Ask An Exec by @shinyopals takes on all five seasons of The Magnus Archives from the point of view of an innocent definitely-not-Ask-A-Manager career advice blogger, who starts getting some interesting queries from a certain archivist...
The entire story is told through blog posts, featuring Jon's terrible anonymized situations, Abigail's attempts at providing genuine advice while also going "WTF?", and many commenters who are also saying WTF while also encouraging Jon to unionize. Shinyopals is masterful at pulling out the true horror in TMA: poor corporate management. It's hilarious but also heart-twisting as the seasons progress, and somehow, somehow, you start caring about not only Jon's situation from a more personal point of view, but also various OC commenters and their attempts at trying to help Jon without having a clue about what's actually happening.
Because this fic is very heavily based on Ask A Manager, I leaned into a self-help tradpub design.
The interior design is not so tradpub-y, but leans into the sterile graphic design of many advice blogs. :D
As mentioned, the fic is formatted like a series of blog posts, which the author did an amazing job of emulating on AO3 (seriously, check it out! A true feat in wrangling code!). It was interesting seeing how much of the comment threads I could preserve while flipping pages, but hopefully it worked out! The fonts, colors, and general design were specifically chosen to mimic the current version of the Ask A Manager blog.
(TMA SPOILER) There's a certain shift change for the epilogue, so I took cues from the author's AO3 coding and changed the design accordingly!
This took almost a year of leveling up in LaTeX to typeset it efficiently; thank you @shinyopals for your patience in receiving this! I hope you enjoy your copy, and seriously everyone, even if you're not in Magnus Archives at all, please read this fic. It's WONDERFUL.
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[ID: A comic of a scene from The Magnus Archives, season 5. It is two panels over a splash page.
Panel 1: Jon and Martin stand facing each other in an apocalyptic landscape. The sky is red, and the land is barren. Martin says, "What about Elias?"
Panel 2: Jon looks intensely forward, pupils glowing red and long hair whipping around his face. The background is black and stormy, with a halo of red static and glitch effects around Jon. He says, "He's inside the Panopticon. The tower, high above the world."
Panel 3/Splash Page: Martin makes a flat, unimpressed expression and gestures over his shoulder to a colossal, black tower rising into swirling clouds that resemble an eye. He says, "That one?" End ID]
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Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
i've always wondered what human speech would look like visually in the POV of eridians in the same way eridian speech is written as music notes in the book and my favorite version of it i've seen in fics is when words are written as phonetics in rocky's POV :-) oh and also that one post about rocky and grace figuring out random words they can say in the other's language
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adrian: obviously grace and rocky have a deep bond that i can't really fully understand from being alone in space saving the universe
grace: obviously rocky and adrian have a deep bond that i can't really fully understand from being married for almost two centuries
rocky: hello eriddit. i (302M) have two mates (337X) (40M) who are both brilliant scientists. i love them both very much and was very excited when they started courting each other. however WIBTA if i thought they were too close? like i'm no slouch or anything, i'm an engineer, but you get these two talking about origin of life research and it starts going WAY over my carapace —
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