Please give me the Lena Kelley Vs Jonah Magnus rant
yay
first of all, personality. complete opposites. jonah is smug and calm and pleasent in an irritating way. you can hear in his voice that he’s almost always grinning at least a little bit. you can tell that things are going his way at all times, and he’s just standing by, watching it all fall into place. lena sounds like she hasn’t smiled in years. she’s serious at all times, actively analyzing situations for the best move to make, rather than passively watching them. when jonah’s (pretending to be) mad at jon, he goes cold and impersonal. he becomes the boss reprimanding his employee. from tmagp 16, we can tell that lena takes to anger in a very different way. that same distant unwavering professionalism that jonah faked is actually her neutral state, so her anger looks wayy different. it’s all genuine and emotional and heated rather than ice cold. you can tell that her anger is real and burning and personal.
then there’s the difference between them in relation to other characters. throughout tma, everyone does what jonah wants them to, wether on purpose or not. from the very start of tmagp, you can see that basically nobody at the oiar actually takes lena seriously.
there’s also the positions they have. jonah’s the head of the magnus institute; in that specific hierarchy, the only one above him is the eye itself. but the oiar is not an institute. it’s an office. it’s a section of the government. so we know that there’s people above lena, telling her what to do. she’s not the one with all the power here. in fact, every episode she seems to have less and less power over anything.
and, most interesringly, lena seems to actually care about her employees. she seems to be trying to keep them safe, hesitant to give promotions knowing what it means, hesitant to even hire anyone in the first place. which is the opposite of what jonah magnus did. the opposite of inviting the horrors into your workplace is, in fact, having strict rules about keeping them out.
Okay so I got curious about your "Kayne would be wholly a slaughter avatar" opinion because in one hand I do agree. Like, YES, he IS slaughter.
He can be so easily confused with spiral bc he acts showy and silly but those are NOT traits reserved to the spiral?? And, He doesn't thrive on the confusion, or in driving people mad, even when he does lie he does it to achieve destruction (Ex: [INTERMEZZO SPOILERS] promising to wipe Arthur's memory and then not doing so)
All the other Fears are completely out of the table to me EXCEPT for the Web.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think he'd be a web avatar, not by a long shot, but I do think he could be web-aligned with his whole "being able to play all the keys" deal,
I wanted to hear your thoughts on this tehehe ( this is all /lh of course )
ooohhh yeah ur thoughts are really interesting!! i think the reason i’m so certain of the slaughter and nothing else is because it’s not about the themes or aesthetics, it’s about what type of fear the character themself invokes within you. and the only fear i could plausibly see being in kayne’s presence producing is “holy shit this guy might explode my head at any second for no apparent reason” which i’d categorize as slaughter. but you do make a good point about the web!
Gotta be honest, I feel like the lonely should be one of the more focused-on & SCARY fears in TMA. Humans are social animals, that is how we survived up to this point. Suddenly being RIPPED from that seems like a very significant thing.
one thing that tma does really well (and, coincidentally, also the thing that the locked tomb book series does really well tma fans please go read the locked tomb PLEASE-) is characters that we never get to meet. some of the most important events in the entire series happened long before the series even started. we get to hear recordings of gertrude robinson, the ghosts of gerard keay and eric delano, letters from adelard dekker, recollections from people who knew agnes montageu, but we never get to meet any of them. not really. and that’s important.
because this story isn’t about jonathan sims, he’s just the perspective we’re following. this is an entire universe of characters, all of whom played their own parts in the story before we even knew there was a story at all. the magnus archives starts in the archives, with the archivist testing out a tape recorder. the story of the magnus archives starts with the first animal that ever felt afraid. the story of the magnus archives lasts the entire span of humanity, and more.
you, the archivist, every character you get to actually meet- they’re all just the smallest fraction of this story. and everyone you don’t get to meet has already played their parts, their actions in the past are actively affecting the present.
I was thinking of an adaptation of TMA where all the characters are women, which led me to the Idea of Trans Woman Martin. I imagine you can see the extra layers it adds to one particular scene.
i like to think that the reason lena described some of the powers as “benevolent” is because they’re actually her friends. they’re nicer to her than any of the humans she knows.
I like to think that Elias is boring on purpose. he spends his time and effort when he should be working on boring his employees instead. he’s perfected it to an art. every day, he visits each department and tries to find the time to talk about spreadsheets whenever there’s the most people in one room at a time. then he tallies up how many of them visibly and/or audibly react with some form of disgust, and compares it with other days. he’d have realised how sad that really is if he hadn’t been found out, but at least now he gets to be as deranged as humanly possible. you go, Elias. I love you you stinky rat whore, can’t wait for you to show up in the new protocol episode <3
another thing about parasight is even though the corruption doesn’t like the eye, the two can work together so easily. something crawls deep beneath your skin and sees parts of you that aren’t meant to be seen. someone stares deep into your soul, and knows exactly how rotten your core truly is. i’m just saying. jane could permanently alter jonah’s relationship with the eye.
it’s been said before but the magnus archives truly has the ship names of all time. all of the ones Ive heard are so lovely - lonelyeyes, ParaSight, doorkeay - EXCEPT for ones involving the literal protagonist. which are jmart. jontim. jonelias. what is wrong with us why did we do that
somebody sent me a submission that i accidentally deleted (sorry lol) asking for my thoughts on lena having any sort of supernatural, avatar-like abilities and actually i do have some thoughts on that
i love it. i feel like it would have to be something related to the computers, since she’s already shown that she has either some level of control, communication, or overall understanding of how fr3-d1 works that the others don’t. technokinesis would be a good thematic fit for her, i think. but i’ll have to see where the story goes, and since it’s unlikely we’re working with smirke’s 14 here and the oiar hasn’t shown any alignment, i doubt she’d have any actual avatar abilities. if she’s got something going on, it’ll be something we haven’t heard about yet.
the secret to embracing and enjoying all the fucked up shit that goes on in horror podcasts is to just get into the locked tomb first. after being hyperfixated on the locked tomb for about a year, i have never since found myself going “this dynamic is too fucked up to be explored”
it’s so funny to me that jonathan “archivist” sims and john “god” gaius are so similar - similar names, humans that turned into something more, eye motif, intense guilt that doesn’t stop them from doing bad shit, caused the apocalypse - except for the fact that in his first appearence, john gaius is a sweet, gentle guy that approaches people with a pleasent attitude, and jonathan sims is first introduced as a skeptic that doesn’t believe any of the stories people trust him with.
thinking about dios apate again. no ship will ever compare. they are the blueprint. what every other fucked up ship aspires to be. nothing will ever hit the same way as dios apate. the concept of shipping peaked with them i think
i see people call jonelias fucked up and all i can think is never ever read harrow the ninth. you will die. you will die all the way dead
elijah volkov truly broke the mold of fiction podcast antagonists just by virtue of not wearing a suit and being very much a guy who Would Not Wear Suits
suits are the one thing jonah magnus, ty betteridge, AND kayne malevolent all have in common.
elijah volkov wears a fucking wizard’s cape over a bloodied nurse’s outfit. he’s doing his own thing entirely
the full ramble on wether fiction podcast antagonists would get along together or not (i got bored) (characters included: jonah magnus, kayne malevolent, elijah volkov, ty betteridge)
jonah and kayne: kind of? kayne would definitely have fun, jonah not so much. in jonah’s mind, this is a slaughter avatar, a powerful one at that, so he probably sees kayne as the threat he is. in kayne’s mind, this is a cute little wannabe eldritch monster and he WILL play around with it.
jonah and elijah: i wrote a whole fic about this. it would get so psychosexual. the religious undertones would become overtones. also jonah probably interprets elijah as a web avatar, and as he said, he just let’s the spiders do their thing. they would both get Something out of interacting, but nothing good. they could make each other worse
jonah and ty: absolutely. 100%. two evil british guys in suits that dabble in powers no human should possess. but at the same time, i feel like they’d get real passive-aggressive with each other. it’s a 4d chess type of interaction i think
kayne and elijah: yeah actually. they’re both a bit wild, a lot less human than jonah or ty. they could chase each other around a bit. they could bark at each other a bit. as a treat. the difference is that kayne is more than a human and elijah is less than a human.
elijah and ty: one way or another, elijah’s ending up in a cage of some sort in this scenario. ty would study him. i mean, he is an anomaly, it just makes sense. i’m sure he could find some use for the whole….thing. eli’s got going on. he’s getting the unethical experiment treatment for sure
people should blorboify adelard dekker more. one of like 3 people enmeshed with the fears who wasn’t on some level an awful or at least deeply morally dubious person. also one of the few canon POC. obsessed with the extinction, like all cool people. he solves his eldritch horror problems with copious amounts of concrete. what’s not to love
backstory: having always loved rollercoasters, mars couldn’t pass on the opportunity to ride the smiler, even though he of course didn’t pass the height limit at 12 years old. after almost an hour of begging, his parents agreed to sneak him on. he quickly got scared when the ride actually started, the loops and spirals and inversions made him feel dizzy. during a loop, mars leaned forward a bit too much, and fell out of the cart, falling upside down for what felt to him like hours. the simple motion of falling cleared his dizzyness and actually made him feel relieved after the looping and twisting of the smiler. he felt safe. his parents found him perfectly intact.
current day: mars works as a cab driver to gain victims for the vast. he wants to share the simple joy of uncontrolled motion with everyone he meets.
appearence: mars is about 170cm, pale, with straight ginger hair kept at about shoulder length, acne, dimples, and green eyes. he mostly wears casual clothing, like sweatpants and hoodies.
name: rachel prado
pronouns: she/they
age: 21
affiliation: the desolation
backstory: rachel was a bully. there’s no nice way to put it. she picked on smaller kids all through her adolescence. of course someone would eventually snap. rachel’s family was far from rich, they grew up knowing what a good meal was really worth. of course the others knew where to strike her to really make it hurt. it was the last year of high school, and they were growing tomatoes in biology class. rachel was the last in the classroom, admiring their own work, when one of her victims ran back in with a lighter in his hand, and set her work aflame. before rachel could run to get water or a teacher or anything, the fire had caught onto her desk. but even as everyone outside yelled at rachel to run, she stayed inside, desperately trying to save their tomatoes even as the flames burned their flesh. when the fire was finally put out, the other students claimed that they could still see rachel holding onto the scorched remains of her project.
current day: rachel feeds on the fear of the destruction or loss of food. many have claimed to see the figure of a young woman taunting them as their crops burn, mouthing “you will starve.” at them.
appearence: rachel is 168cm tall, and, post-becoming, sickly thin with sharp bones visible through her tan skin. their bleached blonde hair appears scorched at its ends, her eyes are hollow and dark, and their arms are covered in burnmarks. they’re often seen wearing a pink croptop and hole-filled cargo pants.
name: “samis” (sometimes referred to as “samishi”)
pronouns: refracted pronouns
age: 32
affiliation: the lonely
backstory: samis has no backstory; they are a manifestation, not an avatar.
current day: samis is seen wherever there is petty disputes, passive-aggression, feelings getting hurt and ties being cut. they thrive on driving wedges between loved ones and strangers alike. they despise human connection more than anything.
appearence: a foggy, unclear figure, often in the distance. average height, appearing to have black hair in a manbun, sunglasses and a facemask covering their face, leather pants, and a jacket worn open with no shirt on underneath.
fun fact: it’s rumored that samis was the anonymous underground japanese punk artist known as SERIFFY who quit music the second they began to gain popularity, declaring they simply “hated all their fans.”
i’m gonna copy all the important info about my ocs into a seperate post so people don’t have to look for it in the reblogs.
mach’s very cool tma ocs
name: mark “mars” oliver
pronouns: he/him
age: 30
affiliation: the vast; marked by the spiral
backstory: having always loved rollercoasters, mars couldn’t pass on the opportunity to ride the smiler, even though he of course didn’t pass the height limit at 12 years old. after almost an hour of begging, his parents agreed to sneak him on. he quickly got scared when the ride actually started, the loops and spirals and inversions made him feel dizzy. during a loop, mars leaned forward a bit too much, and fell out of the cart, falling upside down for what felt to him like hours. the simple motion of falling cleared his dizzyness and actually made him feel relieved after the looping and twisting of the smiler. he felt safe. his parents found him perfectly intact.
current day: mars works as a cab driver to gain victims for the vast. he wants to share the simple joy of uncontrolled motion with everyone he meets.
appearence: mars is about 170cm, pale, with straight ginger hair kept at about shoulder length, acne, dimples, and green eyes. he mostly wears casual clothing, like sweatpants and hoodies.
name: rachel prado
pronouns: she/they
age: 21
affiliation: the desolation
backstory: rachel was a bully. there’s no nice way to put it. she picked on smaller kids all through her adolescence. of course someone would eventually snap. rachel’s family was far from rich, they grew up knowing what a good meal was really worth. of course the others knew where to strike her to really make it hurt. it was the last year of high school, and they were growing tomatoes in biology class. rachel was the last in the classroom, admiring their own work, when one of her victims ran back in with a lighter in his hand, and set her work aflame. before rachel could run to get water or a teacher or anything, the fire had caught onto her desk. but even as everyone outside yelled at rachel to run, she stayed inside, desperately trying to save their tomatoes even as the flames burned their flesh. when the fire was finally put out, the other students claimed that they could still see rachel holding onto the scorched remains of her project.
current day: rachel feeds on the fear of the destruction or loss of food. many have claimed to see the figure of a young woman taunting them as their crops burn, mouthing “you will starve.” at them.
appearence: rachel is 168cm tall, and, post-becoming, sickly thin with sharp bones visible through her tan skin. their bleached blonde hair appears scorched at its ends, her eyes are hollow and dark, and their arms are covered in burnmarks. they’re often seen wearing a pink croptop and hole-filled cargo pants.
name: “samis” (sometimes referred to as “samishi”)
pronouns: refracted pronouns
age: 32
affiliation: the lonely
backstory: none; samis is a direct manifestation of the lonely.
current day: samis is seen wherever there is petty disputes, passive-aggression, feelings getting hurt and ties being cut. they thrive on driving wedges between loved ones and strangers alike. they despise human connection more than anything.
appearence: a foggy, unclear figure, often in the distance. average height, appearing to have black hair in a manbun, sunglasses and a facemask covering their face, leather pants, and a jacket worn open with no shirt on underneath. often described by witnesses as “weirdly hot”
fun fact: it’s rumored that samis was the anonymous underground japanese punk artist known as SERIFFY who quit music the second they began to gain popularity, declaring they simply “hated all their fans.”
hi hi i come bearing questions, how come mars works as a cab driver? how did he pick that as his preferred pickup method for victims? also i love him already
thanks for the question!!!
mars being a cab driver was an idea i had way before i added onto his backstory; i just really liked the idea of a vast avatar cab driver.
mars has always been all about the movement, especially the chaotic escalation of movement, i.e. rollercoasters and reckless drivers lol. it was his dream job, really. he enjoys that specific brand of fear that’s invoked by a situation where you’re in the backseat of a car, and you feel the speed slowly increasing, dread building in your stomach because you’ve trusted a stranger with your life, and they’ve decided to throw it all away. you’re helpless. all you can do is hold on tight and pray.
technically speaking, mars has never gotten into an accident. not one anyone could prove he was involved with, anyways.
okok so im working on Rachel's drawing and I've got 2 questions
1. what's her hair length?
2. when they're saying " you will starve" to ppl after burning their crops, does she stay close to them ( like looking them in the eye unblinking a few centimeters away ) or far away ( like a figure in the horizon, or maybe in the middle of the fire mmm)?
thanks for the questions!!! i’m so excited to see the drawing ahdjfjek
1. her hair is just below ear length, but it’s very fluffy which makes it look longer
2. they’re usually in the middle of the fire, as if feeding off the flames.
rachel is so cool, id genuinely love to hear more about her
eeee thank you!!!!
i just really really love the idea of the fear of starvation being the desolation lol.
here’s some fun facts about rachel, just as a treat:
she’s mixed latino; half-brazilian.
outside of school, they actually used to be very sweet and calm. nobody’s sure wether this was a facade or not.
they curse like a sailor.
her victims are usually people like her, the more similar the more likely she is to target them. make of that what you will.
the holes in her pants look burned at the edges, much like their hair.
they do, in fact, describe the feeling of starving as poetically as every other avatar does about their own fear. they once described it as “that burning, righteous anger in your stomach, that this is not fair, that you worked so hard. but you cannot stop it anymore. you cannot salvage this. your crops have burned. this is the year you will starve.”
sometimes, when she gets tired of burning farms, she’ll pick a specific victim and make it so that anything they try to consume burns away into nothing upon contact with their tongue.
technically i could say that me making a manifestation of the lonely weirdly hot serves a narrative purpose and is actually a metaphor for how we glorify and romanticize solitude. but really i just wanted to make them hot for funsies.
it’s important that you all know that my tma ocs are all losers and assholes. mars forces his victims to listen to radiohead while subjecting them to intentionally irresponsible driving. rachel is mean and cruel on purpose but she’s also lame as fuck. samis is hot and cool but they’re also a misanthrope that hates every single human, and somehow it’s personal every single time
hi yes hello can i have more information about samis please and thank you :) :) :)
sure!!
they were created about 32 years ago by the lonely. their original purpose was to feed on the fears of japanese hikikomori, but later on branched out to feeding on the general fear of solitude being your only option in life. the fear that you will be forced to stay inside, by yourself, because what and who is out there is worse.
this is why they’re such a misanthrope; they’re dependent on human hostility, harassment, discrimination, and general horribleness to exist. they make every place they can as hostile as possible for as many people as possible; to force people into loneliness.
samis secretly craves a sense of self outside of the lonely, but their sheer hatred of humanity always gets in the way of trying to establish any other identity. one of their attempts at an identity was when they (allegedly) started a career as an anonymous underground punk artist known only as SERIFFY (not a translation; how the word “self” would be pronounced phonetically if it was a japanese word), which they inevitably quit when they started to gain popularity; they couldn’t stand the idea of people liking them.
given the opportunity to fuck elias bouchard i would do it for one reason and one reason only - i want to be able tell jonathan sims that i fucked his boss
the reason i’m not sad about tim’s death is actually that i understand his character on a deeper level. if he had lived, he would not have been happy. his character arc needed to end the way it did, nothing else would’ve made sense.
and also can i just say. i was so confused for such a long time because the fanon design for tim is. not at all what he looks like in my head. i hear his voice and all i can picture is like. jhariah clare with longer hair. so there’s also that
you've mentioned that Rachel's hair is a bit scorched at the ends, are they permanently like that? or does she just do it for the Avatar Aesthetic™? or do they just prefer that to cutting their hair? enlighten me ( hehe)
permanently like that, but they could probably change it if they wanted to. the reason she doesn’t want to is the avatar aesthetic lol
ALT
