#mag142

[dspd]

You know how fanart always makes Jon's eyes glow when he uses his powers? I always imagined he has these nearly unremarkable dark brown eyes that turn to tiger's eye if the light hits right.

Before his transformation, when he witnesses a real statement, it's like a nicotine hit. As he gets stronger, it's less innocuous as nicotine and more like heroin. That soft brown that Martin fell in love with is the tiniest ring around the black of his blown pupils and, after the transformation, nothing really changes physically. He still stares the statement giver down with this hungry look, drowning them in the black holes that used to be his pupils. But now the statement giver feels the icy, oppressive energy, the claws that hook deep and drag that fear out for anyone to see.

Like in MAG142, Scrutiny, when the woman is talking about how he's sitting there, gulping down all her terror. It's like when you stare at something so hard your field of view distorts like fishbowl POV and she was forced to sit there under that.

for anyone who doesn't know what I mean by fishbowl, I've attached an example below the cut

[abejaenacuarela]

pipeline weak sarcastic nerd ---> lovcraftian demigod who doesn't know how to human anymore (but is trying)

[timeline de peinados, barba, cicatrices, outfit, poderes y personalidad de Jonathan Sims a lo largo de las temporadas según yo las imagino] 👁️🧿👁️‍🗨️👀💚🩸🥸🛐🥴💀📼🕸️

Just binged TMA in less than two weeks. I'm dizzy and obsessed. I can't believe it took me this long to get into it. Drew this in a trance. Jon they could never make me hate you<3

•do not repost •

odio como quedaron la mayoría de estos Jones. No sé hacer barbas. El color se tradujo re mal de la compu al celu. Enfin

Anyway así es el formato con el que lo subí a Instagram ( y el boceto final):

yes I am implying that the t-shirt daisy dreamt about was a Dua Lipa 2017 tour shirt

[fractal-voidling]

MAG142 - #0181206 │ Scrutiny

John

John

I can't believe I'm the one who's saying this, but John

that's not how you communicate

you can't just eat people's trauma

bad John

spit it out

I swear to the gods, Daisy's need for company's gonna save Martin's stupid ass

or John being a suicidal idiot, lol

[ceaseless-bitcher]

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

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

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

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

JONNY GIVE US THE STATISTICS

goddd i love tma so much i love how each episode has thematic relevance to the fear that's about to attack the person, they have to be SUSCEPTIBLE first. im relistening to piecemeal and in addition to just being a literal murderer who presumably deals a lot in Meat, the guy keeps using phrases like "waste of skin" and "human garbage" and all this other stuff that clearly feeds into the more esoteric stuff behind The Flesh, about feeling like a body in the machine, only as valuable as the pieces you can cut off of yourself are. he was ripe for the flesh long before he met angela.

and ive gone on before about like, Do Not Open, and how joshua was feeling money pressure and all this ambient stress unrelated to but definitely feeding the coffin.

10/10 good shit jonny sims knows how to do a horror.

[ndrwlls]

i love the fact that in mag142 jon became one of the entities he reads about. he is now a nightmare haunting innocent people i love that for him

no green eyes version he looks crazy here

[deadkraker]

listening to MAG142 and going like this bc damn he really did just do that

[heeha-must-die]

i’ll try to do at least some of the inktober 2023 prompts

this is obviously not made in ink but who cares

day 1: dream, featuring my beloved little deranged archivist (MAG142, that is)

[duskerus]

thinking about jonathan sims at the late hours of night never goes well. Have you thought about how the web deals with addiction and how Jon is basically confirmed to be addicted in mag142 scrutiny lately? how he's forced to keep his habits up to survive, how he fights for a way to stop them? How at the last second he relapses? Cause once you're stuck in the spider's web you're never free again? Have you????

[pinkbeetroot]

less eyes under the cut (statement found in MAG142)

[if-loki-was-a-fox]

Finally have to relisten to mag142 (<- scared voice)

[ceaseless-bitcher]

Honestly, part of me believes he was almost entirely following the instincts borne of his new association with Beholding, combined with the influence of the Not-Sasha. It seems like everything Jon did to “investigate�� made him quite likely to be caught; it’s not an effective method, but it causes the greatest reaction from his victims. It also reminds me a bit of how Jess Tyrell recounts hallucinating Jon in her periphery in the two weeks since he took her statement (mag142).

All of the details listed here are things Jon would have had to research on his own, which would be far more likely to fly under his colleagues’ radars. It doesn’t benefit Beholding, even if it would help Jon. His poor research methods here create a never ending cycle of paranoia, stalking, and scrutiny. I feel that Jon is a genuinely good researcher, as well; this doesn’t necessarily fit exactly with the limited profile we have of his 4 years preceding his promotion to Head Archivist.

things jon missed while stalking his colleagues:

the fact that sasha had been half lined up for gertrude's job and how that would be a pretty good murder motive

the discrepancy between elias's hiring in 1991 and how he said he was working as a filing clerk in 1972

tim's brother's mysterious disappearance/death directly preceding his change in careers

martin's real age and literally any of his academic or employment history

conclusion: he's bad at this <3

[ace-apple]

my life is over and i will never be okay again (listened to mag142)

[mag200]

MAG142: Scrutiny

watercolor & ink // kofi

[kaijukebox]

-eats your trauma- -eats your trauma- -eats your trauma-

[gammija]

my thoughts on this eps statement et cetera are [LOUD HUMMING NOISE] and cannot be expressed in words so instead I'll just remark on some small martinisms

- "Look, I-I just need to, to talk to a manager, or something?"

MARTIN: "Okay, uh, well, uh, yeah, actually; I’m a – I’m a manager."

i love his one-sentence journey from 'ah what do i do, i can't send her to peter but who else is there' to 'wait... IM technically a manager'

MARTIN: "I know. Not nice being interrogated, is it?"

i fully did not get what martin was getting at here during my first listen, since i went through s3 and 4 in about 3 days or so. And i didn't remember her interview with him as being particularly harsh. but clearly my man can hold a grudge

@a-mag-a-day

[im-the-knight-of-stardust]

Love how Jon's distinguishing feature is "looks like he hasn't slept in a week".