#again like her name's the equivalent of someone named jonathan calling themselves Evil John | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tanoraqui · 5 years

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Eldritch Terrors of The Magnus Archive as rated by me, now finished with season two (sequel post to). Cut for length.

The Eye: 10/10. I still know where my bread is buttered. Incidentally, when they held that Intervention and Elias gave Jon the CCV tapes like “maybe these will finally reassure you”, it was the equivalent of it my dog half-destroyed my backpack while rooting around it it for food and I pulled her away and gave her a stern talking to and then a sandwich, like “maybe this will stop you from being hungry.” Jon is a knowledge beagle. Side note: kind of took my suggestion for a performer who finds themselves Watched with that newswoman, but not quite as I’d wanted.

The Stranger: 7/10. Notsha was pretty good. I quite liked the taxidermy (same flowery smell as Sarah the noise tech from Melanie’s hospital ep, so her origin is settled, ish! Look forward to seeing her again.) More importantly, I remembered that one of the scariest nightmares I’ve ever had involved me coming home to signs that there had been an intruder in the house and finding that they’d made nearly perfect copies of all my stuffed animals and left them on the bed with the real ones - like they’d meant to replace them but didn’t have the time, maybe. And I could tell which ones were real, were loved and mine, and which were soulless copies with colors just slightly off and eyes slightly duller, but I knew, looking at them all, that no one else would be able to tell. And that’s the Stranger all over, isn’t it? The NotThem specifically - except instead of replacing the semi-imaginary friends you have slept with every night of your life, whose presence is an eternal reliable soft warm hug and whom you named one by one and gave personalities like pieces of your very self, it goes for, like, your cousin. Good concept, amateur execution relative to the terror my young mind cooked up in the wake of a Winnie-the-Pooh episode with alternate, evil New Jerseyean versions of Tigger, Piglet, and Pooh.

The Distortion: 9/10. Points for being the first entity to utilize the internet, and just...consistently being peak Cheshire Cat. I fucking love Michael every time he appears, even when what he’s doing is fucking with people just to see what happens (and, please note the title “Liar”: definitely wanted Jon to meet Leitner and definitely has an angle other than For The Lulz here. But it might be, well, upside-down and inside-out and twisted like a broken elbow relative to anyone else’s angle, so possibly we don’t even need to worry about it! Possibly.

The Flesh: 6/10. Solid, reliable performance from the cannibalism crowd this season, and connection with boneturners confirmed. MEAT IS ME.

The Slaughter: 9/10 god i just love Melanie King so much, okay. “It was like once I’d seen that there was a path to stray from, I couldn’t unsee it, and I couldn’t ignore the call from the woods all around.” Actually that’s more Eye, probably - 7/10 to the Slaughter, I wish we had more but also there may be only so much you can do with mindless bloodthirst; 15/10 to Melanie King, embodiment of “’[X]’s haunted’ ‘What?’ *cocks pistol, walking out* ‘[X]’s haunted.’” Also, I spent most of “Grifter’s Bone” thinking it was probably the Stranger but when the woman turned out to have mauled a neighbor and then herself with a hammer, I gasped, “Slaughter!” delightedly. Music of war!

The Web: 7/10. Won this season’s award for creepiness, I think? Annabelle Cane is clutch, y’all. Also, the grudge match with Desolation over Hilltop House is fun. ALSO, who the HELL is Adulard Dekker; I met him in a fic or two also and I have questions?? Anyway, shoutout to the Web for frequently reining the others in, actually - spiders killing worms, binding the NotThem...agreeing by uneasy truce to help raise Desolation’s...whatever exactly Agnes Montague is...

The Desolation: 6/10. Most interesting by far is that the Desolation/Cult of the Lightless Flame is the only beings we’ve seen using I would call “sympathetic magic” - whatever they were doing with those pictures of Gertrude + her hairs in that Scottish grove, some ritual with Agnes and spiders once her tree fell. TMA doesn’t seem to have much of a “magic system”, but this indicates...something with rules.

The Lonely: 6/10. Points for most interesting and long-term - both in practice and effect - destruction of a single human’s psyche, in “Personal Space.” That’s craftmanship, that is. Pretty boring season otherwise, aside from Peter showing up to lose a bet on whether a man would survive a brush with the Buried.

The Buried: 5/10. I dunno, it’s still just not doin’ it too much for me. I do love how I can’t figure out if Katerina Gorka is lying about her experience on the train or if she just...hasn’t noticed that she’s definitely become some sort of dirt-shedding avatar of death underground.

The Darkness: 3/10. Weak! Showing! Who CAN’T make the tunnels underneath an ancient church crypt creepy? Oh, wow, you also killed a handful of police officers and a guy in jail who nearly....god, I so desperately want to know exactly what Robert Montauk was trying to do. Raynard implied that he’d tried to kill the Darkness? Ballsy.

The Vast: 9/10. So, when I wrote that obviously autobiographical bit in the s1 ratings, I was really just remembering “Freefall”, which didn’t describe the Vast much like that at all. I listened back at “Page Turner”, the first Leitner, which was Vast, and it had some similarities that might have been bouncing around my subconscious...but the reason I checked back was that “Literary Heights” had a lot of similarities to the autobiographical bit I wrote, which I wrote BEFORE listening to that episode at ALL...9/10 because that’s actually the most unnerved I’ve been all podcast.

The Corruption: 4/10. Weak too, tbh, particularly relative to the magnificent Jane Prentiss. Introduced, I think, though, the concept of objects that can be wards (John Snow’s syringe) instead of harbringers, which is very interesting. Concept: Corruption episode based on rotting food, please? At a fancy restaurant or at a dump or just in someone’s house, everything going bad...maybe a dig somewhere at how much supermarkets just throw away...

The Hunt: 5/10. Vampires still neat. More to the point: Me, standing outside Jonathan Sims (the reality one)’s house at 2am, blasting Schubert’s “Erlkonig” from a boombox while shouting: GIVE! ME! WILD! HUNT! GIVE!! ME!! WILD!! HUNT!!

The End: 5/10. Did, uh. Did Mary Keay kill and partially flay her own son, binding his uneasy ghost to a page made from his own skin, and then give that page to Gertrude as a weird passive-aggressive present. I guess that book might be Flesh instead, but it seems more End and I just have to ask. Nobody should answer, but between scattered spoilers and what episodes I’ve heard, this is...an impression I have formed... The End didn’t do much at all but it always has decent credit just for being The End.

#tma #the magnus archives #in this post: a boombox. the music of war. 'jon is a knowledge beagle'. more about my relationship with stuffed animals #than you probably wanted to know #(SOME stuffed animals. MY stuffed animals. not ALL stuffed animals.)#(though of course i would defend any stuffed animal in the world with my very life)

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