Whenever I get really into something I get very paranoid that I’m making everything about it, and being an incredibly obvious fan.
Anyways the other day I was having a conversation and I thought to myself “I have to stop speaking like this, it’s so obvious I’m just trying to sound like Jonathan Sims.”
Because of my accent. My English accent. That I’ve had my whole life. Because I live in England.
One of the weirdest things I love about TMA is how embarrassing it all is. Like, romanticism is fun sometimes, but embarrassment equally so.
If you’ve ever meaningfully interacted with the supernatural, you know that shit can be awkward. If you’ve ever had an office job, you know how embarrassing it can be! Pretty much if you’ve ever experienced any form of life, you know how embarrassing a day of existence is.
And my god Jon’s life is embarrassing! He can’t stop getting kidnapped, he doesn’t have any friends, he can’t even get his job done due to infinite supernatural interruptions. That’s really embarrassing.
He’s an adult who effectively has to relive being a child because he’s thrust into a world that no longer makes sense, and that vulnerability is so real!
But Jon’s not the only one who’s going through embarrassing stuff, oh no! Martin is hopelessly in love with his cruel boss who barely looks at him; Tim and Sasha hooked up only for Sasha to break it off against Tim’s wishes; and hell, Melanie literally got laughed off of YouTube and BECAME A MEME.
These people are going through awful, otherworldly terrors, but not once is it ignored that they must still suffer through painstakingly awkward everyday moments too.
I suppose it comes down to realism. Understanding that the supernatural can become just another part of life in an annoying way, and letting the characters be normal fumbling people makes it hit so much closer to home.
I think all this is why The Magnus Archives is popular not only as horror, but as an explanation of human relationships; the everyday realism is so deeply entwined with the otherworldly but both exist in their own right. And this in itself is realistic, as how far away is horror from your daily life, really? And how different is fear to embarrassment?
Sharing media with your friends is great! It allows you to get to know them in ways you never wanted to and hear opinions you could never even dream of!
The thing about blood is that once you’ve seen it you can never really get it out. It has a tendancy to linger, to drip into those places impossible to reach, a slow unnoticeable movement breaking its stagnation. Even if you think you’ve got all of it, chances are you haven’t. The smell lingers, a sickly sweet fuzzy smell tinged with iron that somehow sticks in the back of your throat.
Imagine how much blood there was when Jared Hopworth attacked the institute. We know the boneturner is capable of removing bones with no blood at all but why would he when what he wants to cause is fear? He says that they undid the institute staff for parts, so I’d say they took a hell of a lot more than bones.
That’s not to mention Melanie’s attack with the knife, God knows how much blood Jared and his “perfect” friends had in their eldritch bodies, but if that knife hurt I’m willing to bet that blood was spilled. A lot of blood.
There’s something uncanny about a place where something that awful’s happened. Something in the foundations of the place. In a place with a history as messy as the institute I’m sure there was always something on the air, but that amount of bloodshed never really fades.
Even if you can’t see or smell it I think there’s something in the soul that knows it. Growing up there was a small park near where I lived, I always knew of it, walked past it, but never once had any desire to go near it. I don’t know if I avoided it, but I never wanted to go into it. I found out a few years back that a girl died there. I won’t go into detail but it was the kind of death that leaves that mark, and when I did eventually end up in that park the weight in the air was palpable.
I wonder if Jon could feel that sense of something when he came back to the institute after his coma. Does otherworldly sight stretch into the realms of the metaphysical? Could he see the residual fear of an entity so different to his own lingering in dark corners and clinging to his coworkers? Or could he simply sense it, that slight wrongness that would be so easy to attribute to being away for so long.
Jon didn’t get a warm welcome, and perhaps he returned to a place that didn’t even feel like the prison it’d been before. There’s a comfort in the horrors we face daily, and even positive changes can make it feel even worse than it did before. The behaviour of his friends changed so much, and somehow so did the behaviour of his workplace.
It begs the question, is it better to know or to be oblivious? To be blind or to seek knowledge relentlessly? That feeling, that slight instinct that something happened here, there’s something to know; how could one bear that after six months of knowing nothing real at all? Jon didn’t know about the attack, and him knowing didn’t help, but did he feel it? Was it there in that sea of knowledge the whole time but he couldn’t bring himself to reach out and grasp it?
Because the thing with blood is that it lingers, and once you smell it, it never really goes away.
I wish real life academia was more like The Magnus Archives because I’d much rather face otherworldly evils than have my research blocked by INFINITE PAYWALLS. Jonathan Sims might’ve suffered immensely and nearly ended the world but at least he didn’t have to cite inaccessible sources.
I gotta be honest if some random guy approached me in the street and asked me to tell him my paranormal trauma I’d literally just tell him? Like he wouldn’t have to compel me I’d like to share. Free therapy for me, free story for him! Not my problem if it feeds an otherworldly overlord.
You know when you’ve been thinking something for ages and it feels normal and then you say it out loud and it sounds so odd and unbelievable that you physically wince but you have to keep going because it’d be embarrassing to backtrack at that point so you just speak it into being normal again?
Yeah I think that’s what the supplementals were like for Jon.