i wanna hear your trans tma/tmagp headcanons…that specifically go against the character’s canonical gender presentation. that’s the only rule. hit me with em.
UNLABELLED ELIAS BOUCHARD. SPECIFICALLY OG ELIAS. NOT QUESTIONING. HE SWINGS IN WAYS THAT WOULD TYPICALLY FALL UNDER CATEGORIES BUT HE CHOOSES TO NOT. HE IS, THE ULTIMATE YESSEXUAL. (also alloaro.)
My silly headcanon is that Jonah didn't know that Elias was a trans man (without bottom surgery) when he did the weird possession thing so he just went "Wait.. Where's my dick?? Why didn't I know about this??" And the eye went "Dude don't be transphobic"
this doesn’t really go against elias’ canon gender presentation, but i do like it. it’s fun.
i love how people draw eyes in tma fanart but have we considered the much more horrifying idea of just. realistic eyeballs floating around jon and elias. like fully real-looking detatched eyeballs turning around wildly to see everything.
hell yeah. i’ve always kinda leaned more towards agender genderfluid nikola (as in; no actual gender, gender presentations and pronouns flunctuate) but i could see this too.
I love your daselias headcannons but why laplace angels? How is that daseliasy?
i mean, they’re both objectively terrible people, but there’s complexity to their terribleness. there’s also the aspect of daisy probably viewing herself as morally superior to elias, whereas elias knows everything daisy’s done and probably considers them very similar in nature. added onto that is the theme of fate and control present in the song; how much free will did either of them really have at any point? are actions taken more or less evil based on wether you had a choice or not, if the outcome is the same? how much does intent or remorse really matter?
i wanna hear your trans tma/tmagp headcanons…that specifically go against the character’s canonical gender presentation. that’s the only rule. hit me with em.
ok i don’t think some of you guys read the full post. or comprehended the “that specifically go against the character’s canonical gender presentation” part. and that’s ok and i have had fun hearing all your headcanons anyways. but now i’d like to hear about the ones that go against the canon.
I forgot we were doing trans against the norm hcs for TMA. Tim Stoker tma being genderfluid but in the manner that one of those orange and pink Hawaiian shirts. That specific genderfluid.
i bet sometime around s3 elias walked up to basira angrily, visible tears in his eyes and a fresh wound on his hand and went “your dog BIT ME.” and basira went “?? i don’t have a dog??” only for daisy to appear, traces of blood on her lips and a very proud expression on her face.
i can never go 30 seconds without thinking about faggy butch tim obviously, but have we considered transmasc jonah that stopped being a "gender" around 1920 and now only uses He/Him in a divine way rather than he/him in a "male" way?
i read “faggy butch tim” and got so hard i passed out sorry what was that last part
i was talking to this chill person at a dance and they started talking about rarepairs and people on tumblr... turns out we both follow you.... i wmswear the world is so small
me wnd my friend are at a queer dance and we're both into tma/tmagp and i mentioned being mutuals w someone "really into lena/gwen and rarepairs" and they were like "...is she finnish" and i was like.. yah.. and they went "is he really into the taxpayers" and we did that until i showed them ur account and they cheered. we are both writing anons to u so we dont reveal our tumblr blogs to each other as the ymca plays. life is beautiful
HAHDJFJFJF THAT’S WHAT IM SAYING!! wild to me that people who follow me are out there living lives and actively thinking about and talking about my blog. in my head i’m still just some guyyy. but that’s pretty awesome i love being the tma rarepairs guy
simon fairchild, kayne malevolent, and david 7 all share one thing in common besides being fiction podcast characters. and that’s being the 3 most common characters for me to picture dancing to abba songs when i’m bored
if there was any justice in the world the fact that i have the vast as my tumblr header image would mean that i get to see every cool thing that happens in the sky ever. but no. i didn’t see the eclipse. i didn’t see the aurora borealis (despite living in FINLAND.) what is the fucking point. the falling titan gives its toughest battles to its strongest avatars okay
(look at me go, not asking anonymously for once lol)
“the web is underrated” “the buried is underrated” “the dark is the most underrated”
yes. you are right, i agree. but they are all underrated. none of the fears get the attention they deserve.
-the dark and the end are almost completely forgotten about due to their perceived simplicity.
-the buried, the flesh, the hunt, etc are so unexplored, no one bothers to look any deeper into them.
-the desolation is not just fire, but no one ever tries to represent it some other way.
-don’t get me started on the whole spiral-distortion thing (perhaps i will make this a future confession bc oh boy do i have a lot to say).
with all of them people seem to be scared of diverging from the explicit canon representations.
no one seems to care about the fears anymore. THE fears. you know, the one thing that makes tma so special? i’ve lost count of the number of times i’ve seen someone say “after listening to tma i can never look at things the same. i always categorise them by the entities”
that’s all they are treated as, categories. perhaps this is an odd way to describe horrific manifestations of our deepest fears, but i think they are beautiful concepts. i could spend hours thinking about each one and the ways they bleed into one another, i probably have.
yeah, at this point smirke’s 14 are old news, but there are always new angles to explore. we saw that in season 5 of tma, and we are seeing it now in tmagp (though the fears are of course different). why did we stop talking about that? (i wasn’t actually on tumblr when tma was happening so idk. maybe no one ever cared)
talk about the fears, put your ideas for unconventional statements or avatar or whatever out there, there’s an audience (me at least). say stuff about how different fears crossover, or some new aspect of one. “but surely people would have already said this at some point” respectfully, i don’t give a shit. if i come across mutliple posts analysing a similar aspect of the vast, i’m going to be fucking overjoyed. because much of the fears is up to intepretation, they have slightly different meanings to different people, so every single person’s interpretation adds value and adds something unique. i see a little of this, but not enough.
we should keep discussing the fears. i don’t know why we ever stopped.
(sorry this is so long and rambling, i hope you can see the points i’m trying to make.)
The Desolation can be natural disasters, including floods, storms and earthquakes. Water is just as destructive as fire
The Dark can be not knowing something. It overlaps with the eye yes, but it still counts
The Corruption is shown to be a response to loneliness, not the opposite of it. Its being so lonely you seek out community, no matter how dangerous it may be. Every single corruption statement has references to loneliness
The Spiral says its a liar, but its never done that, only changing your perception of reality to make what it says true. It is delusion not manipulation
The Slaughter is never portrayed outside of war, which is strange because sheer unhinged violence has so much variety
hello I recently started listening to malevolent and I’ve almost caught up and I wanna ask are there any malevolent/magpod crossover ships that you have?
i actually haven’t really thought about it before, but there’s something kind of appealing (to me specifically) about helen distortion and kayne. i just feel like they’d get along. also the butcher and daisy tonner, for obvious reasons. actually in a weird way, i kind of think arthur and lena would have an interesting dynamic. i feel like lena would resent him for his optimism, but admire his ruthlessness.
i’ve seen some people say that they don’t like helen because her specific brand of spiral is too evil and i just wanna say. i love that side of helen so much. i love that she’s a lying liar who lies in a condescending and manipulative way.i love that she’s a genuine villain, but only ever has friendly conversations with jon and martin.
michael’s brand of spiral was very overt. all about confusion and madness and fractals and shapes.
helen is a lot more subtle. a lot more “you know it’s fake, but you have to play along” or “you don’t know what’s going on, but you feel lied to” that girl is playing MIND GAMES she’s playing 4d chess with jmart’s emotions and i love her for that.
i’ve seen some people say that they don’t like helen because her specific brand of spiral is too evil and i just wanna say. i love that side of helen so much. i love that she’s a lying liar who lies in a condescending and manipulative way.i love that she’s a genuine villain, but only ever has friendly conversations with jon and martin.
michael’s brand of spiral was very overt. all about confusion and madness and fractals and shapes.
helen is a lot more subtle. a lot more “you know it’s fake, but you have to play along” or “you don’t know what’s going on, but you feel lied to” that girl is playing MIND GAMES she’s playing 4d chess with jmart’s emotions and i love her for that.
and you know. i also love that she can get mean. she can get angry. she can get desperate. she can get scared.
it’s implied a few times that the distortion is less of an avatar and more of a direct manifestation/monster, but helen acts like an avatar would. i think michael really did become just a mask the distortion wore, but helen seemed like she really grew into the distortion. she sort of became an avatar of her own volition. she enjoyed it, and she didn’t deny herself that enjoyment at any point. she thought…well, if i’m gonna have to be a monster, i’m at least gonna have fun with it and not worry about the morality of it all. and that was iconic of her.
helen was the distortion so much more than michael ever was. michael was a mask and a vessel and a sacrifice. helen was a victim that became an avatar. i think, in a way, she was lying to herself the entire time. telling herself that this was just her nature now, that she wasn’t evil, she was just doing what she had to. that she wasn’t evil for enjoying it. that’s what she told jon too, and in a way, she had a point. jon beating himself up about being an avatar never actually stopped him from hurting others. an avatar cannot exist without harming others. at least helen was having fun with it.
i think that difference between victim (michael) and avatar (helen) is a really interesting thing. for example, you could make a case for martin being a victim of the lonely rather than an avatar of it. he doesn’t enjoy it, he uses it as an unhealthy coping mechanism of sorts, whereas peter genuinely enjoys the lonely and wants more people to experience it.
but also, there’s something to the idea that a victim can become an avatar. the distortion took helen without her consent, marked her, it made her cry and drove her to the brink of insanity before consuming her fully. but she still became an avatar of it.
it’s interesting to think that there was just something about helen richardson that there wasn’t about michael shelley. some kind of inherent trait, some kind of quality, something that made her take to distortionhood in a way he never did.
i’ve seen some people say that they don’t like helen because her specific brand of spiral is too evil and i just wanna say. i love that side of helen so much. i love that she’s a lying liar who lies in a condescending and manipulative way.i love that she’s a genuine villain, but only ever has friendly conversations with jon and martin.
michael’s brand of spiral was very overt. all about confusion and madness and fractals and shapes.
helen is a lot more subtle. a lot more “you know it’s fake, but you have to play along” or “you don’t know what’s going on, but you feel lied to” that girl is playing MIND GAMES she’s playing 4d chess with jmart’s emotions and i love her for that.
and you know. i also love that she can get mean. she can get angry. she can get desperate. she can get scared.
it’s implied a few times that the distortion is less of an avatar and more of a direct manifestation/monster, but helen acts like an avatar would. i think michael really did become just a mask the distortion wore, but helen seemed like she really grew into the distortion. she sort of became an avatar of her own volition. she enjoyed it, and she didn’t deny herself that enjoyment at any point. she thought…well, if i’m gonna have to be a monster, i’m at least gonna have fun with it and not worry about the morality of it all. and that was iconic of her.
helen was the distortion so much more than michael ever was. michael was a mask and a vessel and a sacrifice. helen was a victim that became an avatar. i think, in a way, she was lying to herself the entire time. telling herself that this was just her nature now, that she wasn’t evil, she was just doing what she had to. that she wasn’t evil for enjoying it. that’s what she told jon too, and in a way, she had a point. jon beating himself up about being an avatar never actually stopped him from hurting others. an avatar cannot exist without harming others. at least helen was having fun with it.
i think that difference between victim (michael) and avatar (helen) is a really interesting thing. for example, you could make a case for martin being a victim of the lonely rather than an avatar of it. he doesn’t enjoy it, he uses it as an unhealthy coping mechanism of sorts, whereas peter genuinely enjoys the lonely and wants more people to experience it.
but also, there’s something to the idea that a victim can become an avatar. the distortion took helen without her consent, marked her, it made her cry and drove her to the brink of insanity before consuming her fully. but she still became an avatar of it.
it’s interesting to think that there was just something about helen richardson that there wasn’t about michael shelley. some kind of inherent trait, some kind of quality, something that made her take to distortionhood in a way he never did.
not judging anybody, but i find it genuinely interesting that so many fans categorize the fear avatars as either “good” or “bad” based on wether they feel bad about what they do or not, or if they’ve deemed their backstory tragic enough. because that’s literally something talked about in the show explicitly; wether jon is a better person than other avatars because he beats himself up about what he does. he still hurts people. he still feeds on fear. but he feels bad about it, so is he a more morally correct person than someone like helen, who shamelessly enjoys the fear she eats? is suffering righteous if it doesn’t help anyone?
there’s also the topic of daisy, melanie, and decisions. daisy chose not to feed, but eventually the hunt still claimed her. melanie chose to quit, but that didn’t stop or even interfere with jonah’s plan. they made the morally correct decisions, but in the end, it didn’t matter. but it mattered to them that they did what they could. i don’t think either of them thought they could affect the outcome; they made the decisions they made out of nothing except their own moral integrity.
none of this is a criticism or an opinion, just me rambling on about the magnus archives and how it handles the topic of morality and nature and people making morally correct decisions that don’t affect the world at all.
me listening to mag 160 knowing that the second the apocalypse started, hundreds of miles away from the tape recorder that is the audience, deep within the panopticon, jonah magnus probably just came
i like to think that helen really was just clueless about what friendship was. i mean, it makes sense. imagine you’re a thing that only exists to confuse, scare, and deceive, and one day you become someone who wants to be around people and have friends. but you have no further context for what either of those concepts imply. of course you’d interpret it as a game of sorts, a new way to lie, is there a difference between “friend” and “victim”? you don’t know. how could you know? you have desires that aren’t your own, and you have to act on them to get rid of that horrible feeling you’ve never quite felt before, but you don’t know what actually gets rid of that feeling. you have to be around people now. that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop being what you are.
i relisten to the magnus archives season 5. my brain says some diabolical shit like “imagine if helen richardson had an unrequited crush on jonathan sims and those feelings manifested within the distortion as an inexplicable need to constantly be around him”. i remember that in the end, jon kills helen. i clutch my head in my hands and fall to my knees. this keeps happening in various different ways forever and ever
Lena losing her patience and furiously berating Gwen for potentially endangering the staff members of the OAIR is quite literally the opposite of how Elias ran the Archives.
Elias used the Archival staff—as well as his Archivist—as pawns that can be readily replaced as needed. His patron offered them minimal protections at best (the Archivist’s privileges notwithstanding), and even then, he would never actually intervene to save any of them if they were in danger, much less take precautions to protect them at their headquarters. They are used as bait, as sacrifices, as currency, as objects. The listener knows, eventually, how easily he could discard them if his plans called for it.
But Lena. This episode showed us that Lena keeps her entire organization running through keeping her subordinates hidden, safe, and unnoticed by the Externals. It’s quite clear through her conversation with Gwen that such a safety risk hasneverhappenedbefore.
As far as we know, Lena has successfully kept all of her employees alive, watched them come and go, bemoaned the turnover rate, and then got them to look the other way while they documented and dutifully filed the horrors.
But most impressive of all, she’s kept her real work hidden from her subordinates, and her subordinates hidden from her real work—a feat Elias had no interest or desire to accomplish.
