im having so many silly helanie thoughts. like i already made a post about helen’s attempts to flirt with melanie (that, to literally everyone else, seem like veiled threats or just complete nonsense) but what about melanie realizing what’s going on and being like “lol that’s not flirting, stupid. THIS is flirting” and starts pulling out really cheesy sapphic pick-up lines and helen gets so flustered that random doors just start appearing everywhere.
you should really headcanon characters as having complex and “contradictory” gender identities, its good for you, do it now!!!
with that being said, [clears throat]
jonah magnus is a transfem genderfluid alterhuman. his gender identity changes a little everytime he changes bodies.
simon fairchild is a transmasc genderfluid, but his gender changes so fast that he’s also technically pangender.
not!sasha is an agender cistrans girlthing. it was created genderless, and doesn’t know what it means to be any gender, but it enjoys pretending to be a girl the most.
nikola orsinov is a strangergender boygirl. gender is a circus show, and she’s the ringmaster.
helen distortion is spiralgender, but collects every mildly interesting label she can find, just in case. you never know when you might need a spare gender. good to have a few ready.
i could go on for hours and hours about my headcanon that all avatars are xenogender and their genders match the fears they serve. tbh. i could write a full longpost about that. if anyone cares
i could go on for hours and hours about my headcanon that all avatars are xenogender and their genders match the fears they serve. tbh. i could write a full longpost about that. if anyone cares
so basically the headcanon here is.
jane prentiss’ gender is unclean and rotten.
simon fairchild’s gender doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
mike crew’s gender will happen anyways, no matter what you do.
michael’s gender is a what.
helen’s gender cannot be understood, no matter how hard you look at it.
jonah magnus’ gender sees you. fully.
jared hoppworth’s gender cuts itself into bits and pieces to fit a perfection it will never achieve.
peter lukas’ gender doesn’t even really know you. you should just leave it alone.
maxwell rayner has a gender, you know its there. you just can’t see it.
michael, finding new and interesting ways to fuck with jon: your manager looks gnc af
jon, on the verge of tears: YOURE INSANE
this is funnier if you know that my interpretation of elias basically just looks like a stock photo business man with slightly longer hair than expected. michael truly is the throat of delusion incarnate
jonah and rayner are the two funniest people to ask the body count question
(this is the awful dread that leaves, still can't figure out how to ask from a sideblog)
oh my god. true. the difference is that maxwell genuinely can’t tell which type of body count you’re asking about, and jonah can tell but will ask anyways just to freak you out.
“so jonathan sims is the hero of the magnus archives?” jonathan sims is the protagonist. there is no hero. except adelard dekker. adelard dekker is the hero of the magnus archives
y'know what? everybody saying anything about joshua gillespie in the notes is also correct. i think dekker would love that guy actually. the king and the prince, respectively.
I know we all love to compare Lena to Elias being the “obviously sinister boss” of the group, and truthfully it is the easiest comparison to make, but for one these ARE new characters. In Sam you can see bits of s2 John, early seasons Martin, Sasha in all her bad horror movie protagonist glory, but he’s ultimately a new character distinct from anyone in archives and I wouldn’t want him to be anything else,
but also in many ways Lena is the anti-Elias.
You’ve got Elias playing the long game, keeping all his cards close to his chest until the time is right. Scheming from the shadows for hundreds of years, keeping everyone in the archives under his thumb and leading them all towards their inevitable fate through his manipulation, and he SUCCEEDED.
Then on the other hand you’ve got Lena who in the first ten episodes has
-spent her first appearance getting openly undermined by all her employees in front of the new guy
-immediety loses control of the situation and has to cave and let them leave the work party with a weak-well at least don’t stay out too late k? 😢
-tries to win over her employees with day old, store bought sweets. It is implied this is a frequent occurrence
-failed to shoot the guy her employers put a hit out on while they were both in the same room
-gets successfully black-mailed by one of her employees
Basically all this to say this bitch is getting brutally pipe murdered before the end of the series.
She can’t even get her employees to respect her. You really think she’s getting used as a successful conduit for a cosmic fear entity?
i tolerate the common fanon interpretation of lonelyeyes. i merely tolerate it. because i have a vision in my mind of a better, more aromantic lonelyeyes. i could elaborate but it wouldn’t matter because nobody would understand
i tolerate the common fanon interpretation of lonelyeyes. i merely tolerate it. because i have a vision in my mind of a better, more aromantic lonelyeyes. i could elaborate but it wouldn’t matter because nobody would understand
[deep breath]
peter lukas is a lithromantic and would never get into a relationship of any kind if he thought the other person actually liked him. he finds the idea of being romantically loved quite disturbing, to be honest. but he still experiences romantic attraction himself. so the natural solution is to get into a relationship of some sort with someone who isn’t romantically interested in him at all.
jonah magnus is a romance repulsed bellusromantic aroallo and despises the idea of being in a romantic relationship. he has never experienced romantic attraction in his life, but he experiences sexual attraction very very frequently, and, while he’d never in a million years admit it, does genuinely crave physical affection. but he’s disgusted by the idea of romance.
both of them refuse to label their relationship. they have sex and cuddle all the time, but they’re not dating, and most definitely not married. peter enjoys this mostly when he’s away from jonah, and gets to yearn. jonah barely thinks about any of this (or about peter).
too many of u guys find jonah magnus hot. not enough of u guys find jonah magnus just kind of adorable
honestly yeah probably. he’d be so confused
you’d mistake him for a desolation avatar the way he melts the second someone calls him cute
Now the question is, which characters would call him cute to his face?
i could 100% see gertrude saying it like. as a joke. and then being genuinely surprised by his reaction. i feel like she’s the type to call things cute as an insult (“you think i didn’t prepare for this? that’s cute.”) but jonah would just fixate on the word “cute” and like. die.
but i also feel like simon fairchild would say it unironically. i think he genuinely just finds him (and probably most avatars in general) endearing. he’d say it really casually too like just drop it into a conversation out of nowhere.
maybe tim. he’d do it Just To Feel Something thinking elias would get mad at him or smth but instead he just kinda. goes bright fucking red and starts shaking just completely unsure what to do because in eldritch horror lore this is NOT part of the process /ref
THIS IS BRILLIANT.
jon would be the first to get defensive about it like insisting “we’re !!! NOT!!! a couple!!!!!” after a few seconds of spluttering but then he looks over at jonah and gets so confused he forgets to be angry because like “wait you’re flustered over this??” and jonah’s on the verge of passing out stuttering “p-people don’t…usually…call me…c-cute…” because he doesn’t even care about the implication that him and jon might be a couple. they are focusing on entirely different things here.
maxwell rayner was honestly such a petty little bitch. someone literally just outbid them and got something related to their hyperfixation that they wanted and this motherfucker got so mad they literally started shaking and then used that other person’s childhood trauma to make them permanently blind themself. and that’s why i love maxwell rayner
AUTOSEXUAL JONAH RIGHTS. Part of the reason I want Red Canary to be Jonah'd and Augustus to be Jonah as well is so Jonah can fuck himself.
LITERALLY. three things i am constantly thinking about: jonah’s relationship with the eye, jonah’s relationship with the institute, and jonah’s relationship with herself.
allowing myself one (1) angsty post cuz i already wrote a whole fic about this idea.
so, “the eye as the fear of being outed” this is known. but have you considered “the spiral as the fear of living your entire life closeted”
michael was chosen by the spiral because of how much of his life was marked by madness. his old friend from school, him seeking out the eye as an antidote for his own doubts and confusion, and, finally, the betrayal that led to his death.
but what if helen was chosen by the spiral because of how connected she was to the idea of lying. what if she’d been lying about something her entire life, to the point where her entire life was an elaborate lie, yes, of course i love my job, of course i trust my friends, of course i’ll get a husband, just give it a few more years. she lived her entire life like this, and it was never her fault, it was a situation she was forced into. she could never be honest. the spiral marked her an excellent liar.
it’s very simple actually. i project my gender onto not!sasha. i project my sexuality onto helen distortion. i project my aromanticism onto jonah magnus. this is what you need to know
cool guy, i’d smoke a joint with him if it weren’t for the fact that he might start telling everybody in the blunt rotation about their deaths. also his letter was one of the most interesting ideas explored in s5 and i wish the series had gone deeper into it.
if the magnus archives was a comedy podcast, elias would’ve yelled “unhand me!” when he was getting arrested and that’s how it would’ve been revealed that he’s jonah magnus.
if the magnus archives was a comedy podcast, elias would’ve yelled “unhand me!” when he was getting arrested and that’s how it would’ve been revealed that he’s jonah magnus.
calls some officer “foul villain” and then tries desperately to remember how the people curse today, going through, in no particular order, Victorian insults and 80s slang
eyes darting around the room to gauge everybody’s reactions as he says shit like “you- you grody dipsticks- damn mutton shunters and fiends-!”
if the magnus archives was a comedy podcast, elias would’ve yelled “unhand me!” when he was getting arrested and that’s how it would’ve been revealed that he’s jonah magnus.
in case you guys haven’t noticed, one of my favourite types of situations to put this guy in are ones where he straight up plays himself. like a cheap fiddle
i absolutely love that everybody seems to agree that unbelievably strange and fucked up things happen to both of the distortions when they get flustered.
i absolutely love that everybody seems to agree that unbelievably strange and fucked up things happen to both of the distortions when they get flustered.
anyways so my personal headcanon for this is that michael’s eyes would turn into those rapidly moving multi-colored spirals that cartoon characters get when they’re depicted as drunk or high. his voice would also get wayy more incomprehensible, like barely audible through the static whirr. he might also turn into some less euclidean shape, like straight up something out of an m.c. escher painting
helen, being way newer to the whole distortion thing, would immediately lose control of her doors. those things would be appearing and disappearing and opening and closing all over the place, and the more embarrassed about it she gets, the worse it gets, so someone (cough cough. melanie.) has to calm her down before a door appears below someone and they fall into the hallways.
i am a helanie fan until the day i die and i believe helen distortion deserves good things for no particular reason. but i cannot deny how entertaining it would be if they were exes. like imagine you’re an abnormally tall being of pure delusion and deception dating a short angry girl but the second she finds inner peace she leaves you. for a podcaster, nonetheless.
and then the apocalypse starts and like sure, you’re enjoying all the people you get to torture, but like…you kind of miss her. and then you find out her and her new girl started a cult and they’re possibly the happiest couple in this hellscape. i would simply open a door directly into my own grave
the idea of the Institute being an extension of Jonah’s body is driving me feral lately. and there’s textual support for it! in episode 92 he says “Should I, or the Institute, be destroyed, you will all, unfortunately, follow suit.” as if he and his Institute are equivalent. and when Martin’s burning statements, he says to Elias, “Maybe I just thought it might hurt.” the idea that Jonah felt something inside him catch fire as soon as Martin started burning statements, hdjfhsjgskdhdg. do you think it feels good when people run their hands along the walls. do you think it feels good when someone does a deep clean of the rooms.
Elias and his psychologically abnormal + one sided relationships with the cleaners at the institute because they put their hands on every bit of him
wait ok. so. adding onto all the excellent excellent takes i’ve seen about jonah being an extension of the institute.
that puts s4 into a hell of a context. like imagine if he could still feel everything going on inside the institute, but he wasn’t there himself. of course he was constantly watching the institute, that’s literally his body!!! and he wasn’t there to make sure people don’t move the furniture, break the windows, get the floor all dirty,, do u think he experienced the lonely inside the institute as like brainfog or smth…
i choose to interpret specific parts of canon as just proof of elias being horny for tim, actually. he let him talk shit about him for three full seasons with zero complaints. he warned him not to go into the unknowing. he immediately let himself be taken to jail after tim died. i can just imagine him getting arrested like “yeah, sure, why not. no point staying in this building when the only hot guy died. it’s so over. it’s never been more over than it is right now”
