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squivulous · 9 months

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My Podcast Masterlist

I have a long commute, giving me two hours a day to listen to podcasts. Here is my documentation of all the audio dramas I’ve consumed plus a little blurb. I just wanted to organize them in a list and also (selfishly) get recommendations if anyone would be so kind. Or maybe you’ll see something that’ll interest you. Enjoy!

Podcasts I’m Caught Up With

The Penumbra Podcast: I’ve made an animatic for this one. I’m down bad. This is the one that sucked me into this podcast world.

Malevolent: Arthur dating sim when??? Everyone wants him. Also it took me way too long to find out it was an actual play podcast.

Red Valley: Gordon fan all the way. Normally I do like the Sad Boy but Gordon is that type of dorky that makes me want to protect him.

Caravan: Interesting world and love a main character that makes questionable decisions. Everything is going to be fine :)

WOE.BEGONE: I’m obsessed. It happened slowly but now I think about it every day… And the music is so good! Mike Walters is cringefail, bbygurl, easy to manipulate, and saws his left arm off at the shoulder.

The Cellar Letters: Legit gets me spooked at times. Steve and Nate are good vibes. I’m sure glad nothing ever happens to them.

Harbor: Love that Sam being a malewife ruined his life.

Rifted: Aurora, another Sad Boy to add to my collection. Daniel should give him a kiss to make him feel better.

Heroics: Pls come back some day… I need more Josh. He’s in his slay era.

Second Fiddles: Max is owning being a bbygurl. Also there are a lot of poop jokes which is weird but I’ll look past it.

Hand in Glove: idk anything about baseball but these baseball players are smoochinggg.

Find Us Alive: Lancaster in booty jorts. It's canon. Don't look it up. I'm right. ALSO HE NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM PLS. C

The Kingmaker Histories: The kiss is still the subject of much historical debate. Eisen <3

The Viridian Wild: It hasn’t been updated since 2021 but I still have hope.

Dos: After You: Ghosting GONE WRONG

Brimstone Valley Mall: SEASON TWO IS COMING. 90’s mall setting is really fun and I’m here for the thing Asmoraius and Trent have going on.

Levian: It starts off with a bang! Well not quite since his sister walks in oops. Excited to see where this pirate tale takes us.

Midnight Burger: Each episode is a delight and as someone who is bad at science, I appreciate Gloria and Caspar. Caspar pls stay forever and also Brodie <3

Return Home: I’m really listening to it for Buddy and DW.

Raythe Reign: Sometimes you need a yaoi.

The White Vault: At this point, I know what I’m getting into and yet still decide to get attached to these characters

The Amelia Project: Please don’t hurt the Interviewer! He’s too goofy for all this drama. I’m scared!

Fawx & Stallion: James Stallion being canonically hot in any situation is such a win

Victoriocity: Inspector Fleet has had a long week and needs some days off

Yokai Detective Agency: I’m always a sucker for detective stories and I’m looking forward to where this one is going

Desert Skies: SEASON TWO STARTED LET’S GOOOOO

The Grotto: the music is so good but also please help. The emotional turmoil is torrential.

Camlann: Yo…. Dai, for real???

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: Idk how they’re still alive

Podcasts I’ve Completed

Dash: This might not be completed? This is actually the first audio drama I finished. Classic noir but supernatural and boys are smooching!

The Two Princes: This was wholesome and had good vibes. I prefer the first season but it was still a fun time.

The Magnus Archives: Arrived late to the party on this one, but I love all the fanart. Awakened my interest in pathetic men.

EOS 10: I also am not 100% sure this is done but I enjoyed the shenanigans!

Wolf 359: Eiffel, my beloved. I liked the silly and dramatic parts of this story. It hurt my soul but it was worth it :)

Time:Bombs: noahdeaart's fanart made me think this was going in a different direction... Still a fun one!

Valence: Love this one WAAAAHHH! Pls listen. I love Nico. Sad Boy but hides it under their chaos energy.

The Bright Sessions: I would 1005% listen to a spin-off just about Mark. This Sad Boy keeps collecting trauma and I need to see him and Oliver maybe go on adventures or something. ANYTHING.

Roommates: I, too, had a pandemic college experience. It's kinda bizarre that there's already a story about that and I love it!

Look Up: Wholesome. Briggon Snow kept me fed.

Moonface: Appreciate having an audio drama from an Asian American perspective. Didn’t realize how much I needed that.

Murray Mysteries: Must protect Jonathan.

Kaleidotrope: More wholesome content. I got more into it by the second half. The hosts have a fun dynamic!

Re: Dracula: Still thinking about Inside You.

Wooden Overcoats: Rudyard is my fav. Chapman deserves the hate.

The Vanishing Act: this Rudyard wasn’t my fav. I was happy to listen to him suffer but also happy when he fell in love. A win for Griffson!

Greater Boston: Michael Tate <3

Ars Paradoxica: Nikhil Sharma <3

Podcasts I’m Catching Up On

Life with Althaar: I knew that plant lady was sus

Love and Luck: I’m on ep 87 now some magical things are going down

Going Lowbrow: I wasn’t expecting a musical but I’m not complaining.

SAYER: There are no bees on Typhon :)

WTNV: I got behind during high school and now I’m too scared to get caught up… one day. It's been so long at this point I think I'd need to start over.

BRASS: I fell behind on episodes :(

Not Quite Dead: If there are vampires, I'm automatically interested. Only a few eps in.

Hi Nay: I’m listening to Murphy respectfully.

Unwell: I just listened to the Christmas episode and cried

Podcasts I’ve Dropped

Moonbase Theta Out

Dreamboy

Archive 81

The Sheridan Tapes

Jar of Rebuke

I’ll keep this updated every so often. Most of these I’ve found either from scouring rec lists or seeing nice fanart.

Please let me know of any recommendations you may have! Thanks for reading if you got this far. Mad respect.

Last updated: 06/08/24

#podcasts #podcast recs #audio drama #squiv speaks #I didn't know I listened to this many

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vickozone · 7 months

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The Magnus Archives

-S5 Notes-

<- previous notes

Handwriting translated below:

#161 old memories, tape that Gertrude should have gave them, Jon says “I love you”, they don’t need to eat to live

#162 Gertrude and Gerry bonding, Tim and Sasha talking about a very relevant subject and Jon and Martin are leaving the safe house.

#163 [VIETNAM FLASHBACKS] [BAGPIPES INTENSIFY]

#164 Gross statement about an infection in a town and Helen talking to Jon and Martin like a proud aunt is beautiful. “I knew you crazy kids would make it work!”

#165 “Ceaseless Watcher, turn your gaze upon this wretched thing.” The Stranger statement. Not!Sasha messed up!!

#166 Martin suddenly is on a murder episode and a dude turned into a worm. Helen says “Slay!”

#167 “Yes, Martin, you are my reason.” Sweet bonding and why Gertrude didn’t have anymore assists.

#168 “I’m not going to kill a man just because you’re jealous!” “Why not?” Oh, Martin. Oliver Banks shall live another day and we are crossing The End domain

#169 Let’s willingly run into a burning building, disregarding your boyfriend and getting revenge together! Jude is now dead and Martin was just struggling in the background. He chose revenge over his boyfriend. Interesting. “We’re burning!”

#170 “I’m Martin Blackwood, and I am not lonely anymore!” “Oh… Hello!”

#171 No way I just spent 23 minutes listening to Jon talk about skin flowers in a botanical garden. “That your boyfriend?” “It is, actually.” “Oh.”

#172 Creepy theatre show that made me genuinely uncomfortable with The Web

#173 Where do you think all of the children went? That’s right! The Dark with Callum! Yay!

#174 Simon calling Jon killing him “rude” is hilarious and immediately dipping is iconic. Weird Vast domain with big explosions. Helen loves some good gossip.

#175 The Extinction items, hate for umbrellas, and Martin’s squelchy couch. We’re going to The Hunt next. Oh no.

#176 Adoptive uncle Trevor and Julia are dead. AWESOME HUNT STATEMENT! And we got Basira! :D

#177 ‘Dr. David’ Jon is so hot. This episode has so many trigger warnings. Helen is so silly. Basira is rad, staying with her boys. Won’t let them have a moment tho

#178 More Flesh. Gross processing line and Jon admits that the thing that traumatized him the most was Daisy going to kill him in the woods. Poor babies.

#179 Daisy is shot and killed. Basira is on her own and I have a reason to give Jon a cane.

#180 I have never felt more serene in my life. I can’t even describe it. I was smiling, giggling, and everything feels okay. Salesa and Annabelle are here and I love Salesa’s voice and HE CAN PLAY THE PIANO! Teaholding fluff, om nom nom, this episode is one of my favorites. The I-Spy game <3

#181 They decide to stay at Upton House for a bit longer before leaving. Jon feels his powers again and forgets the whole experience of ignorance. Pity. Seemed like a nice place. I like Salesa.

#182 Anatomy Class student hospital and Breekon asks Jon to kill him. I feel bad for him. :(

#183 “I’m sure I love you.” “I love you too.” THEY SAID IT!! Helen was concerned for them. She’s like a wine aunt who acts motherly to them. Also, Martin’s domain…

#184 Jon made Jordan an entity. That’s a lotta ants! Jon is just… so complicated.

#185 Ouch. Police brutality and wrongful imprisonment are rough subjects. That guy pleading out to Martin HURT. Martin is… somewhere at the end. Alone again, oh, Jonny, I feel horrible.

#186 Martin went from being a joke in Jon’s anger to being one of the most well-developed characters. He is either going to kill himself of Jon. Martin legit talks to himself. Statement made me cry. This better end with them being happy together.

#187 HELEN! D: Aw, man… I liked her. That poor woman. Calm down, Jon! Helen was their friend till the end. Dang it, that was a nail-biter.

#188 We’re in London now! Eyes, man. They’re everywhere. We grieve for Helen a bit. Did I mention EYES?

#189 MEL AND GEORGIE! OMG! They… made a cult and can hide from The Eye. Great.

#190 Fresh take on modern dating! Antichrist plus one! Archivist mocks poems, beloved pet turned monster, and a blind prophet

#191 Jon sleeps with his eyes open. Georgie wants to avenge her cat (I think I’ve seen this film before), mystery can, and Jon and Martin discuss death. Sobbing atm.

#192 Rosie is literally just going with the flow. It’s weird to see someone else’s perspective on things. Jonah’s incantation is awesome and gosh, I love Martin

#193 Elias 'high as a kite' Bouchard’s origins. Jonah’s distorted voice is hot.

#194 THEY HAD AN ARGUMENT D: After a gruesome metamorphosis statement, Jon tried to find Martin to apologize only to find he was taken to HILL TOP FREAKIN ROAD

#195 Just Basira and Jon, catching up and trudging through water. Omg. The Mr. Spider tape.

#196 Earth shattering rip-in-space time crap. Annabelle is wicked cool. Martin keeps getting sucked into things AND THE TAPES!! ASDFEKGLZMV

#197 MARTIN! ANNABELLE! TAPES! THE LIGHTER! INTER-DIMENSIONAL PIT! WE NEED TO DESTROY JONAH AND THE EYE SIMULTANEOUSLY! LES GO!

#198 If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you too? Ew, bones reforming. Chill ep. Silly.

#199 Group agrees on plan after ten minute discussion. Martin consulting Jon while he cries in his arms HURT!! Also, Mel thanks Jon. This is going to end horribly, isn’t it?

#200 Statement ends.

Crying tally: |||| |||| (I cried ten [10] times listening to this stupid podcast)

#the magnus archives #tma #the magnus institute #tma jon #tma spoilers #tma season 5 #tma s5 #tma s5 spoilers #tma notes

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mllemaenad · 5 months

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The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

Well, Colin is the most interesting character. It might just be because I've done IT. Never mind the supernatural. That error does not mean anything. You're seeing that error because it's the last thing that failed, but it only failed because nine other things failed before it. The first thing that failed is the actual problem, but you don't know what that is because you currently can't get to the top of the log file because of all the other things that crashed. So what the hell is wrong with you, you stupid machine?

It's all very relatable.

That said, a ".jmj error" does seem likely to be the text-to-speech programs crashing, so it probably is a supernatural error and it probably does mean something.

For the moment, it still seems most reasonable to speak as though "Norris" is Martin. It may not be, of course. It could be a disembodied voice with no personality attached to it at all – but what do you do with that, until the narrative makes something of it? It could be somebody else entirely, but in that case I know nothing about them or their motives so there's nothing useful to say until they reveal themselves.

So for now: Occam's razor. It sounds like Martin and it came into being after the conclusion of The Magnus Archives, so the simplest guess is that it is Martin. If and when useful evidence to the contrary surfaces, I will change my mind.

Also: Norris told a story about a man who killed his love and then lost himself so badly that he turned into a tree like bloody Harold from the Fallout series. It also dealt very much with feelings of being forgotten and unnoticed:

Norris/Samuel Webber I can’t go home. Not for a few days at least. And I’ll have to avoid the usual haunts until they forget about me again. That won’t be difficult. What’s one more stressed doctor. Just a grey man in the crowd, unnoticed until I’m useful. The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

That's a problem from Martin's past, but also a problem he might reasonably said to be having now, if he's explaining the horrors of the world to people and nobody (with the possible exception of Sam) is listening.

If that isn't Martin, it is something doing an uncannily good job of explaining why Martin might not be having a great year.

And, while this is evidence of nothing, for the moment I am much amused by the idea that a ".jmj" error is the cast of The Magnus Archives continuing their longstanding tradition of complaining about statements. One of those creepy messages comes in and Martin just wails "Again? Seriously?" and the whole system blue-screen-of-deaths. It may not be true, but it's funny in my head.

I do note that the new format gives a much greater capacity for bad or ambiguous endings to the tales. There's a thing John says in season four that sticks with me:

Archivist One thing that always strikes me when I read statements like this is… the bias of survivorship. With one or two notable exceptions, the only statements the Institute receives are those where the witness has successfully escaped whatever terrible place or being has marked them for a victim. I wonder how many don’t make it out. How many of those shapes in the water were once just like Mr. Shakya. – The Magnus Archives: Submerged

And he's right: there are a few instances of letters-to-be-read-in-the-event-of-my-death, and a few cases where a person who is clearly still being pursued by something stops in to tell their story before being run down, but most of the stories end in an escape. They aren't exactly happy, but they do tend toward the hopeful: by luck, tenacity or skill you may survive. Even the cavalcade of horrors in season five has finally has something you could call a happy ending: you can assume most of those people lived, and even went home.

If you compare the first four stories of The Magnus Archives with the first four stories of The Magnus Protocol, you get a very different pattern.

The Magnus Archives:

Nathan Watts of Anglerfish outwitted the titular monster – he spotted that the voice did not come from the figure's mouth, and got away.

Joshua Gillespie of Do Not Open outlasted the coffin, using music ice, and apparently an iron will to resist its siren song.

Across the Street is the odd one out: while Amy Patel seems to have survived the experience unscathed, the story is clearly about Graham Folger, and the monster very definitely got him.

Dominic Swain of Page Turner was rescued by Gerard Keay.

But in The Magnus Protocol, because the stories are harvested, they can just end – and so far, they do:

Harriet Winstead's fate in First Shift is unclear: did she escape, or was she killed or taken? She is last seen in fear for her life and seeking shelter.

Likewise, in the episode's second story, RedCanary's fate is somewhat unclear, although only in the sense that there isn't a definitive ending: there's a clear implication that their explorations had permanent consequences. More than that, while it is uncertain if Harriet got help, it is certain that RedCanary did not. Due to the anonymous nature of the forum, they were warned and banned when their behaviour began to reflect the peculiar things that were happening to them. Nobody went to help.

Daria of Tweaking lived (at least so far), but is afflicted and changed by whatever the tattoo artist did to her, and the most distressing thing is that she seemed largely unaware of that fact. She knew that the tattooing itself was weird and invasive, but did not seem to find her persistent self-mutilation odd, and is merely awaiting further "inspiration" to continue the process.

Samuel Webber of Putting Down Roots turned into a tree, and while it is not completely clear if that means he died, he's definitely gone – his belongings simply found among the roots.

There has not, so far, been a story that matches the general pattern of The Magnus Archives, in which a person who is at least broadly fine describes the weirdest thing that ever happened to them. People here ... they disappear.

Everything feels much worse in this universe.

In terms of the overarching plot, Alice's plot against Colin seems unnecessarily petty, and also weird. I've turned her logic over in my head a few times, and I do not believe it. There might indeed be occasions where a bigger IT department would be better at troubleshooting problems than the one local guy, but those occasions probably do not include a scenario where you're running 30-year-old proprietary German software that is mysteriously haunted by text-to-speech programs that should not be there. Colin freely admits he does not understand the system – but it is highly doubtful that anyone else does either.

She also says this:

Alice All I’m saying is that Colin tinkers with this system all the time and I don’t see any oversight. If you queried upstairs asking about it, all bambi-eyed and innocent, some alarms might go off. They might even come down and do a refresh or reboot or whatever. – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

This contradicts a lot of what was said in First Shift, in which Colin was indicated to be essential personnel who might not be allowed to quit, and that he was being leaned on by a minister to accomplish ... something. Now, granted, Alice may simply mean that a senior IT person isn't monitoring him – but it does seem that the people "upstairs" are aware of Colin's activities, and seem to be in contact with him about them. And her insistence on a "refresh or a reboot", aka "turning it off and back on again" is interesting in light of the earlier conversation:

Colin Do you have any idea what will happen if this thing finally managed to extinct itself? Alice We’d go home early? – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

Calling in IT only makes sense in the context of killing the system: shutting down whatever they are using and migrating to something consistent with what everyone else is using. Then they could be supported the same way everyone else is, and have their software updates managed at an enterprise level. And what would that do? Stop the voices? Unleash indescribable horrors on the world? Couldn't say.

But the core of the episode is a small-scale power struggle over the stark difference between Colin and Alice's attitudes to their work.

Colin seems overworked, highly stressed and oddly dedicated: he learned German to help his crappy IT job, for a start. He is suspicious of the system and what it is recording, and disinclined to be "friends" with it, but also seems to regard its failure as potentially catastrophic. He is under some kind of pressure from above that indicates that someone regards his work as critical, but does not seem to have clearly stated what that means to anybody – or if he has, they weren't listening.

Alice is committed to the idea that their work is meaningless, and engages with it as little as possible – she sticks around while Colin is fixing her workstation, but exits to make coffee the moment Norris starts talking again. She's stated previously that she believes they only exist as a forgotten department and is unmoved by the thought of their programs finally biting the dust.

Sam, as the new guy, is caught between them: he's naturally more engaged with the stories than Alice is, and has clearly been looking into the history of The Magnus Institute, but he's also closer with Alice than with Colin and being mentored by her.

The plot goes nowhere, because Sam declines to participate. It's impossible to say who is right and who is wrong, or if both characters are just screwing around because their jobs are awful – but it is interesting that this ideological difference escalated so early.

Something strange is happening. Do we care, or do we not?

Of course, it's also fair to note that the characters themselves may be unreliable. John continued to pretend to disbelieve the statements in The Magnus Archives long after he'd worked out the correlation between the ones that required the tapes and the ones that were true – because he believed that was the prudent thing to do. It may be that Alice is deeply invested in everything that is happening here and simply refusing to say. But you can't know these things until the characters crack so, for now: Alice is committed to not caring, and Colin is committed to finding things out, and this is becoming a problem.

The story ends with a minor spat between Gwen and Alice, which is interesting because it sheds a bit of light on Gwen's past. Her surname is Bouchard, which makes it easy to make assumptions – but it's hard to tell what is still true in an alternate universe. Apparently The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street still got made, but The Magnus Institute is in Manchester so all bets are off.

In this instance, however, there seems to be a pattern: Gwen, like Elias, seems to have come from money.

Alice Let me guess, fancy gowns, champagne, bathing in the blood of the poor – that sort of thing? Gwen You know we make the same, Alice. An old friend just made partner at her law firm. She wants to celebrate. Alice You sound thrilled. Gwen Oh I can’t wait to catch up and tell them I’m still working in the same cesspit I was last time they asked. – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

Elias, however, was something of a feckless stoner whose most notable trait was an utter lack of a defence mechanism for dealing with the supernatural. I would not describe Gwen as feckless at all, and while Elias was picked as a means for an immortal to hold on to life and power, and thus ostensibly rose quickly to the top of The Magnus Institute, Lena seems to be actively stymieing Gwen's career.

But it creates an interesting pattern. The OIAR is implied to be a place with a high turnover rate and little security – and it's a bastard of a job that no one enjoys and seems to be accomplishing little. It's easy to wave your hand at Sam: he's here because of whatever weirdness has led him to research The Magnus Institute.

But. It's him, but not just him. Sam is overqualified for the job. Gwen has connections, which usually lead to better prospects. No idea what Alice has been doing with her life, but ...

Alice Fine. Yes, I’m working that night. I’m working every night. I was born down here and I’ll die down here. Happy? – The Magnus Protocol: Putting Down Roots

So why are these people still here?

#the magnus protocol #the magnus protocol spoilers #the magnus archives

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loafthecat · 1 month

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Anyone want more facts about this guy? ^^^

Too bad because your getting them:

- Ollie is 26 years old, he’s been working at the ccc for a total of 3 years.

- current voice claim for Ollie, is Martin Blackwood from the Magnus archives.

- he was originally made as a minor character for a thsc rp I’m in, but then Sam happened and we started to develop the two more and eventually from there, we got the Ollie we have today!

- Ollie joined the ccc after he was suggested (and heavily pressured) into by his…. Less than good… ex partner.

- he doesn’t have any powers, he’s just kinda a average stick… except for one thing.

- After an event where his ex broke Ollie’s coding slightly, ollie has been having “dreams” of other timelines of himself. These “dreams” often are from the pov of whatever alternate version of him is there and while these “dreams” are harmless (at least physically), sometimes they contain stuff which…. Causes Ollie a LOT of distress.

- Ollie’s favourite food is bagels, he doesn’t really have a specific favourite combination of toppings, but he does tend to have cream cheese bagels more than other types.

- Ollie LOVES music, (heck- he probably would’ve tried to get a career in it, if it wasn’t for the ccc) he mostly listens to video game music and lofi when he’s stressed out.

- oh did I mention Ollie’s ex is actually, Trevor-? I don’t think I did.

- Ollie has two main fears, a fear of deep water (caused by multiple in-counters with a certain water based entity that has tried multiple times to kill him), and a fear of losing his mind (mostly more towards the “becoming feral” side.) caused by working in the ccc for a while and seeing some…. Stuff….

- Ollie has around 6 siblings. Mit baker (oc), Matteus guardsmith and Quentin alabaster as well as two others which are the ocs of a close friend of mine. Unfortunately ollie was put up for adoption as a young kid, (mainly because his parents realised they didn’t have the finances to care for 6 kids.) so he doesn’t know much about his family.

- family wise, he’s closest to his sister Mitzy, they both love video games and have had experiences with bad exs so they understand each other a lot.

- he is currently taken!! His current partner is Samuel C. Adams (a Oc by another close friend) and he’s a goofy boi, Ollie loves his current partner a lot. <3333

- Ollie x Sam’s ship name is catsamwich, because CATwell and SAM-wich, like… like sandwich… and because cat’s do a loaf…. lol-

- his headphones and hoodie are comfort items, he tends to have a habit of playing with his hoodie strings or headphones when nervous. the ccc didn’t originally like him wearing them instead of uniform but they quickly gave up once they realised Ollie was not gonna take them off.

- local 2nd ccc punching bag along with Kyle Baxter, someone help these two they need a rest…

- definitely a introvert.

- probably has anxiety and autism, just undiagnosed.

Annnnnnnnnnndddd-

That’s all the facts I can remember for now about him!

He’s goofi-

Ye-

#thsc #henry stickmin #the henry stickmin collection #henrystickmin #art #henry stickmin collection #oc tag #thsc oc #henry stickmin oc #loaf doodles #loaf lore #oc lore #LOOK AT HIM-!!!! <333 #my bb boi!!!!!!!!#🏳️‍🌈#Oliver catwell #thsc Ollie

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lycanlovingvampyre · 1 year

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MAG 166 Relisten

Activity on my first listen: cutting the Kolkwitzia amabilis in my garden.

MARTIN: "What happened back there? What you did to Sa–" [HE CUTS HIMSELF OFF.] [A PAUSE.] JON: "Go on. Say it." Oh no. Oh god, does Jon think that Martin thinks it was his fault that Sasha died?

HELEN: "Oh, goodness. You see what you’ve done to the poor boy, John? He’s coming to me for clear answers." Oh Helen really knows how to get under one's skin.

HELEN: (giggle) "It’s very satisfying though, isn’t it? Teasing out vague information? You see why Elias got a kick out of it." Oh fuuuck, and now she's comparing him to Elias? Jon really is straight up not having a good time..

TMA usually is super vague, but I'm actually happy we got an explanation how the smiting works. Does sound plausible, I’d say. But also, this explanation about there only being watcher and watched should have got Martin's gears to turn. They are not victims of a domain. So they have to be watchers.

MARTIN: "Sure. Okay, that’s – I mean, that’s really not that complicated, John; I don’t see why you were being so coy about it –" JON: (overlapping) "Because I’m ashamed, Martin." [SLIGHT PAUSE.] MARTIN: "Ashamed?!" JON: "Yes! Ashamed of the fact that I just – destroyed the world and have been rewarded for it, the fact that – I can walk safe through all this horror I’ve created like a… fucking tourist, destroying whoever I please. The fact that I… enjoyed it, and… the fact that there are so many others that I want to revenge myself on!" Why does everything in TMA feel so natural!! There is so much bad and boring writing out there, every time something very logical happens it makes me super excited xD So yap. It's super understandable that he's ashamed of all of this. Especially since we know how he actually feels about this revenging stuff. His anger says “do it!”, but his logic says “It’s not gonna do anything”..

MARTIN: "…No; No, I actually think you’re good on that front." JON: "What?" MARTIN: "Yeah, I, I, I think we should go for it, get our murder on!" Martin, when he only remotely tastes power xD

MARTIN: "f you want to stop them and have the power to, then – then, then yeah, let’s do it, let’s go full Kill Bill!" JON: "I – I, I haven’t seen it." Laughed so hard at this xD Of course he is deflecting.

HELEN: "Oh, Martin, I am so proud of you. Can I come?" JON & MARTIN: (in unison) "No." HELEN: "So that’s a strong “maybe” then?" Asgdsdfjkdf, Helen can also be so funny! One of those characters I hate and love!

MARTIN: "Do you need anything?" [JON EXHALES.] JON: "No." Love that Martin checks in with him there. He has been a bit dismissive of Jon's feelings about this whole situation.

Yeah, that statement does nothing to me, neither terror nor excitement. As far as I understand it, it's more about the financial part of the Buried. About the pressure of the society we live in, ever trapped in bullshit jobs with only ever a glint of the prospect of escape and there is no use in fighting others like us (that second worm part) cause if we win against them, we’re stuck exactly where we were before.

"The rains fall here as they do so many places in this new world. Thick and oily drops that taste of bitter salt, torrential tears plummeting from the watching sky, thumping and squelching onto the thirsty soil in which the worms writhe painfully towards a surface that does not want them." That is a gross image!

"How do you fight, when you cannot move beyond the slowest inching crawl, without limbs or weapons or the kinetic force of violence? You do it slowly, pressing, biting, tearing gradually through each other until at the very end, one of you is still." There is a very horrifying animatic of this part of the statement, it's called "The Worms (Magnus Archives Fan Animation)”.

JON: "God, I hate the Buried." Mh, he was there once...

That phone's got to be a Nokia 3310, right? XD It is the Nokia ringtone after all!

ANNABELLE: "He’s more powerful here than he’s ever been, isn’t he? And you’re not sure what that means for you." [THE BRIEFEST OF PAUSES. MARTIN INHALES SHAKILY.] MARTIN: "I’m hanging up now." ANNABELLE: "Does he even need you at all?" That part about "you're not sure what that means for you" is actually something I could relate to. Especially in a relationship this young and under extremely high stress levels. Shared trauma and being in the same life-threatening situation can create incredibly strong bonds. Being in that same boat. But how life-threatening is it actually for them? Aside from his guilt and post trauma, Jon is very much fine in this new world. Still, not sure what Annabelle wanted to achieve with this, she does mention it to have been "clumsy", so yeah.

[THE PREVIOUSLY-HOWLING THINGS IN THE BURIED – LIKELY THE WORMS FAR BELOW – HOWL AGAIN, INSISTENTLY.] MARTIN: "I know, right?" Adflkdhfs, this episode has some great comedy!

@a-mag-a-day

#a-mag-a-day #mag 166 #tma #tma spoilers

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ryutarotakedown · 3 months

Note

magnus archives! for the ask game

[ask game link] YAYYYYYYYYY THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE ASK this got horrifically long so under the cut!

Favorite character: i’d love to say basira but it’s probably melanie. or martin. oh little moth…

Least Favorite character: uhhhh i love all the characters as *characters* but i love to hate elias of course. what a fucking creep they did such a wonderful job with him. 106 and 117 live in my brain constantly & forever

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon): FIVE? THERE AREN’T ENOUGH IN HERE FOR FIVE but it’d be what the girlfriends, jonmartin, daisira, basira/melanie, and. hm. hmmm. gertrudeagnes

— oh crap wait i keep forgetting platonic relationships are ships too, okay okay add jon & basira and jon & melanie and jon & georgie in there. not in any particular order but still

Character I find most attractive: im not even attracted to women but. daisy. i didn’t understand the fan reaction until i listened to her voice for the first time (i consumed this podcast almost entirely through transcripts) and went Oh I Get It Now

Character I would marry: georgie easily

Character I would be best friends with: jon or melanie because i love befriending haters you are all so fun

A random thought: i miss them so much. i kept expecting the transcripts to switch to “archive” for jon at some point but they never did which is probably for the best for accessibility reasons but can you imagine. i miss them so much. basira is funnier than people give her credit for. georgie is less funny than people give her credit for and i appreciate her so much for it (don’t be a Stranger!). i miss them so much

An unpopular opinion: hey did you know basira hussain is in the third most episodes total and actually has the second most scenes with jon (she had The Most, period, before martin dethroned her in s5)? did you know? anyway she should be in more stuff and i love her deeply. i also don’t think she actually had double standards for jon versus daisy per se, i think her problem was thinking that guilty people deserve punishment and therefore that daisy’s victims (criminals) were fine while jon’s victims (random people off the street) were not

— this is also why she stops daisy from killing jon in 091, because she’d met him before, he was a human being who cracked jokes, he *couldn’t* be guilty; rather than because killing people is bad

— i also think she knew deep down she was wrong for this considering how she says in the unknowing: i don’t want to hurt you. i don’t want to hurt anyone. and then in s5: of course i care! …that’s the problem

— she had to force down her compassion in order to function well as a police officer and forced herself to believe that it was the right thing to arrest people who did bad things

— reader she was incorrect

— have i mentioned i love her

My canon OTP: jonmartin and what the girlfriends

Non-canon OTP: you cannot tell me basira and melanie didn’t have something going on while jon was in his coma you simply can’t

— melanie was strong and violent and necessary and basira needed someone strong to rely on after daisy even though she could see how miserable melanie was. basira stuffed down all her emotions and became a stone figure and melanie feeling herself being overtaken by rage both aspired to that and hated her for it. they are anchors for each other but false because their usual anchors (daisy, georgie) aren’t here or wouldn’t get it. do you understand.

Most badass character: the admiral

Pairing I am not a fan of: sorry to jon.elias fans i do understand that exploring the Power Dynamics could be fun but i genuinely cannot see any romance in there whatsoever. can’t jon just hate a man in peace

Character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): hmmmmmmm. not anyone in particular? i think basira’s s5 arc was kind of rushed but i’m not super mad about it. also obviously the racist stereotypes in there (the haans. i mean the haans) but in terms of main cast i can’t think of anyone

Favourite friendship: tim & sasha because i haven’t mentioned them anywhere in this ask and that is a travesty. they’re fun i hope they are kayaking happily together somewhere

#THANK YOUUUUUUUUUU I HAVENT TALKED ABOUT THEM ON HERE IN FOREVER #p: the magnus archives #mail #thehallowoods #jules.txt #caps

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autolenaphilia · 1 year

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I finished listening to The Magnus Archives many months ago. It is a horror audio drama podcast that was very popular here on tumblr. Yet i felt underwhelmed. It was okay, I guess? I felt that the statements were actually scary in the first two seasons, and by season 5 I was not scared at all, despite horrific things happening regularly.

Like there was nothing outstandingly bad in the writing. The characters were fine, nice representation of cis gays I suppose. Although the only trans woman being a single statement giver who doesn’t actually appear in the show is a bit disappointing. For me, perhaps the most important point of media representation is to get creative people from marginalized communities employed. I get it's a single-writer thing, Jonathan Sims writes every episode, but employing a trans woman actor to give the statement (something that happens with plenty of other statements) for the only transfem statement giver would be nice.

Well the only trans woman if you don’t count Nikola Orsinov. Oh Nikola, she is literally a man turned into an evil fake plastic mannequin/doll woman who hides her malevolence under an exaggerated cutesy performance of femininity and like Jame Gumb, steals skin to appear like a human woman. Giving potentially another meaning to the acronym TMA there, but I’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt and say that’s probably not intentional. even if it does express some anxieties about gender. Besides, she’s my favourite villain by a long shot, Nikola Orsinov is a lot of fun.

I also disliked one of the canonical lesbian couples, Basira Hussain and Daisy Tonner. It's a typical example of the trope where the butch lesbian character is a cop, and on top of that, the series does a police brutality arc with them. It's not like women can't be violent cops, but like come on, Magnus Archives. When police brutality happens and a non-white lesbian like Basira is involved, they don't tend to be the perpetrator in the incident.

Anyway, the show was entertaining but felt underwhelming.

And I think I finally figured out why. It’s because the basic idea of the series is that it starts out seeming like a horror anthology series. It’s seemingly disconnected stories of people being menaced by the supernatural, with no explanation of what the supernatural actually is, as in most horror stories. The statements in Magnus can be good, solid horror fiction, if a bit derivative.

And then it reveals its true face: it’s actually a horror serial. The series actually has extensive worldbuilding which connects together and explains all those seemingly disparate stories.

The shift from horror anthology to serialized drama is frankly just awkward in general, it's such a radical shift in story structure. The show sticks with the statement structure for continuity reasons long after it makes any dramatic sense, when the story is carried forward by dialogue rather than any information gained from the various statements..They interrupt the story by the final seasons rather than develop them. In season 5, characters are literally annoyed with the statements because they interrupt the plot progression.

Yet the problem with this storytelling shift I think is far more deeper. That’s because I think horror is kinda antithetical to worldbuilding. I think horror needs some mystery to it, a sense of the unknown, of humanity being menaced by inexplicable forces. When you can explain the supernatural, as extensive worldbuilding tends to do, it ceases to be really scary. And The Magnus Archives has macabre and dark worldbuilding, but it also explains far too much. It tries to be a metafictional commentary on horror fiction, but it ends up showing how bad it is at understanding the genre

It presents these very genre-typical horror stories, with all their unexplained supernatural events and it seems writer Jonathan Sims saw their unexplained nature as a promise of a future solution instead of actually standing on their own. And that’s not how mystery works in the horror genre for the most part, and for good reason.

I’ve sometimes heard The Magnus Archives described as Lovecraftian, but looking at what Lovecraft said about horror in the classic Supernatural Horror in Literature, I think he would agree with me. “The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” And in what he claimed in the true weird tale “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint...of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.“

This is a kind of horror ethos that is antithetical to worldbuilding. Worldbuilding maps out and explains a setting’s fantastical elements, which works best for a kind of Tolkienian fantasy, whereas horror relies on the unknown. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is often seen as the kind of explanatory worldbuilding Magnus engages in, but that’s something his lesser imitators such as August Derleth engaged in far more than Creepy Howie himself. It’s an impression created more by the Call of Cthulhu RPG than Lovecraft’s stories.

M. John Harrison’s criticism of worldbuilding is also relevant to The Magnus Archives:

“When I use the term “worldbuilding fiction” I refer to immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it “logical in its own terms”, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one. Representational techniques are used to validate the invention, with the idea of providing a secondary creation for the reader to “inhabit”; but also, in a sense, as an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity. This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake. “

This is harsh, but describes the problem of The Magnus Archives quite accurately. I would add that in horror this kind of worldbuilding also undercuts any genuine horror. The “rationality of the fake” is no substitute for fear of the unknown. Supernatural horror without any mystery regarding the supernatural things just becomes a depiction of fantastical torture.

In season 1, the Archivist tries to deliver "rational" explanations for the supernatural events described, and they deliberately ring hollow. It reads as a man trying desperate to shore up his worldview against events that defy them, showing a "malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature" It's a classic horror writing trick. But by season 3, the archivist knows the basics of the story's worldbuilding, and starts explaining the statements with a new supernatural logic, which is shown to be correct.

And Sims doesn't seem to realize that he has simply replaced a naturalistic rationality with a supernatural "rationality of the fake." The stories in the first two seasons show the supernatural disrupting the laws of normal existence, and are therefore scary. Yet then the story creates a new "safeguard against the assaults of chaos" in the form of worldbuilding explanations of these events. Its fantasy with a lot of suffering, rather than horror.

The Magnus Archives might seem like a story that is very certain of itself. It has built this extensive worldbuilding construction to explain its every fantastical flourish, and even its genre and medium. We get explanations for genre staples such as "why are people able to give such articulate and clear statements of horrific and traumatic events?" And because it's yet another audio drama that has a "found footage" or rather a "found recordings" gimmick, we even get an explanation for why everything plot relevant is recorded.

Yet this is to mask a deep uncertainty, as it clearly feels a need to deeply justify its fantasy. A story that was more genuinely certain of itself would allow things to remain unexplained and not need to justify its own flights of imagination.

I don’t care much about spoilers, but I have some further more specific thoughts under the cut. I won’t summarize and explain concepts and plots from the series because it’s boring to write, so think of this as supplementary criticism for those who have listened to Magnus.

The problem with The Fears as explanations is that they are so boringly anthropomorphic. In fact they are explicitly explained in the final episode as arising from the human emotion of fear, a final bit of worldbuilding that adds explanation at the cost of actual horror.

And their motivation is so boring, in that they are basically sadists, whose goal with everything they do is to create fear in humans. It’s such a mundane motivation for interdimensional amorphous powers. That’s about as scary as the serial killers in the most boring kind of mystery and horror fiction, which is not much.

And it sucks all the actual surrealism and imagination out of the setting. Anytime Magnus borrows from surreal horror fiction, it’s not actually surreal, because everything is explainable. Things are surreal because surreal supernatural events scares humans and the supernatural entities want to scare humans. So things that are meant to be surreal horror like the Stranger ritual in the season three finale or most of the hellscapes in season five aren’t actually surreal.

Speaking of season five. For all my criticisms of the series overall, I have to praise the season four finale. It ends on a revelation that the supposed hero’s effort were all meaningless and that actually he has been manipulated into bringing out the apocalypse he hoped to prevent. This revelation is really effective tragedy, especially as it comes after what seems to be a happy ending for him and his partner Martin. Good shit, the series could very well have ended there. It would be a bleak ending, but that fits a horror series.

Yet then the series continues with another season. And by this time the transformation into Tolkienian worldbuilding fantasy is complete. The story of season five is how Frodo and Sam must journey through Mordor to defeat the eye of Sauron by destroying the source of his power. Sorry, I meant that Jon and Martin must journey through hellscape Britain in order to defeat the rule of the Eye and destroy the source of its power. The parallels are obvious.

This season feels so unnecessary, a fantasy quest to undo the tragedy of the fourth season finale. And they largely do, Jon and Martin are gone, but the fears leave the world. It is all justified with the worldbuilding, but again ending on this note of world-saving heroic sacrifice has barely anything to do with horror.

The hellscapes of season five are dark, but they are not effective horror. It’s the final confirmation that Jonathan Sims did not truly understand why his horror stories in the earlier seasons were so effective. And that was because they were set in a largely realistic and contemporary world. People living mundane lives before they are menaced by the supernatural. Most horror fiction does this, not only because it gives a “it can happen to you” quality but because horror most easily comes from taking a safe, mundane and explicable world and subverting that with unexplained and frightening supernatural events.

The Magnus Archives does have stories like that and they work, but then it undermines it by explaining the supernatural in rationalistic terms. And in season 5, it even takes away the mundane setting. Now almost everyone except the servants of the entities live in hellscapes literally designed to make them suffer over and over again. There is no longer any normal world to provide contrast, just entire landscapes of torture. It may sometimes present bitter parodies of realistic situations, but so removed from real life that is hard to connect with or regain the sense of horror from those early stories.

And again, because the rationalistic worldbuilding of The Magnus Archives there is no real surrealism to these hellscapes, because why they exist is explained. There is just torture and no mystery or wonder to the fantasy of season 5. It’s just suffering for the sake of suffering, the worst and least interesting kind of horror. And it’s a deep-seated problem within the show, developed to its utmost extreme.

It's fiction that feels the need to justify itself at literally every turn. It doesn't dare have something happen without explaining why. So we get this fake surrealism, where if anything weird happens it's because supernatural powers want to scare people with the weirdness.

Apparently there will be a sequel, a Magnus Archives 2, despite earlier promises there would not be. And considering the original show went on for far too long and explained its world too much to be truly scary, I don’t think there is much fruitful to be gained there, but we’ll see.

#my writings #the magnus archives

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pokeythegreat123 · 9 months

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Season 3 wasn’t so bad actually.

I mean, I don’t like that Tim died, but it wasn’t a surprise. Daisy was certainly interesting, so it’s sad to see her go too.

bUT THEY KILLED MICHAEL! AND GERRY! TWICE EACH!!! and the other Michael. And ALMOST Jon, but he’s thankfully not dead.

I’m really glad we got a full grasp of what entities there are, and why, that just makes me happy lol. The more I listen to this the more convinced I am that I wouldn’t mind this job TOO too much. I probably wouldn’t, y’know, SURVIVE, but I think I’d be good at the rest of it. I also really liked getting to see all the different characters, like Trevor, Julia, Gerard Keay (r.i.p. v_v), and Helen once she became the Distortion. I can’t believe she literally asked Jon for help and he was just like “gEt OuT”, like SIR. STOP PICKING FIGHTS WITH ENTITIES THAT DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU!

I gained some healthy respect and admiration for Elias this season but while I appreciate how absolutely killer the man is, hE MADE MELANIE AND MARTIN ***CRY*** AND THAT IS **NOT** OKAY WITH ME!!! I loathe that he was like “well, if I had more time I’d tell you about how your crush despises you and break your heart THAT way, buuuuuuut since I’m a very busy man I’ll just go with shattering your entire sense of self-worth instead. :)”Watching Martin snap at people is probably one of my favourite things though because yes bby, stand up for yourself! Stop taking shit from people! You have a right to be angry and optimism is not a bad thing!

Oh my gosh though, when Jon was in Georgie’s house and all the lights went out and Nikola came in and talked to him I almost died. My sister had showed me TikToks and YouTube Shorts that she liked, usually cosplayers, using the audio of “You don’t sound Russian??” “How can I sound ANYTHING, silly? I’m Plastic! :D I don’t even have a vOiCe BoX, I had to bOrrOw this one!” And she’d literally shown me one like, THE DAY BEFORE, and I have no idea how I didn’t pick up on Jon’s voice, but once the scene was playing on the episode and then hit that part I was like OH MY GODS NO WAY ITS FROM MAGNUS ARCHIVES NO HEKKING WAY!! I played it for her and she got the exact same look on her face, though since I started the scene earlier than most audios do (for context) she already had the look because she recognized the voice lol.

But yeah, pretty good season overall. Listening to Basira and Melanie go “oh my god nobody has ever had a bigger crush than Martin has on Jon” was absolutely brilliant, I couldn’t stop grinning for a solid minute. Then Elias made her CRY but that’s not the point here. I also love that they invited Martin out for drinks, and that Jon is a Cat Person(tm).

I’m excited to see what season 4 does with Jon’s essentially-a-coma-but-he-has-no-actual-vitals and dreams, and whatever the ritual for the eye is, since that was supposed to come after the Unknowing. I can’t remember what Gertrude called it, but I know it had to do with crowns.

Anyways, thank you for listening to my rambles, luv you so much, and enjoy the beginning of yet another school year! :D <3

AHHHHHH season 3 my beloved. Also you may judge me but one of my favourite scenes is Elias making Martin cry because the two things I love in this world are Elias Bouchard and angst. Season 3 is so much fun bc u get to meet so many cool people. I love Daisy sm, she’s such a cool character. I’m very excited I think you’ll love season 4. Anyways have fun I’ll probably see you tmrw <3

#tma

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aflyingcontradiction · 8 months

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The Magnus Archives Relisten: Episode 178 - The Processing Line

Jon: Er, maybe one in a hundred or so are actually real. The rest are there to make those people’s fears more acute. Martin: That’s… ugh, that’s somehow more disturbing.

Martin agrees with me! I was saying exactly that (in a slightly more long-winded fashion) in a recent relisten post! (And I had completely forgotten that the show itself points this out explicitly!)

Jon: Well, it’s a factory of The Flesh, Martin. Use your imagination. Martin: No. No, I don’t think I will.

Martin has a lot more self-control than I have. I am DEFINITELY using my imagination and it is not pretty.

Martin: God, I hate all of these… loose ends.

There's something disturbing about Martin referring to the avatars as "loose ends" when each of them is a person. A person turned monster, yes, and in many cases gladly and willingly and passionately so, but ... still a person! "Loose ends" is just so ... clinical, almost.

There is nowhere else, only the processing plant, and he’s heard the stories of what happens if you don’t get processed through the official channels. It’s messy and, more than that, they just throw the remains away. Nothing is used. And deep down, Tyler knows that’s what he’s for. He’s there to be useful, and the thought of running from that scares him as much as whatever is waiting for him at the end of the line.

This is fucked up but it's also a thought process that is uncomfortably familiar. If you're going to be used up and you get no choice about it, at least you want to be USEFULLY used up, right? (My brain may need a slight recalibration...)

They wordlessly slide a form across to Tyler. His eyes travel down it: name, age, ethnicity, blood type, eye colour, body mass index, the list stretches on and on and on, and he can feel the stares of the thousands behind him burrowing into the back of his skull.

Oh god, they have combined the flesh-and-blood-iness of a meat processing plant with merciless BUREAUCRACY of all things. That is genuinely terrifying. (Even moderately complicated forms make me break out in fear sweats, in case anyone was wondering.)

Once or twice Tyler tries to engage those in front or behind him in conversation, but gets only panicked weeping in response.

With all we know about this domain, I can't help but wonder whether these are actual people or ones created by the domain itself. And which option would be more disturbing.

The noises that come from behind the mask seem to indicate the weight does not match what he has put down on his paperwork and, despite everything, Tyler is suddenly gripped with a panic that he might somehow be in trouble.

What does it say about me that this thought process makes perfect sense to me on a level that I can't explain (because, really, it SHOULDN'T make sense)?

There wasn’t a single suitable cut. “Useless,” one of the butchers says.

This. This is the line that stayed with me from my first listen! It was such an absolute gut punch. Throughout this episode I kept having the sinking feeling that really, the whole "usefulness" angle is something that shouldn't make such intuitive sense to me, but the fact that in this domain, being useless as you're being used is part of the nightmare also made me feel ... oddly seen. And here it is, all distilled into two lines. Yeah, this is some excellent writing.

Basira: I thought we were doing good. I really did. I knew there was some bad shit. I knew Daisy was into a lot of it, but… I thought it balanced out. (...) I thought we were good.

Oh, this is juicy, I really like where this is going. I mean, obviously, it's commentary on police brutality and the police as an institution in general, and I'm appreciating it on that level, too, but it's also a really, really good character moment. For all three of them, really, even though Basira is the only one really undergoing any character DEVELOPMENT right this second.

Jon: I’ve been scared, terrified for my life so many times these last few years. But I’ve never, not once, felt so horribly, abjectly, powerless as when she took me into that forest to kill me. I’ll never forget it.

I wonder why exactly this, of all the trauma Jon has experienced (some very similar in nature to being kidnapped and nearly killed by Daisy), stuck so deeply with him.

My impression of this episode

So the body horror / torture part of this episode is certainly stomach-churning, but what really makes it is the cold bureaucracy of it all and the fact that, despite being dehumanised and tortured and cut to pieces, the victim in this scenario still wants, on some level, to feel useful to his tormenters and is denied even that. I was practically screeching internally when the episode reached that point in the statement. And then there's that hard-hitting conversation with Basira after the statement... yeah, this one got me. This one got me hard.

#tma relisten #the magnus archives

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levaagrace · 5 months

Text

Back in whenever season 8 of Supernatural was airing. I had a. I suppose a ‘come to Jesus’ moment? I was spending most of my time here on tumblr scrolling and reading meta and blah blah blah and I got SO. ANGRY. At the amount of Sam-hate. From the show. From the fans. Etc. And it all came to a head when one Thursday night I got so angry for a good few moments I saw pink. Almost red. And I nearly passed out. When that happened I stepped outside of my room, paced the house, and then deleted and unfollowed anything I ever reblogged or blog I followed that had to do with Supernatural. The moment that happened I realized how much it took over and affected my life.

I’ve had the same feelings with regard to The Magnus Archives and Jon. Both due to the fans and the show. Multiple times. Yet for some reason. I cannot escape. I haven’t listened to the podcast in ages, and yet I still check in on blogs that I KNOW make me filled with rage. And I have no idea why. Cause I know it’s not healthy. And it’s not really the same? It’s not consuming my life. I do other things. I care and am involved in other things that aren’t fandom. I have friends. An actual life. Not like then. So it’s not as bad. It’s just. I don’t understand why I can’t move on, y’know? I don’t understand why I don’t WANT to move on. It’s not even that good a podcast ffs.

I don’t know. We have The Magnus Protocol next week. And I’m not holding my breath that Jon isn’t going to be the root cause of all the problems the new characters go through. I’d put money on it.

#the magnus archives #tma #the magnus protocol #tmagp #everything is his fault forever and I would do well to remember that #nothing but a privileged monster #shouldn’t expect or hope for anything different

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shine-reblogs · 1 year

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He compartido 4086 publicaciones este 2022

¡Son 1560 más que en 2021!

8 publicaciones originales (0 %)

4078 reblogueos (100 %)

Estos son los blogs que más he reblogueado:

@the-peculiar-rogue

@randomfae

@skyeraid

@ineverpostmydoodles

@chicken-magnet

He etiquetado 1008 publicaciones en 2022

#tma: 216 publicaciones

#the magnus archives: 38 publicaciones

#saving for later: 23 publicaciones

#tlovm: 21 publicaciones

#statement remains: 15 publicaciones

#the magnus protocol: 14 publicaciones

#tlovm spoilers: 13 publicaciones

#tma2: 11 publicaciones

#omg xd: 10 publicaciones

#tmagp: 8 publicaciones

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#but people always assume i'm spanish because i was born in spain and live in spain and always have and spanish is the language i always use

Mis publicaciones más populares este 2022:

Yoo! I've been tagged by @randomfae (except tumblr is broken and it didn't really tag me/I didn't get a notif, so we all lucky I saw it xD) to post the top 4 songs I've been listening to recently, so let's a gooo!

I should note that I usually listen to music while drawing and play whole albums, so this list is not gonna be super accurate in order to not make it 4 songs from the same album xD

The Breach, by Starset- (from their last album, Horizons, which I've been listening to obsessively for the last several weeks. I don't know what is it about this song but I really love it and makes me want to siiiing! A song I actually put on listen-on-repeat, which I rarely use)

Boundary (VY1V4), by Youtube user Heartbreaker- (I recently rescued this one from my Vocaloid obsession period, which was, pffft, like 6-7 years ago? I didn't remember the title or artist so it was really hard to find again. It just has like, a lot of emotion to it? A song that doesn't bring me down when in a good mood but that resonates with me when in a bad mood. Nevermind the lyrics because I)

DLH Afrodita, by Pascu y Rodri- (look, this song is very catchy, very fun, and about greek mythology, so what else could I ask for? xD Oh, yeah! It's also in my first language so that means I can actually catch onto the lyrics easily! :D)

And I'm gonna leave it at three songs because otherwise it's just the rest of Starset's Horizons album, lol! I tag @ineverpostmydoodles and anyone else who wants to join! ^^

1 nota. Fecha de publicación: 17 de febrero de 2022

This must be the messiest drawing of jon ever known, but I saw this post and I needed to doodle it real quick xD

4 notas. Fecha de publicación: 30 de septiembre de 2022

So, I'm relistening to TMA (for the first time, so there's a lot of things that I didn't remember) and just- just- MAG83:

ARCHIVIST Look, Georgie, it’s not… You don’t need to worry. I mean, I’m not, I’m not on drugs or anything. [GEORGIE LAUGHS DISBELIEVINGLY] What? … I could be on drugs!

Jon is so dumb, I swear, bless him xD ❤

11 notas. Fecha de publicación: 1 de noviembre de 2022

I don't know if anybody else has made an OT3 version of the 'understand my ship in 5 minutes' before, but anyway, here's my edit of it in case someone wants to use it

Original template by: gibslythe

Edited for OT3 by me (aka Shine-Reblogs)

97 notas. Fecha de publicación: 1 de junio de 2022

Mi publicación más popular de 2022

I'm relistening to S3 of TMA and needed to do this, it's probably been done before, but I don't care xD

158 notas. Fecha de publicación: 8 de diciembre de 2022

Descubre tu resumen del 2022 en Tumblr →

#the tma has been strong this year xD #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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c-is-for-circinate · 3 years

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Like, is the gist "Real life pedophilia/incest/rape is bad, and stories saying these things are good are bad, but including these topics in a story isn't inherently bad, so the people being like 'hey, maybe Ao3 shouldn't have so much kiddie porn there's an entire category called "Underage"' are just overreacting and making things worse?" Because it feels like you're saying, "your negative reaction to this stuff is valid, but also you're annoying and prudish and bad and really you aren't valid."

So here’s the thing: it really does not sound like you're asking this question because you want my answer, it sounds like you want to be angry with me and have a fight. And fair enough! I'm not terribly interested in a fight, but apparently this is my day to dive into this topic as thoughtfully and honestly as I can be. Maybe I'll say something you haven't already heard from other people before. Maybe not! Only you, anonymous asker, know that.

To begin with, you got part of the gist right. Real life rape (including child abuse/child sexual abuse as well as incest) is bad. Stories about rape, about underage sex, and about incest, are stories.

They're stories. They're pixels on a screen. They're not real. Whether they claim that rape is good, or bad, or sexy, or melodramatic, or life-destroying, or a normal Tuesday afternoon. They're stories.

And having a negative reaction to them is valid. Stories can stir up powerful emotions in people. It is absolutely, 100%, fair and valid and even normal for there to be certain tropes, plot elements, events, and kinds of content that make you upset and that you never want to see in a story you read, ever. You don't have to want to read about sex. You don't have to want to read any of it. That doesn't make you bad.

There are tropes, plot elements, events, and kinds of content that upset me. There are stories I won't read. The same is true of literally everyone else I know. Even though I know the stories aren't real. Even though I know the things happening in them are happening to fictional characters, who do not exist, who I cannot protect and who also cannot be harmed because they're not real. Even then, I can be made sad and scared and upset and hurt by reading those stories. And that is okay and that is valid and I am not bad or wrong for being upset about the story I've read, and neither are you.

But that doesn't mean the story doesn't have value to somebody else. That doesn't mean the story isn't important to somebody else.

What I see most often coming from antis, possibly even including yourself, is an overwhelming desire to protect. They want to keep themselves and others--possibly people they know, possibly hypothetical people they may never meet--safe from being hurt by these stories. And that desire to protect, also, is normal. It's even admirable! The problem, though, the thing that does more harm than good, is when that desire to protect drives people to lash out against things that matter to other people.

There is a difference between actual rape and stories about rape. There is a difference between a story that could theoretically hurt somebody, someday (which is all stories, always), and a story that hurts you personally. And there is a difference between a story that hurts you personally, and a story that is inherently poisonous to everyone who touches it.

We know--absolutely, scientifically, incontrovertibly--that stories about rape do not make people rapists. Yes, even the stories where the rape is there to be sexy. Even stories where the person being raped is a child. Even then. Fiction is not the same thing as normalization; again, there are far smarter people who have written far more extensively on that topic than I, and next time I come across something that goes more into detail on this point I promise I will reblog it. If this really is the thing you're afraid of, I may not be the right person to convince you that this is an unfounded fear, but I know someone out there can elaborate on it.

(Unfounded, which is not the same thing as invalid. My mother's claustrophobia is unfounded; it flares up in many situations where there's no physical threat whatsoever, where she has plenty of space to move and air to breathe. It's still real. It still chokes her. It's still valid, she is not bad or broken to feel that way, and she still can't drive through certain tunnels. The fear is real. But the thing she's afraid of can't physically hurt her, and that is worth knowing in terms of how she deals with it.)

We know, absolutely, scientifically, and incontrovertibly, that stories about rape and many, many, many other things can hurt and even traumatize their readers. Even though the situation you're reacting to is not real and you receive no physical injury, you can still be hurt by it. The key word there, though, is readers. The fact that the horror genre is out there terrifying people who enjoy being terrified for fun does not damage me unless I do something stupid and try listening to the Magnus Archives again and end up tense and miserable and paranoid for the rest of the week. The fact that guacamole is apparently delicious to everybody else in the world does not hurt me unless I do something stupid and order the wrong thing at a restaurant, and end up itchy and miserable with a little trouble breathing for the rest of the night.

The fact that there are, yes, tens of thousands of fics on AO3 in which characters under the age of 18 have sex? It can't hurt you. Those fics do not hurt you by existing. They can only hurt you if you read them. They can only hurt anyone who reads them. That's why there is an 'Underage' tag--and it's worth noting, 'Underage' is a warning, not a category. Nobody wants you to get hurt reading the wrong fic, any more than the sushi chef wants my throat to swell up because I ordered something with avocado. Literally nobody wants that.

The flip side, of course, is that you hating each and every one of those fics individually and as a group doesn't actually hurt me, or anyone else who writes, reads, or enjoys them. By itself. You can hate anything you like, and fic writers can write anything they like, and it all comes out in the end, more or less. Except.

Except that reading fic is always, entirely, 100% opt-in, and online harassment isn't even opt-out. Some antis have a nasty habit of going after writers whose content they don't like; climbing into inboxes and comments sections, calling those writers nasty names, throwing around cruelties and aggression and insults. I know that's not the same thing as simply disliking a genre, or even passively disagreeing with its existence (although disliking a genre and disagreeing with its right to exist are also very different things). I know not all antis do that. I don't know you, anon, but based on the speed and aggressiveness of this response to my last post, I can't help but wonder if you would do that.

And that does hurt people. Just like it might hurt you if someone threw a bunch of content that makes you uncomfortable into your inbox. Including the harasser, actually--because getting into fights with strangers on the internet about things that make you angry, sad, defensive, and upset isn't good for anybody. Including both you and me.

Anyway, after yet another lengthy ramble, let's get the tl;dr response to your ask here: nobody is ever bad or wrong for disliking certain content in their stories, no matter what that content is. You and your emotions are valid. The "overreacting and making things worse" part isn't about what you feel, but what you do with it. Constantly engaging with places where the thing that upsets you will probably show up, even to argue and try to fight it, will make things worse in the sense that now you're spending way more time thinking about this thing that makes you upset and angry, thereby leaving you more upset and angry. Getting together with a bunch of your upset, angry friends to make your feelings everybody else's problem? Makes fandom a more toxic place for everyone else involved.

Don't read stuff that's going to hurt you. Don't make other people read stuff that's going to hurt them. That's the whole thing, really.

#Anonymous #asked and answered #rape cw #incest cw #discourse #anti discourse day

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ieattaperecorders · 3 years

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May as well do just one more of these "general reactions" to the Magnus Archives (which was and is a podcast:)

Me, the second the episode starts and I realize we're hearing Jonah: Oh, Jon. Jon. You're going to do it, aren't you.

That whole first scene I was half like "Jon, oh Jon, I wish you weren't doing this : (" and half like "YES FUCKING YES KILL HIM KILL HIM MAKE HIM KNOW HE'S GOING TO DIE, STAB HIM SO FUCKING GOOD!!!"

FOR SASHA, FOR TIM, FOR GERTRUDE AND ALL THE OTHERS! aaaaaaaa fuck!! yes!! fucking good!!!

hhhhh listen. Listen. I knew after MAG 199 this was how it was going to go. It wouldn't have felt right character arc wise for Jon to go along with the plan. It was the right choice narratively for him to do this exact thing, and even if it was sad in a way it was deeply satisfying.

Jon letting Rosie go was. Just. Nice. Sad. Nice. Hnmmhh.

The statement didn't really tell me much I wasn't already pretty clear on worldbuilding-wise and wasn't the most interesting, but there was something nice about it anyway. It was like, after the intense, emotional, no-turning-back moment, with the intense future still ahead, there's a moment to breathe where we sit down and Jon just tells us one last story. Kind of liked that.

hmmm have I thought about this exact scenario, where Jon is the Pupil and Martin sees him and they talk? where they talk about what happens now and the limited options and it's painful and intense?? absolutely. I didn't think I wanted to actually hear it play out but dammit if I didn't like it, it hurt SO good.

Jon being like "It can't be undone. But listen. We can still hang out until the End consumes everything. That's something, right?" hhhhh god.

JON STILL NOT BEING ABLE TO THINK ABOUT HIS LIGHTER BEING THE THING THAT FUCKS HIM!!! GOD THAT WAS GOOD. FUCK!! THE WEB GOT US ALL AGAIN!!

I. Love. LOVE that Jon was like "I'm sorry but I'm not doing the plan, I refuse, I can't, I'm mercy killing the world and destroying the fears and nothing, NOTHING will convince me to let them escape." AND THEN he turned around on that so that there would be a hope of saving Martin, and so that he wouldn't have to outlive him even if he did die. FUCK!! YES!!!

Martin in 199: It hurts that you could make a choice that involves losing me. Jon in 200: YOU THINK I COULD? YOU THINK I COULD? YOU FOOL, YOU HAVE NO IDEA, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.

THEY BROKE EACH OTHERS' PROMISES. Martin refused to run from the exploding Panopticon and live. And Jon doomed the world(s) to save him. They broke each others' promises but kept the promise to stay together. FUCK!!!

Either they died together or wound up in another world together which is absolutely the happiest ending they could have had. Don't think for a second I'm not going to imagine them as dimensional travelers that herald the coming of the Fears and try to warn/help people (probably without much success because giant inescapable forces but they can try and have hope and be together.) You just try and STOP me from headcanoning that you cannot!!!

I really liked the bit at the end, too. I'm glad the others get to live. I'm glad Georgie gets her cat back. I'm glad they get to help try and rebuild everything together.

I'm also really glad the world didn't just revert, there's still consequences -- everyone's still traumatized, probably a lot of people are dead, who knows what the world looks like but probably a lot of change there if they're scavenging batteries in the ruins of the Institute. They can rebuild and be free, but there's still consequences.

And the "I'm sorry. And good luck." Just in case you were so invested in the characters you forgot the bad guys won, the evil system continues, Jon never escaped the fate the Web had for him and neither did anyone else. It's grim and dark and yet I am smiling so hard.

also sfklgsh;dkl; Simon Fairchild coming in at the 11th hour to get torn apart by an angry mob who saw THAT coming. He died the way he lived: making me laugh.

#tma spoilers #tma finale #hhh aaaaaaaaaaa so much heart full #tma

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rantrambles · 3 years

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Ever get so upset you make a Tumblr account to vent?

I haven’t even listened to The Penumbra Podcast yet but it’s on my list because it’s insanely popular and the cosplays I’ve seen are hot as hell (A+ to all the cosplayers I’ve seen you’ve done great work). Now, with the recent news surrounding the podcast, I’ll wait till it’s done if I ever do get into it. I’m Asian and part of the LGBT community but I’m not nonbinary so I can’t say much about the trans represention in the art but I wanted to add my two cents on the matter as a person of color and someone examining the situation from the outside. Also, before I get deeply into it, I’m not the only person of color with opinions on this matter so if people have their own frustrations and criticism with the racism in The Penumbra Podcast and/or the new artist they hired, definitely listen to them too. These are my own personal opinions, and I’m sure other people will disagree and that’s fine. We’re all going to have different views on this so bear that in mind. Also, feel free to correct me or add anything if I’ve missed some information. Here’s a great breakdown of the whole situation for those that don’t know what happened. Finally, I was very hesitant to post this, but I felt it was important because I make a statement at the end on how race should be presented in a podcast format so if you are interested in making a podcast and want to have a diverse range of characters, please skip to the end to read those thoughts.

I’ll start off by saying, I’m not even that upset with the new artist that The Penumbra Podcast hired. I know that statement alone is controversial but I don't personally know them, and I’m not going to judge who they are as a person by a few pieces of art they’ve made. They are the least of the problems that I have here. Since the announcement and the backlash, I’ve been scrolling through the artist’s Instagram account and I can tell why people find the designs offensive, but I’m also comparing the designs to the artist’s other work, and I honestly believe that’s just their style. They’ve exaggerated the features of just about every character they’ve made, regardless of race or gender. From what I’ve seen the sharp angles and overly round curves in the anatomy that make some of the character’s features more jarring are how they prefer to draw. I’m sure they’re capable of drawing more realistic proportions but for the most part they’re art aims to call attention, be bold, and create distinguished features. Not inherently a bad thing on its own.

And yeah I’d understand the issue if this were a scenario where the artist heard how these characters acted in the podcast and thought “hey, obviously this character is a black woman because they are super strong and therefore must have big muscles, no other woman could look like that” or “hey, this character has to be Asian because they act super seductive sometimes better draw them as such.” But from my understanding the race was already decided by previous official artists and a general description of the characters were already generated by the audience, similar to how The Magnus Archives leaned towards drawing scrawny Jon with black, greying hair and dark skin. The new artists couldn’t really change those features even if those features aren’t described in canon because a depiction that strayed too far from popular fandom interpretation would make the character’s unrecognizable to the fanbase.

I think the reason this became such a big issue for most people is because the new Penumbra artist used their exaggerated art style when making these characters and people of color and nonbinary folks already see themselves drawn as these exaggerated caricatures all the time (with those images being used to further discriminate against them). I’m sure the artist didn’t mean for their art to be offensive, but that of course doesn’t change how it was received.

According to some, the poses and expressions the artists chose did not fully represent the characters entirely and only served to further perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and I’ll have to take their word for it because I still haven’t listened to the podcast so I have no idea how the characters act. But again much of the criticism is based on the one line-up and doing a deeper dive into the artist’s work I managed to find artwork that was much less offensive. Here some art where Vespa is depicted in a non-violent pose and one where Vespa is in a threatening pose but not an overly violent one. Here is Peter drawn in a non-seductive pose. Hopefully, the artist truly does keep the criticisms in mind as they work on the new official art. I’m just not the type of person that wants to get the pitchforks out and cause this particular person to lose a job they seemed really excited about over their old character line-up, especially when that person is also part of a marginalized group.

Again, that’s just my opinion on that particular artist. Those who are offended by their art are still valid in how they feel, and the artist should absolutely take their criticism to heart to better how they represent the characters.

What I’m more upset about is that I think The Penumbra Podcast should never have released official art for their characters in the first place and that’s their mistake that they refuse to own up about. They have made it clear that the story was never meant to portray characters of colors, a fact emphasized by the fact they hired mostly white actors from the start. They only started releasing art of the characters to get a profit. And the thing is they know what they did was wrong. All I had to do was search Penumbra Podcast racism and there is a note on their website saying that they archived some old official art.

“We have discontinued all Penumbra merchandise that uses the original character designs, and in the meantime, any profits on the sales of that merchandise will go to the For The Gworls project. We also realize that the depiction of these characters as POC, while not appropriate for us to use in our marketing and merchandise, has nonetheless become personally meaningful to many POC listeners. For that reason, and because we do not wish to distance ourselves from our mistake, we are keeping these images on our website for archival purposes. Though we do want to make it clear that many of the main/featured voice actors are white and that we did not write the characters to represent any specific POC experience, you are, as always, free to imagine these characters in any way that you like.”

I went to their shop and they still sell posters and pins with the character’s faces on them, but they are donating it to a good cause so hopefully that stays the same. However, I still find it a little uncomfortable that they are still selling character merch and have plans to continue selling character merch. They have no right to dissuade the fans that already found representation in the characters, but they also have no right to profit off the representation that was built, regardless if they made the story.

Let’s compare this to another piece of popular media. I love Avatar the Last Airbender and, I liked the ATLA voice actors just fine but there should have been more people of color doing voice acting behind the screen too. The voice actors for that show were mainly white too, however, the creators knew that they would be making poc characters. That’s what makes the difference. Did they still choose to go with mostly white voice actors? Yes. Could they have done better and pay more people of color? Also yes. But I’m not as furious at them because they did their research on the cultures they were basing the ATLA world off of and intentionally gave us a show where Asians could see characters that looked like them represented on the screen. The Penumbra Podcast did not do any of that. Again, they openly admitted that it was never their intention to make the character’s people of color when they made the podcast so that goes to show no research was made to properly represent specific cultures. The color of the character’s skin in their official designs therefore became more of aesthetic choice rather than representation, and it wasn’t even their aesthetic choice to begin with!

Race isn’t a color you can just throw onto the character because you feel like it. So I want this to be a lesson to anyone that wants to make a podcast: if you want to include poc characters please do some research into the cultures you plan to represent the way you would with any other form of media. Just because the audience can’t see the characters and just because it’s harder to smoothly introduce the character’s appearance doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be lazy on how you present the characters. Do research before you start writing the first episode and take the time to hire poc actors. Hiring poc actors is actually the least that can be done to show representation. Also, since the audience cannot visually see the race of the characters on a podcast and it can’t typically be described the way you would in a book, you’ll have to be creative. It’s not my job to say how, but my suggestions would be, before the fans come up with their own image of the character, you need to establish race in the first few episodes or release character profiles on a website so that the fans know you canonically intended the characters to be of a certain race even if you aren’t able to mention it in the actual podcast. If you are unwilling to do any of these then the best route is to avoid stating race at all and allow the audience to build their own representation into your form of media. However, once this happens, you are not allowed to profit off popular fan interpretations. You lose all rights to create official art or images of the characters. You cannot use “we have a diverse cast of characters” when you market your story. It doesn’t matter whether you created the content or not, you did not create the representation for those minority groups.

It’s one thing for fans to build their own inclusivity into a form of art like a podcast, but it’s another thing for the creators who never worked to make the representation happen to take advantage of the representation that the listeners built for themselves. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.

#the penumbra podcast #podcast #race #the magnus archives #diversity in podcasts #diversity #tpp #tpp fanart

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