Right Back Where We Started

taking poison damage from thinking too hard about how tma capitalizes on the horror of not having all the information by slowly taking away said information from the listener

elaborating: seasons 1-3 are firmly rooted in the viewpoint of Jon. The audience knows just as much as he does about the goings on around him, and sometimes even more (such as with Sasha being killed by the not!them). There are very few points in which Jon has more information than the audience, and most of said information is discovered and deciphered within the confines of the podcast episodes.

Season 4 is where this starts to change. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that Jon is rapidly developing supernatural knowledge, but at the same time this is basically giving him a get out of jail free card. As the audience, you assume Jon is still giving you the information when he finds it, because that's what he's been doing up until this point. You assume he's still doing all this for the noble cause of saving the world. Hell, it's not even until over halfway through season 4 that you learn he's been stalking people and taking their statements (the guy who does have a history of stalking, of paranoia, of taking things to far - but you don't want to think about that, because he's the protagonist, the voice you're supposed to trust), and only then does the audience fully come to realize how much he's been lying to you and how little you can take his words at face value.

And then there's season 5. If seasons 1-4 were spent looking over Jon's shoulder, season 5 is spent looking over Martin's - the man who does not have eldritch knowledge, who doesn't wish to know every little detail about the horrible world he's found himself in, whose only source of information is from his partner who is trying to protect him from what he did. And at that point...you really cannot say anything about what's going on in Jon's head for definitive fact aside from what he explicitly says out loud. You're stuck with a bundle of uncertainties. You don't know how they're going to put the world back. You don't know Jon is planning to kill Helen before he's at her front door. You don't know Jon is going against the group's plans until he's already at the top of the Panopticon. You're not the watcher anymore - you're the one being watched.

this has me sobbing on the floor

The holy trinity of outsiders finding out stuff about TMA

HAPPY EXTENDED SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PIPE MURDER DAY I SEE THE REMINDER ON MY PHONE AND THE TIME HAS COME TO DO ANYTHING BUT PAY RESPECTS TO THE MAN WHO HAD SO MANY FUCKED UP IF TRUE BOOKS

It is complete! After obtaining a new tape deck (and 146 re-records because the quality difference was day and night) I have finally finished recording all 200 episodes of The Magnus Archives on tape. Now all that is left is the "painful" task of having to listen to them all and confirm the recordings are good ;)

Yup. That’s it. That’s all of them.

You know how Elias sounds smugger and smugger as the show progresses? I like to imagine that he also starts to wear more ridiculous eye attire...

He goes from your boring boss in dark green three piece suit to bright green or combination of gold and black. And also extensive amount of eye jewelry from rings to earrings and ties with eyes...

The archival crew takes it as a mockery.

The rest of the Institute simply thinks he is going through a mid life crisis.

Happy Ace Day!!!!!!!

so i know we make jokes about Jon asking the assistants to commit crimes, but i was thinking about the bits in 81 where he talks about getting brought home by the police three times by age eight, and just… what if he asks for info you can’t get except by breaking into places because he’s so used to doing it himself?

like, I’m just imagining Tim joining the research department at the institute and meeting fussy academic Jon who’s a skeptic but knows a ton about this supernatural stuff, and befriending him because he’s kinda hilarious if you can sit through the acid.

And then they go to do field research together, and the man who Tim half-thought had never been outside in his life climbs a ten-foot fence without a beat of hesitation because this is where the statement happened, Tim, now hurry up, we’re wasting enough time on this blatant fabrication already…