The Magnus Archives, Season Five
Jan. 7th, 2023 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWhile playing Elden Ring in 2022, I listened to the monster-of-the-week horror podcast The Magnus Archives. The previous time I listened, I stopped at the fifth and final season, but this time around I was sure I would make it all the way through.
I managed to make it a few more episodes into Season Five, but I couldn’t keep going. I don’t want to hate on the podcast, which is fantastic for the first three seasons, but I still want to try to explain why I don’t like this final season.
The primary reason I find the fifth season difficult to listen to is because it’s focused on the character Martin, whom I dislike. To be frank, I find Martin to be whiny and humorless. I think the conceit of the character is that he’s initially supposed to come off as stupid while actually being fairly intelligent and having a hidden strength of character. Unfortunately, the way his actor (and the co-producer of the show) delivers his performance makes it seem as though the character’s “boringness” (for lack of a better word) is his primary virtue. Like, any normal person would become a brainless coward in the face of the circumstances presented by the story, and the other characters need a “normal person” to keep them grounded.
This makes sense, but Martin doesn’t do anything, and he doesn’t have any real agency in the story. All he does is follow other people and make shitty comments that aren’t wise or funny or insightful; they’re just petty and mean. All of his lines are some variation on, “I’m tired and upset, and I don’t like what’s happening.” This is how a normal person would react, of course, but it doesn’t make for good storytelling.
I guess what I’m trying to say about Martin is that he isn’t much of a character to begin with, and he doesn’t change in any meaningful way. He doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t have any backstory. He doesn’t have any real character flaws besides being annoying. He doesn’t have any good lines. He doesn’t have any good scenes. He’s not fun to spend time with; he’s just dead weight who gets a bizarre amount of time in the spotlight right at the point of the story when the pace needs to pick up.
I guess the note to myself is: If you write a Martin character as a stand-in for a “normal” point of view in extraordinary circumstances, this character either needs to undergo a significant change in order to be less normal, or they need to be sidelined by the last quarter of the story.
Another thing I don’t like about Martin is that he feels like a nagging parent right when the main character gets super interesting.
The main character – his name is Jonathan – becomes an X-Man and gains the mutant superpower of magically compelling anyone to answer any question he asks. Essentially, he can facilitate total recall and total honesty. I get that not everyone wants to have mutant superpowers, but the assumption that it’s bad to help people sift through their memories of a traumatic event feels like it’s coming from a very specific point of view that I don’t share.
On top of this, Jonathan develops the ability to become a storyteller. If he invokes his power, he’s able to look at a situation and tell a short story about what’s going on. And that’s awesome! But then along comes Martin, who will always say, “No no no! Time out!! Good people don’t like bad stories! Don’t you realize that telling stories about bad things is unhealthy, and that you’re a bad person if you enjoy these stories?”
Martin’s objections to horror fiction feel very 2020 to me. This was a time when people were sincerely like, “It’s neurotypical and ableist to make jokes about fast food, because making jokes about fast food implies that you want to eat fast food, which will make your listener want to eat fast food, which is a Bad-And-Wrong thing to do during a pandemic.” Like, I’m not any sort of fan of the McElroy Brothers, but it was wild when they were getting multiple waves of death threats on Twitter for making some dumb throwaway comedy podcast joke about Wendy’s hamburger-flavored Pringles.
(For the record, the joke was that this was such a batshit promotion that they actually felt bizarrely compelled to try the chips. And for the record, yes this joke did make me want to try the chips myself.)
Anyway, I don’t actually hate Martin as much as this post would make it seem, but he’s a useful focal point for what The Magnus Archives starts to do at the end of its fourth season, which is to emphatically and repeatedly state that the listener is a bad person for listening to the podcast. Although it makes sense that the fictional character Jonathan is undergoing an unwanted transformation, the overt statement that the listener is personally culpable for driving him forward because of a morbid interest in horror stories feels awkward and unnecessary.
I also feel as though The Magnus Archives panders to queer identities without (the straight male writer) really understanding the lived experience of being queer or where the queer interest in horror comes from. This could be another essay entirely, but basically: The Magnus Archives presents “queer” characters with almost zero expression of affection or attraction in their relationships, and the stories in the last season are very clear that not being cisgender or normatively able-bodied is a source of horror.
The assumption that bodily transformation into a more desired (or perhaps genetically unavoidable) expression of identity is horrible and wrong rubbed me the wrong way, especially in combination with the repeated assertion that the listener is horrible and wrong for being interested in stories that express the nuances of such transformation through symbolic abstraction.
Idk, the first three seasons of The Magnus Archives are interesting and smart and actually quite sensitive, but the writing suffers from multiple missteps regarding queer relationships and the essential nature of horror toward the end of the fourth season that make it feel hostile to me as a listener. And this is deliberate – the narration is intentionally hostile, although not always for the intended reasons.
I guess it just struck me that I don’t like the final season of The Magnus Archives for the same reason that I don’t like The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable wants to tell you that you’re stupid for playing a video game about video games, and The Magnus Archives wants to tell you that you’re a bad person for listening to a horror fiction podcast about horror fiction. It’s like, Fine then! If you don’t want me to engage with your story, then I have a panoply of other stories to enjoy, and you can take your “Please like comment and subscribe” and shove it.
I managed to make it a few more episodes into Season Five, but I couldn’t keep going. I don’t want to hate on the podcast, which is fantastic for the first three seasons, but I still want to try to explain why I don’t like this final season.
The primary reason I find the fifth season difficult to listen to is because it’s focused on the character Martin, whom I dislike. To be frank, I find Martin to be whiny and humorless. I think the conceit of the character is that he’s initially supposed to come off as stupid while actually being fairly intelligent and having a hidden strength of character. Unfortunately, the way his actor (and the co-producer of the show) delivers his performance makes it seem as though the character’s “boringness” (for lack of a better word) is his primary virtue. Like, any normal person would become a brainless coward in the face of the circumstances presented by the story, and the other characters need a “normal person” to keep them grounded.
This makes sense, but Martin doesn’t do anything, and he doesn’t have any real agency in the story. All he does is follow other people and make shitty comments that aren’t wise or funny or insightful; they’re just petty and mean. All of his lines are some variation on, “I’m tired and upset, and I don’t like what’s happening.” This is how a normal person would react, of course, but it doesn’t make for good storytelling.
I guess what I’m trying to say about Martin is that he isn’t much of a character to begin with, and he doesn’t change in any meaningful way. He doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t have any backstory. He doesn’t have any real character flaws besides being annoying. He doesn’t have any good lines. He doesn’t have any good scenes. He’s not fun to spend time with; he’s just dead weight who gets a bizarre amount of time in the spotlight right at the point of the story when the pace needs to pick up.
I guess the note to myself is: If you write a Martin character as a stand-in for a “normal” point of view in extraordinary circumstances, this character either needs to undergo a significant change in order to be less normal, or they need to be sidelined by the last quarter of the story.
Another thing I don’t like about Martin is that he feels like a nagging parent right when the main character gets super interesting.
The main character – his name is Jonathan – becomes an X-Man and gains the mutant superpower of magically compelling anyone to answer any question he asks. Essentially, he can facilitate total recall and total honesty. I get that not everyone wants to have mutant superpowers, but the assumption that it’s bad to help people sift through their memories of a traumatic event feels like it’s coming from a very specific point of view that I don’t share.
On top of this, Jonathan develops the ability to become a storyteller. If he invokes his power, he’s able to look at a situation and tell a short story about what’s going on. And that’s awesome! But then along comes Martin, who will always say, “No no no! Time out!! Good people don’t like bad stories! Don’t you realize that telling stories about bad things is unhealthy, and that you’re a bad person if you enjoy these stories?”
Martin’s objections to horror fiction feel very 2020 to me. This was a time when people were sincerely like, “It’s neurotypical and ableist to make jokes about fast food, because making jokes about fast food implies that you want to eat fast food, which will make your listener want to eat fast food, which is a Bad-And-Wrong thing to do during a pandemic.” Like, I’m not any sort of fan of the McElroy Brothers, but it was wild when they were getting multiple waves of death threats on Twitter for making some dumb throwaway comedy podcast joke about Wendy’s hamburger-flavored Pringles.
(For the record, the joke was that this was such a batshit promotion that they actually felt bizarrely compelled to try the chips. And for the record, yes this joke did make me want to try the chips myself.)
Anyway, I don’t actually hate Martin as much as this post would make it seem, but he’s a useful focal point for what The Magnus Archives starts to do at the end of its fourth season, which is to emphatically and repeatedly state that the listener is a bad person for listening to the podcast. Although it makes sense that the fictional character Jonathan is undergoing an unwanted transformation, the overt statement that the listener is personally culpable for driving him forward because of a morbid interest in horror stories feels awkward and unnecessary.
I also feel as though The Magnus Archives panders to queer identities without (the straight male writer) really understanding the lived experience of being queer or where the queer interest in horror comes from. This could be another essay entirely, but basically: The Magnus Archives presents “queer” characters with almost zero expression of affection or attraction in their relationships, and the stories in the last season are very clear that not being cisgender or normatively able-bodied is a source of horror.
The assumption that bodily transformation into a more desired (or perhaps genetically unavoidable) expression of identity is horrible and wrong rubbed me the wrong way, especially in combination with the repeated assertion that the listener is horrible and wrong for being interested in stories that express the nuances of such transformation through symbolic abstraction.
Idk, the first three seasons of The Magnus Archives are interesting and smart and actually quite sensitive, but the writing suffers from multiple missteps regarding queer relationships and the essential nature of horror toward the end of the fourth season that make it feel hostile to me as a listener. And this is deliberate – the narration is intentionally hostile, although not always for the intended reasons.
I guess it just struck me that I don’t like the final season of The Magnus Archives for the same reason that I don’t like The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable wants to tell you that you’re stupid for playing a video game about video games, and The Magnus Archives wants to tell you that you’re a bad person for listening to a horror fiction podcast about horror fiction. It’s like, Fine then! If you don’t want me to engage with your story, then I have a panoply of other stories to enjoy, and you can take your “Please like comment and subscribe” and shove it.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-17 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 02:14 pm (UTC)I think this is because the fandom was more willing to explore what it means for Martin to be aligned with The Lonely - and thus willing to portray him as strange and transformed. That transformation never really happened in the fourth and fifth seasons of the podcast, and it was frustrating to spend so much time with a character whose reaction to his environment was so superficial.
In contrast, I found Alasdair Stuart's performance of Peter Lukas to be very interesting. I appreciated how Lukas used his extreme "niceness" as a shield to prevent anyone from knowing his true thoughts or feelings, and I was hoping that Martin would go in a similarly creative direction. But alas.
Meanwhile, Jonathan was absolutely blamed for his transformation. This wasn't just suggested; it was outright stated by every character at least once, especially towards the end. I feel that this was unfair, as Jonathan didn't actually do anything aside from trying to help himself after his requests for help from others were denied. The story seemed to be trying to set up Jonathan as a character with gray morality, but it didn't come off that way at all.
This was especially frustrating because the podcast never explored why The Beholding is supposed to be scary and bad. Like, there were no stories about the darker aspects of being on social media, or what it means to be canceled. There were no stories about CCTV cameras or government surveillance or data tracking. There were no stories about thought crimes. There were no stories about what it means to be female (or female-coded) and have your appearance and behavior constantly monitored by society at all times. For example, you know? So why was The Beholding bad, and why was Jonathan judged so harshly?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the end of the fourth season and the entire fifth season suffer from the missteps in the character development arcs of the two main characters. To me, it's not so much that the ending hurts, but rather that the ending doesn't have the emotional weight or valence that perhaps it should.
I also dislike the reaction the podcast tries to provoke in the listener by saying, "Jonathan is bad and wrong, and you are just as bad and wrong as Jonathan." Exactly as you said, there's a lot of emotional baggage tied up with that, especially since the writing did such a fantastic job during the first three seasons of helping the listener identify with a queer+ace point-of-view character.
Sorry for rambling. It's just, damn. I really love this podcast, and it's such a shame.
ETA: Sorry, I guess there was the "Extended Surveillance" episode about the security guard whose consciousness is swallowed by an outdated CCTV system in a low-rent shopping center, but this story seemed more like a "horror of the machine" sort of deal rather than a reflection of the public conversations surrounding the social and political implications of mass surveillance that were going on in the UK in the mid-2010s. I hope that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 05:15 pm (UTC)