The Magnus Archives - MAG Season 5 Q&A - Part 3

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Alex and Jonny answer as many questions as they can from the Season 5 mailbag in the final part of our Q&A series.Thank you to everyone who submitted a question!Featuring: Jonathan Sims & Alexander J. NewallContent warnings:Spoilers for all of The Magnus ArchivesInnuendoExplicit languageDiscussions of: thalassophobia, canon-typical apocalypse & trauma, food, death (inc. mass death) & murderMentions of: rot, addiction & mind control, violence, homelessness, explosionsThank you to all our Patrons for your continued supportIf you'd like to join them, visit www.patreon.com/rustyquill.Edited this week by Nico Vettese & Alexander J. NewallProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop & https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill.You 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.

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Bye! listener and welcome to Q&A 3. The year is 6057. All is death. Except for me. Alex won't let me die. And Johnny as Johnny stays answering Q&As in a dark and bitter future of only Q&As. In the future there are only questions and Johnny has all the answers. Hello. Hello. Are you ready for some more Q&As, Johnny? No. Cool. So I'm going to go ahead and just jump straight in then. Yep, great. Let's do it.

I got a question. Oh, as always, we're not going to get through all of them because there's too many. Johnny will burn out like a very, very tiny stick of dynamite. Like a guttering star flickering its last and then just supernovaing taking out most of walthamstow well thankfully we'll have a bit of warning as you slowly expand to fill the entire solar system we'll at least know that's coming first questions from lauren how did your own relationship to fear change over the course of the show i think it deepened in some ways like it was quite an interesting one because right from the start, creating the entities was in many ways the closest examination of fear and my own fear that I had to do in the whole journey. down and be like well what am I afraid of and what lines would I draw between them and what fears are

like just mine and what fears do I feel can be expanded into a slightly more sort of primal space I think as I went on my relationship to horror changed more than my relationship to actually fear and how I feel horror and the horror that I write interacts with fear in both sort of an entertainment and an exploratory sort of sense like I think the later series are a lot more exploring certain ideas within fear whereas the earlier ones are much more like hey here's that scary thing pretty scary right mine's real simple I'd love to say I did it didn't really when you make the machine it just turns into a bunch of nuts and bolts. I learned the word thalassophobia.

That was a word for a thing that I thought was just a me thing, but that's about it, I'm afraid. Sorry for an underwhelming answer there. Do you think you were the only one who was afraid of the sea? No, no, no, no, no. But I didn't have an explanation and I'd never managed to explain it to anyone. The issue of I'm a very very strong swimmer

like used to lifeguard and stuff like that yeah I still don't like open sea because of the depth sorry I don't know why that tickles me you're like oh yeah no I'm scared of the ocean I'm a very strong swimmer like it's great well you've got to be a strong swimmer otherwise how are you going to conquer the ocean Johnny now open water weirds me out because there is clearly a whale the size of, you know, an oil tanker down there. But I never managed to explain it in a word before. And there you go. The last phobia, that's it for me, I'm afraid.

I'm going to bounce then to a question from ZoomBeam. Did you ever consider any of the other fears as the patron for the archivist when planning the whole story? No. Just because the idea of what the eye was did evolve and change slightly, but because of the nature of the podcast, it was always going to be a watching fear

or a listening fear. The whole idea of the collecting stories was so tied up in the idea of observation and recording that it was always going to have to be an entity in that vein and so yeah while details about the eye kind of changed and got a little bit refined over the course of planning and early season one it was always going to be the eye like the others wouldn't have worked on a metatextual level the only thing that really bounced around a little bit was how much the web was interested in him but even then it was more just a case of like is it a four or six in terms

of how hard you push that and that's not really the same thing as the question yeah okay then in that case question from dc i know that time was broken during the apocalypse but did either of you have a sense of how long you thought the apocalypse actually lasted for in my mind probably about six months interesting that's a little longer than mine but yeah i did some google mapping to figure out how long it would actually take to walk from john o'groats down to london john o'groats being the most northerly point of scotland and like the conclusion i came to was if you were walking at like a normal pace rather than like absolutely booking it and not along highways and stuff yeah it would be a few months with breaks and all that sort of stuff to my mind yeah about six months probably i think

some of it as well is it depends on versions of the story there was a version of the story where we had a mid-season break where they chilled out of salacious for a bit longer i think so as a result that would have extended and shortened it. I always kind of had it in my head around the four-month mark, but yeah. But you're absolutely right that time doesn't really work during the apocalypse period. So that's very much a ballpark figure. So the answer is somewhere between one hour and a billion years.

I mean, yeah. Next question is Drowsy Salamander. Johnny, the Magnus Archives has a huge amount of unique minor characters did you find it difficult balancing all of them and ensuring that the audience knew what their deal was while only having limited amount of episodes yes it is one of those things where a lot of the early episodes act as in some ways auditions for the rogues gallery that's a good way of putting it and weirdly a lot of it when i say auditions is not really for the audience but for me in the sense of is this a character that lodges well enough in my own mind and hangs around and like

just lingers and drops little things it's like hey this is something new you can do with me and if that happens then I'll bring them back and once they've come back two or three times various points I had different spreadsheets of the threads and the different characters that I'd sort of just drop them in but yeah if you listen to some of the season one and season two there's quite a lot of like hinted characters that might or might not have grown into something bigger. At one point, I had an idea for like a buried avatar. And there was echoes of them in the workhouse episode with Kempthorne and the London Underground episode. But in the end, I just didn't get a strong enough sense of who they were going to be.

They never really fully materialised as a character. Like, in-universe, they're still there, they still exist. So yeah, a lot of those early episodes were me seeing which members of the rogues gallery were going to hang around because they tended to be the ones that I did find myself able to keep track of. Next question's from a lot of people. around because they tend to be the ones that I did find myself able to keep track of. Next question's from a lot of people. Were there any horror domains that didn't make the final cut? I have a few, but that's because I was just keeping them in reserve in case at some point you turned up and went, Alex, I've got nothing, and it didn't happen, so.

Yeah, I feel like I went through a big list, but enough that none of the discarded ones really stick in my mind like i know that the ladder in 198 was actually a replacement for another domain that i'd written into the plan and then realized didn't particularly excite me so i swapped it out for a big ladder but because it didn't particularly excite me i've completely blanked on what it actually was. That scans though, doesn't it? I mean, ultimately, when everyone's like, are there any things that didn't make the final cut? 90% of the time as well, the answer will be,

well, yes, and it's hard to explain, and that's why it didn't make the final cut. Like, what if like inside a shark and things, it's like the reason that it doesn't make a good answer is because it never came together as an idea in the first place if it did it would be there i had some idea of like a weird rusted old clock tower i think oh that would have been nice aesthetically yeah well the thing is a lot of my discarded ideas were really nice aesthetically but i couldn't get to work thematically yeah isn't that always the? I'm the same, where aesthetically that'll work,

but when you try and dig into the meat and bones of it, it's just you're trapped in a weird space, and that's pretty much the entire thing. Yeah. When we were planning out season five, there were quite a few of those, because I was like, oh, that sounds like a really interesting horror environment.

But as soon as I started writing it, and I was like, oh, these are all about things, I'd be going back to the list and being like, well, I've no idea what this one's about. There was one that's always interested me, which is the shrinking endless library. You know, the endless library is a trope. Yes. And it's like, if you keep walking long enough, you get back to the middle of the library. That, except so the person knows it's an endless library and then that library is shrinking. So it's endless and shrinking as a combination i find that very very interesting but again ultimately it's person trapped in room similarly i think there's stuff to be done in you know there's big massive old victorian uh orangeriums orangiums i mean greenhouses does work unnecessarily

massive greenhouse oh with like gross plants and like getting everything rotting and like yeah or you can do the thing where it's like you know i'm trapped in a space that's bad it's not got that meat great little hellscapes but i've no idea what i'd do with them thematically next questions from blues there has been a lot of talk about how much agency john had during the series how much was he able to decide for himself in the end in your real life how much are you able to actually decide what you have asked there is fundamentally one of the core questions of the series where you land it's very much to do with your own reaction to the text sorry to be a bit like i don't know

i mean because the question is his decisions are all his decisions. He is not at any point being actively mind-controlled. But at the same time, his decisions are taking place within an extremely oppressive framework. His options are deeply limited and usually an array of different bad things. And while he's not technically being mind-controlled, he does have externally influenced desires and pulls. Because of my background, my parallel to me is always of addiction. Your addiction isn't in control of you, but it is still a factor. It is still an external pull on you. So how much you see John as having agency, how much you see as his actions being 100% his own responsibility, how much it is the situation he's in, that is very much to me something that is a personal response to the text.

Because fundamentally, that's not a question that has an answer. That personal response to the text because fundamentally that's not a question that has an answer that's a question the text is asking yeah pretty much and i know that there'll be some people who are like no but tell me the answer it's like it doesn't work like that sorry i warned people there would be some answers that are just that's a question that is a question yes it is one of those things where a lot of the time you'll be asked questions and you're like yes you have successfully identified the question that the text is asking but if i had an answer i wouldn't have asked the question over the course of five seasons in a podcast dear blues whoever asked this question i would suggest if you have not already do an examination of chaos theory

versus hardcore determinism that will be a fun deep dive. I suspect you've already done that. But also, like, fiction is not, to me, about providing answers or pointing you towards particular philosophical research. Like, I think there is a lot of value in sitting with questions that don't really have answers and just, you know, having fiction and stories that explore these

spaces that fundamentally you can't say for certain one way or the other. Next question's from Flamango. Which part of the show do you think is most misunderstood and could you explain it now? I have one I could start with. So this is one that comes up a lot and it isn't necessarily a magna specific thing but it comes up all the time which is podcasts aren't novels and people consume long form audio drama very often like it is a novel and you will get a lot of well why didn't you redraft this why did you do that and a lot of the time it's like well you have to remember in a lot of, well, why didn't you redraft this? Why did you do that? And a lot of the time it's like, well, you have to remember in a lot of ways, what effectively you're listening to is draft one. And like in a novel, it's like, of course I'd go back and I'd tighten this. I'd

change that. Oh, that arc didn't go anywhere, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But one of the things that I keep having to say more and more, especially on anything that has an improvisational bent, which doubles down on that is this is is effectively you're listening to a hot off the press, very first draft of a thing. So a lot of the time it would be like, oh, you know, for certain shows, this didn't land how I'd have thought you'd have wanted it to. And you'll get the writer going, you are correct. That's not because they're bad. It's because it's a completely different medium. It doesn't work like that. And I think that that to me is probably one of the things that I think is most misunderstood is people conflating having a plan for 200 episodes as that was the first draft written and we have then gone

back and redrafted and revised and it doesn't work like that. It couldn't. It's impossible. It's too dense. I've previously used the analogy of just trying to direct a boulder as it's rolling downhill and that's exactly what it's like and yeah i think that's probably the thing that people most either misunderstand or underestimate as a factor and on top of that you have the thing where you need to try and balance it so that the pacing works both as a week-to-week thing and a binge yeah and i think it's interesting that the reaction to 198 was broadly positive but quite a few people were like why are you having a filler episode two before the finale and it's like well it's not fully a filler episode it's not it's not actually a filler episode it's doing a lot of specific emotional work with the characters but also because pacing wise the big reveal and the big

confrontation in 197 needs a beat to rest afterwards before going into the final two episodes and the thing is the week on week listeners already had that the week on week listeners had a whole week to digest it and mull it over and decompress so when they come back for the next one they're like okay so we're just having this now but the thing is you've still got to have that episode for the pacing to work yeah for any other context other than the week on week live listeners yeah it wouldn't land with a show this size and this scale stuff gets misunderstood all the time like a detail will be overlooked and people will build huge theories on stuff and i'll i don't know

stumble across them and be like oh actually there was something in like episode like 16 that completely invalidates all of that you just obviously didn't catch it i think in a wider scope a lot of it actually does kind of reflect on the previous question. I think the biggest misunderstanding is that the Magnus Archives, and in a lot of cases, fiction more generally, is able or looking to provide concrete answers or specific moral lessons. What is the moral of the Magnus Archives? I mean, there isn't one. There are a lot of questions, a lot of themes, a lot of subjects and thoughts that I'm keen to explore. But in a lot of cases, it's like, well, if I had an answer for these questions, I would be writing a philosophical treatise, not a horror

podcast that is trying to grapple with these subjects. The Jonathan Manifesto. I mean be writing a philosophical treatise, not a horror podcast that is trying to grapple with these subjects. The Jonathan Manifesto. I mean, to a certain degree. A lot of these things are ambiguous because I don't have answers in myself to them. There's a reason that there are so many arguments between characters. It's because often I don't know what the answer is. Next question, a bit more specific, is from basically everyone. Could you talk some more about Agnes Montague and her connection to Gertrude? Were you intending to do more with her character? Intending is a tricky word in this

sense, because the short answer is no. Again, it sort of speaks to this first draft thing that you mentioned. Agnes Montague is very much a character that I think if I did a second draft of the Magnus Archives as a whole, which I'm not going to do. Yeah, don't lay that seed, Johnny. Please don't open that door. Just to be clear, I'm not going to do that. But if it was something that had been wholly written and then gone over, I think Agnes is a character I would have done something a bit more with. Well, you've said it in a previous Q&A, she was meant to be, you know, the messiah in absentia. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't received as such. And so the benefit of the redraft would have been,

you can tweak it a bit. It was received as such, but I think in retrospect, it was not a satisfying character study in that way. And I think, yeah, she is a character that could have had more done with her, especially that connection with Gertrude, which is something that, to be honest, I don't know if it's something I ever fully figured out enough to hang any significant plot on it. We always discussed it as an illusion,

not a thing that had to hold up the whole series or anything like that. Yeah, it was one of those things that, like, I think if I'd gotten a better sense of it earlier in the series, it might have taken greater prominence but as it was i don't know if i ever properly figured it out more than an aspect of gertrude and like drawing this sort of connection and parallel but not really paying off on it i guess next question is from again a bunch of people uns unsurprisingly. There's been a lot of debates on social media about the different options discussed in 199. Which option would you

personally have gone for or preferred in that situation? I mean, the morally correct decision ish, in as much there is one, is to like contain the fears. You are incorrect. You have no guarantee of multiple words beyond the statement of a single person known fact versus potential fact in that risk assessment you let them go the thing is it is that choice about like villain or victim and like i think that is the dichotomy that the whole series is ultimately concerned with by the end of season five literally every character in the series has been rendered either villain or victim and in the early ones it's looking at the interplay where does the cross overcome where's what's the overlap how do you draw up these categories in a

system which hurts people but also gives them the opportunity to offset that pain onto others and like this relationship with fear and so that is all very distilled into this final choice in many ways it's one where it's like yeah okay but if you do strip off all nuance what do you do i think most people would choose the villain side rather than the victim side in this dichotomy. But I mean, that may just be an indication of my own cowardice or my view of people in general. I do very enjoy our new dynamic. Question, Johnny, carefully considered a nuanced answer that considers all angles. Alex, hot take.

Next question. Well, I mean, to be honest, a lot of these are things that i myself have been mulling over for however long and so someone's like question i'm like okay here is me just vomiting up the answer that's been sort of churning over inside me for however many months this one is a little less involved a little easier to answer i think from sazan durable what are your best memories related to the fan base or favourite fandom moment or anecdote? They're all from early seasons. Once the fandom blew up to a certain size, I had no real way to constructively engage. I really enjoyed back when there was the forum do you remember when there was a forum alex oh yeah i was so proud of my like 1980s-esque forum it was so very retro i made that there were maybe like a couple of

hundred people post and a few of them posted up observations about like some stuff that didn't add up in season one and so we included those as like when tim is like just going through all the ways that the archivist has screwed up those were like legitimate things raised yeah i remember that i think we may have used some of their like actual names we got their permission and they were like yeah great that felt like a really fun back and forth between what was at that point a very small podcast and like a fun little fan base. Also, like weirdly, the strangest thing about the expansion of the fan base is how almost homogenous it makes certain things. I'll be honest, I miss the fan art of the early days.

Oh, yeah, where everyone was still just, yeah. Yeah, because, like, you used to get so many variant different designs in the early days. Like, every character, every time you saw art of them, they'd look entirely different. And it would be fascinating to see how everybody sort of saw these characters. Whereas at this point, because with a large fan base, generally people come into something having already seen a bunch of fan art, it's this recursive loop

where you end up getting like characters kind of settle into standardised looks. I'll be honest, I really like the sort of broad fandom idea of what the archivist looks like, what Martin looks like, what Michael and Helen look look like but i miss the days when there was just this huge variety of all sorts of different character interpretations i think i have two i haven't done much in the way of live events by virtue of just frankly i'm too busy like i tend to end up doing other stuff so i'm like would you rather a new episode or a new show would you rather this one event so i tend to lean a bit harder to the former but it was at an event and i overheard some fans having a conversation and it was just the takeaway of that's mine that can't be martin

no it is that's mine he looks wrong what do you mean he looks wrong he's wearing a belt and that just stuck with me as someone caught a glimpse of me as person and went, that can't, no, no, no, no. Again, it was a genuinely lovely experience and everyone was lovely, but that just tickled me. It can't be Martin, he's wearing a belt. Martin, famous elasticated pant wearer. Yeah, it was just, it was an interesting little glimpse into someone's specific take. Martin only wears dungarees i don't like it's pretty much canon the other one was answering my door to a delivery from a very very bemused looking delivery driver who had like enough baked goods to feed a small country and i had no context for it and i found out after the fact that long story short

as a sort of thing the mods had sort of like clubbed together and just the idea was to send like a cake our way to just be like oh here's a cake well done however because there was a little bit of a miscommunication as to like stuff it spiraled wildly out of control so there were like three full-size cakes plus like 30 scones and an entire thing and an entire thing and after the fact it was like it over scoped very quickly but it was just the look on someone's face as they thought i had ordered to what is clearly a house of just two people four cakes 50 scones blah blah blah to just sit there and eat on my own. Did, enjoyed it, have no regrets, but it was just a very funny moment. And it just ties into that thing I keep saying of like,

the fan base is terrifyingly organized when it wants to be. Just scary sometimes. Okay, next one is on to a technical question. This one's from The Thoughtful Ninja. Johnny, do you re-record the Rusty Quill Presents the Magnus Archives beginning sometimes, or have you used the same one since season one? I don't remember. Alex, have we used the same one since season one? We've recorded it three times. We used one in season one.

I think we then did a better one in season two that saw us over to about season four. And then we did one more in season four. But bear in mind that Johnny obviously had to record the titles for each one. And because the way we did it, we always got him to read it three or four times per title so yeah like I've read it many many times in various scenarios I have zero idea which of those were used and at what point they were next questions from Elizabeth Wynn kind of touches on stuff we've covered before how did you decide which characters would become regulars were they all decided from their introductions or were there any who were written into future episodes after their first appearances if they were fun to write and i kept thinking about them

after i wrote them the first time they were probably going to come back at least that was the season one and two by like season three and four it was very much like we had our basic rogues gallery and we were adding people in shifting them around to actually set things up in motion for the last seasons. There was no major character who was introduced either where we were like, well, I guess you can't be in any further because you didn't work as a character, which is useful. It was all either these are your core characters or these are ones that are fun to keep around. I don't think there was one that we had to bail on. But that's the problem is that audition thing that you talk about where you kind of, for Nikola Orsinov,

it's not like we had an entire Orsinov thing to then introduce a single episode and go, oh, that didn't work, we have to rewrite all of season three or whatever. It didn't really work like that. Michael, for instance, then later when Michael died, Helen, the distortion became, I think, a bigger character than it was originally conceived of. Largely because in season two, Alex was like, the distortion has to turn up. We have to actually meet this monster.

That actual in-person appearance wasn't in my original season two plan. wasn't in my original season two plan and like we actually had a bit of a of an argument about it because i was saying like alex if we meet it at this stage then this monster is going to become like a character yeah i did give you that as a rule which is not like i say like this difference between like the monster and the character and like the naming and all this sort of thing i was like it's going to become like a character and i'm not sure that's what I want to do with it. And Alex, you very much were like, no, I think it will work best in the narrative as a character and as this foil for Jon's own journey. And you were right. You were absolutely right, I think. I forgot about that. That is one of the few times where I was like pushing on something quite hard in a way that I don't normally do. Yeah, I forgot about that. Good point.

Next question's from Alice. What happened in the rest of the world? Did Paris turn into the inheritor's domain as 134 predicted, for example? The apocalypse was global. I don't know enough about most other countries to speak to what the specific domains and fears that they would have. I mean, I think a lot of them would be similar. I think France would probably have their equivalent of a lot of the domains that we travel through in the UK, probably with their own avatars. Yeah. Next question's from Pamplemoose Rose. What are you most proud of in this podcast? Finishing it? Finishing it. I wrote 200 episodes basically every week. No, I wrote an episode a week for like 200 episodes over the course of five years.

That's like 600,000 words. It was a lot. And I did them all, and they just about work. They function as a cohesive story. They don't collapse. The ending isn't a complete cop-out. The themes broadly come out as they're intended to. I did it.

We started with whatever we could and stuck to it. There's a lot of alternate versions out there where we went, we're not going to be able to start well and then never got around to starting it. Or there's versions where we got bogged down trying to get things changed in season two. There's a lot of versions where this never finished. And I think probably that one.

I mean, God knows, it almost nearly never launched. Did it? Yeah, I remember I was made homeless because of all of the stuff. I launched Magnus from a temporary hotel room that was being paid for on debt i hoped an insurer would pay they did oh god yeah yeah that was a whole whole thing so to be fair some early episodes were recorded in james ross's flat some were in your asbestos flat before

it asbestos i think if you look at the multiverse there's more versions where it didn't work than it did so that's the thing i'm proud of yeah this next one's from asrael i think we've answered this similar before but worth readdressing if lottie broomhole could have continued playing sasha what would sasha's arc have been or was her story not yet written her story wasn't solidly written it's a good question because like fundamentally we knew the situation with lottie by very very early pretty much by halfway through season one so it was established by the time we were like properly planning out season two and beyond i have a suspicion that if lottie been able able to keep going and Sasha had remained as a character and we'd, you know, got rid of Tim.

As quickly as possible. Yeah, yeah. I wanted to have the not them take someone at the end. So assuming it took Tim instead of Sasha. Yeah, I think in season two as it is, the archivist is very much the paranoia and the investigation and Tim is dealing with his trauma i think the theoretical sasha season two i think sasha would have been a lot more involved with

the investigation side of things and it probably would have doubled down a bit on the archivist's paranoia because we had sasha as a character to do a bit more of the digging. Fan the flames a bit. Yeah. That could have worked. That also might have sent the archivist on a slightly different path. I don't necessarily believe that. I think he'd have ended up homing in on more or less the same point. I think that's what you start out with

and you'd get a little different flavour in season three, but I think ultimately Tim and Sasha would have just kind of inverted each other's story roles a lot. Yeah, I think they would have ended up in the same place, but I think they would have got there very different ways. It probably worked out for the best in a lot of ways, because I'll be honest, I think that we probably would have ended up killing Sasha at the season three finale,

just because pacing-wise where that escalation death needs to happen. But I think it ended up in quite a satisfying place with tim now hot take archives would have blown up in start of season two and then the series would have ended that's my hot take that's what would have happened i mean that would have been a comparatively happy ending i mean once you start looking at the total scope i think that's a very happy ending unfortunately next questions Next question's from Ricey. Was there any aspect of John and Martin's relationship that was especially important to get right,

or was there any aspect that was especially difficult? I wanted them to communicate well, but I also wanted them to be... I mean, fundamentally, I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that they were essentially having their first date in a global apocalypse for however long, nailing that balance between good communication and a broadly healthy relationship, but also representing that stress. And I think I just wanted it to feel real. See, that's very interesting to me because i found the season five dynamic quite an easy one to tread admittedly i am a married man in a high stressed environment for extended periods

so it might have yeah like i'll be honest i didn't feel that the writing season five was actually difficult because yeah actually a healthy relationship in an incredibly high stress environment is something that i too have been navigating over that year. It certainly was the most important to me, I think. Season four for me was the one that was difficult. That was a really fine balancing act of keeping them away from one another without it being full-blown hostility, without it deteriorating into just pointless pining either way. I think that season four was a more difficult balancing act because there was so little time

of the two characters together, it had to work. And then so much of their time apart was being defined by that absence in a way they were both being surprised by and blah, blah, blah. Like, I think that was probably the most difficult one to write.

I guess if you've got 40 episodes of them being together any given individual interaction has less pressure on it is going to be less definitional for the relationship as a whole because in season four there are only like a handful of scenes they're in together. And if you misplay it then the big reunion is oh well that feels kind of like harsh or whatever and i found season four much more difficult to make sure we had it right i think you're right there next question is from sophia soap what do you think are the most important things that distinguish tragedies from cautionary tales and how did you incorporate this into the magnus archives a cautionary tale is intended to deliver a specific lesson and honestly i feel that the majority of lessons simple enough that you can properly deliver them through a story those are

your childhood lessons those are your like your fairy tales to me a tragedy is about people failing. It's like in your classical sense, it's that core flaw in a character that leads to their ultimate failure. But what is the lesson of the Magnus Archives? Don't go to work for the Magnus Institute, but you don't know because the majority of the choices you make in life, you don't have all the information necessary. I think it comes down to the fact that a cautionary tale has a right answer yeah that is it the cautionary tale even if you want to go broader with it and consider something like 1984 a cautionary tale

what's that don't embrace fascism you know i'm oversimplifying but my point is is there is a right answer that you're meant to take away from that i don't know if that's even true in the in a sense because like 1984 is a dystopia like it is illustrating a bad end but like there's nothing within it that could be easily interpreted as like and this is how you don't get there but i'd still say it was a cautionary tale i'm stretching it a little bit but here's a destination that you want to try to avoid. The right answer is avoid this destination. Yeah, no, okay, fair enough, fair enough. A tragedy is far more personal and inevitable. You can't look at a tragedy and go,

you shouldn't do this. I mean, there is an overlap to a degree, but the point is there is it's like a tragedy, once the pieces are in play, off it goes. You know what I mean? And a cautionary tale is meant to be a thing where you see it off and i realize there is some overlap the whole like argument let's go real classic with it you know romeo and juliet you could argue well there's a cautionary tale of you know don't create these divides between people blah blah cautionary tale

is don't be teens my point is is i think it comes down to that there is a clearer right answer in a cautionary tale and god knows the whole point of magnus archives is there couldn't be that was something we dictated at the start is we always wanted 199 to be that big heavy discussion and it was really really important that there was not a right answer for that heavy discussion because if there was it ceased to work yeah or rather it's the sort of thing where, like, I think maybe 30% of the audience absolutely, as soon as they heard the proposition, were like,

there is a right answer. And another 30%, as soon as they heard the proposition, absolutely said, there is a right answer. And those two 30% had the exact opposite, because, like, a lot of it is to do with your own personal philosophy and how you view the world and value. And, like, that 40% had the exact opposite because like a lot of it is to do with your own personal philosophy and how you view the world and value and like that 40% in the middle that's like oh no this is oh difficult choice then there's that 1% who are like me who see the trolley problem and go yes how do you hit all the people hmm I've said it before like I don't feel like I have lessons to impart in the cautionary tale sense,

and I am much more interested in exploring tragedies and the anatomy of a tragedy. And if through the anatomy of a tragedy, you as an audience can hone in on something and see it and say, oh, well, this could have been avoided if X or Y, and like take that away as a personal insight. Brilliant. That's something that fiction is very good for, helping you work through your own thoughts on something, help you sort of figure out where you stand on different things. But yeah, I'm not interested in writing cautionary tales in the sense of like, and here is the lesson to be taken we now have lined up here a series of quickfire questions now the reason that these are quickfires

are a lot of them the answer might just be the text is the text okay so we've gone through and we've picked out ones that i think you should be able to answer okay but i will apologize now that there were a lot of questions where if there isn't an answer, a lot of it might be just, well, you're kind of not meant to know, necessarily. At Ellie Ellie, what exactly did the apocalypse survivors do to Simon Fairchild? I mean, what do you think they did? They threw him off something high. Next question.

In Oliver's first statement, he mentions an ex-boyfriend named Graham. Is this the same Graham from across the street or is it a coincidence? Yes. Next question. I know I've got to ask now. Yes to which? Yes, it is the same. It is actually one of the very first connections

I wrote in this thing. I did nothing with it, but it is deliberate. Okay, next question from Bunch People. What happened to Monster Pig? Did it have its own domain? Yeah, sure. Why not? Bunch People, where is what happened to Joshua Gillespie? I don't know. He was probably fine.

I don't know. I don't care. No, you do. You do. I do care. Next question. I do care. What did Martin say was his middle name? That's the joke. That is the joke. The joke is you don't know. The joke is you don't know.

The joke is you never find out. Next question. Cricket Says No says, what was the creature that killed Robert Montauk? Oh, that was one of the monsters that I never ended up really doing anything with. It was like a dark summoned thing. Yeah, killed Robert Montauk,

hassled Julia. In the end, I got more interested in the cult that summoned it than the actual creature itself. I had this sort of vague image of like a creature made of darkness that like stagnates water and like was very ice cold to the touch, was kind of like a negative space thing, but I never really did much further with it. Next question. Dilf Elias asks, what skincare routine did Nicola use on John and did he stick with it afterwards? He probably didn't because it was probably very traumatic to apply any sort of lotion or toner after a month of that. And like, I think it was probably just a very standard cleanser toner moisturizer routine it

would have taken a while to get the right products for his skin because i don't think he was going to be very helpful with that dr brain box asks is the dog barking in the background of the sick village agape from love bombing yeah sure why not next question from a bunch is rosie's last name zampano a reference to house of leaves yes That one I will say is just like, I really enjoyed taking characters that were specifically supernaturally investigation-y characters or connected to the Institute and just giving them the surnames of horror writers or horror characters I like. But in some ways I regretted it because I was never consistent with who I actually did that for and didn't. It was just whenever the fancy took me.

But when I was doing Rosie, I was like, you know what, for old time's sake, I'm going to throw in a horror reference name. Fair play. Next one's from James. Was there a reason Elias always referred to Basira as detective? Sounds good. Literally, it is a trope that I really love when like a smug villain says the word detective. It's just something I like. Candy Cane asks, was the house in Mag 170 Moorland House the home of the Lucases?

Yeah, sure, could be. I mean, that wasn't in my mind when I wrote it, but it makes sense. Actually, wait, no, it doesn't make sense. The locations don't match up because in 170 they would still have been quite far north and moorland house i believe i located somewhere in the arse of britain down the southeast lulu solia asks where was toby carlisle getting all the meat from meatsend.com oh no don't give people websites is that a real website well it probably is now alex quickly google meatsendcentre.com for me. I'm not googling that. No way. I'm on a work computer. Not a chance. Google it. A lot of it came from the meat dimension and the stuff email ordered came from a website that sends you meat. I will call

it meatcentre.com if that is a real website. Please don't sue us, meatcentre.com. Olly the Crab asks, what really happened to Michael? Is he dead or just somewhere else? The nature of identity in the distortion is a difficult one. I mean, what happened was Michael died in those corridors shortly after he was eaten by the distortion. Then the distortion became a Michael. Then that Michael died, was torn apart from the inside by the rest of the distortion. Then the distortion became Helen, who was also dead as a character. Then the distortion as a whole died wearing Helen's face. Sort of, I guess, is one interpretation. The questions of identity and existence within the distortion are ambiguous and deliberately kind of deliberately so next one is from a

bunch of people what was the significance of the archivist calling jonathan fanshaw his namesake in remains to be seen what do you mean they were both called jonathan yep that's what namesake means namesake just means someone with the same name as you. Okay, we're on to the last ones. Hilla Horizon asks, was the Admiral happy in his domain? Yeah, he loved doing violence, like all cats. From a bunch of people, is Jürgen Leitner Martin's dad? If you want him to be, I guess. I didn't have that in mind, but that doesn't mean anything. I've never thought of that as a connection.

So if you figured you've cracked a secret, sorry. But if it makes sense, like if you've constructed a big theory where it makes sense, then yeah, I guess it makes sense. Last one. Ian Lynham. The most important question, arguably, did Martin's poems survive the blast at the archives?

No, none of them. Destroyed. Utter utterly wiped out so that's your quickfire done i've only got the last few proper questions fair play we got through a bunch there and i'm impressed with you some of those were actually proper answers hardly any of them were i don't care last couple of questions which will probably have unsatisfying answers to just around it out in a really nice way from a lot of people what's next for both of you and rusty quill is johnny going to be working on rusty quill future projects yeah it's a very good question actually alex is johnny going to be

working on rusty quill future projects can't wait to be shot of the man we can't talk about future stuff i'll tell you now don't expect the magnus archives 2 coming in two months that's not gonna happen we need to not make magnus archives for just a little bit i will probably still be around here and there as a voice but i personally am probably done with podcasts for a while i'm really interested in different media and like what any given medium can do at the moment I'm leaning quite heavily into novels obviously 13 stories is the book that has came out in November that's my first horror novel and I've got a second one that should be coming out later this year and there are a few other projects that I'm working on tinkering with, but I feel like I've done everything I can do

at the moment in the podcast sphere. Do not expect a new show suddenly to just drop in out of the ether. It's no. And personally, I'm also doing a lot of work in game design at the moment with mine and Sasha Sienna, my partner's company, MacGuffin & Co.

I think by now the Kickstarter will have finished for our little micro-sendings collection, but you can check out our work at macguffinandcompany.com. In terms of what's next for Rusty Quill, I literally am not allowed to talk about any of it. Sorry, I'm not allowed to talk about any of it. You will find out soon, but I can't talk about any of it. But I have a final question, potentially your final Q&A for the Magnus Archives. Right. I think it's from AMJT. I don't think that's an acronym meaning like all Magnus Junior team or something.

I think it's just AMJT. On behalf of the entire fan base, Johnny, please could you say the following, that the Magnus Archives was a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike, 4.0, international license. Caveat, in the voice. No.

Because it still exists. No! It still exists. You're a monster. It's still out there. You can still listen to it. It still is. You're going to make so many people angry with that answer well tough

brutal twisting the knife to the very last wow okay in many ways i feel like the end of this q a is the real tragedy of the magnus Archives. Oh my God, Johnny. Why do you just want to pick fights with the world? Brilliant. You know what? Okay. Okay, cool. All right.

Okay. All right. All right. All right. You do you, Johnny. I'm not going to say it all. I will say the Magnus Archives was a podcast. I'm not going to do all the rest of it.

Okay. You've all got the recordings you can like i don't know just pop into audacity like chop it up yourself right but i don't believe it because media doesn't stop existing just because it's not being actively produced anymore didn't you hear we're both deleted from public consciousness forever now it's fine if nothing else thank you for your time you know for the last five years and for the stuff we're still gonna record today but thank you everyone if we didn't get through to your question i guarantee you there's limited hours in the day and we did try i promise you that and i think after this one we have a commentary episode so strap in for that

thank you everyone i hope you've enjoyed it and if you have any further questions I'm sorry if you have any further questions good good it means you've engaged with the story and you have reactions to it and thoughts goodbye everyone bye Bye! Facebook or email us at mail at rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening. Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchard from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks, so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Thank you. Next. Audible can take you places only you can imagine and whenever you want. On a run, doing errands, commuting, or just relaxing at home.

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at participating wendy's until may 5th. Terms and conditions apply. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca Her kommer et podcasttips fra Eikast. Hei, Dana! Hei, Erika! Og sammen har vi podden Skidshowet. Hva er det? Her kommer et podcasttips fra Acast. den siste uka. Samtidig som vi tester nye ting, som for eksempel menneskehåp og kosmikk. Så det man skal gjøre nå er å neppe huk

igjen, for jeg får faktisk litt panikk. Hør om du gidder! Bye!