The Magnus Archives - MAG 160.2 - Season 4 Q+A Part 2

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

It's time for Alex and Jonny to answer more of your questions in the second part of our Magnus Q&A!Thanks to this week's Patrons: Spooooky, Kate Talbot, Lisa K., Jari Thorup Palo, Lou Harrison, Elliot, Claudia Howard, Amanda Lord, Sarah Cavanagh, Jessica Freeman, Freshcat, dog, Elizabeth Kalbacher, Aine Morgan, Corvin J Lyn, Kit, Cody Wolfe, Iris Lazuli, Sparr, Carrie LeClairIf you would like to join them, be sure to visit www.patreon.com/rustyquillEdited this week by Elizabeth Moffatt & Alexander J Newall.Check out our merchandise at https://www.redbubble.com/people/rustyquill/collections/708982-the-magnus-archives-s1You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hi everyone, Alex here. I'd just like to take a moment to thank some of our patrons. Spooky. Kate Talbot. Lisa Kay. Jari Thorup-Parlow.

Lou Harrison. Elliot. Claudia Howard. Amanda Lord. Sarah Kavanaugh. Thank you all. We really appreciate your support. If you'd like to join them, go to www.patreon.com forward slash Rusty Quill and take a look at our rewards. Hello again! Welcome to the Magnus Archives Season 4 Q&A Session 2. Part 2. Part 2, because we have a lot of questions. Two questions, two furious. Yep, and from our perspective, we stopped for...

Step up to the questions. We have stopped for five minutes before immediately pressing on with a new round of questions. So, with that in mind, then I'm going to... Q&A 2, question boogaloo. Q&A 2, the quickening. I'm going to jump into the first question. Q&A 2, Q&A harder. This one's at an airport, but it's basically the same thing.

Miri asks, was Ben aware before the last few episodes of season four that Elias was possessed by Jonah Magnus? If not, when did you guys tell him and what was his reaction? Oh, when did he find out? Ben knew well, like more than a season. It's really weird because what different voice actors do and don't know is often kind of determined by them. It's non-standardised. Because generally we'll lay out all of their story to them pretty much from the off.

But also we're really bad at not just massively talking spoilers when we're in the production space. So some voice actors, Faye specifically, is very keen to not be spoiled. Which does not gel with how I direct at all. Which is lovely. Because they are very into actually listening along lid used to really not like spoilers she gave up the coast then gave up the struggle at some point they're just like yeah okay just tell me what happens some people argue that you give a better portrayal if you don't know what's going to be

coming next i argue the opposite and that i think it leads to better script reading if you do know the destination because you can focus on like the foreshadowing and making the bits that matter land more and so on it is up for debate it is like that there are different schools of directing but generally speaking i err on the side of telling people pretty much their arc as far as is reasonable so i wouldn't like in episode one tell someone how they're going to end in season five yeah we told ben right from the off that elias was one of the big bads yep uh we didn't go into a lot of detail with him at the time uh both because jonah magnus as a thing hadn't been fully fleshed out for us yeah and also because he hadn't even been mentioned in the series at that point so there wouldn't

have been any context for Ben to understand anyway. It would have been irrelevant to his characterisation. I think we laid out everything about Elias to him early Season 3, shortly before the big villainous turn. Yeah, Ben knew he was the big bad straight out of the gate. He didn't know the niche. No, he knew he was a bad. So he knew he was a big bad.

He didn't think he was an arbitrary bad. Yeah. And then, yeah, end of season two, beginning of season three, we're like, here's the nature of your badness. But I don't have a specific date or anything. No. And generally, Ben has been one of the ones who I've always enjoyed his reactions to discovering the twists quite a lot.

With different voice actors, some of them are like, oh different voice actors some of them are like oh cool uh some of them like oh okay ben is very much a sort of like an appreciative like ah but only so ben ben's very expressive and i feel safe in saying with ben what makes me laugh is ben doesn't hide if he doesn't approve of a story move as well. Yeah. So if you give him a story move and he doesn't think it makes sense, it'll immediately be a, hmm, right, okay, hmm, what? I wouldn't know. Until he gets the remaining character things that are relevant. It has happened for Magnus once where he's like, I can't remember what it was.

I think it was something like, why is he killing Lightner? He's like, cool thing. I don't understand why this is happening. Oh, yeah, no, because we gave him the script before we'd laid out so he basically turned up going yeah it's a cool story move i don't understand why this is happening and he doesn't do that oh he goes up cool there's a there's a problem that needs solving but then the second that he's given the context it goes okay cool great but yeah he's a very expressive that sounds like that might have been the time we actually laid everything out like that might actually have been it so that's even earlier than we think okay in that case then i am going to

carry on with a little bit which is a similar one from cmp which is how much to backstory do the general cast know in advance uh yeah we kind of covered this a little bit in the last question the answer is it's very much up to them uh most of them, I think, know a random smattering of significant upcoming twists. Though not from season five, actually. That's what I was going to say. We're now in a really weird situation where, for most people, us saying this is what's going to happen has generally resulted in, and then the world ends.

So we're actually in a weird situation where performers now... What happens after the world ends? So now we're in a situation where I'd actually say performers know the least about their arcs yeah than they have for years because everyone was always satisfied with and then the world ends yeah i think ben was the only one who of course goes but then what you know yeah ben knows a little bit of what's uh what's coming he does um but yeah it's always weird having people also also people within the wider Rusty Quill family who sort of come into Magnus

because they'll have osmosed stuff from a production point of view, like when we brought Helen as the therapist, which, oh, incidentally, I'm really sad about Helen as the therapist just because everyone decided that she sounded really spooky and thus was really plot relevant and I was like oh no

we just we forgot to cast someone because it was such a small bit we ran out we ran out of people to cast like everyone who was on our casting books was either unavailable out of the country or already cast in other roles by that point and then helen

was there for a gaming recording and like we'd kind of penciled her in for some stuff in season five yeah but we were like okay well it's it's fine it's a very small role uh it's just like three lines no one's gonna really notice like we can reuse you in season five but now everyone decided that the therapist was massively significant and massively important. It's because we introduced a speaking character in season four. It was just meant to be a playful swipe at the black tapes and Tannis and the Bright Sessions, all the ones where it's like, OK, so now we're going to get a lot of story through these tape recordings of a therapy session.

I thought it'd be really funny to have a, oh, can I record these therapy sessions for exposition? No, you can't. No exposition. No exposition. I thought that'd be a really funny little joke. Didn't, can I record these therapy sessions for exposition? No, you can't. No exposition. No exposition. I thought that'd be a really funny little joke. Didn't come up how you did it. No, everyone has been hanging theories on it. And I'm like, oh, that's, that's not ideal. Is it too late to make the therapist Jonah's therapist? Okay. How did you go about scripting and editing the sounds of the apocalypse in the season finale well from a scripting side uh i think what was it something along the lines of uh the world goes horribly wrong everything is bad forever i think that's the stage direction or as close as it gets

yeah in terms of audio i am gonna reveal something i didn't think i was gonna reveal but i'm feeling i'm feeling honest today fruity i don't like my soundscape for that episode at the end i don't feel like i did it justice properly if i had another stab at it i think i could do a better job however that is in a way where i know in my heart of hearts that the only person that would tell the difference between the one i would make and that one is me in terms of how it was made bizarrely i actually used loads of leftovers from the lonely i did loads of soundscape experimentation with the lonely and ended up with a few that were completely inappropriate for the lonely but quite useful however the soundscape for the apocalypse is actually a bit too dense there's more layers

than the human is really going to be able to pick up on um so there are things like um pitch shifted and slowed down screams there are some winds from an actual desert in there like a too tall cake there are a oh there's a really peculiar distortion that i managed to stumble on where basically it is the sound of a magnetic tape breaking like a weird cake but yeah again it's a bit it sounds strange i'd probably strip a bit out and make it a bit clearer what's going on if i had my way. Too much detail on that one, I think. Disagree. Story questions.

All right, let's hit it. This one's from Bells. Good question. I like this one. Will we get any more information about the original Elias Bouchard? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Like, his major contribution to the story is having his eyes nicked.

It is true. But that doesn't mean that we won't find out a bit more about him. I think more context is probably going to come through at some point. I don't think it is something upon which the entire story will pivot and become an Elias-centric masterpiece. Yeah, the pre-Jonah Elias is not super plot significant, but that doesn't mean he won't get a little bit more exploration, if we have time.

I like to think as well, honestly, he's just not that interesting a guy no that's kind of the point of him like he's in in my in my mind he's kind of a lightly posh dickhead who just kind of coasted through uni uh and landed a just a weird little academic job uh and crucially didn't have a lot of connections who would miss him if something were to happen to his eye color or shape or presence right onto a writing question specifically this one's from des i find that writing and working on intensive dark material can often be mentally slash emotionally taxing how do you you, especially in long takes, sessions or scenes, take care of yourself? Oh, this is actually something I'm not great at.

I find that the emotional aspect doesn't get to me as much because I tend not to write things that I personally find too emotionally draining. Sometimes it will end up in that territory, especially with like The Lonely. But for the most part, I write the sort of horror that, though it might give me that sort of scare,

as I'm writing it, it's not going to, the emotion I'm getting from it is a sort of, kind of slightly sadistic glee, I guess. So I don't find the writing of that super draining. What I'm bad at is I'm very much a deadline cruncher, which is something I've been gradually getting better at over the course of Magnus.

Certainly early on, my challenge was not shotgunning the writing of two episodes like the day before a recording and absolutely destroying my sleep pattern. Within recordings itself, a lot of it's just drink a lot of water take regular breaks don't scream so much that all the oxygen leaves the room and you all start to feel dizzy yeah that's the thing you get used to that you were climatized you really do um from my perspective i'm quite lucky in that i've said before sometimes i'm a bit weird when it comes to the writing side no matter what I've written or no matter what I've worked on

it just doesn't occupy the same part of me as actual real world emotion for me scripts even when I'm writing the most emotional thing ever are still almost a puzzle to be solved so it doesn't have that effect on me I would say in terms of other cast this season has definitely been

the one that has prompted the most emotional responses from performers again 90 of it due to the lonely if i'm honest and there has been ones where part of being a director is learning to read the room and part of that has been like cool i, I don't know, we are behind schedule for an hour. We still now need to take a 15 minute break because if we don't, you're going to break someone or you're going to end up just completely ruining a recording day because no one's in a state way because of stuff outside yeah that show you've got to make sure to just give them the space they need and fundamentally work around it because their well-being is always going to be 100 more important than whatever your own artistic vision might be the self-care thing is really important it's extremely important on the artistic side because we have been exposed to a lot of false narratives that sacrifice of self is a necessity for artistic endeavor and i don't believe that is the case i think that yeah you ultimately you have to

put time into the thing that you make but there has it has mutated over the years into the ideas that you have to yeah you have to punishated over the years into the ideas that you have to yeah you have to punish yourself in order to make something of worth and it's not true also i think the the overwhelming narrative that's is built up that your productivity is your value oh is something that i mean we both struggle with i think and the worst thing is that it doesn't actually make you more productive it just makes it just makes you feel worse when you're not doing stuff really really high in a way that they don't need to be yeah it just means that if you're not doing work you feel really bad it doesn't actually mean you're doing more work and it's something that i think we both still

struggle with but it's a very important thing to learn creativity is not stick to hit yourself with yeah like it's that simple and productivity has become. Creativity is not a stick to hit yourself with. It's that simple. And productivity has become the new way of disguising the old idea. It's the whole thing of like, oh, I'm a seventh cup of coffee and I haven't slept because I've been... Don't glorify. Don't do that. It's not a good thing. Yeah, people are right.

Which is something I'm... Yeah, we're still learning. I actively struggle, but I will never, ever do the thing of like, it's when people brag about, oh, you know, I'm getting by on like four hours sleep. It's like, what are you doing? Why? Sleep is good. If nothing else, it's inefficient.

And that's the real evil. It's inefficient, okay? Here we go. You've got to maintain the engine. And that's the real evil here is the inefficiency of it as a system. I would say it is about your own well-being. And what's real evil here, is the inefficiency of it as a system. I would say it is about your own well-being. And what's this? We're finally dropping caricatures and laying bare Alex's core.

It genuinely really bugs me. It bugs me because you're making life harder for yourself in the long run. Trading off your long term for your short term doesn't work. It goes wrong. You end up running a podcast company. Okay, that one was a joke um i should bring this mostly i'm gonna bring this back let's wrangle it just drag it resembling an actual episode here okay i'm gonna i'm gonna loop back around then sure sure oh interesting okay uh this one's from orchid alex what was it like to voice martin while he was in The Forsaken?

Staying with the high truth, which I'm trying to do for this Q&A, actually really annoying because it just so happens at the time we were in a real quagmire of production issues. It was when the stuff was going wrong with Alistair's audio and the technical stuff and blah, blah, blah. It's really really really difficult when a day of production is going down the toilet to then go and now i'm sad and kind of distant because what you want to do is go so so problematically calm yeah i would love i would love to give a real deep like expose my core of my being about what it was like.

Honestly, 90% of it was just trying to take how a day is going, a bad day, putting it in a box, putting it on the shelf, and getting the audio. It took more takes than it should have. Oh, God, I'm sorry. I'm just remembering when we were recording the cabin scenes and you'd just hurt your foot. I had really, really a lot of foot pain due to like

minor surgery and it was giving you this weird manic energy and i was like weird i was like no it's it's domestic it's chill it's relaxed it's a respite before all the the horror and i just yeah yeah yeah of course i'll let you know if i see any good cows good cows good cows yeah it was not good we had to do a complete retake it was not good um here's something useful in terms of points of reference in order to play martin in that situation due to varying situations i have spent chunks of time around people who are on things like um heavy neural inhibitors things like that often it's just like a pain medication things things like that uh so of all the things i weirdly use that as a bit of a touchstone but in terms of again whether it emotionally upset me or anything i'm really sorry mostly i was angry

when i was recording those lines that might not be as as glamorous and to be fair like my my my heart rending like shouts for martin were mainly just us doing it again and again trying to get the exact levels right so that they weren't clipping but were also clearly shouted and johnny was being really good with me because i was i was getting i was getting real antsy i was getting real antsy that day okay we're going to abandon that for a little bit so i can just forget the memories sure just forget that feeling and not get that manic energy back we're going to go on to talking a bit more about story again yep specifically from constantin valdo given the actions eric and melanie took to leave the archives what extreme actions would one need to take to sever their

connection to other entities oh so you're talking like how would you how would you throw a roadblock against the desolation or how would you do the same against the end things like that i don't feel like there is an option for the end unless you i are making no i mean all actions with that would get you further in because it's showing an obsession at the end kind of is yeah like the like the ends are yeah the ends actually a really interesting one because because it works very strongly in both directions i mean the like the the thing to do with the end is essentially what georgie ends up accidentally, which is just no longer fearing it. Just check out. Just, like...

And in Georgie's case, it wasn't something that she... Or rather, I feel that, like, after a certain point, she did choose it, but... It's a bit mucky. It's a sort of a grey area. In terms of other ones, though. Yeah, that's a real good question. Because it's not about the physical action it's about the categorical and very concrete rejection also via dream logic

as well yeah like via sort of fairy tale dream logic um oh i don't think this is the one we're going to have to be able to answer on this for the simple reason that it's actually going to require quite a lot of thought yeah i mean it's like i'll be honest it took quite a while to to nail down for the for the beholding because like while it while it's technically a very simple act a very simple answer it took a quite a journey to actually arrive at that as the there were sort of various drafts, and it was only when we came up with that we were like, yes, that's the one. I'm trying to think.

I don't even have another one for any of you that's just leaking out. Something like the desolation. If you were to legitimately sacrifice your life for someone you loved. I suppose, but at the same time, does it count as being severed from an entity if you're well like well well if it would be if you survived oh sure okay like i don't think a pure altruism yeah like like it would need to like i think for the desolation like a pure act of altruistic love but at the same time that's not quite as that's not quite as concrete as, like, you need to blind yourself.

Because what we would do is we'd have to take that as an idea and then find a symbolic physical action to manifest that emotional swap. And I don't know what that would be. Like I said, that's a really good question. Oh, The Stranger. The Stranger, you've got to run through the town centre nude. Just bare it all. No disguises.

And if anyone draws attention, you have to engage them in a conversation. You don't just fly by. No, absolutely. You walk through and you engage people. You're very, very honest about what you're doing. Absolutely. There you go. That'd work.

That took a weird turn at the end. the flesh you go veggie that's not i knew you'd say that that's not correct you know what i know in fact that's that's gonna jump me back to this is gonna jump me back to a um question on cast because this is from hannah sure is johnny a vegetarian honestly after all the meat content i might just become one myself no my relationship with meat is as you might have guessed complicated basically i'm not a vegetarian i wasn't a vegetarian at the beginning it was much more a fear about body horror and gore and then in episode 30 i did a bunch of research into abattoirs and was like oh no the industrialized meat industry is real bad and it's been something of a you know a low-key struggle since because i i really i really like meat and at this point

i don't eat a lot of it especially because a lot of other people in my life are vegetarian or vegan. So most of the meals that I cook at home or that we eat at home are vegetarian. But I will still generally, you know, I might get a steak if we're going out to eat or a burger or that sort of thing. So I feel that I am... You are definitely meat- light as a person yeah i i consider i try to be a conscientious meat eater even though that's kind of a contradiction in terms but you do have a coherent sort of set of rules in terms of like what counts as people and not oh yeah also uh i have occasionally seen people being like oh this guy's got to be a vegetarian because he keeps saying that there's

no difference between human meat and uh animal meat and i'm like oh no the the other way around in that i don't think like let's be clear probably wouldn't eat i mean i wouldn't just eat a person okay i wouldn't i wouldn't eat a person where i would i mean no no there are context like this is this is the point like i feel that i that, I mean, obviously, prion disease aside, like, I wouldn't actually because prion disease is horrible. Oh, God. But I don't fundamentally see a difference between eating other meats and eating human meat.

You need, like, a short, pithy, like, three-word phrase that encapsulates that. I mean, don't kill people and also don't is meat but no i mean yeah meat is meat is meat but like also if someone was dying and was like hey after i die cut me up and eat me i probably would so diving in then just because i know this specific thing about you corvids people or not people corvids are people octopus people or not people yeah the i have a not people yeah i have a list of um i have a list of animals in my head that i consider people uh let's see octopuses corvids

uh dolphins apes apes if i believe an animal is capable of choosing oh elephants elephants are 100 people uh if i believe that an animal is capable of choosing to do evil, then it's a person. You've never mentioned that to me before. Well, but no, because there are elephant serial killers. True. Like corvids will pass down their vengeance list to their children. Oh, but now you're getting into the nature of evil.

Yeah, I know. This is why I say it's a very personal thing. Because I don't really have a solid like this is what evil is but at the same time i can be like okay so these dolphins helped dick van dyke when he floated out to sea these dolphins murder baby seals for fun those are clearly actions that are not being taken based on instinct because different dolphins are engaging with the exact same thing in different ways, some of which are cruel and some of which are altruistic. It's a very weird, very personal thing. But honestly, I think if an animal is capable of doing something and I'm like, you know what, that was a dick move and you could have not done that. I think it's a person. I love that your criteria for what constitutes like a person is, are they capable of badness?

Yeah. What a bleak vision of the world. Okay, okay. It's not, are they capable of badness? It's, would I judge them for being bad? Like, if a dog does something bad, I'm like, oh, that's a real shame. The owner's messed up that dog was following what it's been taught was following its instincts i don't blame the dog but an octopus that climbs

out his tank yeah an octopus that climbed sneaking around every night unscrews the lid to its tank climbs out oozes itself across the aquarium floor into other fish tanks eats the fish oozes back out back into its own tank and then screws the lid back on that's a bad octopus so what we're saying hannah is thank you for a question that i knew would immediately open a can of worms i'm so problematic now johnny sims definite cannibal we're gonna move on i've never eaten a human we've got to move on unconfirmed okay so uh this is a production question from fawny uh when you record as martin and the archivist how often are you recording together in the same place versus

recording separately and combining the dialogue in post we're always together there has been one time where we haven't, and it is because a single line needed a pick up from me. Okay, so let's be clear. All my dialogue is recorded with Alex in the room. Sometimes there have been Martin lines that he's recorded in isolation to drop in, but all my lines are recorded in the presence of Alex. Follow-on question from Playfully Evil.

Has Johnny actually been in the same room as Alistair Stewart yet, or have they never managed it? Once. We had... To be fair, I've met Alistair in other scenarios, but we were recording together for the final, the big confrontation between Peter and the Archivist. Yeah. This ROM is from Theatre underscore Ghost 98. Sure.

I want to know about the other 97. Melanie had protection from being a part of the archivist's nightmare zoo for lack of a better term because she worked for the institute right did she lose that after she quit or is she exempt because she can't see anymore oh i don't think we actually uh we actually addressed this directly it hasn't been addressed in the series i would probably say like if it's not in the text it's not canon my head can would probably be that severing our connection with the eye probably means that she doesn't i've been working under the same assumption nightmare zoo but also it would only have been for a short time anyway because the rules

have changed significantly so we'll do from one from uh an alert is jan kilbride still alive in the buried given john said it didn't help that Gertrude killed him before chucking him in? Eh. Kinda. I think that's all you can really say on it. Yeah, chucking someone into one of the entities is probably a bad idea, regardless of whether they're alive or dead. Correct. I haven't really worked out the details of Jan Kilbride's situation and how much it is still a situation, but it's probably not great.

From Demon Cleric, were Agape and the monster pig animals that became avatars? Oh, what a good question. Huh. I'd mainly been conceiving of them as monsters in the sense of direct expressions of the entities. But pigs are people that can make choices, Johnny. No, I don't think pigs are quite people. They're on the cusp. Oh, okay.

They're on the cusp. I personally don't quite think they're people, but I respect those who would disagree. Okay, okay. But yeah yeah you could 100 see them as as avatars although actually not in the case of monster pig because monster pig emerged like turned up from nowhere yes if there was a particularly horrid pig but monster pig explicitly there was an extra pig in there and it wasn't there yeah agape maybe like as i've said i don't personally conceive of dogs as people enough to necessarily believe that any choice they would make would be

concrete enough to constitute to constitute a pledge yeah but it's a really interesting thought and i am very confident that there are going to be a lot of fanfics out there that explore it far better than I would. On to another writing one. This one's from Elisis. Johnny, can you talk about how the Magnus Archives comments on capitalism and getting tangled in systems of oppression? Not really, because it's all in the Magnus Archives. Like, broadly speaking, I think capitalism's a big **** and that systems of oppression are real bad.

But it's all very complicated because it's impossible to extricate yourself from the system. And if you do extricate yourself from the system, how much that is actually helping to dismantle the system and if you do extricate yourself from the system how much that is actually helping to dismantle the system is difficult but also when you're within a system working to dismantle it is really difficult as well because the system is designed in order to take your efforts to dismantle it and channel them into reinforcing different aspects of it and it's all a big wobbly complicated unpleasant mess and you know you could theoretically say

that's analogous to the fears a bit there's an additional factor here as well which is worth bearing in mind which is just because of the nature of like people who are engaged in the arts and so on as a group we do tend to lean left so that will affect the things that we make as a direct result of that but i wouldn't say that it is written entirely as a treatise and manifesto no but like it's it's very much yeah it's as i've said before it's very much our examination of a lot of these thoughts and topics and yeah capitalism is is definitely one of the uh one of the most cohesive metaphorical frameworks but i think there are quite a lot of uh other metaphors that you can use it for it's it's about being caught in systems bigger than yourself which i

think is what cosmic horror speaks to oh yeah very well i think it's it's useful because it's a useful real world large scale system that people get swallowed by. You could also look at it as analogous to finding yourself working under a totalitarian or fascist regime. Yeah, true. Like the idea of like, well, no, you have to participate in an actively harmful system or you will yourself receive harm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is the moral thing to do in that situation? Yeah, it's difficult questions and no easy didactic answers, at least not from me.

Well, then let's jump onto one that I think you can have an easy answer to. Sure. From Nimbus. It's been nagging me since I started producing fan work back in season one. Does the Institute have a dress code? Yes. It's on maybe page eight of the Institute policies, and people read it, and then they look around

and see that most people kind of disregard it. It's unnecessarily arcane in how it's written. Yeah, like, it doesn't give any examples. The word appropriate is used, like, 14 times with no reference to how something can be appropriate. It's very much there so that if Elias needs to call someone up on something, he can just be like, and your dress is unacceptable. Oh, you know what it is?

It's the Magnus Archives equivalent of loitering. That's what it is. It's loitering. It's a rule that only comes into effect if I need to punish you for it. Also, no one in the archives has ever been pulled up on it, and it's a bit of a sore point around the rest of the institute that the archives staff always look just absolutely horrendous and no one ever says boo whereas like david in research he wore jeans that were slightly shorter

than uh the n that doesn't sound appropriate to me it was appropriate apparently it was appropriate he wore them with sandals is the thing that's why it's inappropriate like he'd worn them before

with like proper shoes and no one had said anything but weirdly when he put them with sandals it was the jeans that Elias was talking about sandals are a trip hazard sandals are a trip hazard

well but he didn't mention the sandals oh he was talking about the jeans so where's where's the line? Okay, cool. From Luna Quill.

Had you always planned to release the final episode of season four on Halloween, or was it just a lucky coincidence? I can answer this one really easily. Originally, we were hoping not to need to have a mid-season hiatus, so Halloween wasn't on the cards. Once a mid-season hiatus was on the cards, we sat down, ran the numbers, and went, well, ending the world on alloween actually that'd be just you know what would happen if we had this length that'd just be that'd just be swell so it does mean as well

rather foolishly that mid-season hiatus was a little bit shorter than it should have been also there was a real danger because it was almost on brexit day and i'll be honest i was absolutely terrified that our episode about ending the world would be forever associated with Brexit Day. But this does lead on to a pretty heavy question, actually, which I think a lot of people will want to know for various reasons. From Lunatic Poet, for both of you, have you experienced creative burnout

while working on this podcast? If so, how do you normally recover from that sort of burnout? Yeah, some of season two, some of season three. To a certain degree, I had to push through the burnout, which was real bad news. Generally, it's not something that you can force a recovery from. You've just got to kind of be kind to yourself, recovery from. You've just got to kind of be kind to yourself, actively ensure that you have the downtime, don't beat yourself up for taking the time to recover, and just wait for it to get a bit better. It was lucky that I don't think it overlapped with any of the massively significant episodes.

So it was very much, I withdrew from a lot of stuff that wasn't Magnus or Day Job. Aside from those two things, I was mainly just kind of locked down in recovery mode. Creative burnout hasn't been too much of an issue for me for the simple reason that one of the sad truths about running the business side of things is that frankly i don't get as much creative output as i would like a lot of what i'm doing at the moment is working with other people's ideas um which is an enjoyable thing in and of its own right but i haven't done the sit down and write for like two days solid in a long time i haven't done it to be fair thinking about it my burnout was less was less creative and more writing in terms of the actual process of writing like i could still conceive of episodes yeah yeah yeah it was you've never

just been dry no uh which is good but also like worrying because it'll happen someday and i'm a little bit dreading when it happens um but no it was the the burnout was much more in the sense of it was just a really really physically uncomfortable and difficult thing to sit down and type out the words yeah i'd love to give people advice on how to deal with burnout i don't really have a solution mine comes out in slightly weird ways so what i have learned over the years which is a unhelpful thing to learn is that i delay when it happens until like when it can be oh you do the teacher thing yes you do the teacher thing where you get through the term and then suddenly you get massively ill every single every single time

and you can always tell how i'm doing because my weight fluctuates i don't have a solution for this but what i would like people to take away from this is a q a so i'll explicitly state it is there is a danger when you are in a position of even minor responsibility within an industry or within a system where you can end up setting a bar or setting a precedent. Magnus is the release schedule. It is due to things that were beyond my control at the outset. And if there's one thing I want people to take away, it is not the belief that the only way to get this scale of growth is by basically sacrificing yourself to do it.

It isn't that at all. And the last thing I want is people to use us as a bar where if you're not putting yourself through the ground we're not we're not doing we're not doing this great i mean the only thing that i'm quite proud of how we do this is that we don't push the other people involved no like we're very conscientious of their well-being well that was heavy yeah that's a big one let's move on to a nice easy one yes story boom eyeless jade will we see a bit more of melanie and georgie during season five yes no they're gone forever no they'll be there all characters that you know are now gone forever well we haven't we haven't fully fully laid out season five.

We'll talk it through. They'll be turning up, don't worry. You're fine. If nothing else, we'd be running out of characters that people know if we hemorrhage many more. We're now going to jump on to a story one, which has been asked by Look Alive Sunshine, but I know has been kind of kicking around the fandom a bit.

Are Daisy and Basira in a romantic relationship? Oh, okay. This is going to be quite a long answer, so I'd ask that people bear with me. There is never going to be an explicit textual clarification of that for a very specific reason. for a very specific reason. So with each relationship within the series, there is a specific thing that I'm trying to explore, a specific dynamic that I feel is the core of the relationship and something that I am really interested in exploring. With Daisy and Basira, what that has always been is the idea of partners within a in this case the police but within a context of an us and them mentality the idea of having your back against a world that is believed

rightly or wrongly to be hostile to you the sort of compromises that get made and the sort of excuses that you create for yourself to allow certain very harmful, occasionally even evil behaviours because you have this mentality of it's us against the monsters. We have to have each other's backs. And so it is this and especially how it manifests within the context of something like police work. Now, adding an explicitly romantic aspect to that relationship would, to my mind, massively complicate and potentially subvert it. Making a sacrifice to excuse the violent and harmful acts that someone has done because you are in love with them is a very different thing to making compromises to excuse the violent and harmful acts someone has done because you have their back within a police or a context of us versus them. a context of us versus them. That's not to say explicitly that they are not. I'm 100% not saying they are not romantically involved, and I'm not going to go into what my own headcanon is, because that would have undue influence. It'd have massive ramifications that are going to

detract from the point you're trying to make. But I will say that textually, that's not a relationship that's ever going to be codified one way or the other. Basira's entire arc is explicitly intended as an examination of how a siege mentality within somebody who conceives of themselves as, to one degree or another, keeping the peace or defending people can turn toxic. Yeah. This one's from jane the brain johnny have you ever worried you'll run out of statement ideas yes hasn't happened yet no not yet um i i actively try and collect them from people around me if anyone ever says anything

particularly spooky or anything that locks into my brain as potentially having a spooky aspect to it I will stop the conversation and I will note it down I am still wanting us to do one on coffin syndrome in submarines yes I know it's great I don't know if we'll be able to fit it in season 5

I genuinely don't know if we will but we'll see I am well aware of time as it's ticking by and we have ended are giving some heavy answers which have eaten some so i am going to make sure that we get through towards the gray i'm going to make sure we try and get through a few more that people are uh wanting to get answers to and we probably should do in the public sure so uh hail the wanderer asks you've mentioned previously that in order to assume their full powers as an avatar, a death seems to be required.

Does it make a difference that the death used to fuel the Archivist's transformation was that of another avatar? I don't feel that a death is necessarily required to become an avatar. What is required to become an avatar is always active choice. You need to make an active decision to finally cross that threshold because drama and death is a very good motivator for that sort of decision you know the prospect of death is it's very scary and it's such a powerful categorical thing that in many cases it is going to be the catalyst but what i might say

is i'm going to ask the next question because i think they bleed together sure from cara roth why does the corruption revolve so heavily around love and looking for love because i would use the corruption as one of the examples of where they tend not they tend not to die or necessarily involve a death because that is a devotion it's the whole eros thanatos love and death ah freud but what that comes back what a coke addle but what that comes back around to though is that i would argue with the corruption more than most of them has probably less active death in it and it's more obsession and love yeah the corruption it does engage a lot with the idea of love and toxicity within that yeah and the the things you do not not just for

like romantic love but for a sense of belonging yeah it links thematically in my mind to the idea of the hive to the idea of colonies of mold almost the like a lot of insinuation yeah the idea of like the many as one and being part of a group or part of a whole and how that very deep human desire can be corrupted and can turn uh turn rotten although i suppose in many ways that does link back to death in the idea of like the death of the self true the idea of subsuming yourself in a wider hole which uh in terms then of the original question to do with avatars and whether a death is required for transformation it is not required but it is common yeah i think that's probably the simplest way of putting it yeah you know what i'd go so far as to say that a metaphorical death is required i can tell you now that a metaphorical death will be required for the simple reason that if it isn't happening

it's kind of a bad bit of drama yeah like but that's where script versus law yeah like it's one of those things where like the uh the thematic aspects are beholden to the drama of the thing like the fact it is a fictionalized thing where you need to have some pretty high moments of drama mean that you're more domestic avatars that like just will come to their full power through just like being horrible in very mundane real ways they're probably not making the cut for for the the drama it's mainly the death it's mainly the mainly the death mainly the death death and sex right we're going to jump on to complete tonal change boom from basically everyone how's the admiral doing oh he's uh you'll see he's fine he's happy what really here's here's a sneaky

little pet peeve of mine that really bugged me everyone was going on and on about oh we want the admiral back we want the admiral back i put the admiral back in but it was the one where melanie's there going i'm sorry i can't help you now no one cared apparently no there's too much going on so everyone had been fighting tooth and nail to get the admiral he's there he's having a great time yeah no one bats an eyelid the admiral's having a great time 40 foot tall with laser beams for claws we'll see okay we are now perisly close to running out of time so i'm gonna do a quick fire across the board and just see how many we can get out. Cool.

Okay, you ready? From basically everyone. Johnny, how did you get through the closing chant of 160 on a single breath? I was a choir boy from the age of eight. Like, I can do breath. From mealy bit? Sorry, I mean eldritch strength channeling my dark masters. Of course.

Oh, actually, you know what? I'm going to add one thing. This should be quickfire. my dark masters of course oh actually you know what i'm gonna add one thing i should this should be quick fire he did that like four takes on the trot never batting an eyelid and we had to take no precautions or extra steps whatsoever it was quite peculiar i can do an invocation it was just funny he did four on the trot you were like cool do you need another one and then didn't breathe between one and the next it was a bit yes i did yes i did weird yes i did right from mealy bit johnny how did you go about doing your best Ben as Elias impression?

Did Ben record a version for you or was that just your skillful ear? It was actually incredibly simple because Ben once confided in me that his Elias voice had originally just been based on my archivist voice, just making it a bit more smug. Yep. So I just made my archivist voice just making it a bit more smug yep so i just made my uh archivist voice a bit more smug and it worked so it's the exact reverse of what you think yeah i like i reverse engineered it because he yeah it was remarkably easy from uh vine tabris johnny the laugh john does at the end of 160 was the perfect mixture of terror and delight how many

times did you have to practice to perfect that laugh uh we didn't practice but we did a lot of takes i believe that was one of the days where production was running into issues so i was a little bit more like do it again do it again we did we did about like i think 10 takes of the laugh uh but like this is the thing about working in audio you tend not to practice as much as you just do a lot of takes. Record the practices. Yeah, because any practice could be the best take. So this is from FFS. Will we find out more about the house on Hilltop Road or is that storyline complete? It is not complete.

This is from a bunch of people. What are those tape recorders? Are you ever going to tell us about them in detail? Yes. This is from Michael Bush. Do avatars of the lonely have other powers than just turning invisible? I mean, they don't turn invisible.

They just make it so they're not where everyone else is. And also they can send people to the lonely. And it depends on the avatar. Like every avatar has fundamentally different powers. I think with the lonely, the being able to send them into a world with no one else is a strong commonality. But like other lonely avatars might have completely different powers other lonely avatars might make it so that you forgot everyone you ever cared about or that everyone you ever cared about forgot you that might be a power who knows okay on to a question from nicole can we finally get an answer as to what power is at work in mag 005 thrown away no actually you know what yes all right

all right all right i'll put this to bed all right let's put this to bed okay so number five thrown away was a very early version of tom hann and the flesh It was the whole, like being able to remove something and it was playing with ideas of surplus of, uh, overproduction, this sort of thing. Also the idea of like body parts that are, that have been transformed.

Uh, but a lot of the thematic elements had not been quite nailed down because it was still very early in the, uh, in the writing process. And so it got a bit muddied, but to be honest, also probably a lot of other powers at work there. It's writing process and so it got a bit muddied but to be honest also probably a lot of other powers at work there it's like a pretty it's a it's a pretty much

we can say yeah there's a lot yeah there's like it's a grab bag of fears because it's uh like so from a meta point of view it's it's a muddy one because there's lots of different powers at play yeah so like it was it was written as kind of flesh adjacent um in retrospect it's a lot more complicated than that a lot of it was just because it's one of the it was one of the early ones uh and we were still workshopping a lot of stuff i'm glad we managed to put that one to bed i didn't know whether we'd go over the entire thing yeah it's one of those it's one of those ones where like i've never wanted to really say because the the answer is well it's this one but we didn't do it very well um and also because i know that a lot of people like no i really like

throw away because it doesn't doesn't it sticks out it doesn't conform like yeah that's because it's because we didn't write it consistently um but at the same time number of gunshots though but at the same time uh i'm it's one of those ones that i've been happy to answer to people who've asked it face to face to me so i'm like you know what i might as well just go on record um another one from basically everyone what's up with john's lighter is it significant what's going on there uh yeah it's significant from kershaw but i know other people as well are we gonna hear anything about rosie's backstory she's a woman of mystery. I don't know. I categorically want to. But want and will are not the same thing.

It depends. There is a non-zero chance we'll meet her in season five, but it depends if meeting her would make the series better. Like, I'm not going to put her in there for the sake of having her in there yeah there are certain things that are still up in the air in season five so maybe but i'm not promising anything okay this one's from seb if john could tell his season one self something what would it be uh run away just stop just go away you've some mistakes. It's already a bad call. Also, leave Martin alone.

Just bail. That's basically what everyone would say to season one. You're making a mistake. Just leave. Just leave. Elias is a prick. Just leave and the problem goes away. I mean, to be fair, it doesn't because they've already, they've already joined the Institute.

Season one. Technically season one, they've already joined. Okay, yeah, fair point. But it's, from an emotional standpoint, that's still the advice. I like, I think just like,

stay put. Have a perpetual slowdown, you know, like, like a strike action. Well, no, no, like what Melanie was doing. Yeah, literally. But just do that.

Sustain it. Just stick with it. And if nothing else, you'll buy yourself a good 15 years extra. Works for you, dude. This one's from NotTorrey. What kind of music do you like or listen to when writing? Oh, my musical tastes change quite a lot. When I'm writing, I mean's it's kind of a dull

answer but when i'm writing i tend to listen to dark ambient playlists on spotify also rain also rain like a rain generator for some rain generator for some if a statement has like a unmuted quality to it i like to listen to rain sounds otherwise just just like generic dark ambient spooky sounds uh it's not a particularly interesting answer but it's it gets me in the headspace outside of that currently in a post-rock phase um really enjoying just ridiculous uh albums with like the most pretentious title names uh what was it something something like shit heap gloria owed to a town planner or something like that they're all just ridiculous and i love them and it's just half of it it's just elderly American men just rambling on about radio towers or like weird spiritualist conspiracies. Right.

I'm going to give you a choice for the last question of this round. Okay. Okay. Okay. Would you rather a question that touches on RPGs or a question that touches further upon cats? Big decision time. You know what? What are you feeling?

I'm going to keep the cats for the Patreon. Okay, okay. RPGs then. So this is from Thimbreus. What classes would the Archives crew be in D&D? Hard mode. Only one of them can be a warlock, i.e. with a patron. Right, okay.

Yeah, okay. Okay, let's have a think um so elias would be a cleric i think rather than a warlock i think you could get a mastermind with him rogue mastermind yeah yeah but it to be clear it is cleric like you are you are i mean like tim's a fighter like i'd love to say he's like a bard because of his high charisma He could have gone so far as paladin because high charisma, punchy

very self-righteous No, he takes his I think his turn is too pragmatic to be a paladin I would agree with that, so we've got Tim as a fighter I think Basira is a paladin Oh yeah Basira is a paladin.

Oh, yeah. Basira's a paladin. Daisy starts out... I think Daisy starts out as a rogue, actually. She starts out as an assassin rogue and then converts into a barbarian that refuses to use her rage powers. That's... Yeah, bang on.

Daisy Multiclass. They didn't really gel as much as they could have. Melanie. Melanie is... It's rogue. It's gotta be rogue. No, I'm sorry just you're just saying that because lid plays uh sasha in real life she plays rogues in real life uh no i think

i would do it as rogue investigator i really would because she's got that i think she's a ranger because she's got her favorite enemy oh okay yeah i can actually get on board she's very driven in terms of tracking and when she's out of her specific element she finds it very difficult you know what you know what i take mine back ranger is a better choice there ranger is a better choice in which case then um so who does that who does that leave so obviously we've still we've still got martin john uh original Original Sasha Wizard Yes yes yes yes Conscientious knows her stuff A bit too empirical when her life's on the line

Does the reading And unfortunately Very easy to kill when found alive Very squishy Okay then Martin then Difficult Commoner um okay then martin then difficult commoner uh i will over ambitious npc i'm probably going to go with bard because his thing is trying to

support everyone else i think he might just be a cohort i think he might just he's a bard i think he might just be a cohort he's he's a bard but unfortunately he doesn't have an instrument he chose poetry and isn't very well min-maxed now what he is is he's a bard who was just like cool guys so what skills do we still have to cover proficiency in land vehicles yeah okay i'll take that yeah what what oh we don't have uh we don't have urban survival okay i'll take that i Yeah. Oh, we don't have urban survival. Okay, I'll take that, I guess. Yeah. And Jon, I mean, Jon's the warlock, isn't he? Yes, due to the fluff, but I still maintain he doesn't play like a warlock.

No, that's fair, that's fair. What does he play like, then? He plays like a wizard. No, he doesn't. Yes, he does. He doesn't because he doesn't do, like, he's not meticulous. He's not meticulous in how he approaches things. I didn't say he was a good wizard.

He's a wizard that picks a fight with something far bigger than he is and releases something into the world. He's a warlock who thinks he's a druid. Expand. He thinks, like, a lot of his stuff comes naturally from connections that he feels are natural. naturally from connections that he feels are natural uh and i think that he tries to engage with the world but actually a lot of his stuff is going to be no what he is we forgot to take into account the player behind the character what john is is a warlock played by a player who's

like i'm not going to take anything for combat and everyone's like come on come on please take something no no i'm going to take only social abilities and everyone's like i mean okay he's just a warlock or he's a warlock who the player hasn't actually told anyone else as a warlock and is pretending that they're a druid right we're gonna have to call it there if yours hasn't been answered on here there's always a chance that we'll be answering it on the extra patreon episode obviously it is worth mentioning that we are on our season hiatus currently we are going to be releasing uh hiatus content about once every two weeks or so where it's going to be extra things to sort of keep things moving and let people see a bit more into how we make things stuff like that and um in the meantime obviously do check us out on social media do check out

twitter i mean if you're already listening a lot of people do um but apart from that is just say thanks you've made it to the end of the world oh yeah thanks everyone good job on that one hope hope you enjoyed the ride that isn't over that isn't over there is a full season yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely but apart from that i guess that's everything so thanks everyone and we'll be checking with you real soon thank you bye bye bye

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