kindkit | the magnus archives 162

Some thoughts on 162, "The Cosy Cabin," with spoilers, under the cut.

That went about as I expected in terms of plot and emotion: Jon and Martin deeply in love but the relationship being slowly poisoned by being stuck together in an anteroom of hell, and deciding at the end that they have to leave.

I did not expect the cosy cabin to have become a literal monster. Mostly, unsurprisingly, a manifestation of Too Close I Cannot Breathe, but with some hints of the Flesh, perhaps? The Fears were never really separate, as we now know, and perhaps they're even less so in this changed world.

I have no idea WTF is going on with Jon being compelled to speak, but it can't be good.

Jonny is . . . assertively emphasizing that Jon and Martin are romantically in love and are, in fact, holding each other all the fucking time rather than, say, expressing their True Manly Friendship from separate armchairs at opposite sides of the room. I love it. (My take: Jon and Martin could never have been queer-platonic, because Martin's feelings were never platonic. They could never have had a non-romantic friendship, because they were never friends. Martin was in love with Jon from very early on--my current guess for The Moment is the ice cream outing when Jon lectured them all about emulsifiers--and Jon's weird emotional journey from disdain to slight respect to distrust to renewed trust to protectiveness to love seems to have bypassed friendship entirely. I do think they're friends now as well as lovers, but they got there by being in love. And also they're still working on the friendship part.) The homophobes in the fandom can fuck right off. And the folks looking for queer friendship: that's awesome, and you can find that between just about any two characters in Magnus canon who are friends, so you don't need to deny an actual queer romance.

Gertrude and Gerry: almost warmed my heart until I remembered that Gertrude trapped dead!Gerry in a book. Did she deliberately lie to him when she said that she believed death was a true end and a release from suffering? Or did she just not think it would matter, because she had no reason to think Gerry would be suddenly dead of a brain tumor while she still needed him? Did she trap him for his knowledge or just because she didn't want to lose him? I do think she cared for him, as much as she was ever able to (or allowed herself to) care for anyone.

Tim and Sasha: are making me retroactively sad. To be honest, I never felt all that much when either of them met their end, because we barely knew Sasha and we'd mostly seen Tim being furious, bitter, and destructive. But now I hurt for them both. Hopefully fandom is busy writing All The Bittersweet Prequels. (To be clear, I don't ship Tim and Sasha, because het isn't my thing even when at least one of the characters is bi. But I like their friendship, which is clearly pretty close. Tim must have been devastated to learn the truth about not!Sasha.)

This season is going to hurt. so. much. I knew that already, but I'm really feeling it now.