2022-09-03 13:58:52 ¶ ●

## TMA characters as texts my sister has sent me:

Martin:

Tim:

Rosie:

Melanie:

Daisy:

Elias:

2022-09-05 19:29:33 ¶ ●

It was MARTIN??!?!!?!!?!! MARTIN PUT THE TAPE RECORDERS ON THE COFFIN??!?!?? WHAT THE FUCK… THATS THE MOST ROMANTIC THING ANYONE’S EVER DONE.

2022-09-06 12:02:40 ¶ ●

“Hopefully by the time you get these tapes I’ll have something more concrete for you. Good luck Jon, I- stay safe.”

2022-09-08 23:06:46 ¶ ●

Rip to the Queen but I’ve got blogging to do so here’s how I think the characters in tma would react to the Queen dying!

Jon: would do the whole “I wouldn’t wish death on anyone!” speel, but is well aware of the damage and violence she’s supported and is not at all sad.

Martin: he’d probably be sad. Not in a royalist way, but in a familiar ‘the Queen has been a big part of life for a lot of people’ way. After the news was broken he probably said something like 'god. I need a cuppa.’

Tim: would probably be happy! He seems like a devoted anti monarchist type! He probably had 'ding doing the witch is dead’ on full blast (to Martin’s dismay)

Sasha: kinddd of wants to join Tim but also thinks it’s disrespectful and is probably trying to remind everyone that this means prince Charles is king now.

Daisy: probably just said 'Oh.’ and moved on.

Basira: understands the historical significance of the whole thing, is very respectful of the people in mourning and shakes her head solemnly about it.

Melanie: probably partying with Tim!

Elias: he’s ancient, he probably knew Lizzie before she was queen, he’s probably in bits about it.

2022-09-12 1:46:58 ¶ ●

I like to think that back when they were first working in the archives, Martin when through little interests every couple of weeks. Just subtle things, maybe to do with specific statements or current events.

And Jon, despite his “raging hatred” for the guy, always seems to get really into the same things. He always has the perfect interesting fact, statistic, or contribution to the subject…

He insists it’s because he doesn’t want Martin “spreading false information and damaging the intellectual image of the institute!”

But really he just wants to impress him.

2022-09-13 2:26:36 ¶ ●

The realest queer representation in The Magnus Archives is Jon and Martin going to live in a cabin in the countryside together immediately after becoming official.

2022-09-15 2:46:58 ¶ ●

The Am I The Asshole subreddit would be such a mess after the eyepocalypse…

2022-09-23 18:04:33 ¶ ●

You see, Martin says ‘I grieved for you’ to Jon, but this doesn’t do justice for just what he would have gone through.

As most people know, having a loved one in hospital is horrible, but Jon’s case is an entirely different thing. Assuming Jon was initially taken to a hospital in Great Yarmouth, it would’ve taken Martin a while to get there, even if he left right away. He might have missed Jon’s emergency treatment, but he certainly didn’t miss the worst of it.

Many people assume that CPR is a quick, simple, lifesaving procedure, it is not. Jon was found not breathing, and without a pulse, so he would have had at least 20 minutes straight of CPR, and that messes up a body. On a person as weak as Jon it would badly break ribs, and cause a lot of bruising. Even if Martin didn’t have to watch Jon’s chest be crushed to no avail, that type of damage is often visible.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a dead body, but it’s different to an unconscious one in every way. Jon of course, was not dead, but he would absolutely look it. As I’m sure you know, blood being pumped is what keeps the body warm, and breathing accounts for a large part of what we perceive as living, so the absence of both of these, especially in a loved one, is jarring, and likely to send anyone into shock

In lots of TV shows you see doctors calling deaths, but in reality it’s actually quite a difficult thing to diagnose. It’s not a quick check of the pulse and you’re done, there’s a lot of tests; there are many conditions that can look like death. In Jon’s case his mind and nerves were still active, meaning it would have been picked up on fairly quickly, but Jon would have been assumed dead until these tests were completed.

The thing with a case like this, is there’s nothing the doctors can feasibly do; as Elias says, it’s an unknown quantity. The most likely course of action would be to make him as comfortable as possible, and redo the death checks every so often. There would be no hope for his recovery, but legally the hospital would have to do this, and would be able to offer very little comfort.

Although of course you want your loved one to survive, many family members of coma patients confess to hoping that they’d just die. The limbo of waiting is impossible to process, and having them there but having no way to communicate with them can be excruciating. There’s no way to properly grieve for someone if you always have it in the back of your mind that they could wake up.

Giving up on someone like that is terribly and awfully painful. You can tell them you’re sorry all you want, but you’ll always be thinking about how they’d have wanted you to stay. Having to create both sides of an interaction like that when truly you’re in control of neither is simply impossible to recover from.

Every action Martin took after Jon’s death was justified, logical, even. To succumb to the lonely after leaving the man you love, sentencing him to die alone?

It feels right.

2022-09-29 2:01:49 ¶ ●

Have you ever thought about what would have happened if Nikola had killed Jon when she kidnapped him? How the story would have gone? How things would have changed?

Elias would have been annoyed, obviously. But how hard would it really be to pick someone else? Everyone in the archives is at least partially marked by the fears, yes there would be delays, but how hard would it be to shape collateral into a usable pawn?

I don’t know how Tim would feel. How do you describe that rage of losing the one you blame for everything, combined with the grief of losing somebody who could’ve almost been a friend? Whether or not your original purpose remains, you’re displaced.

Daisy and Melanie wouldn’t be all too affected- an annoyance of course, perhaps a pang of loss, guilt mavbe? But what could stop them powering forward. There’s more important things at stake than just one man.

Basira cared about Jon. She liked him, even; thought he was funny. She’d be sad. Not devastated, but it’d be a loss. The kind you feel through a sheet of fog, you know the pain is there but you can’t quite reach it.

But Martin. Oh Martin. Can you imagine how he’d sob? How he’d fall apart? The loss of a love who loved you back whilst neither of you ever had the strength to say it? The denial of every idle daydream, every menial thought of cooking together, of cuddling on a sunny morning… Everything that mattered rotting away like wasted meat.

And the unknowing. Without Jon there to plan and organise, would Melanie and Martin have been spared the experience? Without Jon, Elias would have to reassert control, see who would be the best pick for the new archivist.

Would Martin watch frozen as Nikola paraded around, wearing Jon like a fur coat? His brain screaming at him that ‘Jon’s skin didn’t sit like that on his body’ whilst his heart rejoices at the return of his love.

And Tim, in that very attempt to tackle Jon, would he have been torn apart by fierce automaton hands? There’s no chance to click a detonator if your opponent isn’t who you thought they were; it’s impossible to react that fast.

Would it instead have been Melanie? Seeing this unfold before her, infernal rage unleashed by loss of control. Would she have watched willingly, as she sent herself, and her only remaining allies to fiery, painful deaths?

Perhaps.

But how are we to know?