The Magnus Archives - Weird horror fiction in the style of SCP

[Judge Dredd]

Make use of the spoiler features where appropriate.

Recently I heard The Magnus Archives name dropped in the same breath as things like SCP and Lovecraft. It's a podcast/audio drama of sorts. 200+ episodes are on YouTube. I'm about 20 episodes in and I'm hooked. So far there's only been a few duds, but the episodes are short, usually about 20-30 minutes.

The set up is the Magus Institute, which investigates the supernatural. The guy reading and sorting through the archives. It's hard to give examples without spoiling the plot, since the fun is in part figuring out what's happening and why. But I'll try.

Piecemeal is my favourite so far. A man wants revenge, and ends up making a deal with an old woman obsessed with jigsaws to kill him. Sick of waiting for the promised death, he takes matters into his own hands.

While the stories are stand alone, I don't think it's spoilers to say some are starting to be connected.

The YouTube playlist I'm using.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqwvYKgb9yRaxgDWwoMk6RFDmdvqxghqy

 

[W'rkncacnter]

I was in your exact position at about 20 episodes in and starting to put the pieces together but I stopped liking the show not long after.

This is not a spoiler but things start to get very tumblry after season 1 I think. I can't remember exactly but there was some episodes that completely took me out of the experience. The first season is amazing though, it has an episode on basically every phobia and it does a great job exploring them.

I might be wrong about things getting shit after season 1 and if I am please do tell me as I'd like to listen to the other 100+ episodes if they're actually good.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

The only thing I know about the show is Tumblr-types talking about which male characters should fuck, so I think it will get bad.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Even though no one asked, I will give spoiler free opinions of episodes as I listen to them. I'll keep what the episode description says not-spoilered.

22 Colony: Follow up to a couple of stories. It was fine. Deals with a member of the archive following up on the spider story and encountering a woman who appears to be a living wasp nest full of worms.

23 Schwartzwald: An episode about an old letter regarding the discovery of a tomb. An okay episode. Fun but is the kind of thing dealt with before.

24 Strange Music: Quieter than other episodes for some reason. I like this one. A woman's grandad dies, and when clearing out his things, finds an old organ he used to play along with some creepy dolls.

 

[bilbo_my_hobbit_hole]

By the end of the magnus archves story, all the main characters are gay. the magnus protocol (the sequel series) has a lot of that too and its only 45 episodes in.

Outside that, there are some really good existential and eldritch horror tales told.

 

[Merry]

I thought it was better before the overplot swallowed the documentation of individual incidents. Showing and explaining the whole panopticon smothers the horror element of anything

And of course, the fagtide slowly swallowing the original characters and turning them into a projection for people who can only relate to penis butthole sex

 

[Day Walker]

I liked it until season 5 when it got so bad I just couldn’t finish. It’s 5 when it becomes abundantly clear why Tumbler loved it so much. Seasons 1 through 3 are very good 4 is ok. When they stick to the accounts of people who have these creepy experiences it’s great.
I will give them this, I have listened to a lot of podcasts dramas and Magus is the best written and acted.

Edit, hit post too early

 

[Der weiße Teufel]

I liked it until season 5 when it got so bad I just couldn’t finish. It’s 5 when it becomes abundantly clear why Tumbler loved it so much. Seasons 1 through 3 are very good 4 is ok. When they stick to the accounts of people who have these creepy experiences it’s great.
I will give them this, I have listened to a lot of podcasts dramas and Magus is the best written and acted.

Edit, hit post too early

Same, dropped it in season 5. Just didn't care where it was going in the end.
Up until then it was more or less tolerable on the woke politics even though the Rusty Quill was/is full of enbies or trannies and I think in the end (aside from the gay shit) we had to have all these "strong female characters!!!!" (I might be misremembering though, it's been a couple of years now since I listened to it).

Kinda reminded me of how Welcome to Night Vale got progressively worse, wouldn't be surprised if they have overlapping tumblr fandoms.

 

[crowabunga]

I've now listened to a dozen and I was happy with most of them. It's such a shame how productions like these get caught up in purity spirals catering to the worst among their audiences and producers, "quirky" groups have no antibodies against weird-presenting narcissists. At least the first few seasons are lengthy so there's plenty to go through, I needed something different to listen to on walks. Thanks, this is nothing like what I'd be introduced to per big tech's algorithmic assessment of my tastes.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

I was a fan of TMA until they turned woke, hired a tranny and included gay trash.

The most horrifying story for me is "Lost in the crowd" because of the image I have in my head when the crowd appears. The description scares me for some reason. I also like the story of the Russian guy trapped inside a computer program and tales about the creepy soldier and the Piper.

There was talent behind these stories but unfortunately the decade of tumblr and wokeshit happened. Now they are getting way less views which means many people turned their back on them.

 

[Etrian Autistry]

I watched TMA and honestly, I enjoyed it the entire way through. The stories/statements are really good and as others in this thread have mentioned, the actual acting component of this audiodrama are phenomenal compared to most other podcasts. The first few seasons of TMA are relatively free of gayshit, that mainly becomes a focus in season 4 and 5 to the series' detriment and literally every character winds up in a gay relationship.

That being said, the series is extremely solid and theres a lot of enjoyment you can get out of it; the first 3/4ths of each 40 episode season focus on reading stories about people who have experienced supernatural phenomena with commentary by the reader afterwards that build up an overarching plot and mystery, and for the first two seasons this was actually pretty awesome before they started overplaying their hand from season 3 onwards. The last few episodes of each season tends to drop the scary stories in favor of progressing the overarching plot, and these are the least interesting parts of the audio drama to me; especially after season 3, when I felt I had enough knowledge about the setting to make accurate predictions of where the story would go that would almost always play out as I'd expected.

That being said, I've started the sequel to TMA, The Magnus Protocol, which prompted me to look up if we had a thread on either the series or Rusty Quill's contributors. The website is full of prog shit, with a tranny and a buh-lack DEI consultant credited on their staff and you can really feel that fact in TMP. Main character is a data entry jeet named Sam Khalid, he was referred to his new job by his tranny ex-lover who is very clearly not as good a VA as some of the other characters, and unlike the first episode of TMA which had a written statement reading with a strong hook and rippling implications that came up throughout the series, the first episode of TMP had no interesting hook, mostly coworker banter, and half the dialogue was from the tranny. It was only in the 2nd episode that they had a statement to read; I'll update more as I watch more epiaodes, but goddamn what a blunder for Rusty Quill to have made a series with a jeet and a troon right out the gate in an age where Britiain is getting tired of that.

 

[Etrian Autistry]

Sorry for the doublepost, but on account of the thread having been dead for about a month, I don't really feel bad about it. It seems TMP's seasons are 30 episodes long as opposed to TMA's 40-long seasons, and while I only just got to season 2, its actually picked up a bit in terms of story. I was quite happy at the end of srason 1 because it was really funny that the single mother sent the jeet to hell, and theres a bit of actual non-homosexual focused drama that I'm enjoying. There are definitely way, way less stories being read, but the ones that do exist are honestly really spooky and great. If you check it out, make sure adblock is running so you don't give any gay woke br*ts any ad revenue.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

its actually picked up a bit in terms of story.

I'm not interested in their literally gay plot and prefer the spooky stories. It's a shame that they waste their talent on writing faggot trash.

 

[Judge Dredd]

For what it's worth, CreepCast has been my background noise of choice this spooky season, and that runs into a completely different, but similar problems.

First is them caving to YouTube censorship by censoring words like "suicide". They claim if they don't the video will be banned, but no discussion of putting uncensored episodes on Rumble or some other platform. It's also complete bullshit as sometimes they miss it and those eps haven't been pulled.

But almost as annoying is their performative Christian BS. Reading stories about murder, rape, suicude, demons, and other creepypasta subject matter is a-ok. But they censor phrases like "god damn" because that wouldn't be Christian.

 

[ChaosReignsOnSomeSaturday]

I brought up.TMA awhile back in a different thread and I'll just quote myself from then:

The Magnus Archive podcast was really thrown off when they started focusing on a forced weird gay relationship, and that whole police brutality trigger warning episode just soured an otherwise great show.

Yes, the Magnus Archives is great, but the crew at Rusty Quill are very woke. I fell behind with the episodes since the beginning of the pandemic, but the last time I checked they had an enbie who voiced one of the characters, the female cop, Bashira, maybe? The name she chose is Frank or something to that effect, and if I remember her twitter well, she hates to be clocked as a woman.

This show had one of the worst endings and all their new series fucking suck.

 

[Professor Donger]

I dropped it because Martin made me want to blow my fucking brains out with how gay he is

 

[Fun Factory]

Found something that may explain what happened to The Magnus Archives on Tumblr (I know, I know, but set a thief to catch a thief):


WTNV is Welcome To Night Vale, a decidedly cosier kind of spooky podcast that was a bit too enamoured with itself for putting the host in a wholesome chungus gay relationship. Even if there's not a direct line of causality it's definitely the same rot-from-the-inside dynamic at play, as the show starts actively trying to encourage a robust and nauseating shipping community instead of, you know, being good.

we had to have all these "strong female characters!!!!"

Granted Basira, Melanie, and Georgie all devolved into basically the same nagging bitch very quickly, but I'll still go to bat for Daisy, who was a much more interesting character by dint of genuinely not being a particularly nice person - and when they did soften her it was with very good reason.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

Faggotry is the death knell for any horror series. MA had actual scary stories before everyone became a raging faggot. Since focusing on trannygay shit the writers lost their talent for writing horror.