#tmagp 02
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THE MAGNUS PROTOCOL IS LIVE! So many new characters to which I will grow unreasonably attached before tragedy strikes!
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tmagp is so trans oh my god we have statements about body dysmorphia and feeling peace in changing bodies and general body horror not to mention Alice fucking Dyer
#i love ittttt#body horror is so trans#tmagp#tmagp spoilers#the magnus protocol#alice dyer#tmagp 01#tmagp 02#tmagp 03
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Frankenstein? Assuming you mean the scientist, not the monster, thatād be another āresurrection,ā possible subsections... āobsession,ā āmedicalā, āpursuitā and... hmmm. āBlasphemyā, maybe, so that would make it... four two three seven.
[Image Description: A digital drawing of Gwendolyn Bouchard from The Magnus Protocol. Only her head and upper torso is shown. Gwen is leaning on a desk, with her chin propped in her hand, and looking off to the side with a thoughtful expression on her face. She is portrayed as a fat woman with pale skin, blue eyes, and strawberry blonde hair in a bun. Gwen is wearing a light blue dress and has blue nail polish on her fingernails. End Description.]
Pose reference from @adorkastock
This latest reference pack was exactly what I needed!
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Aliceās Attitude
and why I donāt think itās going to save her.
I havenāt seen a lot of people talking about the implication of Alice's attitude towards the incidents and horror elements so far, so Iām going to. Someone else may have already made a post about this, but I havenāt found anything yet, and I couldnāt find a way to get this out of my mind without writing it down. Naturally, Iām also going to inflict this long-winded and potentially needless analysis on all of you, since I spent 2 hours typing it out (sorry in advance). TW for blatant overuse of parentheticals and politics towards the end. This draws on content from TMAGP episodes 1-3 and TMA overall, particularly the series finale.
I feel like a lot of us going into TMAGP and having listened to TMA already were probably pleasantly surprised by Aliceās attitude of āThe Horrors? Just say no!ā since a lot of TMA revolved around the idea that curiosity and investigation of the fears usually doomed people to be consumed by one of them, as we saw with a lot of the Archive staff, particularly Jon. I certainly was. Though her ideas about how to deal with the incident reports are definitely somewhat callous, in the context of TMA, they feel very pragmatic, and I found myself thinking, āfinally, a character who knows what genre sheās in and refuses to surrender to it.ā Iāve been seeing a couple people agree with this, and say that her approach might even help her stay afloat when things start to escalate as the conflicts of TMAGP develop in the coming episodes. I thought that too, at least for a while.Ā
After thinking about it for several days, I donāt think this is the case. Given TMAās themes and propensity for tragedy, and Jonnyās approach to tackling social issues, I donāt think Aliceās apathy is going to save her. In fact, I think itās potentially going to be the character flaw that will doom her in the first place.
1. Alice already cares (not about the horrors, but about people)
To start with, Iād like to point out that Alice will only be able to maintain her apathy to a limited extent, and when people she cares about start being harmed, she is going to get involved. In fact, we can already see this happening. Ep 3 notably starts and ends with Alice making a plan to get Central IT involved in looking into their computers, when she tries to mention them to Colin in the first scene, and when she asks Sam to call them on her behalf in the final scene. Iād argue that the issue comes up because sheās concerned about Colin more than fixing the OIARās computers. She tells Sam itās because Colin may not be able to handle FR3-D1 as well as he thinks he can since heās been working on it forever with very little positive progress, but given the additional context of the starting scene, I think itās reasonable to assume she also wants to meddle for Colinās sake. In the first scene of ep 3, she seemingly talks more softly/slowly than usual (to me, it sounds like sheās trying to be soothing when compared to how she normally talks, even outside of the times sheās actually soothing FR3-D1), she doesnāt make too many digs at Colin as he sounds increasingly stressed, and she asks gently and subtly about calling Central IT for help when she is generally pretty direct when she seriously wants something (like all the times she repeatedly shuts down Samās questions because she wants him to stay out of danger). It sounds like sheās trying to slip it in as a half-joke, but Colin treats it as a genuine suggestion when he usually either brushes off her jokes or plays into them instead, so I think it was her actual intent to involve Central IT even at that point. Furthermore, Gwen tells Sam something along the lines of āAlice is the only one [Colin] toleratesā in a previous episode, they have good banter throughout so far, and Colinās explosive reaction to Sam mentioning the app completely deflates when he learns it was Aliceās idea. All of this seemingly demonstrates a bond that goes pretty far beyond what Iād think of as a basic work relationship with no actual friendship involved. Colin is already pretty deep into investigating FR3-D1 to the point that itās probably going to be detrimental for him based on him threatening/ranting at the computers in the first episode, and Alice is already trying to intervene on his behalf. Simply put, she is doing a pretty bad job of pretending not to care and staying out of it so far, and weāre only 3 episodes in.
With that in mind, I donāt even think Colin will be the primary reason sheāll get involved as the series goes on, and I actually think Sam is being set up to be the one to draw her into much of the conflict. She cares enough about Sam to find him a job when heās having a rough time, based on their conversation in the bar, and she tells him not to care about the incidents precisely because she cares about him, and doesnāt want him to get sucked in and hurt by them. With Samās propensity for curiosity established and likely being set up to be one of his fatal flaws, Alice will probably get drawn into the conflict whether she likes it or not if/when Sam goes digging and actually stumbles on something dangerous later on. As a side note, I really do think Samās curiosity is being set up to be something big here, since he repeatedly wants to look into the Magnus Institute and says itās a āblast from the past,ā he wonders about how the code system works and how it could be improved, and heās generally shown to ask a lot of questions about the OIAR, Gwenās backstory, etc. He asks about things more often than I think he would if his questions were purely an expositional device for the audience and not actual characterization (I could make a post just about this, but I think other people have definitely already done that). Finally, our very first introduction to Alice as a character in TMAGP shows her trying and failing to be glib and uncaring about Teddy leaving, where she jokes with him casually before admitting, sincerely and somewhat hesitantly, āIām gonna miss you.ā If her failing to not care about something in the opening scene of the entire series isnāt going to turn out to be important, if not Jonny Sims style foreshadowing of some kind, Iāll eat my hat.
2. Apathy kind of sucks, actually (thematically and otherwise)
Alice being saved by her refusal to care, assuming she manages to maintain it, feels too much like an easy out for the kinds of stories TMA was trying to tell, and clashes with its sensibilities in my opinion. A lot of people fall into the trap of nihilistic apathy when thinking about the state of the world right now, and TMA even acknowledged this in the series with the Extinction beginning to emerge as a new entity/fear. Between worsening climate change, the gradual rise of bigotry and the increasing trend toward fascism in the western world (especially america, it sucks here), escalating international conflict, poverty and the worsening cost/standard of living, like the fact that a majority of people my age will probably never own a house and our college debt is going to eat us alive, etc., it feels like weāre all circling the drain and no one with the power to help is interested in doing anything other than making it worse to make themselves money. A lot of people think the only way to cope with that is to decide to not give a shit, which is a pretty natural response to being constantly confronted with worse and worse news every year that shows no sign of stopping. This has also naturally inspired a lot of doomerism and a rise in insincerity/irony poisoning and cynicism in popular culture thatās really hard to escape even if you avoid the news entirely.
However, the idea that not giving a shit about the problems in the world can somehow spare you from them is a) ludicrous, since they wonāt go away if you decide to ignore them (a majority of the TMA statement givers didnāt previously know or care about the fears, and they got screwed over regardless), and b) definitely not supported by TMAās cannon or themes. Surrendering to the idea of your own helplessness is precisely what TMA ends by specifically not doing. Jon sunk into a hopeless state of mind throughout S5, with the culmination of this process being his proposal to let the world end and allow the End to consume everything, including the rest of the fears. It wasnāt necessarily that Jon didnāt care or was apathetic, especially since one of his primary motivation was to avoid inflicting the fears on another universe, rather, he didnāt think anything could be done to stop the fears from destroying his world or whatever world they ended up in, which is the same deterministic mindset that Aliceās style of apathy stems from (āI canāt change or fix it, so I donāt careā). The other characters refusing this course of action and banishing the fears is what ultimately spares TMAās universe from the sort of extinction it wouldāve had if theyād accepted that it was hopeless and Jon had gone through with what he wanted. TMA ends with the central takeaway that you canāt give in to the idea you wonāt be able to fix things because then you wonāt try, and shows the characters subverting their helplessness and actually solving the problem of the fears by getting rid of it at the source (the ethics of sending the fears somewhere else are definitely debatable, but thatās a totally different post). The idea that Alice could be saved from the consequences of the problems in TMAGPās world by choosing not to care flies in the face of the conclusion to the previous series. Aliceās refusal to care wonāt save her from whatever TMAGP has in store, and judging by the events of TMA, fatalism and apathy might even seal her fate.Ā
Some of these points of evidence might be a little bit basic āwater is wetā types of statements and I probably couldāve explained this in half the time, but I really do think that Aliceās apathy isnāt going to turn out to be very useful to her and I wanted to include everything I could think of that led me to believe that.
TLDR, Alice is just as screwed as the rest of the cast, if not more so, and her attitude is not going to get her out of it.
#tmagp#the magnus protocol#tmagp spoilers#the magnus protocol spoilers#tma#the magnus archives#magpod#tma spoilers#the magnus archives spoilers#tmagp speculation#tmagp theories#tmagp 01#tmagp 02#tmagp 03#alice dyer#fr3 d1#character analysis#meta#tma meta#jonathan sims#tma podcast#magnus archives#the magnus pod#magnuspod
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Case files 02.01
what I think happened in:
Case 02.01, the case of "Portrait of Daria Gray" or "The artist becomes the canvas."
Daria's story is pretty straightforward. What we know about Daria: she's a struggling left-handed artist who used to wear a lot of hand-me-down clothes from her sister, and she doesn't like the way she looks. At some point she decides to get a bit of a makeover and, among more mundane things, she starts shopping for a new tattoo. She finds a deal too good to be true (it is) offered by one 'Ink5oul'.
Ink5oul is sketchy as hell, and definitely has something supernatural going on. The tattoo they gives Daria (with no input from her, WTF! - paintbrush, floral patterns and glittering symbols) hurts much more than it should, but also heals almost instantly.
Looking at the tattoo (which is 'perfect') fills Daria with sudden desire to paint an autoportrait (which comes out 'perfect'). And once that is done, looking at it again makes her realize she can adjust herself (and make herself perfect).
So she takes her painting tools, most notably a pallet knife, right to her own face (and soon pretty much every other body part) and gives herself an impromptu plastic surgery. Which goes on uninterrupted for several days (???!?!!?!) until her room-mate Sarah comes home. Poor Sarah walks in on Daria while she has a knife stuck in her jaw, understandably freaks out and punches Daria, at which point half of Daria's face collapses under her hand like putty.
Having no idea that her room-mate has been touched by the spooky, Sarah comes up with the only rational explanation she can think of, which is that Daria poured some acid on her own face (which is very comic-book logic, but maybe Sarah paid more attention to Batman than chemistry and biology class as a teen).
So now Daria has severely disfigured face, and also is officially considered suicidal and a danger to herself and must go to therapy. (Honestly, she needs therapy).
There are two things, aside from the obvious, that grabbed my attention here:
The voice. Narration in the first case was that of a pretty normal email - a little bit rambly, a little bit disjointed, referencing things that the recipient would know about that we can only infer. The second case had a perfectly average forum thread. This case... also starts out with pretty realistic voice - right until the moment Daria stats talking about the tattoo. Then suddenly this story gets ridiculously verbose. The way she describes the studio, the tattooing process, the tattoo itself, the painting process and finally the 'adjustments' - the details, the wording - there's no way a regular person talks that way. Not in real time, not about a traumatic event that they very much don't want to talk about at all. So where is this coming from? I think it's the ink. Until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume that Ink5soul's tattoo somehow infused Daria with power to 'express herself' perfectly in whatever medium she's using - be it words, paint, or her own flesh.
Invasion of privacy issues all over the place. First Daria's tattooing session is streamed for who knows how many Ink5oul's fans without her say-so, and then her be-damned therapy session gets intercepted by some weird basement government branch. Daria glosses over the former and doesn't know about the latter, but they are there. And there was that private email in case of 'Not-Arthur' too. I wonder how present this theme will be in rest of the show. One thing I can bet on: if one of the cases doesn't deal with a conspiracy theorist yelling about government spying on them, I'm gonna eat my hat. (And the poor paranoid guy will be 100% right, just not in the way they think).
#the magnus protocol#tmagp 02#tmagp case files#tmagp case 02.01#Daria Gray#(not her actual name but I'm going to nickname there that for now)#Ink5oul#that little rat bastard#also#I was away from my PC last two days and I TRIED writing this from my phone#and I absolutely could not do that#how on earth do some people manage to write whole damn essays and fanfics from their phones#HOW#how do you type and edit without mouse and keyboard#are you wizards?#I fear you and salute you#ep. written by Alexander J. Newall#ep. written by A.J.N+J.S.
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"if i wanted to clear the canvas, i would have used turpentine." the gasp i gusped. these lines! keep killing it! (no pun intended)
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the magnus protocol sure is a podcast , , ,
#tmagp spoilers#the magnus protocol#tmagp premiere#tmagp 02#ink5ole for LIFE!!!!#my littol flesh/stranger (?) guy!!!!!#artwork#it sure is tumblr tags
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It will be Lena.
I'm not saying she'll get brutal-pipe-murdered, but she'll die/disappear in 'mysterious circumstances', and no-one will get promoted to replace her and the cast will spend rest of the season without immediate superviser, with Gwen going feral over being denied the position she wanted.
I have absolutely nothing to back it up, it's just a theory. (a podcast theory)
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itās INSANE how weāve gotten an āiconic lineā in every tmagp case so far. we got āsome of him,ā we got ācanaries should stay above ground,ā we got āif i wanted to clear the canvas, i wouldāve used turpentine,ā we got āi think i shall stay here for a good long whileā
the writing in this show is crazy so far
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MAGNUS PROTOCOL BABES new characters, new fanart designs, so I really want to add my part in creating this beautiful headcanons and even if nothing I made will stick I still want to join the fan
ļæ¼INK5OUL
Do we think we will ever see them again? Are they a Flesh avatar ? I don t know but they give witchy/influencerļæ¼ļæ¼/ theater kid vibe
If you have some ink5soul fanart I would Iāve to see it
#the magnus archives#the magnus archive fanart#magnus protocol#tma podcast#podcast#ink5oul#the magnus protocol#magp 02#johnny sims#tattoos#portret#fanart Magnus protocol#making adjustments#tmagp fanart#tmagp#alexander j newall#rusty quill
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First pass! Was going to add Alice's whole entrance, but it ballooned into waaaaay too many drawings to finish XD.
(Honestly I don't think I could stand being co-workers with either one of them)
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I wonder if we'll see Teddy again a few episodes from now, after a 'mystery illness' made him unable to perform his new cushy job and he is forced to crawl back to horrible-hours-and-worse-pay gig in OIAR just to make ends meet.
I'm relistening the first 2 TMAGP episodes AND THE FUCKING "Teddy's goodbye partyā MF I'D LOVE TO SEE YOU TRY
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real bodybuikder vibes. nice
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Database Additions for MAGP 02: Making Adjustments
Released 18 Jan 2024 Episode written by Alexander J Newall Edited by Jonathan Sims
Episode summary from The Magnus Database
SPOILERS BELOW CUT
CASE
CAT3RBC1567-23092022-18012024 Transformation (full) -/- dysmorphic [video call] Video call recorded between subject Daria and her Therapist
Parties mentioned: Daria Ink5oul Khan (Doctor) Therapist
Locations mentioned: Ink5oul's Studio Sarah
Misc objects mentioned: Unidentified symbols
Other Parties Introduced
Bullets for Saint Sebastian Dredgerman Luke Trotter
Other Locations Introduced
None
Other Misc Objects Introduced
None
Connections/Item Relationships Found (New)
Alice's family Luke's bands
Voiced Characters
Alice Dyer Gwendolyn Bouchard Samama Khalid Daria Therapist
Database
The Magnus Database has been updated for this episode.
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So, the Magnus Institute ruins are, apparently, "a blast from the past" for our main protagonist. I wonder if that is where Sam had his supernatural experience hinted at in the trailer, and how young was he back then.
For sentimental reason I want to guess he was 8 at the time. I sure know that kids in my day could and would get into some very questionable places to get in trouble in. But Sam sounds like he's at least a decade younger than me, probably more, and it's more likely that he stumbled upon the forbidden place in his late teens. Definitely before uni, because by then he was friends with Alice and that girl would absolutely immediatly know if Sam had a spooky adventure on her watch.
I'm gonna wait eagerly to learn exactly what happened to our noodle-armed boy.
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Alice TMAGP the woman that you are.
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