#my magnus protocol stuff

[cirrus-grey]

Cat! Cat?? Cat!!!!!

[mice-and-moonbeams]

Here's my thing - I theorized , I had ideas and they connected to other ideas that also connected to other ideas. I could have had my own red string board. I was researching computer terms and archival files lol

I went full tilt head on into this series....

Guys I have no idea what's happening anymore lol nothing I'm just listening along at this point like holy moly good cows what's going to happen next. I for sure cannot for the life of me predict ahead with any clarity. Which is fine I'm sure it's all gonna be fine ... right.......?

My only wish is I would love some closure for a certain archivist who didn't want to be a goddamn mystery oh and his plus one clearly.

[creativecat757]

finally, she’s back from the war

[jamiekb]

im loving the two reactions to this episode:

1. love you Heinrich Unheimlich, thank you for bringing the chair (that’s a very expensive chair)

2. good riddance for Dane the Annoying American

[cielle-b]

Gertrude and Gerry playing Smash bros Gertrude mains jigglypuff, Gerry mains Falco

[the-magnus-protocol]

Crazy what a difference a year can make

[butchprophecy]

[cirrus-grey]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one with a spreadsheet heheh

Love the DPHW breakdown you've got here!!! I still have no idea what each score means - I've seen theories ranging from the four classic elements (water, earth, air, fire), to the four humors (phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, melancholic), to the three primes plus one (sulfur, mercury, salt, ???), to @theeldritchcorvid 's delightful suggestion that it could be the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Death, Pestilence, Hunger/Famine, War) - but it’s great to see the breakdown of which cases get clumped together...

I'm pretty sure I have the first bit of the coding figured out, though - the 1RB etc! It's two different codes: CAT (category) 1/2/3 and R (rank) A/B/C (there was also 1 episode with Rank S, the Custodian at Hilltop).

As best as I can figure, CAT1 is for cases involving people (Bonzo, Needles, Mowbray), CAT2 is for cases involving places (buildings, tunnels, piers), and CAT3 is for cases involving things (dice, violins, gambling apps).

And it was @theboombutton who keyed me in on the Rank meaning! Apparently it's a type of tier list used in video games to rank how strong various opponents are, with S as the most powerful, then A, B, C, and so on, getting less powerful as you go down the alphabet. So in this case, it seems to be ranking how strong/dangerous the subject of each case is, with something like tree guy or a talking corpse ranked lower, and the Hilltop center grabbing the Custodian as the strongest possible.

(This means that FR3-D1 ranked itself and the OIAR offices as a person, place, and thing when it ate Colin, but only a B in power level)

These could be contradicted at some point of course, but for now they seem to be holding true!

Ok I have finally gotten my tmagp case spreadsheet all caught up and I've been sorting it all different ways to look for patterns in the DPHW case numbers!

As per ep 36's reveal of their being four metrics, thoughts on the last four digits of the code:

Our highest D cases are ep 3 (8), 4 (7), and 15 (6). Guy turns into a tree, blood-drinking violin, and Lady Mowbray. They all involve the woods or the wilderness in some way? Lowest Ds are 16, 17, 19, 24, and 32 (all at 1). No clear pattern there.

Ep 6, 12, 35, and 13 are the highest ranked for P (8, 7, 7, and 6 respectively). Needles, two Bonzo cases, and the gambling app. Physical injury maybe? Not sure. No clear patterns in the low scorers either.

There's a LOT of high scorers for H, including the only 9 we've gotten so far (for the evil volin). Also 2 Bonzos, tree guy, demon baby, statement-giving dead, Voyeur movie, possessed by Liverpool, awful restaurant, Sam's statement, and the split brain experiment. Interestingly, another Bonzo (ep 12) is one of the lowest scorers for this, only a 2. No cases so far have scored a 1 for H.

@cirrus-grey pointed out that W is the highest metric and I'm seeing that too. Split brain, 2 Bonzos, Sam's statement, and Hilltop Center buried in stuff are all 8s. Voyeur movie, painting away body dysmorphia, reanimated pieces of Arthur Winstead, murder your alt-universe double, and Newton's fucked up dog are 7s. Liminal service station, custodian turns to concrete, sailing ship tattoo, coral better self, and snake guy all score 6. Once again one Bonzo statement is out of place, with ep 10 this time. The only case with a 1 for W is Lady Mowbray.

The only case with even 5s in all four metrics is Freddie eating Colin. Perfect balance, eh?

There's also the middle term, with both letters and numbers:

The most frequent middle term is 1RB, used in episodes 14, 35, 10, 6, 15, 12, and 16. These episodes feature Bonzo 3 times, and Ink5oul, Lady Mowbray, and Needles once each, leading me to guess this means externals. I'm not sure why guy-turns-into-pile-of-snakes is here, or why only one Ink5oul case is, though.

2RB is applied to 5 cases: ep 33, 28, 25, 5, and 29. I don't see any pattern here; that's the pier getting eaten by darkness, Sam's Institute encounter, the really gross restaurant, the movie Voyeur, and the flooding lock museum.

2RC is pretty straightforward! Episodes 7, 17, and 30 all have to do with the Hilltop Center! 32 is the odd one out, the woman possessed by Liverpool, but maybe its because it's still about a spot on the planet that's spooky for some reason?

13RBC is the code for ep 22, 23, and 19, all of which have similar body horror/fucked up experiment vibes? And sort of a gaining of sentience, maybe? The dog from Newton's experiment, the trapped other brain half, and the coral-duplicate woman? I'm not sure but the vibes are the same.

Eps 26, 24, and 1a are all in 1RBC. Reanimated pieces of Arthur Winstead, demon baby, and PE teacher killed by the error-chivist. No clue.

There are more middle terms with 2 cases tied to them, but that's not really enough for me to see anything there, except for with 3RB. Both ep 9 and 13 have to do with gambling.

That's about all I can glean at the moment, maybe somebody else can see some stuff here that I can't.

[gammija]

So... why tape recorders?

After hearing about the [ERROR]chivist from Sam, Georgie obviously immediately starts thinking the same thing that anyone familiar with the events of tma is: In what way is this related to Jon? Sam literally quotes the 'all eyes' line, this Archivist feeds off of people's Fear, makes people tell them stories about their trauma, and tape recorders keep following them around! All Jon powers, or at the very least Archivist powers!

...Except, as we learn in s5, while the tape recorders follow Jon and Martin around, despite them being such an Archivist motif from the audiences POV, the tapes are not of Jon, they're not of the Archivist.

In MAG196 and MAG197, it's revealed that the tapes have all along been part of the plan of the Web, to use them, Jon and the Eyepocalypse to spin a web and spread to other dimensions:

So if the tapes aren't and never were an Archivist power, why do they show up for the [ERROR]chivist?

Is it the Web spinning a new plan? It can't be ruled out, but the [ERROR]chivist seems a poor candidate for a new rituals lynchpin. Not to mention that the Fears don't seem to exist in those same categories in tmagp in the first place, or that doing the same thing twice seems kinda basic from a meta perspective.

Really, there is something the [ERROR]chivist is reminiscent of, more than anything else. Not Jon, or Getrude, nor any one character or person from either universe.

With their tape recorders, their gender ambiguity and cloaked form, their most identifiable feature being their eyes, All Eyes, being able to compel statements without even saying a word, making victims relive their trauma not just in spirit, but in body, what the [ERROR]chivist is, most of all, is the idea of the Archivist.

The [ERROR]chivist is the Archivist, insofar as he would exist to the minds of the people in the ruins of tma's post-apocalypse. A vague, watching creature, always tailed by tape recorders, making you spill your guts figuratively and literally before moving on, and those eyes, those eyes, the only feature you remember. It's a role without an actor.

[jenijro]

My dumbass be like “oh give me more podcast recommendations” knowing damn well I have at least 500 other podcasts to listen to

[cirrus-grey]

Whoomp there it is!

[dzook]

sorry i dropped off the face of the earth i was trying to figure out how to show a city having feelings

[moominmammaonhero1n]

Sooo who’s excited for the MAGP panel at MCM in October?

[jamiekb]

Yeah no it’s fine. Like the case implies someone who was rejected by the institute eventually gets too involved in the supernatural and looses himself in the process. I’m sure it is of no consequence to my friend Sam who is obsessed with the institute that didn’t pick him, no connection there surely…

[phinnking]

not to be overdramatic but tmagp44 might be my new favourite episode. im losing my mind actually

first of all, the fact that heinrich was in association w the stasi???????? and the “at least i normally spared the children” line????????????????? insane.

heinrich intentionally mistranslating what alice is saying until he openly starts trying to scare the shit out of klara is also wild. he really does feel like something that would reactivate all those childhood fears. no matter how irrational you know they are he is living evidence that they ARE real and they CAN hurt you and thats terrifying no matter how silly goofy he is the rest of the time

the statement is incredibly spiral-coded in my opinion (no, im not trying to apply archives-universe categorization to things in protocol, just saying that im a huge fan of the spiral related vibes. that being. psychological warfare/torture and manipulation. also the meshing of human parts and computer parts in a grotesque way)

statement was also very reminiscent of the one episode from TMA (in s4 or s5 i think?) where theres a website that this guy goes into every day to replace code with another line of code and then people die or something. the details are fuzzy but yall remember that right? intriguingly similar imo since that one was a Web statement which is always good to note....

AND THEN, OF COURSE, THE OBVIOUS. NEW FEARS SYSTEM. i am still so suspicious of it rn since it likely does make sense and work, but there are still questions left unanswered that could alter how this system actually works in substantial ways.

Biggest question is "where did this system come from (both this power of dread that needs to be balanced, as well as the OIAR)?" like, in TMA we know the fears were formed in some sort of parasitic relationship to the development of fears in every living thing (mainly humans) that they could feed off of. so, is this dread native to this world/organically spawning, or was it intentionally created? if it was created/came from somewhere else, who/where? And then, where did the OIAR come from? Where did Fr3-d1 come from? how did anyone come to be doing this job and when?

Another question is if Lena is actually correct whatsoever. We can only assume that she is (at least partially/mostly), but she admits herself that no one ever told her any of this stuff and just "worked there long enough to learn what the system needs." Just because she worked there the longest and puzzled all this out herself doesn't necessarily mean she's correct or, at the very least (and what i think to be the case) understands it in its entirety. She is looking at all this from a very "top down" approach---her job was to monitor these things and balance them accordingly. It's like trying to stop the spread of dandelions by attempting to cut off each flower before it can turn to seeds. Sure, it works, but it's a very surface level understanding of and solution to the problem. Lena probably does still know more than she's said, but I don't think she actually does have all the answers.

Not so much a question than an observation, but ahaaaa yes we have confirmation on the idea of balance being foundational to the system! like, we mostly already knew it was true, but it's nice to have it reinforced. This also obviously ties back to the ties between the archives and the protocol universes and everything that's going on with that, which im very excited to learn more about

i now need to go back and relisten to a bunch of the show with this context and see if i can find anything else that makes more sense now/stuff that still needs answers

[spooksier]

it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a repost of my shop update to include my damn fishing sticker !

keychains and the pin are on preorder til the 31st of july!!

shop here :-) thank u all so much as always