'i got sent to apply to be avatar'd by the magnus institute and all i got were some weird snakes in my throat'

-snakekeeper from tmagp 14, maybe.

What’s your opinion on the contrast between “silly” and “serious” spaces? Do you think people can have very serious interpretations about a genuine piece of media and also be goofy about it? I’m asking this particularly because I’ve seen people in the Magnus podcast fandoms fight about people “misinterpreting” characters you, Alex, and the many other authors have written. Are you okay with the blorbofication or do you really wish the media you’ve written would be “taken seriously” 100% of the time?

And follow up question, what do you think about the whole “it’s up to the reader (or in some cases, listener) to make their own conclusions and interpretations and that does not make them wrong”, versus the “it was written this way because the author intended it this way, and we should respect that” argument?

This is a question I've given a lot of thought over the years, to the point where I don't know how much I can respond without it becoming a literal essay. But I'll try.

My main principle for this stuff boils roughly down to: "The only incorrect way to respond to art is to try and police the responses of others." Art is an intensely subjective, personal thing, and I think a lot of online spaces that engage with media are somewhat antithetical to what is, to me, a key part of it, which is sitting alone with your response to a story, a character, a scene or an image and allowing yourself to explore it's effect on you. To feel your feelings and think about them in relation to the text.

Now, this is not to say that jokes and goofiness about a piece of art aren't fucking great. I love to watch The Thing and drink in the vibes or arctic desolation and paranoia, or think about the picture it paints of masculinity as a sublimely lonely thing where the most terrible threat is that of an imposed, alien intimacy. And that actually makes me laugh even more the jokey shitpost "Do you think the guys in The Thing ever explored each other's bodies? Yeah but watch out". Silly and serious don't have to be in opposition, and I often find the best jokes about a piece of media come from those who have really engaged with it.

And in terms of interpreting characters? Interpreting and responding to fictional characters is one of the key functions of stories. They're not real people, there is no objective truth to who they are or what they do or why they do it. They are artificial constructs and the life they are given is given by you, the reader/listener/viewer, etc. Your interpetation of them can't be wrong, because your interpretation of them is all that there is, they have no existence outside of that.

And obviously your interpretation will be different to other people's, because your brain, your life, your associations - the building blocks from which the voices you hear on a podcast become realised people in your mind - are entirely your own. Thus you cannot say anyone else's is wrong. You can say "That's not how it came across to me" or "I have a very different reading of that character", but that's it. I suppose if someone is fundamentally missing something (like saying "x character would never use violence" when x character strangles a man to death in chapter 4) you could say "I think that's a significant misreading of the text", but that's only to be reserved for if you have the evidence to back it up and are feeling really savage.

I think this is one of the things that saddens me a bit about some aspects of fandom culture - it has a tendency to police or standardise responses or interpretations, turning them from personal experiences to be explored into public takes to be argued over. It also has the occasional moralistic strain, and if there's one thing I wish I could carve in stone on every fan space it's that Your Responses to a Piece of Art Carry No Intrinsic Moral Weight.

As for authorial intention, that's a simpler one: who gives a shit? Even the author doesn't know their own intentions half the time. There is intentionality there, of course, but often it's a chaotic and shifting mix of theme and story and character which rarely sticks in the mind in the exact form it had during writing. If you ask me what my intention was in a scene from five years ago, I'll give you an answer, but it will be my own current interpretation of a half-remembered thing, altered and warped by my own changing relationship to the work and five years of consideration and change within myself. Or I might not remember at all and just have a guess. And I'm a best case scenario because I'm still alive. Thinking about a writers possible or stated intentions is interesting and can often lead to some compelling discussion or examination, but to try and hold it up as any sort of "truth" is, to my mind, deeply misguided.

Authorial statements can provide interesting context to a work, or suggest possible readings, but they have no actual transformative effect on the text. If an author says of a book that they always imagined y character being black, despite it never being mentioned in the text, that's interesting - what happens if we read that character as black? How does it change our responses to the that character actions and position? How does it affect the wider themes and story? It doesn't, however, actually make y character black because in the text itself their race remains nonspecific. The author lost the ability to make that change the moment it was published. It's not solely theirs anymore.

So yeah, that was a fuckin essay. In conclusion, serious and silly are both good, but serious does not mean yelling at other people about "misinterpretations", it means sitting with your personal explorations of a piece of art. All interpretations are valid unless they've legitimately missed a major part of the text (and even then they're still valid interpretations of whatever incomplete or odd version of the text exists inside that person's brain). Authorial intent is interesting to think about but ultimately unknowable, untrustworthy and certainly not a source of truth. Phew.

Oh, and blorbofication is fine, though it does to my mind sometimes pair with a certain shallowness to one's exploration of the work in question.

GWENDOLYN BOUCHARD PATHETIC LITTLE MEOW MEOW SHE THOUGHT SAW SOMEONE CARING ABOUT HER ENOUGH TO BRING HER ONE (1) CUP OF COFFEE AND TRANSFORMED INTO A PUDDLE OF GOO INSTANTLY

IT WAS IN FACT SO PATHETIC THE PERSON WHO CARED ABOUT HER ENOUGH TO SPECIFICALLY NOT BRING HER COFFEE TO LOOK AT HER REACTION GOT SO DUMBSTRUCK SHE LET HER HAVE THE COFFEE MEANT FOR SOMEONE ELSE

Broke: it’s desires, not fears

Woke: it’s both, there’s more entities than TMA

Bespoke: there were never multiple entities to begin with and the reason all of the entities needed to come together to start the apocalypse is because there’s only One Entity that the avatars can’t agree on how to worship correctly

Gwen: The letters, you mean? Sam: Jesus!  Gwen, softly: ...She goes by Alice, now, actually. Sam: ....What? Gwen: What?

CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVEN’T POSTED ANY TMAGP YET SINCE LISTENING TO THE EPISODE. I GUESS I JUST DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT TO SAY, UMMM…. SNAKE PRENTISS?????

CONTAIN THIS MAN.

HEY BABES so I was relistening to tma s4 and I couldn't help but notice how.. uhm...

THE WEB SENT JARED HOPWORTH REPEATED LETTERS WITH A NAME AND AN ADDRESS OF WHERE TO ATTACK SO JON COULD GET THE FLESH MARK?????

uhmmmmmmmm sounds familiar??? huh lena?? huh gwen?? thats a cool letter you send to your externals, huh?? so you can control the horrors??? on your little website software?? huh??

*banging my fists on my desk toward Alice Celia and Sam* polycule polycule poLYCULE POLYCULE

PROTOCULE PRAYER CIRCLE

idk so like, in TMA, Smirke had this whole thing about striking balance in the fears, and using them in a "pure" way in the form of his architecture. He separated the fear into categories to make it easier to distinguish and therefore make an attempt to control and wield it.

Here, there's apparently some sort of "benevolent" forces, whether that means there is some sort of good aspect to the fears, or simply that there is enough good in the world to counter the bad in some respect. and the OIAR's purpose is to.. redirect the bad into a way that's limited and controlled? Like, giving the bad an outlet that doesn't result in complete havoc. Like if they hadn't given a letter to Mr. Bonzo, he would have the potential to do much worse.

Compared to Smirke, they also have the very broad spectrum of categories in the form of the binder, where there aren't many specific categories. This is a very different approach compared to Smirke's 14, but they both seem to have the same end goal of control, Smirke's ideals just being more optimistic and well-intentioned.

Could possibly be in response to the apparent new direction of the fears in that they're meshing and working together more. Could also just be as doomed of a system as Smirke's turned out to be.

Finally am interested to find out how Starkwall fits into all of this. They used to work for/were contracted by the OIAR, but separated. Perhaps they got too out of control and couldn't be properly "managed" anymore?

tmagp13 :] notes n reactions spoiler cut

welp, Sam may have "no game" but apparently he's super good at picking restaurant dates.

I'm sorry, "baby in a horror podcast" was NOT on my bingo card. huh???? I'm... assuming the baby won't be in any serious trouble?? but it has to do with Celia so?? Is the baby...real? I mean if he's just over a year old that's right around .jmj error but yeah @-@ idk how to appropriately make speculations on a baby given the genre.

Sam's whole origin story is "gifted kid facing severe rejection anxiety" and honestly mood. Aspiring law major though no wonder he's so set on filling out all the weird forms.

Dang and here I was thinking that Alice was going to be the outlier in the trend of "spooky workplace employees whose families are all dead". rip. girl probably feels super responsible for her brother and that's what's got them into the whole financial issue stuff :/ _____

Gwen is so so green in all of this, very much thinking about it in black and white. idk if she's actively choosing to go along with the "bad" because she wants to advance or because she's seeing the gray side or because she just wants to find out more. time will tell ig. _____

this guy sounds like a jerk (though not a rich one apparently) but I mean. he's in a hospital and this is a horror podcast so there's probably a decent reason. talk about morally gray huh. We've got Sam "ex gifted kid who flunked out of his career" and then this guy who never even got started and fell into crypto and bad finances instead

this Darrien guy went from very angry to kinda thoughtful and reminiscent pretty fast. also he did not have to give this much exposition in the complaint. at least in tmagp2 there was more of a reason for it with the therapist asking but with this idk. maybe it's like the eye's residual influences means that every recount of a spooky event requires proper storytelling? seems a little too easy tho. maybe this guy just like. needs someone to talk to and actually listen cause boy does this dude seem seriously deprived of that.

oo normal phone now linked to the fears after opting into the spooky software. sounds familiar! weird how so many of these statements involve outside people, but are also so self contained to the case person.

oh so the more this guy gets himself into a rut the more money he gets. no wonder he's at the hospital. does he lose money when he's doing well? does the setting automatically force or encourage some kind of mindset that will cause these sorts of things? seems kinda like the opposite of the dice guy.

did the app originally have some sort of "betting against an actual person's life circumstances" thing? how did he not find this weird? just the money talking I guess?

anyways. seems like a pretty clean cut web case, what with the "insectoid sounds", gambling, and whatnot. For the sake of all the mental health stuff, sucky turns in that guy's life, and the whole thing about the fears not being singular per case, buried too.

Fun case. reminds me a lot of the dice guy, but the damage is done inwards rather than outwardly. _____

alice the teasing is not making you look very good and not upset about this whole sam and celia thing

"we spent most of the time discussing if [the cases] are real" and the mystery virus wasn't curious about the specifics of that conversation?

absolute knockout gwen is never going to recover from this

Today’s incident was from march 9 2024.

The ep 10 incident had march 9 2024 as the current date.

Which means bonzo bonzo’d over there and bonzo’d all over the place the same day? Which seems rather fast.

How does he even move? Surely he can’t drive. Does Nigel drive him? Probably not since then Nigel would be given the address, right?

I can’t imagine he’d be patient enough for public transport

this episode killed me. celia is a MOTHER? sam used to VAUGEPOST? gwen is literally JONATHAN SIMS? lena is basically ELIAS BOUCHARD? SOME OF THEM ARE BENEVOLENT?????????

sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

they’re so bbg core