Something I Noticed Is That Oliver Is One Of The Few Avatars Without Any Distinct Cause Or Circumstances

something i noticed is that oliver is one of the few avatars without any distinct cause or circumstances for his involvement in the fears. like it's not like he's in an environment where there's a lot of people dying, nothing notably spooky happened to him, no cursed artifacts happened to be in the vicinity, he didn't even have a morbid interest in death. he just started dreaming about horrible murder tentacles one day. and that honestly seems rather fitting for the end, an entitiy that will always and has always affected every living thing, something completely natural and inescapable in nature that had the potential to single-handedly stop the entire eye-pocalypse by just passively existing.

and funny thing is that the cause of oliver's involvement doesn't really make a difference. like sure it seems unfair maybe, but what difference is their really between random chance and blind choice? between those and informed choice under a system where the only options are submit or face a fait worse than death?

the thing I really enjoy about oliver banks is that he's got such a long character arc and we get three statements directly from him at distinct points along his path of becoming. we know other minor character avatars for similar amounts of time, but we tend to see them from outside points of view or get their life stories in retrospect once they've completed monsterfication, whereas oliver makes his own statements 1) when he's still mostly human in 2015, 2) just after he's properly crossed the avatar threshold in 2018, and 3) when he is decidedly mostly of his patron the apocalypse, all of which parallels the stages of jon's journey.

in mag 121, he makes a point of calling jon "jon" over "the archivist" because he says "archivist" is too formal, and in mag 168 he refers directly to jon two times. the first is at the top of his coroner's report, where he denotes it as being addressed to "the great eye" and "its archive, which draws knowledge of this suffering unto itself," referring to jon both with the more dehumanizing of his avatar titles and with an "it" pronoun. the second time is towards the end, where he calls jon "jon" and expresses that he isn't asking for mercy and that he would have offered this report willingly if that were still an option.

he never comes across as having any particular kind of feelings about the fear he harvests. he started off as quite anxious and desperate to avoid his patron, but it never turns into pleasure like it does with other avatars, he just stops caring, and I wonder how much of that is due to the nature of the end as a power and how much is due to the lack of choice he had in his path. some combination thereof, probably.

based on this very good post by @themlet

mfw im trying to explain to my coworker that having a paranoia induced breakdown is actually the most sane thing i can do rn given the situations i be in

bonus:

beginning this blog with the very first piece of tma fanart i’ve done, hello.

The Magnus Archives is genuinely so funny from an objective pov because for four full seasons it’s this really tense horrifying portrayal of losing yourself to your fears and then the last season is just two very grumpy British boyfriends, one of which is just a regular nerd who loves tea while the other one is literally the antichrist, taking a road trip through a post apocalyptic wasteland during which the nerd constantly complains about his eldritch boyfriend’s habit of needing to sustain himself via recording his emo slam poetry.