The more boring and mundane Michael Shelley is portrayed as the more psychological damage I take from the idea of Michael and Gerry’s ship.
Because the thought of Gerry, someone who was forced into a world of horrors at a young age, finding solace with the most normal guy alive who just wants to have an average life is so bittersweet in a way that lives nonstop in my head.
(And so angsty too if you think the idea of Gerry finally getting a normal life with his normal boyfriend for a little while, only to have his “normal” boyfriend turn up as a monster and pull him back into the world he only had a brief escape from.)
I’m rereading The Magnus Archive transcripts right now and I just realized that the “Annabelle Cane Show” she once considered sounds a lot like “A Guest For Mr. Spider.”
Both the book and this (hypothetical) show had an aim toward children meant to give them a slight nudge toward the terror of The Web.
While I would brush it off as a nothing more than a vague reference, the nature of The Web is so methodical that it makes me wonder if, had this show come into fruition, it would have been a television adaptation of a “A Guest For Mr. Spider.” Which, of course, would have made a million more Jon’s who were marked by The Web without realizing it.
It’s a decent theory in my opinion. The Web is manipulative in it’s actions and if just reading the book “A Guest For Mr. Spider.” was more than enough to mark Jon for life, why not repeat that success on a large scale? However, if this theory had any bearing, it would leave the question as to whether Annabelle had an idea to where her inspiration came from, or if she was just another thread in the web.
Some Magnus Archive Characters I Wish Met Because There Are So Many Good Dynamics To Think About
A: Emma Harvey and Martin Blackwood. Two people who are extremely manipulative, yet one manipulates to hurt the people they “care” about while the other manipulates to help the people they care about.
B: That one statement giver that just walked out of The Spiral and that one statement giver who survived the coffin by freezing it’s key in a block of ice. Honestly, I just want to hear them compare notes on their Supernatural experience.
C: Mikaele Salesa and Tim Stoker. There’s actually a lot of things about this dynamic that I think could be interesting but my main thought was “Guy who dedicated his entire life to the fears interacts with guy who wants nothing more to get away from them.” Also, Mikaele does have that camera….
D: Agnes Montague and Simon Fairchild. Or otherwise known as: Women who is deeply weighed down by their destiny VS guy who thinks his destiny is a playground.
E: Annabelle Cane and Distortion Michael. Annabelle has a plan for every possibility. Michael exists outside what is possible.
F: One of the vampires mentioned in the series and Gerard Keay. I just think it would be really funny if Gerard thought he had met a fellow goth while the vampire thought it met another one of it’s kind. I would not want this interaction to be serious.
G: Jonathan Sims and Adelard Dekker. They’re both paranoid, but how efficient they are despite that varies widely. Also, I would love to see Adelard learn that Jon destroyed the table he carefully bounded the creature to lmao.
H: Rosie Zampano and Not! Sasha. Rosie is mentioned to be nosey, I wonder if any of her observations ever made her think that something about Sasha just seemed…off.
I: Jared Hopworth and Jude Perry. Mostly because I can’t decide if they’d end up killing each other or end up being really aggressive besties and/or frenemies.
J: Oliver Banks and Michael Crew. Two guys who stumbled into their fates before embracing it fully through morally questionable means.
One of my headcanons for Michael Shelley is that he always had low-simmering rage.
It started when he was a kid, right after Ryan disappeared and the adults around him became frustrated by his confusing story. He was asked so many times what really happened that day, and he never had an answer to give. Not even to himself.
It wasn’t long before their frustration crawled under his skin and became something he internalized. He spent a long time being mad at himself for being too disoriented by what happened that day to be of any help to Ryan in the aftermath. Yet, he was upset with someone else too: The adults who wouldn’t believe that something strange had happened to him. Who wouldn’t just say “Yes. That sounds scary. I’m sorry you had to go through that,” instead of “That couldn’t have happened.”
When he joined The Magnus Institute, that angry part of him was giddy to have the chance to prove them wrong. He wanted to find books and statements about missing people that would give him the chance to say “See! I was right all along!” But he didn’t. And every time it seemed like he stumbled on something close Emma would run up behind him and put all his eagerness to rest with a reasonable explanations.
That only made Michael’s frustration grow. He was in the one place he could hope to find answers, and he was still just as lost as when he started. He could feel himself become a little angrier everyday, but he shoved it all down to be just as pleasant and kind as he always was. After all, he didn’t want to scare his frail, timid, elderly boss by having a meltdown and ripping down every shelf in the place until he found the information that would validate him. So he just bottled it all up.
I think about the dynamic between Gertrude and Agnes a lot because what do you mean someone who was forced to be a “chosen one” and never really got to exist outside of people’s projections of her had a connection to a women who’s purpose was to observe and see the realities of the world other people missed?
The thing about watching TMA is that you spend 200 episodes being told that Jon’s fatal flaw is his inability to “turn a blind eye” from anything, and yet, when you hear about a women who wakes up in a fresh grave on her every birthday, you, like Jon, want to hear that story too.
You (or otherwise known as the audience) know just as well as Jon that by taking statements he loses a bit of humanity and dooms the statement giver to relive their trauma every night in their sleep. But… that knowledge is tempting. It’s so hard not to want to know. I mean, which birthday did it start? Which entity causes it? How does the statement giver feel about what’s happening to her? You want to know so many things, despite understanding that’s all for worst.
I think the point of TMA is that audience IS Jon to a certain degree. I think we’re supposed to be just as bad as he is when it comes to the pursuit of understanding and knowledge, even when it’s something that should be left alone. And the moment in the screenshot above is when I first had that thought, because when I first saw this conversation I went “Is he not going to elaborate on her story? That’s kind of disappointing. I would have loved to get a full statement on that.” Only to realize “Oh. Yikes. That’s the exact same mindset that has lead Jon to this point.”
Michael calling Jon “Archivist” really hits my brain in all the right ways because:
On an analytical note: Michael calling Jon “Archivist” is very likely a Michael Shelley choice instead of a Distortion choice. I say that with a pretty good amount confidence because Distortion Helen notably calls Jon by his name, even in Season 5 after he has become a full-fledged Avatar of The Eye.
So I feel safe saying that it’s what’s left of Michael that calls Jon “Archivist.” Personally, I think that’s interesting enough information on it’s own, but I do have a few more thoughts.
On a speculative note: I wonder if a large part of him calling him that is because, to Michael, the fact that Jon is now in Gertrude’s role is far more important than any personhood he has. It doesn’t matter who Jon is. It only matters that he’s connected to the Institute and the women who betrayed him.
On an analytical note: I think it’s interesting that Michael downplays Jon’s humanity by calling him his role instead of his name…just like how his name got (metaphorically) taken when he was forced to play the role of “The Distortion” instead of just simply being allowed to be Michael Shelley. I wonder if that’s a conscious factor that plays into Michael calling Jon “Archivist”, or if it’s just meant to be a parallel.
Either way, I think it’s an important note on their dynamic, and I do love to take those. After all, the few times Michael and Jon interacted in the series fed my Magnus Archives hyper fixation like a five-star chef. So I am always very eager to analyze them.
This exchange is so funny to me because it’s just a guy going “Do I look stupid enough to eat an apple my inhuman, monstrous, students gave me without checking inside first?”
And it’s like….Sir. You were entertaining the idea of eating it instead of throwing it in the trash. So. I mean. A little.
My interpretation of Jon regarding the Not! Sasha situation is that, on some level, he knew the entire time something had happened, but he purposefully looked away from it because didn’t want to face the truth.
While it’s said in canon that Jon trusts Sasha more than Tim and Martin and that’s why he’s willing to give her more passes, it’s also worth noting that Jon’s bar of trust is in hell. He says that he can’t trust anyone multiple times, and the quote “I may not entirely trust my assistants but I won’t lose them,” comes from a time frame where Jon is under the impression that Sasha is alive. By his own admission he doesn’t entirely trust her, and yet he’s willing to overlook things he’d try to exorcise Tim and Martin for.
And I don’t think that’s because Jon just randomly swings between being overly trusting and overly paranoid. Rather, I think he knew something had happened when Sasha came back without the tape recorder. Because think about it: Jon’s character could be summed up by his thirst for knowledge. Yet, when Sasha tells him that information about Prentiss’s attack was lost…he just accepts it. He doesn’t question it. He doesn’t look for the lost tapes. He doesn’t even keep an eye on her.
Overall it seems like he acts really out of character, and I think that’s because he is. For the first time in the series he doesn’t WANT to see something. He doesn’t want to know if something happened to Sasha in the evidence room, because if it did, it means he might have lost one of his assistants. And it’s as Jon says himself: He won’t lose them. Even if that means turning a blind eye.
So, yeah, I think Jon’s attitude in Season 2 of “Sasha threw a knife at me today. I’m sure it’s just because she’s practicing her aim” was out of subconscious denial of the truth instead of blind trust. Especially because it would be consistent with one other knowledge Jon turns away from…which is Gerry’s page. He burns it because he cares for the people around him more than knowledge itself when push comes to shove. And unfortunately in his case that’s a great motivator of ignoring a monster.
The realest thing the Magnus Archives ever did was give an entire hell dominion to bigots where their own hate and desire to be a part of the “in” group became what tormented them.
(Also, this is great social commentary in general about bigots and how their “need” to be right about their hate often stims from the fear that they’ll be the one turned on if no one’s viewed as lower on the food chain then them. Of course, having this fear doesn’t negate the harm bigotry causes, and plenty of bigots are just hateful because they’re hateful, but I still do really like this commentary and how it’s woven into the world of The Magnus Archives. It hits really hard as someone apart of a marginalized group who lives in a rural area.)
There’s something to be said about Gertrude claiming (true or not) that she started down her path because the Desolation killed her cat, only for Georgie to say that she’s going to help Jon and Martin take down the Archives because she wants her cat back.
There’s also something to be said about how they both use their cat as a way to deflect their real motivations. While we don’t know whether Gertrude had a cat or not, we do know that her goals were usually more of the “save the world” sort than the “revenge” sort. So even IF some of Gertrude’s actions were driven by the need to avenge her cat, that’s clearly not the whole story. And the same is true about Georgie. While she loves The Admiral and wants him back, her motivations in this scene are also to end the apocalypse and help Jon, both things she’s downplaying with a joke.
Just like Gertrude did when Elias asked what drives her.
This parallel is super interesting because Gertrude and Georgie are very different people, and yet, Georgie is one of the characters who helps fulfill Gertrude’s wish to take down the Archives. And she even does it in the most Gertrude way possible by blowing up the building.
For two characters who have never met and don’t have a lot in common, Georgie and Gertrude are sure intertwined by the end of the series. It makes you wonder how they would have interacted if they ever got the chance to meet. Personally, I think they would have bonded over their desire to avenge their cats, but that’s just me.
As someone who managed to not fall victim to The Magnus Archives having a hyper-specific statement on one of my hyper-specific fears: Two things I wish we would have got statements on are mascot costumes and tornados.
Mascot costumes can fall really well into the uncanny-valley territory. I feel like they’d be tied to The Stranger, but could also be tied to The Lonely, or even The Eye. An idea for a story about that could be someone who likes to go to amusement parks being stalked and watched by something in a visibly worn-down mascot costume. I feel like that would be super creepy.
Then, tornado’s would probably be in Vast territory considering they come down from the sky, but they could also be tied to The End or even the Desolation. An idea for a story about that could be a storm chaser who has started hearing tornado sirens and feeling the electricity in the air that comes before a storm even when there’s nothing forecasted, which leaves them with the distinct paranoia that a storm is chasing them and just hasn’t managed to catch up yet.
Anyways, I just find thing’s in uncanny valley and semi-unpredictable weather events to be terrifying and it would have been really neat to get a statement on them in canon. I would make a joke here about TMA just not being hyper-specific enough to scare me, but it gave me new fears about space suits with no one in them…so.
So, as Jon points out, it’s odd that a letter written in 1845 America ended up in Jonah’s private collection. The first time I read this statement I was hopping TMA was alluding to the fact that maybe the unnamed Mrs. Carlisle had somehow managed to survive mostly unscathed…but, unfortunately, that’s likely not the case.
In fact, the very likely way the way this story ends is that: A: Mrs. Carlisle never managed to leave the cave and ended up eating her husband, becoming an Avatar of The Flesh. B: Mrs. Carlisle left the cave and then turned back, eating her husband and becoming an Avatar of The Flesh. Or C: Mrs. Carlisle’s husband was able to walk away from the cave.
And I know what you’re saying. “What on Earth brought you to THAT conclusion?” And I’ll tell you! In TMA 18 “The Man Upstairs”, we meet a name named Toby Carlisle, who, get this, has an apartment full of meat:
The horrifying conclusion here is that Toby is likely the descendent of one of The Carlisle’s. Either Ben Carlisle who supposedly died in the cave, or the unnamed Mrs. Carlisle who was hopping to escape the cave.
If this true, it would likely mean that there’s a whole descendent line of Flesh avatar’s out there…which would make it make sense as to why Jonah has this statement. He would look for it. He would likely know that a statement about how a flesh avatar family got their start was out there, and as an Avatar of The Eye, it seems like he’d do his best to get his hands on it. So. It makes sense how it would would find his way into his possession.
This was a really dark post, but I think the connection is way to interesting not to point out, and it would explain why Jonah would go out of his way to get this statement. Still, I didn’t love typing the sentence “ate her husband” twice, so take this headcanon as a palate cleanser: Tim has a folder of cute dog pictures on his phone and Martin sometimes sends him pictures to add to his collection.
When we see Gerard Keay interact with statement givers he comes across as pretty socially awkward. For example: In TMA 38, he stares at women until she’s uncomfortable and then he goes up to her and insinuates that she’s ruining his vacation before saying that she’s “marked” by something. Then he doesn’t elaborate on what she could be marked by. In another example, when interacting with the nurse in TMA 12, after bottles of saline start to bubble, he says “Yes. For you, better beholding than the lightless flame,“ which, again, is confusing and the nurse explicitly says that she doesn’t know what that means.
And I think that’s an interesting note on how being raised in a world where the fears were so normalized affected him as a person.
Because the social mistakes he makes when interacting with the statement givers is talking about the fears as they’re these casual things, which does nothing other than confuse and scare people who are already disoriented by what they’re going through…but the thing is, you can’t really blame him for making these mistakes.
After all, the fears ARE normal to him. They’re all he’s ever known, and from that perspective, it has to be hard to interact with people who have had such a different existence. There’s a good chance he doesn’t even register how confusing some of the things he says are, because in his world you don’t need to explain what a mark is or why it’s better to serve The Eye than the Lightless Flame. That’s just a fact of life.
And I think this idea that Gerard just isn’t good with interacting with normal people is backed up by the way he seems when we hear him interact with Gertrude and Jon. When he’s interacting with people inside his world, he comes across as very witty and charismatic, not off-putting in the way statement givers tend to describe. And I don’t think that’s because the statement givers are painting a false picture of who he is. Rather,he just has an easier time with people who "get it” and (mostly) need as little context as he does.
Anyway, it has been exactly five minutes since I’ve had too many thoughts about Gerard Keay. But my main one is this: Gertrude should have gotten the chance to fist-fight Mary at least once because who raises a child like that?
I feel like Season 1 Jon is an “I don’t have a favorite color” type of guy, while Season 1 Martin is an “I can’t choose a favorite color because they’re all nice” type of guy.
This wolfman statement might be my favorite isolated, “monster of the week” statement. Not just because the statement giver is tough and handles a bad situation as well as anyone could, but because as soon as I read the eerie line “It sounded like somebody whistling, a slow version of The Farmer in the Dell or, as I believe it’s more commonly known, A-Hunting We Shall Go,” my power was knocked out by a storm.
The timing was perfect. The idea of hearing humming in a forest is already really off-putting to me, so the sentence would have been creepy enough on it’s own. But reading that and then IMMEDIANTLY having my power go off, leaving me in a pitch black living room at 2PM in the afternoon from where storm clouds were blocking out the sun…well, there was a moment where I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear whistling.
And TBH that really elevated the statement for me. I can say without a doubt that it’s easily the most freaked out I got while reading TMA, and finishing the statement in the dark while thunder and wind shook my house was an viewing experience that I don’t know if any future horror media will be able to beat.
When you first listen to TMA it seems like the Institute’s “No dream” policy is simply to cut back on the amount of false supernatural reports they receive. However, upon a relisten of TMA, the Institute’s “No dream” policy is actually super messed up.
We know that giving a statement causes the giver to have awful nightmares that force them to relive their trauma for The Eye, and we also know that some people (obviously) want to lodge a complaint about that from the episode where the women complains about Jon scaring her in the cafe and causing her to have nightmares.
However, The Institute having a “No dream” policy means that anyone coming to try and talk about their nightmares is going to be shown the door. The Institute literally has a policy that stops people from being to officially document any trauma the Archivist’s causes them.
It makes me wonder who made the policy in the first place, and if was something Jonah Magnus came up with, Gertrude came up with, or an Archivist before her came up with. I think the answer that makes the most sense is Jonah since being bureaucratically evil is his entire thing, but the answer that would be the most ironic is Gertrude since the policy would have stopped her from receiving this statement if Oliver was unwilling to lie.
It’s interesting to think about for sure, and stuff like this really makes me love rereading the series. You never get to read something for the first time again, but you can find fucked up details that make you go “Wait.”
What makes Jonathan Sims such an interesting character to me is that, if he could go back in time and relive the series again knowing how it all turned out, I think he’d still end up in the same place at the end.
Not on purpose. I think he’d try to try and change things, and I think those attempts would be genuine. But Jon’s fatal flaw is that he can’t look away from anything. And that trait isn’t just a tiny flaw, rather it’s a large part of what makes him who he is.
Jon, fundamentally, is a watcher. If he could do it all again I don’t think he’d be capable of saying “I’m going to turn a blind eye and walk away.” Instead, I think he’d try to fix everything by attempting to apply the forbidden knowledge he has in a different way and hoping that would change the outcome…but that’s exactly the thing that would make sure the outcome was very-close to the same even if the journey to get there was a little different.
It’s usually super interesting to think about what a main character would do if they could relive their series again because it’s fascinating to think of what all they would change. But what I think makes Jon interesting is the fact that I think he’d inevitably fall into the exact same pitfalls that get him in trouble in the series. Not because he’s a bad person, or a stupid person, or anything in-between. He just can’t seem to help himself. And that makes his writing SO GOOD to me.
