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
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.
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:
it’s been a bit here’s some tma hot takes. elias is and always was a more compelling character than martin. martin is a heartstopper boy to me he’s inoffensive but pretending elias made-his-own-messiah (that paprika the novel quote about his protege as christ with female genitals) anthropomorphised fear of the voyeur three overlapping psychosexual relationships bouchard wasn’t a standout is absurd. don’t give me any of that ‘but what’s interesting about martin is he stayed nice and dull despite despite despite’ i don’t care !! i do not watch the owl house. also sims especially towards the end had one way he wrote female supporting characters (Strong, exasperated, decent chance of being either a lesbian or a cop or both) that causes a lot of the cast to blend into a slurry of quips and powers. despite this i do consider him an actual genius of shortform horror i have yet to find another podcast that hits anywhere near the same as good magnus archives
Fascinating that in a narrative where one character sculpted another, the sculptor himself was, on a meta level, modelled after his creation. They are so similar, by intent.
eugh blugh anyway anyway. elias like talks to jon completely differently than he talks to anyone else. if jon is the room he is talking exclusively to jon regardless of how many other people are in the room. if jon is not in the room but there’s a tape recorder running he’s talking to jon. if he thinks jon might have this conversation relayed to him at a later date he’s talking to jon. mag 92 is hysterical because why did you pack this office with as many people as possible for this conversation and then audibly not break eye contact with one specific guy for twenty minutes. well this is because jon is the only person that actually exists to him in this situation. or most situations. elias knows he’s in a podcast but as far as he’s concerned he and jon are the only characters in it and everyone else is set dressing and he gets so cranky about it when the set dressing starts expressing free will. jon is aware that other people exist 95% of the time unless he is actively talking to and/or yelling at elias and then he kind of forgor. mag 102 when elias is like melanie is coming to murder me with a knife for like .25 seconds jon is like the fuck is melanie and then returns to reality and remembers he has a life outside of “weird thing with elias” and is kind of embarrassed. like uh whoops sorry got kind of intense there for a second (elias continues to be kind of intense unabated) (forever)
Thinking about Jon and Elias hunting together in the most brutal, synchronised, and methodical fashion possible 🥰🥰🥰
I do have a weakness for the scarce moments of complicity we glimpse in the show. I wish we could have seen Jon realise that understanding Elias is both possible and inevitable to him because they are the same… and Jon would hate himself about it afterward, but that doesn’t change much now, does it?
randomly got annoyed again today at fandom portrayals of elias as a luddite. you think the world’s most powerful avatar of beholding would be…. behind the times? ignorant to the progress of technology? even if you choose to ignore the fact that the digital age revolutionized beholding as a dread power (going from something tied much more closely to the hunt to something so much more exestential and all-consuming… the surveilance state! online surveilance! wiretapping! data gathering! predatory privacy policies! the zoom boom! etc!!!) and that the evolution of recording technology is how the institute was able to function as efficiently as it did to tell us its story… why would it ever make sense to you that the world’s most powerful beholding avatar would remain wilfully ignorant of… anything. let alone wilfully ignorant of how the vast majority of the world functions and communicates. plus his greatest fear is death!! you think he isn’t up to date on all the most prominent medical advances? that’s just a willful misreading of the text.
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