Protocol has seemed to have multiple other pointers back to those particular episodes of TMA (the date & location of TMAGP 4, and the nature of RedCanary's fate vs Albrecht's fate)... maybe Colin could learn more from a trip to Germany than he thinks.

[thatpodcastkid]

Magnus Archives Relisten 9, MAG 9, A Father's Love

Julia Montork.

That's it end of post.

Jk jk this is my MAG 9 analysis. Spoilers ahead!

Facts: Statement of Julia Montauk (not Montork) regarding the actions of her father, serial killer Robert Montauk (not Montork). Statement given December 3rd, 2002.

Statement Notes: This episode utilizes two horror tropes that are rather common, but not often seen together. This is a Serial Killer horror story, but also a "Discovering A Family Member" story. Serial Killer stories are self-explanatory, following the vicious actions of a single killer, drawing fear from the nature of their deeds and the fear that anyone could be next. "Discovering A Family Member" is the name I use for horror stories in which someone discovers that someone in their family is a monster, literally or figuratively. Think Mom and Dad or We Need To Talk About Kevin. The combination of these two tropes makes it so the audience witnesses a serial killer story from the inside out. We aren't afraid of who the killer is going to get next because we don't need the other characters. Rather, the fear we feel isn't that of attacked townspeople, but of a child. We are not afraid because we might be attacked, but because the person who's always protected us might be the thing we need protection from.

Something that really stood out to me in this episode is how much Julia expects of her childhood self, repeatedly pointing out things that should have bothered her or made her realize what was happening. Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty and it's easy to see all the clues after the mystery's been solved, but there was no way for her to know back then. Especially because she was a literal child. This is a very real feeling though. It's common for people to hate or blame their childhood selves for doing things wrong or not knowing enough, even though there's no way for a child be as intelligent or mature as an adult. Julia expresses a very genuine feeling, if not an entirely rational one.

The heartbeat audio at the end of the statement was so incredible. Such a gradual and effective sound. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the first time an outside noise was used to create effect in the series.

Entity Alignment: This is the first Peoples' Church of the Divine Host Mention, and a pretty solid Dark episode, but there's some stuff that doesn't make sense to me.

(Unrelated, but one of these things is the Church's name. We have "The Cult of The LIGHTLESS Flame" and the " Peoples' Church of the DIVINE HOST." One of these groups worships darkness and one of them has a person acting as a spiritual host for all their desires and it's not the ones you think.)

The shed glows when Robert Montauk performs his ritual. For a Dark ceremony, this doesn't really make a lot of sense. The only explanation I can really think of is that this glowing area is somehow "stealing" the light from others. But I don't fully understand how the murders and heart collection truly fuels the Dark. There's probably another aspect that occurs during the tortures Julia sees in the photographs, but I guess we'll never really know.

It's never confirmed that Montauk is a member of the Church, but it is confirmed that at least some of his victims are. Additionally, the light goes out in his cell when he is murdered. I theorize that even if Montauk was a member of the Church, he wasn't killing for the Dark, but rather targeting its members to get revenge for his wife and to protect his daughter. The ritual may offer protective forces against the Dark, which is why the shed glows.

The line that really stuck with me in this episode was "The Darkness was inside." The idea that the darkness isn't an absence of light, but a presence of something else. In a weird, poetic way, Julia foreshadows that the lights going out isn't something that just happens, but fear entering a room.

I also love the use of the Dark as a childhood fear throughout the series. Even in episodes where it attacks adults, many of them still cite feeling like a child again. This is because fear of the Dark is a very primal, instinctual thing engrained in our psyches from the moment we are born. It also makes the stories so relatable. When Julia says she "did as I was told" and went straight to bed, only wandering out to get a drink of water, when the fear crept in, that's something every kid has gone through. It keeps with the recurring fear of the mundane in the Magnus Archives. It's not during the big moments that the fear will get you, but the during the little, everyday ones.

Character Notes: I love Julia. I love her. I think about her all the time. That's it end of post.

[temporallloop]

it's time to cry about julia montork again

[blorbos-and-such]

y’all ever randomly think about the Mandela effect of “julia montauk’s” name? Whenever I relisten and get to MAG 9 and see her statement it baffles me. It’s not montauk. It’s montork. Her last name is “montork” they’re all just fucking British

[flerow114]

Julia Montork and Trevor herbert in real life? In the united states? It's more likely than i thought

[oh-shit-i-spilled-my-genderfluid]

Julia and Trevor

Y’all they had such a sweet father/daughter relationship I’m gonna cry

[salt-water-sable]

Day nine of doing a doodle for every episode of the Magnus archives until I get bored. Julia Montork is one of my favorites, and this episode starts a theme among some of my favorite episodes of the early tma seasons, and that is how unreliable everyone is as a narrator when they have no clue what the hell is happening, I think Julia’s statement stands out in this, especially on first listen, because of the fact that she’s a child, and both she, and us as the audience, know that she doesn’t know anything, not just about the spooky stuff, and relistening to the series is fun because you know more about what’s happening than any character, and you can fill in the gaps like Julia herself does as she tells her story.

[bizarreandjarring]

started my tma relisten and i’ve just seen how julia montork is spelled i’m DISGUSTED and REPULSED in my head i saw “montauk” and now that i’ve seen the actual spelling i’m afraid i must leave the fandom 😔✌️ peace u guys

[otacringe]

A Julia sketch I did yesterday! The pattern on her shirt is meant to be a heart, but… uh… yeah, I couldn’t draw that properly.