I keep seeing those “what did you think the Magnus Archives was about before you started listening to it?” posts, and I feel like my specific experience was really weird, because I was kind of in the TMA fandom before I ever started listening to the show. I would always see posts about it with no context, think they were hilarious, and like them, and I did that often enough that all the social media I used just became convinced I was a Magnus Archives fan.

Because of the timing (I started seeing TMA posts all the time as season 5 came out, and didn’t start listening until around the time 198 was released) I saw all the memes that came out about each of the last few episodes as they aired, which means I went into the podcast with a little bit of general knowledge but also some very specific knowledge. So like

What I knew about the overall plot before I started listening to TMA:

• It’s a horror anthology about the Magnus Institute, London, which collects stories about the supernatural
• At first you think the stories are unconnected, but eventually you realize that there’s a complex meta plot
• There’s a guy named Jon and a guy named Martin, and they’re in love
• There’s a dude named Tim and a woman named Sasha, and they’re dead
• There’s something called the Eye, which the main characters are connected to, and something called the Web, which manipulates them
• Elias Bouchard is a rat bastard motherfucker
• At some point there’s an apocalypse

What I knew about the last few episodes before I started listening to TMA:

• Annabelle Cane wanted to fill Martin with spiders, but he was too in love with his boyfriend, so it didn’t work
• Jon is bad at rowing
• Martin gets mad that the nightmare realm they’re in changes from a giant lake to a giant ladder before he has a chance to show off how good he is at rowing in front of his boyfriend