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a-mag-a-day · 1 year

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MAG 41 - apple cutting

So Prentiss happened 29th July, now it's the 2nd September, 5 weeks.

Martin giving Jon the ashes of Prentiss, so cute… Well, um, the thought counts!

"and the archive looks remarkably like it was never attacked at all. Unlike me." / "I’m told it’s unlikely the scars will ever truly fade" - The first of many more scars :´(

"but I don’t think the boredom was good for me." - I like the consistency of this. Jon doesn't like boredom. He didn't like it as a kid, he didn't like that about Bournemouth at all and he still doesn't like it.

"Martin wouldn’t hear of it. Almost threw me out of the archive. Is he hiding something? Heh. No, of course not. He’s probably just legitimately concerned for my health." - He says this with such fondness in his voice that I find it hard to believe sometimes, that JonMartin was NOT planned from the start. (I know, Martin's crush was planned from the start, but not them actually getting together.)

"It’s been a couple of weeks now. From before I was officially back. If you listen to this, Martin, I am sorry. I’ve gone behind your back to explore the tunnels on… several occasions." - see above.

"Then I came to the trapdoor. If Sasha hadn’t thought to clearly mark it with hazard tape, I’m not sure I would ever have found it again, but there it was. It took several minutes of fumbling before I was able to figure out how to lift the concealed handle and expose the lock" - So what do you think the trapdoor looks like? Does it just do a very good job at blending in with the other floorboards? It is in Jon's office, right? The Head Archivist office. Why? Was it already there when Gertrude got the job? Did she have the choice to make this room her office? Or did she somehow make the entrance to the tunnels herself, so she'd have a quick way to escape the Watcher's gaze? Leitner probably could have used the Seven Lamps of Architecture to get an entrance exactly to her office. Or maybe she had other ways, she and Dekkar really liked concrete, maybe they knew a few people in construction xD

"Have you ever left a crowded room, and literally felt the silence as you walked out into the night? It was something like that, a sudden, quiet absence." - Like when you feel being watched for hours on end and suddenly that weight is taken off your shoulders?

"I didn’t even have the excuse of the corridors all looking the same, as they varied significantly in height and construction." / "This place, it felt more organic in its unpredictability, as though it had been intended to be used, to be travelled, but had gotten twisted somehow." / "I found spaces that seemed intended as rooms, but without doors. Elsewhere, there were doors that seemed simply attached to the walls." - Like they have been shuffled around?

"I found myself wondering whether that was where Martin had found her." - Thinking quite a lot about Martin there, eh?

"Inside the circle, the stone was… wrong somehow. Solid, but oddly wavy, like chocolate that’s melted and then rehardened." - So even though the ritual never could have succeeded, it did at least something to their reality.

"I had done what research I could on Millbank. First proposed and designed in 1799 by Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher who wished to test his theories of the panopticon prison, where cells would be arranged in a circle around a single, central, guard tower, so all cells were observable at once." - First time Panopticon name drop! That is something which to this day I find one of the most remarkable uses of… basically anything that exists… for this story. I didn't even know what a panopticon was before that! And it fits so well with Beholding.

"That was when I heard the noises again. They could have been footsteps, I suppose, but if so they were soft, quiet. Was someone running around those tunnels barefoot?" - … I will send you the post in a separate ask^^ You know what I'm talking about, right?

"I am not a brave man. I believe I am starting to come to terms with that fact, but I am, in certain circumstances, a very stubborn one." - No don't say that, you are so very brave! T.T

"Only an empty wine bottle, the label all but rotted away, but the year was still legible as 2003. The passages here were more pronounced in their difference than the ones further up, some being so irregular and seamless as to almost seem organic, while others were almost unnervingly square and regular, with sharp angles and precisely laid bricks." - Okay hear me out, Jurgen Leitner home makeover show! Does it spark fear?

"I turned back, and immediately noticed that the wall opposite me was closer than it had been before. I took a step back in shock, and my feet hit the wall behind me. The passage was getting narrower, though I could not see any movement." - Effect of the Seven Lamps of Architecture

"I heard a single word, clear as day: “Leave.”" - Leitner returning from his nightly visit to the loo finding the stupid new Archivist standing in the middle of his bedroom…

At this point I don't know which of the two I find funnier, Jon or Leitner xD

Jon spending hours and hours of his time exploring the tunnels, preparing for the excursion, making a 20 minutes statement only then to go "Supplemental. I don’t care about the tunnels, or the secrets they might hide." You're lying to yourself and you know it!

"If you’re hearing this, I assume you’re my replacement, following my death or disappearance" - crying

"Trust can get you killed." - crying even more

Okay, so I was veeeery happy about the fact that this season would contain more story about the archival team aka the supplemental parts! The statements of course were cool, but they felt very distant to the story. They weren't directly endangering our characters here, or only on rare occasions and then it led to the story being focused of the archival team.

Jurgen Leitner being the sneaky mystery in the tunnels puts everything terrifying Jon is experiencing in such funny context I bet anything that Jon later on thought back to these scary memories and either face palmed or choked from laughter

#a mag a day #tma #the magnus archives #episode asks #mod ashes #tma spoilers #mag 41 #lycanlovingvampyre

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