the main driving force in my life is acquiring information. if you ever see me doing something stupid please understand its because i have probably developed some bizarre idea about how to acquire more information and i have disregarded other concerns (“safety,” “politeness”) in favor of my ultimate goal. what am i going to do with this information? nothing at all. i am going to sit on it like a dragon sits on its golden hoard. dragons dont need gold to buy anything they are just using it as some type of really big couch or sensory sand type of situation. this is my relationship to information. in the past i have been happy to eat villagers in order to acquire my information but i am trying to be better now and only blackmail them, which i understand is more polite in many human cultures. im losing track of this metaphor. someone tell me a secret.
the web probably thought to itself “great, now that the chosen one has reached adulthood, I can pass him off to this nearly-omniscient supervillain who has a vested interest in getting him all his marks, that’s so much less work for me” and then elias would have plans like “hmm, I need to arrange an end mark, just killing him should work, right?” or “well, the coffin exists, so it’ll probably turn up and he’ll probably just throw himself in” or “I’m putting all my faith in jared hopworth’s ability to correctly interpret and respond to my cryptic anonymous letters.”
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
you guys all know i’m in the panopticon too right? just because i’m in the tower doesn’t mean i should be treated any differently. all of you can see me just as well as i can see you. my position is worse actually because you’re all looking at me at once while i can only point the spotlight at one of you at a time. have some compassion. we’re all in the panopticon here. we’re all in the same boat
“It was a book. The cloth of the cover had worn away, and it was still wet from the seawater that covered the area at high tide. I expected it to be a useless lump of wet paper mush, fused together and unreadable, but when I pulled it open the pages came apart easily. There was a label at the very front, but the ink had run and I have no idea what it might have said. So I turned to the first page.
It was very strange. It was just the one word, solid capital letters in a small, neat typeface at the very centre of the page. It said ‘DIG’. I took that to be the title, and turned to the next page. ‘DIG’. Exactly the same. The third page. ‘DIG’. The fourth page. ‘DIG’. Dig, dig, dig, dig.” -TMA88: Dig
the magnus archives transcripts, mag139 // the wolf - the crane wives // this tornado loves you - neko case // polar nettles - neko case // take me to war - the crane wives // the stranger at my door - brandi carlile // the magnus archives transcripts, mag139
Canon Jonah Magnus is way funnier than fanon Jonah Magnus. Why does everyone try to change him. He’s perfect.
Everyone writes him like Stereotypical Creepy Looking Villain Who Is Easily Angered Into Mistakes but he’s so much funnier than that. He’s trying to destroy the world and put everyone in perpetual misery specifically to avoid someone doing that to him first and his Secret Fear Factory is a shitty paranormal research institute full of offices and bureaucracy because he genuinely prefers it that way. The highlight of his week is on Wednesdays when he does the scheduling for next week and the protagonists trying to get out of their shitty fear jobs use this against him.
He almost never gets angry at anyone because he genuinely does not care, he does actually try to be reasonable and convince his employees not to try to kill him or break his stuff, and considers using his See Everything Powers and Evil Mental Torture powers on them to be a strenuous inconvenience. When he is annoyed or threatened enough to pull out the Evil Torture Mind Powers in self defense, he just does it and then washes his hands of it and goes back to being the Totally Normal Institute Manager he genuinely enjoys being. Dude could hire and blackmail people into doing all the boring tedious parts of his job but he just likes doing them himself.
Half of the dude’s character is how Totally Normal he is. Whenever someone has a big revelation about his evil mind powers or his secret immortality or about how he’s killed someone or screwed them over in some way he completely takes the wind out of their sails by acting like this is a normal thing and he forgot they didn’t already know, like they’re inquiring about when they need to attend a new HR seminar by. He treats them like they’re being unreasonable and need to keep up and it’s funny every single time. He’s so good at being a Helpful but Incompetent Office Manager that it’s usually impossible for the protagonists to tell how much he knows and whether he’s screwing them over on purpose at any given time (he always is). He considers little matters like “my employee keeps trying to kill me” and “my employee got me sent to prison for murder” to be minor inconveniences and never holds grudges against anyone because he genuinely doesn’t care about them enough to be angry.
It’s never stated why he has so little control over what the Head Archivist decides to do at any given time; he just seems to hate micromanagement. He let Gertrude do whatever the fuck she wanted for 50 years no matter what danger or inconvenience it caused (it’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of attacks on the archives during Gertrude’s day were from people who were specifically pissed off at Gertrude’s actions) and only killed her when it was necessary for self-defense. The whole thing is just a sitcom to him. Everyone is an NPC in his Destroy the World Adventure and he doesn’t seem to take anything personally. He’s Owen Burnett who thinks he’s David Xanotos and it’s the funniest fucking thing.
He overreacted and killed ONE GUY with a lead pipe and now half the fanfic treats him like an incredibly weird little murdergoblin who can be incensed into making mistakes with a bit of namecalling and throws his Eye abilities around constantly. The canon version is so much funnier.
EDIT: There’s been a lot of people asking/wanting a physical poster of this poster design, I don’t have any way to sell any of my art at the moment sadly.
EDIT EDIT: Scratch that. I’ve set up a Redbubble 🥳🥳 should be officially live in a few days!
can’t stop thinking the phrase ‘i have the indexer’s temperament’ to myself because. i literally do. love to read things and go wow i would love to make a comprehensive list of all the occurrences of my favourite subjects and themes <3
NEVER be vulnerable. FLUSH your medication down the toilet. LIE when people ask how you’re doing. SUPPRESS your feelings. ALWAYS be irritable and abrasive. MAKE SURE you push away anyone who’s close to you. CANCEL your therapy appointment.
more stuff about becoming a god being inherently dehumanizing pls
too much focus on Ascension or becoming Greater not enough focus on what is Lost of you
you’re not a person anymore, just a personification. you’re a concept, an abstraction. all neatly defined boundaries and borders, none of the vagueries or blurring of lines or grey areas that come from being mortal.
you can never change, now. never grow or evolve, you are this, forever, stagnant. and the thing you’ve been made to embody might not even be your best trait.
It has been brought to my attention that people might be interested in the research I’ve done for Magnus stuff (I frequently go on research dives and assume it’s of interest to no one but me 😅)
Jonah Magnus
Some calculations about age/background (spoilers involved)(some of this plus pulled right from the wiki)
SO! I went down a rabbit hole last night because I’m playing the sims and decided to make the Magnus Institute, and, being me, I wanted to try and make the architecture accurate.
Of course, I could have just gone for late 19th century/early 20th century architecture, but I went into the various wikis and reddit threads and found that there is, in fact, a building that Jonny references as an inspiration for the Institute.
Namely, this:
This building is referenced as 42 Millbank, and now owned by the Chelsea College of Arts. Except when you search either one of those, you get different buildings!
What is pictured above is actually 45 Millbank. It’s now used as an event/conference center, and is indeed owned by the College of Arts. Once I knew that, I was able to find these pictures of the interior:
Neat!
But the thing is, I really wanted floorplans. At which point I did some more digging and found some archival records by the lovely people at Friends of Millbank, which explained that 45 Millbank was built as the Royal Army Medical College. There are lots of interesting articles on their site, including primary sources, through which I found this:
“constantly changing and shifting architectural landscape” really is one of my favourite settings for a story because it encompasses two similar but distinct niches of existential horror
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illustrative diagram i made to explain my point
a story itself is, of course, both of these at once - you are trapped within a living organism more vast and multifaceted than your own understanding of it can ever hope to contain, and subject to the whims of its architect, the author
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