Avatar
Reblogged purple-blossom-wings
Avatar

What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation

Intro

Extreme spoilers for the Magnus Archives. If you haven’t heard it and want to hear it, it’s a horror podcast that can be listened to on Youtube(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiUHYacaRI&list=PLSbuB1AyaJk-GJV4d3AdvBMJHYiXUEDfI&ab_channel=RustyQuillPodcasts). If you want to read this article in the form of a google docs you can do so here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation).

I’m going to be honest. I’m a little late to the Magnus Archives party, and I’m about to be even later because of how long it usually takes for me to write these articles. However, I desperately need more people to talk with in regards to my thoughts and speculations about TMA and none of my friends listen to the podcast, so this is the closest thing to a healthy outlet I’m going to get for that. It also just so happens that the Magnus Protocol was announced for next year during the writing of this article. 

Keep reading

Avatar

I didn’t really touch on the idea of someone trying to avoid extinction but there’s a massive precedent for it. There have been people who have been granted powers by the End in order to avoid death and elongate their life. It’s important to remember that the Entities only embody the fear of various concepts not the concepts themselves. So while it might seem counterintuitive some of them have a habit of “saving” people so they can feed of their fear for longer. The Eye might hide you so it can feed of the fear you produce from the idea of being found or caught and the End might grant you new life to feed of the fear of the idea that you might lose it one day. I could see the Extinction behaving similarly at times. Someone who’s so afraid of humanity being wiped out that they constantly make what they feel are justifiable sacrifices to survive. Although, if they end up causing a bunch of creatures to go extinct in the process they probably end up playing up the Exrinction’s fears for other people and feeding it even more. You could also probably extend these ideas to someone who’s just afraid of change and doing whatever they can to keep things from changing.

77 notes
Be the first to Reply! Or…
Avatar

@douglysium / douglysium.tumblr.com

More like this

How it feels spending all my time writing TMA essays while Magnus Protocol is coming out

YOU want to fix him, I want to stay by his side as he slowly turns into an eldritch deity with ten thousand eyes. we are not the same.

The Investigative Archives of Ana Otto (TIAANO): Investigation 102: What’s Up Dog?

Ana Otto- A review of investigation 021 as a follow up to my previous investigation. The statement being reviewed regards an investigation for client Ray Mcnamara in regards to the disappearance of their dog Terra during a storm after their return from a vacation in Jamaica. The statement is by Ray Mcnamara and is being played via recording. The investigation is being led by private detective Ana Otto near REDACTED in the U.S.A, and the transcripts are written by Nancy Otto. The date is January 10th, 2015 and the recording is from January 7th, 2005. Content warning, this investigative statement contains themes of tornadoes, storms, acrophobia, aerophobia and the harming of animals that one may find disconcerting. Investigation begins.

Ray Mcnamara- Hello?  Oh right, this is a message not a call… Um… where do I start? I’m calling in to request your help in searching for my dog. I heard you investigate the paranormal and perform exorcisms and stuff. No one else can find my dog but even if you can’t save him I hope you can at least tell me where he went or maybe even where I could find him. 

Oh right, the statement. Well, I think it all started right before we started heading back. Right before we left for the airport for the trip back home we decided to relax by the seaside and in the distance hanging over the vast sea was this odd storm cloud. I could feel the chilling wind of the storm just by looking at it, even from where I sat in the warmth of the sun along the cliffside of the resort. The cloud was massive, bigger than any cloud I had ever seen, and it towered into the sky higher than any skyscraper. I didn’t really think about the cloud that much at the time outside of how big it was and after a couple of minutes of goofing off with some family members and staff we had to leave. Which meant we probably would have been gone by the time the storm hit anyway. 

But then when I went back into the hotel room we stayed at during the trip to get our dog… we brought our dog with us on vacation by the way. I’m not sure if I mentioned that but we brought our dog with us because we were worried about leaving him behind when the forecast predicted a lot of snow in the area we lived in. We were worried he’d get trapped somewhere alone. He’s a small black standard poodle by the way. I sent you some pictures in case you see him around and his name is Terra. A-anyway, when we went into the hotel room the poor thing was absolutely losing it. He was trying to hide under the couch and probably would have gotten himself stuck while hollering and howling the whole way. We managed to get him into his carrier pretty easily but it was all super weird. He was well-behaved the whole trip until that point, and in general he’s a relatively quiet dog. Well, he is EXTREMELY afraid of thunder, so at the time I just figured that his more sensitive dog hearing picked up some thunder from the storm cloud in the distance. I mean it did seem pretty big after all. 

As we took the shuttle back the cloud seemed to… speed up I guess? Like yeah, it was still far but even after driving for like two hours it looked like it was the exact same shape and the exact same distance from my specific location. As if it was tailing us or something. Anyway, we go through the airport and almost everything’s all hunky dory, nothing too weird to report there except for an encounter with an old man. He was a tiny pink skeleton of a man who walked with a cane and had clearly taken notice of the cute dog I had. He definitely wanted to do a little small talk and at the time the rest of my family was taking a bathroom break (I had already gone and someone needed to watch the dog along with all our stuff for a moment) so I figured I would humor him until everyone came back. He seemed quite spry for someone of his age with a cane and a lot of our small talk revolved around how he was learning to play piano. He said his name was Simon Fairchild and the name definitely sounded familiar. I couldn’t quite remember where I heard it from at the time but I looked it up later and found out that the Fairchilds had donated a crazy amount of money to the airport and their respective company we were passing through. They even helped design some of the airports. Oh, by the way, it was owned by Endless Blue or something. They are a relatively small company, so they’re no Delta or anything, and their symbol is a circle that resembles a cloud swirling over the ocean if you need help finding the company. 

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

Extreme spoilers for the Magnus Archives. If you haven’t heard it and want to hear it, it’s a horror podcast that can be listened to on Youtube(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiUHYacaRI&list=PLSbuB1AyaJk-GJV4d3AdvBMJHYiXUEDfI&ab_channel=RustyQuillPodcasts). If you want to read this article in the form of a google docs you can do so here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation).

I’m going to be honest. I’m a little late to the Magnus Archives party, and I’m about to be even later because of how long it usually takes for me to write these articles. However, I desperately need more people to talk with in regards to my thoughts and speculations about TMA and none of my friends listen to the podcast, so this is the closest thing to a healthy outlet I’m going to get for that. It also just so happens that the Magnus Protocol was announced for next year during the writing of this article. 

Anyways, One topic that has basically every TMA fan’s brain gears turning is the titular “entities” or the “dread powers.” Especially, when it comes to the emerging of a new entity known as the Extinction, or Great Change. Part of the reason it sticks so deep into every TMA fan’s subconscious is because the audience sees so little of it due to the fact that it never fully emerged by the time the podcast ended, and even then it’s still questionable how much of it we actually saw. We know very little about it and it’s possible that it didn’t yet have enough power to create any avatars or monsters that could hint at, or potentially explain(well explain as much as you can with entities beyond human comprehension born from our collective conscious and unconscious fears) any aspects of its nature. However, we do see a domain aligned with the Extinction in the post-apocalyptic fear hellscape that was created after the Great Change. Which confirms that it at the very least existed in some capacity. But we still don’t know for sure if it was on the same level as the other fears or would even have gotten there if given enough time. As we all know, these domains are meant to feed their respective fears, so this domain does give us some insight into the Extinction(even if it’s not very much). This leaves a lot of how the Extinction could manifest up to the imagination of the viewers, something that has inspired me to make this article. So in this article, I will theorize about what the Extinction’s avatars and monsters might look and act like if it ever fully emerged and talk about some of the symbology and traits I think might be associated with it. But first, we need to get a couple of things out of the way.

Defining the Extinction

What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation

Intro

Extreme spoilers for the Magnus Archives. If you haven’t heard it and want to hear it, it’s a horror podcast that can be listened to on Youtube(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiUHYacaRI&list=PLSbuB1AyaJk-GJV4d3AdvBMJHYiXUEDfI&ab_channel=RustyQuillPodcasts). If you want to read this article in the form of a google docs you can do so here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation).

I’m going to be honest. I’m a little late to the Magnus Archives party, and I’m about to be even later because of how long it usually takes for me to write these articles. However, I desperately need more people to talk with in regards to my thoughts and speculations about TMA and none of my friends listen to the podcast, so this is the closest thing to a healthy outlet I’m going to get for that. It also just so happens that the Magnus Protocol was announced for next year during the writing of this article. 

Keep reading

What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation

Intro

Extreme spoilers for the Magnus Archives. If you haven’t heard it and want to hear it, it’s a horror podcast that can be listened to on Youtube(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiUHYacaRI&list=PLSbuB1AyaJk-GJV4d3AdvBMJHYiXUEDfI&ab_channel=RustyQuillPodcasts). If you want to read this article in the form of a google docs you can do so here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation).

I’m going to be honest. I’m a little late to the Magnus Archives party, and I’m about to be even later because of how long it usually takes for me to write these articles. However, I desperately need more people to talk with in regards to my thoughts and speculations about TMA and none of my friends listen to the podcast, so this is the closest thing to a healthy outlet I’m going to get for that. It also just so happens that the Magnus Protocol was announced for next year during the writing of this article. 

Keep reading

What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation

Intro

Hello, this is Douglysium and you might not know me as that guy who wrote over 100 pages of analysis on the Eye (which can be read on Tumblr here (

https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/735599414228484097/the-relationships-between-the-dread-powers-the) or Google Docs here (The Relationships Between the Dread Powers: The Eye- Knowledge is Fear and Ignorance is Bliss)) or as that guy who wrote an article on the Extinction (which can be read on Tumblr here(https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/717929126195003392/what-would-avatars-of-the-extinction-be-like-a) and Google Docs here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation)). Suffice to say I might be a bit of a TMA fan. Also, spoilers for TMP up until episode 4. You can read my ramblings on the last episode here (TMP Quick Thoughts 4).

However, Protocol offers a very unique opportunity and experience for me because I didn’t actually get into TMA until after it was over and I binged all of it. So this is my first time experiencing something even remotely similar to what the original TMA fans probably experienced when waiting for each episode week by week and slowly having to put everything together with the limited information they had. So I decided to throw my hat into the ring since this might be my only chance to do something similar. However, I’m working on some longer form TMA content so I can’t spend as much time on these articles giving a bunch of super detailed thoughts. I will try to keep these short and that inevitably might mean some could have questions about why I think or predict certain things and in those cases I would probably recommend you read at least some of the two articles I mentioned above to get a better idea of where I’m coming from. This also means I won’t be giving you a play-by-play of every single thing that happens in the episode so I encourage you to listen to or read them yourselves and feel free to comment if you feel something is important.

These reviews are probably going to end up focusing mostly on the Entities and their manifestations as they are what I have thought about the most and spent the most time interpreting and there’s been a lot of… interesting theories floating around about how the Entities are manifesting that I want to go over.

Finally, I’m just going to say it right now, spoiler warning for all of The Magnus Archives. I know that Jon and co said one could start with Protocol and be fine, and while that’s probably true, media like this tends to be made in conversation with or take into consideration what came before it in the irl chronology in order to connect them. While I’m sure you could skip The Magnus Archives, I don't really see the point of skipping over it when we are already getting characters from TMA showing up in TMP in Protocol. So to me it’s pretty clear that if we want to understand the full picture of TMP and all the things it is trying to say then we can’t just try to pretend TMA doesn’t exist or scrub it away. Just because you could understand what’s happening without the context in broad strokes doesn’t mean you're getting all the nuances.

Episode 5 TMP Quick Thoughts

Housekeeping and Prologue

Hello, this is Douglysium and you might not know me as that guy who wrote over 100 pages of analysis on the Eye (which can be read on Tumblr here (

https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/735599414228484097/the-relationships-between-the-dread-powers-the) or Google Docs here (The Relationships Between the Dread Powers: The Eye- Knowledge is Fear and Ignorance is Bliss)) or as that guy who wrote an article on the Extinction (which can be read on Tumblr here(https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/717929126195003392/what-would-avatars-of-the-extinction-be-like-a) and Google Docs here(​What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation)). Suffice to say I might be a bit of a TMA fan. Also, spoilers for TMP up until episode 19. You can read my ramblings on the last episode here (Episode 19 TMP Quick Thoughts).

However, Protocol offers a very unique opportunity and experience for me because I didn’t actually get into TMA until after it was over and I binged all of it. So this is my first time experiencing something even remotely similar to what the original TMA fans probably experienced when waiting for each episode week by week and slowly having to put everything together with the limited information they had. So I decided to throw my hat into the ring since this might be my only chance to do something similar. However, I’m working on some longer form TMA content so I can’t spend as much time on these articles giving a bunch of super detailed thoughts. I will try to keep these short and that inevitably might mean some could have questions about why I think or predict certain things and in those cases I would probably recommend you read at least some of the two articles I mentioned above to get a better idea of where I’m coming from. This also means I won’t be giving you a play-by-play of every single thing that happens in the episode so I encourage you to listen to or read them yourselves and feel free to comment if you feel something is important.

These reviews are probably going to end up focusing mostly on the Entities and their manifestations as they are what I have thought about the most and spent the most time interpreting and there’s been a lot of… interesting theories floating around about how the Entities are manifesting that I want to go over.

Finally, I’m just going to say it right now, spoiler warning for all of The Magnus Archives. I know that Jon and co said one could start with Protocol and be fine, and while that’s probably true, media like this tends to be made in conversation with or take into consideration what came before it in the irl chronology in order to connect them. While I’m sure you could skip The Magnus Archives, I don't really see the point of skipping over it when we are already getting characters from TMA showing up in TMP in Protocol. So to me it’s pretty clear that if we want to understand the full picture of TMP and all the things it is trying to say then we can’t just try to pretend TMA doesn’t exist or scrub it away. Just because you could understand what’s happening without the context in broad strokes doesn’t mean you're getting all the nuances.

Episode 20 TMP Quick Thoughts

Housekeeping and Prologue

Sponsored