#with Jonny sims and Alex newall? no way!

[trubirb]

The girls 💖

They hate each other 💖

I hope they kiss 💖

[bi-rex]

the existence of TMA characters in the TmagP universe means one of 2 things:

They're gonna tell us they're there and then give us Nothing. Nothing at All, Not A Word. No content. We won't get to hear Sasha's voice ever again. They're all completely unrelated, why tf would they give us shit

They're gonna traumatize my babies all over again

And i don't know what's more cruel

[hatedbyiife]

Now that alex is also on tumblr and answering asks about tma, i find it so funny that he answers the production questions with explanations and details while whenever jonny answers a tma ask, it often boils down to "fuck if i know what was going on with myself when i made that"

[kristsune]

Look, I could listen to Alex talking about audio all day long, so I just wanted to capture that, and then him and Jonny talking about how Protocol and Archives are different, story wise, because it's really very interesting.

[demonholdingalillie]

TMAGP fandom is dying over TMAGP07, it's fucking hilarious. Thank you Alexander J. Newall, I salute you. I shall sit over here, sip on my 3 days old water, and watch this fandom fall apart over the next episodes.

I shall laugh when Colin stays alive just for us to be so fucking afraid for him.

I shall smile when Gwen gets sucked into the Eye and either beats the system from the inside out Gertrude style, or swaps sides and because one of the BBEGs.

I shall gawfaa while Alice just sits by and gets slowly unsettled by Celia and not know what to with herself.

These are all headcannons by the way, but My Point Is that when this fandom goes insane over episodes, I shall laugh, cause I'm an asshole

[dontmindmeimjusthereforthesequel]

Ok, so, I recently listened to the season 3 Q&A and we are all very familiar with the whole Jonny "Half the Characters are Named Michael and the Character I Play is Named After Myself" Sims method of character naming perfection, but during the interview they mention that there is no character named Alex, a point that Alexander J Newel himself is very proud of and a standard he is very keen to uphold, and from what I can remember that seems to be true throughout the series.

But.

I was just doing some random researching on some names I liked and I ended up looking up the name Sasha. Apparently it's a unisex Russian name meaning "Defender" and is the shortened version of the Greek name meaning "Defender of Man": Alexander or Alexandra.

Sasha is short for Alexandra.

Sasha has been the real Alex all along.

and I have no idea if either Jonny or Alex are aware of this.

[johnsspacesuittight]

god the Magnus protocol is already so fucked up I don’t even like horror why am I still here

[jazzically]

the magnus protocol episodes 4 through 7 — my live reactions not clickbait

magp 4

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD IS THIS THE STATEMENT AND/OR ORIGIN OF ALFRED GRIFTER

omg i love how the literal only reason for hearing statements from the 1800s is gwen being behind on her work

ALSO I FRICKING LOVE THE MAGNUS PROTOCOL THEME

Oh my lord you know it's a good sidequel when you can already feel the itch to relisten to everything you just listened to

magp 5

Ok i do not know whether we say "a blast from the past" in America but i have heard that phrase like five times now from Brits all on the RQ magnus feed so im wondering if that's just an alexander j newall thing or !!! what (love it tho. i love it)

faith the unholy trinity referenced???? faith the unholy trinity!!!!!!?

aint no way he won the contest by coincidence LMAO

OOOH THIS IS SUCH A COOL FORMAT!!! ahh ... just how many ideas do they have for digital first-person storytelling mediums?? cuz with every new one i am fascinated

i wonder if jonny just flipped between soft speaker and robot while recording or if "[UNINTELLIGIBLE]" is a digital insert. if it's the latter i am VERY impressed although it's characteristic of jonny at this point lol

OOOooooOOoOoO personal relation is always extra spookyyy

i am also extremely impressed by the similarity in writing style. i can see it (in a good way) now that i'm looking harder, but i would never have guessed jonny didn't write all the episodes

also i just love how alex and jonny swap announcer roles sometimes (jonny as credits, alex as title/episode) for tmp

NOTE TO SELF: check out the cellar letters!!!!! omfg!!! it sounds fire!!!!

magp 6

aw that's such a sweet dedication message

URGH HAVE I MENTIONED I LOVE THE TMAGP THEME

i always wondered what the muffled falling-down-the-stairs noise at the end of the original theme was. it always put me in mind of the aesthetic of the beginning of portal 2 (and, later, the Buried coffin) idk why

I LOOOVE ALL OF THESEEEE none of them have been hard to get through at all?? which is rare for me bc i fail to pay attention to things for long unless they come in more than two forms of stimulus simultaneously (video + music, audio + fidget toy, video + candle)

AWIEE SAM AND CELIA 😭😭😭

Yes alice you do that matchmaking you are SUCH a girlboss

magp 7

OMFG CELIA DEFINITELY KNOWS SOMETHING

lmao jonny says ree instead of err ee now (for "re:"/regarding)

[ThEory time babes woooOoO]

heyyyy is this one of those other worlds that the fears got banished to. actually what happened to the dread powers? am not exactly clear on that (i hope it's on purpose). maybe the place where the dread powers exist alongside "our world" in tma is also adjacent to other worlds in exactly the same way?? like how a hexagon can be adjacent to six other hexagons??? that'd be sick and it would also explain why there wasnt an overwhelming amount of supernatural incidents in "our world" such that everyone was familiar with the dread powers and normalized safety procedures and such ... interesting au idea ... also the idea jonny proposed about a post-apocalypse world in the s5 qna... that one is cool too............ writers get on that (/j/j/j)

is tmp a separate world ??? they only said it was in the same universe as tma iirc

[wild speculation over]

RAAAAAA i LOVE the robotic voices' VAs' abilities to slowly transition into humanlike speech

cLaYtOn!!!!!? do i know that name or am i going crazy

perhaps i am yet again thinking of the worker of clay (see previous post)

LOOOLL "better than norris, whiny little toad"

OHMYGFUCKING GOD WAIT I RESCIND MY EARLIER STATEMENT!!!!!! THAT'S CANONICALLY JONATHAN SIMS' FRICKING VOICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

hehehe ooooh you're evil writermen. how dare you use our constant uncertainty as to which characters you're referring to induced by your earlier repetition when naming characters (really there should be a limit as to how many michaels can be in one story) so that we are still unsure, even with prior knowledge, whether sam's mysterious "john" is actually the archivist or just some other john. good lord (im obsessed)

HOLY CRAP COLIN KNOOOWSSSSSSSS THINGSSS i just adore his role as the town crazy old man

omg alex's writing is incredible

[annabelle--cane]

Sending that ask reminded me of another one I was meaning to ask. I remember a while ago when Jonny and/or Alex said they didn't like Jon very much (I think? I can't remember it very well) and I saw some people be kind of shocked over that and say that that led to bad writing. Looking back now, I might be misremembering some context, but I also don't know that disliking your characters necessarily is a bad thing and wanted to know what you think, if you have an opinion on it.

off the top of my head, the closest either of them have gotten to saying they don't like jon was in this bit of the s2 q&a:

Alex: “Are the writer and actor Jonathan Sims, and the Archivist Jonathan Sims, at all alike or do the similarities end in the shared name or voice?” Jonny: I mean, I don’t think they’re super alike. Like, a lot of his, a lot of his aspects are small aspects of my own personality turned up to 11. Alex: I just think you mined the bits of yourself that you don’t particularly like. Jonny: I mean, yeah. Alex: And then, and then just built a personality around them. Jonny: No, I mined the bits of myself that are useful in a horror protagonist.

and if memory serves me I think the thesis of that bit of fan commentary back in the day was that basing a character loosely on himself led jonny to be overly self-deprecating-by-proxy, so he made the narrative/other characters come down too harshly on jon. it's an approach to criticism that always makes me feel a bit icky, I already dislike critical approaches that are primarily about the author's psyche and imo leveling it up into saying "this guy's self-worth is too low for him to write a good story" about an author who is still like. alive and online. is a huge and just plain weird overstep. and even beside that, this argument still supposes that the characters behaving badly towards jon is a writing flaw, and that's simply not a take with which I have ever agreed.

I have definitely seen fiction before where the creators clearly grew to dislike a certain character and started writing them Weirdly, where they would act out in ways that weren't consistent with their earlier characterization, or unfortunate things would happen to them that they didn't expect the audience to sympathize with, or their extremely reasonable viewpoints would be dismissed out-of-hand, but I think that writers can dislike their characters without it having bad ramifications as long as they're self-aware enough about it. for an example, alexander j newall kind of infamously didn't really like martin until the end of season four, but he is still a sympathetic character with a really solid arc.

[witchinatree]

magnus protocol episode 12 recap

had a really bad/stressful day so it's time to unwind with my favorite. a horror podcast.

every employee of the OIAR drinks coffee except celia who drinks tea... interesting.. wonder if i know any other people who drink tea...

DID SAM JUST ASK CELIA ON A DATE? WAIT ACTUALLY? REALLY? this is kind of sad for alice but also she has gwen if u think about it. OH NO ALICE WAS RIGHT THERE OH NO i might cry for her

"you know it's rude to have absolutely no GAME" "it's been years but you still ask people out like a baby foal" humor is alice's coping mechanism and i LOVE her so much

"i think i'm done with the magnus institute" sam, based on how long this podcast has to go, i don't believe you

MAHTIN!!!!! oh shit yeah the statement was mascot horror again wasn't it???? it's in the episode description followed by "bonzo" so i think i know what happened

jack's? wasn't the thing that celia had happen to her last episode have something to do with "jack" ?

MR BONZO'S ON HIS WAY HELP ME

..uh oh.. who are these guys? like they're the ones gwen delivered the bonzo info to right? baz???

yeah no this is the worst thing that has happened absolutely not i would be running and screaming with tears i would be so gone no career is worth it

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SLEEP AFTER THIS?? IT'S 11 PM??? i fear i have made a grave error

GAGGED GAGGED NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO HOW DID MR BONZO GET GROSSER HOW DID MR BONZO GET GROSSER

alex newall and jonny sims came armed to the war on monsterfuckers holy shit.

his teeth really weren't soft huh

GWEN??? HAD TO SIT THROUGH THAT??? GWEN HONEY LOVE I'M SO SORRY

gwen opening up to alice in the same episode as sam asking celia on a date oh they're so so so so so so i'm gonna cry

I THOUGHT ALICE WAS BEING SERIOUS I GASPED. I GASPED.

this one was soooooo sooooo interesting i do not feel well

[plut00nline]

The magnus archives are great because it was (for me) a new format of horror that was so unpredictable in a good way. But with tmagp, we're all trying to find the double meaning between stuff to figure out what the big thing is gonna be. But that has just given Jonny Sims and Alex J Newall more resources to fuck with our minds even more

[symphony-calamity]

Jonny Sims and Alex Newall will really just write podcasts where the real horror is the employment we experienced along the way

[vampyreblogger]

thinking abt the parallels between mag 159 "the last" and rqg "last words". being needed as a lifeline, being needed bringing martin back to reality and wilde literally back to life.

thinking abt the parallels between jmart and zoscar, the gap between the characters that at first is too wide to bridge across, but then they are brought closer by tragedy and shared experiences. the comradery and love in suffering.

thinking abt how zolf and jon both isolate themselves in the way they are overly motivated to save the world. the lonely imagery surrounding zolf and the fact that jon, despite not being lonely aligned, consistently and repeatedly finds himself alone.

thinking abt how wilde and martin are both self sacrificing poets (and both voiced by alexander jalexander newall) and they both have the same twisted view of their own utility. the need to keep others at arm's length.

thinking abt love in the context of shared fear.

thinking about jonny sims' masterful writing and alex j newall's magnificent gming (and ben meredith's fantastic character building)

[artisticmenace]

jmart blues: THEY DESERVED BETTER!!!!! crying. AUUUUGHHHHH

See. I hate that that's really the only way it coulve ended. cause jon really is that dumb of a bitch and also. the eye wanted him to do that. and i feel like it would be hard to ignore the beck and call of a fear god. but also making MARTIN KILL HIM???? uncalled for and RUDE. no amounts of in canon logic could have circumnavigated that those bitches were truly doomed by the narrative. this is how alexander j newall and jonny sims went right up on my hit list with alex hirsch(gravity falls creator)/j.

[hippeasantwitch]

There’s parasocial behavior, then, there’s the 225 (yes, I am serious with that number) highly sexual and deeply intimate RPF about Alexander J. Newall and Ben Meredith. 190 of these are by the same person and it’s not just RPF, it’s an RPF universe with a foundational timeline that divests out into AUs that chronologically follows the events of the actual Rusty Quill company and its….. unsettling. Like, the pets are characters, real life events are speculated on, sexuality and gender is assumed and played with (which is beyond inappropriate as it will inevitably create needless speculation or worse, accidentally out someone). I didn’t expect someone to create a story where Alex, everyone’s boss, is dating his own employees, a situation amongst content creators that has recently had huge consequences (Ned from Try Guys for starters). Even just a rumor starting that a creator is with his employees romantically is career ending. There’s even the insinuation in the tags of an inc*st storyline, which, I haven’t researched, but damn wtf.

Please let these people live their lives in peace, they are private, everyday people. It’s making someone a character in your fantasy of their own real life. It’s especially unfair when a bulk majority of the situations are sexualizing close, platonic relationships and innocuous or friendly interactions amongst folks who are friends AND real life family (like blood relations are in the relationship tags, shit is too far).

Also, I don’t think the author is like evil or malicious, I think they have major boundary issues and need to reevaluate their relationship with the content they consume, genuinely. I like Rusty Quill as much as the next nerd and I truly hope the best for the creators, but I also think there’s a line between fandom jokes about Alex needing a nap and dedicating literal years of content to a fanfiction about his fake romantic and sexual exploits.

Also also, I’m not gonna link it. I’m just, haunted by this entire creation and have been contemplating our relationship with internet creators. It’s kinda sad in a way, I feel like behavior such as this stems from a really deep sense of loneliness or disconnectedness.

Also also also, I found it because I clicked on the wrong Jonathan Sims tag on A03 and my eyes fucking jumped out of my skull when the top relationship combo was Jonny/Ben/Tim and frankly, that’s when I knew I went somewhere God never wanted me.

[not-she-which-burns-in-it]

It’s funny I always just assumed it was for *union reasons* because that’s true for so many people that I know/work with. Hell, that’s why I use my middle name professionally, to the despair of every graphic designer in town (my whole first middle last name together is pretty long, and when I PSM my name gets to be on the coverpage).

But that’s because of SAG or Equity, I have never wondered before now if the DGA or British equivalent… DGGB (?) also has name exclusivity rules. I don’t see why not? If “your name is your brand” is so important for actors, whose faces are fully visible and make it much easier to tell people apart, then why wouldn’t it be important for directors who are behind the screen.

And Equity at least (I can’t speak for SAG) implemented those rules because actors work nationally. You’re unlikely to mix up Alex Newall electrician in Boston MA and Alex Newall electrician in Atlanta GA because they don’t cross paths. No overlap, no confusion. And that works for most industries where you’re at a particular job with a particular company, or working in a particular area in a somewhat stable fashion. But artists are ~special~ and we work wherever people hire us. 

You could be Jonny Sims actor in New York and then actor in Atlanta, and then Boston and Seattle pretty easily within one calendar year. That’s not even considering people who are on a national tour and have worked in 30 to 40 states every year. So it’s much more important to be the only Jonny Sims acting in the country.

Which is also why Equity doesn’t have locals like most unions. Love it or hate it, the assumption is if you are doing this professionally, you are eventually going to end up in and out of New York or LA or Chicago (or Florida, but that’s a different can of worms). SAG has regional markets but thru don’t run the same way as a local.

And the unions take this very seriously. It’s why David Tennant had to make his legal name David Tennant when he started working cross market in the US. He changed it first from his birth name, David MacDonald, when he joined Equity in England because MacDonald was taken. But Tennant was taken here so they were gonna make him change it again. Which is ludicrous considering how famous he already was by this point. But, you can sometimes get an exception, or make an appeal, if it is your full legal name.

Because it’s a whole process, there use to be a fee for Actors’ Equity to change your name. But of course fees like that predominantly affect women who statistically change their name more often than men. And trans people who need to change their name, sometimes more than once. And being trans in the US and doing the and name change saga, is so long and grueling and demoralizing, that the very least we could do as a labor union was not “pay us this money or you keep having to publicly use your dead name” so the very first piece of policy that I proposed (with a couple of friends) as an elected was to abolish the name change fee at Equity.

Anyway. 

If it’s not union reasons, I bet it’s SEO to avoid being confused with American Alex Newell even though they spell their names differently. If you search without the “J” google gives you a “did you mean” pointing to Tony award winner and darling of our hearts Alex Newell. Which I assume would be pretty annoying for Alex Newall, king of podcasts. 

Is the J just there for the ✨️aesthetics✨️

Trust me, if it was for the aesthetics I'd have something cyberpunk in there.