The Aviary

So, my mom decided she wanted to listen to The Magnus Archives and of course I said, "Oh, let's do it together - that will be super fun!" It is super fun - she is entirely unspoiled for everything* because she only knows about the show through me and I have basically only described it as "sarcastic British man with a nice voice tells you spooky stories". We have listened to the first 8 episodes and are making it a thing that we do on Thursday nights and I'm so excited to see all of her reactions.

However! I am still working very slowly on my personal relisten and am about midway through season 4. Listening to both season 1 and season 4 simultaneously is a hell of a trip, you guys.






*Which is not an experience I had - I came in while season 4 was airing and was spoiled for, say, [EXTENDED SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PIPE MURDER] before I even started listening.

A conversation from today:


Me: ::relays an incident I witnessed earlier, wherein a mother told her two children Wrong Information about otters in front of me and I had to restrain myself from correcting her::

Katie (my sister): Oh no, you can't do that!

Me: I will admit that I have done that, but only in zoos.

Katie: Parents are allowed to be wrong sometimes.

Me: Parents are allowed to be wrong sometimes. They are not allowed to be wrong in the zoo when the informational plaque is right in front of them.

Sean (Katie's husband and the one person I've recommended The Magnus Archives to who has actually become a fan): That is the most Jonathan Sims thing I've ever heard a real person say.



I am recording this conversation for posterity because I've never felt so simultaneously flattered and vaguely horrified at myself.

Also, if you're going to give misinformation to children because you are too lazy to read something a foot away from you, then you don't deserve to be at the zoo.

When I first started listening to (read: "consuming as though I were starving") The Magnus Archives, I mentioned that I was braced for the small disappointment of a continuing plot with connections and answers, because those make a story less scary.* And yeah, that is happening because that sort of thing is inevitable in a story with a continuing plot and yeah, the connections do make it less scary, but I appreciate that the writer has acknowledged that and is clearly doing his best to avoid those moments of letdown.

For example! Today on my lunchbreak, I listened to episode 61, which calls back to the second episode of the podcast, in which there was a mysterious locked box. In episode 61, the box is opened. Now, of course, any horror fan can tell you that, no matter how scary something you can see is, it is always less frightening than the thing you can't see, can't identify or quantify. Seeing inside that box was almost inevitably going to be a disappointment. ( Spoilers! ) That's so good! As a person who enjoys the sensation of a good horror story, I am pleasingly unsettled and as a person who enjoys the craft of a good horror story, I am pleasantly impressed.









*Connections mean that, on some level, a thing can be fully tied together and possibly described, which means it can be understood, and understanding inevitably diminishes fear and, in conclusion, that's why there are conspiracy theorists.

**( spoilery footnote )

Things:

- I have now finished episode 22 of The Magnus Archives. I promise I will stop constantly talking about it soon but soon is not now, so I'm going to mention how consistently excellent the sound design is on this show. There aren't sound effects as such, but the very slight tape recorder distortion during all the statements is very effective and god, I love the little changes to the background music that reflect the story being told. The bell in episode 20 really got me, as did the slight skittering noises in 22. It's very good.

- Also, episodes 19 and 20 (which are, unusually, a two-parter) were lovely, because they were a flavor of horror that I don't see nearly enough of, which is spiritual horror - the horror of being cut off from god. The Exorcist has a little of that with Father Karras' whole thing, and I'm sure I'm missing some other obvious works, but I'm hard pressed to think of a story that dealt with that flavor of horror so directly. Maybe I would enjoy possession horror more if more of it were from the possessed person's point of view.

- Actually, this may be a place where I am displaying my ignorance: I have not enjoyed much of the possession horror I have read/watched so I tend to avoid it. Is there other possession horror from the possessed person's point of view? It seems like most of what I've seen tends to be otherwise.

- Relatedly: I've had to take my WWI and horror book back to the library half-finished, as it has a hold. I'm not sure that I will try to get it again to finish it. While parts of it were very interesting, the author's thesis is far too broad to my mind (while obviously influential in terms of early horror film and thus some of the tropes that survive to this day, I don't really believe that all 20th century horror is about WWI and the author did not make his case on this point convincingly). Also, he does a thing that I've seen other horror scholars do before and which always irritates me, which is decide early on that all horror ultimately boils down to fear of one's own bodily death and then continue to try to interpret every work of horror through that lens. Which is obviously nonsense: I can think of all sorts of horrific things that have very little to do with the fear of bodily death. The author at several points tried to argue that all of Lovecraft's work is about fear of bodily death and I had to physically put the book down for a few minutes due to the weight of all that wrongness. This dude wrote a Lovecraft biography! I don't understand! In conclusion, I cannot finish this book because it would end with me writing the author a long and angry letter about how wrong he is and I cannot be that person.

- I have my D&D meetup scheduled for tonight, but only two out of the six players have said they could make it. Which means I'm going to spend the rest of the day anxiously wondering if they're going to come or if I should try to reschedule for next week. It is a trial.

Continued listening to The Magnus Archive on my lunchbreak and have come to a potentially disturbing realization about myself, to wit:

If, in the course of my day, I found a garbage bag full of human teeth, my first thought would not be, "Oh gross!" or "I should probably report this to the police," but "...can I take this home with me?"

I mean, I probably wouldn't for reasons of hygiene and would probably stumble on the idea of reporting it to somebody eventually but the desire to own a garbage bag full of human teeth would still be there.