#mag 016 arachnophobia

[themagnustournament]

Redemption Round 3 - Match 18

Honestly, I'm surprised both of these are in the Redemption Zone, and against each other, too! Though, they did have tough competition that sent them here. Today Arachnophobia comes with 126 votes from last round, up against Dead Woman Walking's 159 votes.

MAG 016 - Arachnophobia | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Carlos Vittery regarding his Arachnophobia and its manifestations.

MAG 094 - Dead Woman Walking | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Georgina Barker regarding the last words of a possible corpse. Recorded direct from subject.

[two-idiots-one-thought]

MAG016 - Arachnophobia

[fractal-voidling]

MAG016 - #0150409 │ Arachnophobia

you know you're fxcked when even the cat just looks at you with pity and abandons you to die by ghost spider

[shinysnek]

EPISODE SIXTEEN: ARACHNOPHOBIA “Though I remembered little of what the long-dead thing had looked like, I knew it was the same. Can you be haunted by the ghost of a spider that destroyed your childhood?” (Welcome back! To celebrate the good news, let’s start things back up, shall we? It is, after all, what The Web would want.)

[ID: A digital painting of the hand of Carlos Vittery, held up with its fingers curled around a mug. The mug is pale, with a green owl design that is broken over one eye, with cracks running throughout the ceramic. From the mug pours countless pale spider hatchlings, a mess of pale limbs and golden eyes which flow down his hand like liquid. On top of the mug a huge black spider sits proudly, its own golden eyes gleaming. The background is dark and glitchy, with glowing cracks running throughout like a broken screen... or like a spider’s web. At the bottom of the image, sketchy white text reads XVI - Arachnophobia]

[themundanearchives]

Statement of Carlos Vittery

I have a spider in my house

[therabine]

[ieatmypizzawithaforkandknife]

MAG 016 - Arachnophobia

Summary: Jonathan reads the statement of Carlos Vittery, regarding “his arachnophobia and its manifestations.”

Carlos: “I. Hate. Spiders.” Me: “Cheers, I’ll drink to that bro, guess this is gonna be one of those episodes, huh.” Lo and behold, halfway through listening to this I had a mini heart attack when I thought I saw a spider in the corner of my room closest to my desk. (Spoiler alert: It was a piece of dust. I live for the scares, but I think that, like Icarus, I fly too close to the sun sometimes.)

Anyway, from here on I’ll be formatting the titles of these posts closer to how they’re written on the podcast and, from what little I’ve seen, what’s recognized by the fandom. I still feel like an outsider, being so late to things, but at least my posts won’t look as weird now.

So obviously this episode was about spiders. Well, one spider in particular - and I’ll come back to that. But first I’d like to point out that spiders have come up twice before at this point. The first (and more notable) is in episode 8, when hundreds of spiders burst out of the rotten apple that was inside the box at the base of the uprooted tree at the house on Hill Top Rd. The second was only a mention, and it was in episode 9 (the serial killer episode) when the narrator said, of the shed in her back yard, “As far as I was concerned, the sturdy wooden structure was just the home of spiders’ nests and the rusted garden tools my parents would use once a year to attack the overgrown wilderness that was our back garden.” I almost didn’t include this second one, since it’s so fleeting and seemingly innocuous, but it could indicate some kind of connection between the spiders and the creepy ritualistic murder that was being committed in that shed, which is...disturbing, to say the least.

I find it interesting that the first appearance of spiders had them coming out of a rotten apple though. In this episode, Carlos tries giving Major Tom (the cat) food, but he just sniffs at it and walks away, which Carlos points out is unusual (and any cat owner knows is unusual). At the very end, Jonathan tells us that the coroner’s report said that Carlos had “foreign organic material” blocking his throat (though we don’t have confirmation of what the “material” was) and that “his body was completely encased in web.” But spiders typically wrap their prey in silk prior to eating them. Are all of these things related to that recurring theme of bad/rotten food? I’m not sure yet.

As a sometimes-writer, I appreciated the subtle but definite escalation in the threat of the spider. First, it’s on his kitchen wall - unfortunate, since that’s the room where you go to get food, but fairly avoidable. Carlos shuts Major Tom in there for 2 hours and is none the worse for it. The second time, it’s on his TV screen. Its body was physically between him and something he was going to use, and if he wanted to watch TV he was going to be seeing that spider the whole time. And then finally it’s on the ceiling above the head of his bed. A person’s bed should be a safe and comforting place, a place where you can go to rest and rejuvenate - and this marks the end of the last remaining “safe space” for Carlos, as this thing threatens to descend on him as he sleeps. Excellent writing as always.

Building off of the idea of an escalation in the threat is the idea that there’s some kind of malicious intent in this spider’s presence. “I hate spiders, as I have said,” Carlos says at one point, “but I would have sworn that this one hated me back.” He describes it several times as staring at him, and one time describes its “mandibles twitching with anticipation”. Spiders shouldn’t be malicious, no matter how much a person might fear them or not like them. But this one is. Just like caves shouldn’t be malicious either (episode 15). The world of TMA is a scary place and I’m just glad I don’t live there lol.

Especially scary is the idea that this was all caused by an accident Carlos had when he was a child. He says that he tripped and fell into that spider and its egg sac when he was 6 - and nearly 25 years later it’s coming back to bite him in the ass. But I wonder - was there always something supernatural going on with that spider, even when he was a kid? The story he tells doesn’t have any obvious supernatural elements that I can see, and the “ghost spider” (as Jonathan calls it at the end) only appears after the Jane Prentiss worms. My first instinct would be to say that there’s nothing supernatural at all about the spider itself, and that the spider was somehow...activated, I guess?...by Jane’s presence. But I know spiders are important in the series, so right now the whole thing is a big question mark for me. Which came first, the spider or the worms?

This post is part of a series where I write my thoughts about each episode and obsessively connect dots in an effort to figure out The Big Mysteries of the series. All posts in this series are tagged “is this liveblogging?” Comments and messages are welcome but I have only listened to season 1, so I ask that you not spoil me for anything beyond episode 40. In the words of Jonny Sims…thanks for listening!

(Spoilers for the remainder of season 1 under the cut.)

So I’d like to take a moment to share with you a story about just how much of an Absolute Dumbass I am. Here we go.

I’ve been keeping an ear out for familiar names (of people and of places), so when Carlos mentions his apartment is on Boothby Rd, I did a quick mental check and, nope, don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name before. But wait, it’s in Archway? At that point I hit pause. I thought to myself, I know I’ve heard that somewhere before... Cue me looking back and seeing that’s where Harriett Lee lived in episode 6 (specifically, on Elthorne Rd), and the last known location of Jane Prentiss! Hmm...well, just how big is Archway, anyway? Are those two streets even close to each other? So I pull out a map - and would you look at that, the two roads intersect! I do a little happy dance from putting that together. Unpause. Carlos’ next words were “While nearby Elthorne Road was full of houses and gardens-”. OK, a little disappointing since they “gave” the connection away right there...but it would still take a really good memory (or in my case, really good notes) to remember Elthorne Rd being mentioned in passing 10 episodes ago, right? I no longer feel great, but I still feel pretty good about making the connection. Some 30 seconds later: “Our building had acquired something of an infestation of some sort of insect I didn’t recognize - small, silvery worms, almost like maggots, but slightly longer, and I assume that they provided a good meal for the eight-legged little monsters.” Friends...I cannot describe to you the deep, deep disappointment I felt in myself at this point. Not only had I paused the podcast and done actual research when the answers were literally in the next minute of the podcast, but I had completely forgotten the worms made an appearance at all in this episode. SMH.

[facelessoldgargoyle]

MAG 016: Arachnophobia

Spiders are a classic. I did get a little freaked by the intense description of the fear of small legs touching you, because yea, I do specifically hate that.

What got to me more though was the obsessiveness of the narrator. I hate that in an unfun, genuinely terrible way. Too close to home for me to enjoy being spooked by.

I do enjoy the idea of being killed by the ghost of a spider that you killed when you were a child. Good revenge, spider, very proud of you.

[wizardcowpoke]

MAG 016 arachnophobia

[themagnustournament]

Redemption Round 2 - Match 36

Arachnophobia is coming in with 165 whole votes from Round Two and 331 total votes. Seeing it Through earned only 89 votes in Round One.

MAG 016 - Arachnophobia | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Carlos Vittery regarding his Arachnophobia and its manifestations.

MAG 199 - Seeing It Through | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

A discussion on the fate of reality and humanity.

[themagnustournament]

Round Two Part Five - Match 36

Bodybuilder! The only episode in which Jon is not even mentioned! And Jared's here again! Can Jared beat out Arachnophobia, which had 166 votes last round?

MAG 090 - Bodybuilder | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Ross Davenport, regarding his experiences at a local gym.

MAG 016 - Arachnophobia | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Carlos Vittery regarding his Arachnophobia and its manifestations.

[themagnustournament]

Round One Part Five - Match 41

"Spiders but no Annabelle. Sad." [mii channel music stim]

MAG 105 - Total War | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Second Lieutenant Charles Fleming, regarding his experiences during the Taiping Rebellion.

MAG 016 - Arachnophobia | Spotify - Acast - YT | Wiki | Transcript

Statement of Carlos Vittery regarding his Arachnophobia and its manifestations.

[themagnustournament]

The Magnus Tournament: Round One Part Five Masterpost

So as to not create horrifically long masterposts, there will be a Round One Masterpost (pinned) which links to the subgroup Masterposts.

Round One Part Five is open for voting March 28-April 3

Find the full Round One Masterpost here!

[Image ID: Matches 37-45 of Round 1 and the following matches (113-120) of Round 2. The content of the bracket is described below. End ID]

The Matches:

MAG 144 Decrypted vs. MAG 150 Cul-de-Sac

MAG 73 Police Lights vs. MAG 195 Adrift

MAG 139 The Architecture of Fear vs. MAG 018 Confession

MAG 38 Lost and Found vs. MAG 180 Moving On

MAG 105 Total War vs. MAG 016 Arachnophobia

MAG 140 The Movement of the Heavens vs. MAG 175 Epoch

MAG 099 Dust to Dust vs. MAG 023 Schwartzwald

MAG 187 Checking Out vs. MAG 013 Alone

MAG 015 Lost Johns' Cave vs. MAG 074 Fatigue

Polls will be linked once they are posted and when I have time to edit this post (within 24 hours maximum, I have a day job). Each poll will have links to the episodes, wiki pages, and transcripts.

[themundanearchives]

A guy sees a spider in his house a few times. He tries to kill it but doesn't succeed. He has a nice cat though