the joy in jon’s voice whenever he puts a piece of the puzzle together is so endearing. and ofc I <3 whenever he reverently calls sth ‘monstrous’ beautiful
darlingggg. ik Elias is frothing at the mouth listening to this
There is some discussion about Elias being, if not directly representative, at least reminiscent of a surveillance state (different from the capitalism takes), and on my end, I’m personally… sceptical that he’s meant to speak to an anything state. The idea of totalitarianisms is that they have all the resources at their disposal. But Elias needs to use quick-thinking strategies and blackmail to keep a few police officers doing what he wants them to, and it still doesn’t stop him from being punched in the gut by one of them. Maybe I’m taking things too literally, but I don’t see an angle where he resonates as a political authority from our world.
He’s not meant to represent a surveillance state. If we must bring politics into it, then Elias would be a representation of those within a surveillance state (but who do not control it) seeking to use its permeation of society to advance their own personal goals. He’s not his own boss, he works for the Eye, which is using him just as it uses everyone else. The biggest lie Elias tells is the lie that he is in control. He’s not.
That said, political and economic readings of Magnus rub me the wrong way because I feel they box the Fears into too small a space. They speak less about discrete systems and more about aspects of the human condition, regardless of the particular society humans happen to be in at any one point in history. That’s why they resonate.
I fully agree! I think straight political readings are constrictive, but if we analyse which political ideas resonate with the text, Elias comes up as someone who is still a victim of the system but has a single ounce of power that he leverages against his fellow victims as an attempt to rise above his circumstances.
Exactly! He’s a manager who has charmed the boss into giving him SLIGHTLY better treatment, not the owner of the company or the coal mine or whatever metaphor you want to use!
i also think that fans’ overestimation of elias’s level of control over the situation/the people around him is a result of them kind of buying into elias’s own elias propaganda. his biggest advantage is people THINKING he’s an all knowing chessmaster, but i think the way peter talks about him, as a hustler and an opportunist, is so much closer to the reality. he’s a guy with a plan! but the plan depends MASSIVELY on his ability to roll with the punches and know when to take advantage of situations that he did not actually engineer himself. he doesn’t pull it all off because he’s an omnipotent puppeteer he pulls it off because he’s flexible and goal oriented. “yeah i can work with that” - king of the ruined world 2k18
i also think that fans’ overestimation of elias’s level of control over the situation/the people around him is a result of them kind of buying into elias’s own elias propaganda. his biggest advantage is people THINKING he’s an all knowing chessmaster, but i think the way peter talks about him, as a hustler and an opportunist, is so much closer to the reality. he’s a guy with a plan! but the plan depends MASSIVELY on his ability to roll with the punches and know when to take advantage of situations that he did not actually engineer himself. he doesn’t pull it all off because he’s an omnipotent puppeteer he pulls it off because he’s flexible and goal oriented. “yeah i can work with that” - king of the ruined world 2k18
like (institute full of worms smelling crazier than it has ever smelled) (looking speculatively at the unanticipated not them) …okay yeah sure. why not? when life gives you lemons.
the lesson perhaps is that it’s really easy to make everyone think you’re in control of everything if you can keep a cool head 95% of the time and are very good at being condescending. it’s called being a player!
Painted this while binging the magnus archives. I rarely do fanart, but this was very fun! I also highly recommend the magnus archives! It’s a horror podcast, cosmic horror specifically. It features short stories each episode with and overarching plot that is slowly revealed over time. It’s very well written!
“Elias is obsessed with Jon and Jon doesn’t give him the time of day.” Sorry, did we listen to the same podcast? Jon constantly acknowledges Elias’s expertise and knowledge, gets flustered at his praise, seeks validation that he’s still human from him after he finds out he’s a monster… The creepy obsession is mutual.
at the end of it,
you’re always just the point of someone else’s story, everyone clamoring
to say what you were, what you meant, and your thoughts on it all don’t
mean nothing.
[Image description: a portrait of Agnes Montague from The Magnus
Archives. She is a thin white woman with long, straight red hair
partially hiding her face, and she’s looking straight ahead. The
background is black, and there is a white spider dangling above Agnes’s
head and various hands reaching up around her from the bottom of the
picture. End description.]
My favorite sex act is called the 169 where two people engage in reciprocal oral sex and a 3rd person off to the side on the same bed as them lays perfectly still arms across their chest like a vampire and gets a wonderful beautiful nap
To clarify for my new followers, my own political philosophy is techno-dystopian utilitarian monarchism, i.e. using invasive mass surveillance to identify an ideal ruler and forcing that person to be king against their will.
one of my favorite flavors of jonelias is that jon had a super long standing crush on elias from a distance when he was a researcher and went out of his way to have debates with him when they bumped into one another just for the sake of argument you know as a skeptic and he absolutely had a teacher’s pet sort of vibe going on so when he was promoted to head archivist he was like well of COURSE elias has finally seen the light and i can save this place from going to the dogs also omg he values my work 🥺🥺🥺
have realized that while i am not a fan necessarily of “people meet and immediately fall in love” i am a fan of “people meet and are immediately obsessed with each other.” the love can come later but the absolute fixation should be immediate
it’s been a bit here’s some tma hot takes. elias is and always was a more compelling character than martin. martin is a heartstopper boy to me he’s inoffensive but pretending elias made-his-own-messiah (that paprika the novel quote about his protege as christ with female genitals) anthropomorphised fear of the voyeur three overlapping psychosexual relationships bouchard wasn’t a standout is absurd. don’t give me any of that ‘but what’s interesting about martin is he stayed nice and dull despite despite despite’ i don’t care !! i do not watch the owl house. also sims especially towards the end had one way he wrote female supporting characters (Strong, exasperated, decent chance of being either a lesbian or a cop or both) that causes a lot of the cast to blend into a slurry of quips and powers. despite this i do consider him an actual genius of shortform horror i have yet to find another podcast that hits anywhere near the same as good magnus archives
it’s been a bit here’s some tma hot takes. elias is and always was a more compelling character than martin. martin is a heartstopper boy to me he’s inoffensive but pretending elias made-his-own-messiah (that paprika the novel quote about his protege as christ with female genitals) anthropomorphised fear of the voyeur three overlapping psychosexual relationships bouchard wasn’t a standout is absurd. don’t give me any of that ‘but what’s interesting about martin is he stayed nice and dull despite despite despite’ i don’t care !! i do not watch the owl house. also sims especially towards the end had one way he wrote female supporting characters (Strong, exasperated, decent chance of being either a lesbian or a cop or both) that causes a lot of the cast to blend into a slurry of quips and powers. despite this i do consider him an actual genius of shortform horror i have yet to find another podcast that hits anywhere near the same as good magnus archives
jonlias in the context of jon as the reluctant other woman in peter and elias’ secret hundred year marriage
when your husband is clearly in love with his stupid fucking science project
peter getting eaten alive with jealousy at jon getting all of elias’ attention and just having to sit with that and sit with the fact that elias knows it and retreating to the lonely only makes it worse
btw note to people who followed me after i made that post about my regency jon/jonahlias time travel everyone remembers everything au 1) yes i am writing it yes it is dope 2) no it will almost certainly never see the light of day because i can’t be bothered to write any of the actual historical setting connective tissue parts and any time i try to do the bare minimum of research i keep getting sidetracked reading about edinburgh’s absolutely insane infectious disease situation during the time period (2a edinburgh in the mid nineteenth century great setting for a corruption-centric plotline) 3) yes the murder attempts are sexy yes they’re zany 4) yes i only want to write jonah pov everything for the rest of my life now which is a shame when you take into consideration point #2. 5) yes if i ever finish it jonah eventually either gets what he wants or jon throws them both off a cliff like the end of nbc hannibal. thanks for your interest.
everyone is entitled to their own little regency au that lives in their heart and in mine jon gets yeeted back into the 18teens but jonah also inexplicably has all his memories from the next 200 years (i had a wonderful dream!) and is so sure this time he can get the apocalypse done in 50 years max (efficiencymaxing) if he can just sweet talk his archivist (who came back to him 🥰) into being cool about it (because you can only really pull off the ‘trick’ route once) meanwhile jon is running around edinburgh trying to looney tunes drop a piano on him. ideally this also involves at least two full chapters of both of them mutually pretending to have amnesia in an attempt to get the drop on each other
my dear jonah. why does that strange chap call you elias sometimes but only when he’s yelling and gesticulating wildly at you in an animal fury
btw what i found out while “researching” for this is that by the time jon can get his hands on some smokes again he will also be able to succumb to the cholera epidemic. it was a difficult time.
Jonelias would have sex by sitting across from each other fully clothed and digging their nails into each other’s wrists until they drew blood. This would be so enriching to them.
okay I need to talk about my fav part of the brutal pipe murder scene actually
So when Jon first has the pipe in MAG 79 he clinks it against the wall just so there is a show don’t tell moment (link to clip). And there the pipe sounds properly heavy and like metal, the transcript even supports this:
[ID: A screenshot of a Magnus Archives transcript. It reads: “ringing of metal pipe against a wall” End ID]
but then when Elias is done with his murder in MAG 80 and he puts it down it sounds so… quiet (link to clip). Like it comes across as way less heavy, while the transcript also says this:
[ID: A screenshot of a Magnus Archives transcript. It reads: “pipe drops and rolls” End ID]
which leads me to these explanations:
a) dropping a metal pipe is pretty loud so they didn’t want to put that loud noise into the sound design and scare listeners just for accuracy
b) it’s not dropped against the floor but Elias is more leaning it against something where it can roll like an inch
or my fav option c) Elias is kneeling down and very gently lets it drop mere millimeters above the ground
look beyond the chainlink fence, lock eyes with the tiger; hes staring you dead, peer into the depths of his pupils; study his soul. truth becomes evident in moments of severity
Actually, I think the finale (and, indeed, most of season five) diminishes the value of TMA’s political themes. Not only does the in-your-face-ness of it come across as hamfisted and clumsy (we get it; we live in a society), but the fact that a small group of people were able to vanquish the entities and the terrible cost that was paid is glossed over (thus giving the ending a firmly hopeful if not outright cheerful quality) automatically undoes everything worthwhile earlier seasons had to say about monstrous systems larger than any individual.
the first of hopefully several “the silence of the lambs” jonelias redraws!! I watched it for the first time with @paradisepuppet today and we had some….. feelings :)
