#blueandsilvercross

Hello thank you for this tasty tasty ask

I actually don’t think he could afford to, or if he did it was more in a damn-it-does-fly-oh-shit-oh-fuck-I’m-running-out-of-time kind of way.

So thinking in terms of logistics: Let’s say he showed up in the mid-1500s. The clock is ticking from go. He’s got to find a way to survive in this dimension physically, which varies in difficulty and interest depending on how sci-fi and/or cosmic horror your hc is. He’s got to find a way to forge out space and time for himself to: first, learn what the fuck is going on in the world (and oh babes he really couldn’t have picked a more complex time and place) and how to slot himself into it in such a way that he is able to pursue the things he’s got to pursue; and second, find out where to learn about all the alchemy stuff that may be comparable to the stuff he needs to get a portal together. Then he’s actually got to have the money, place and status to be able to materially work on it, while being able to afford the privacy of doing so. But he also can’t be too conspicuous about it, because it’s game over if he raises the slightest suspicion from the wrong party. Then there’s all the business of going about a facade and becoming part of the ecosystem so as to establish himself as unthreatening, yet indispensable, balanced with the fandango of you know, not too obviously being the exact same person for three hundred years. Then you’ve got to find the time for experiments and for building. Oh no, they’re not going too well, better start again. Oh no, that’s too expensive and the crops have failed again because we’re at bloody war again, where’s the money coming from? Royal sugar baby sidequest time! Bonus sidequest: use your seductive wiles to try and convince the King not to start another world war because it’s really inconvenient in the construction of impossible geometry OK so there’s all that, what about those two guys who screwed you over who you’ve got to keep playing off against each other and—oh fuck why has yet another war broken out, now you can’t get all those provisions and—why are we partitioning Poland again and—shit everyone’s died of plague again and there are no more taxpayers and—damn now they’re looking for that soldier I locked in the basement and—when did I put all those skulls in the cupboard I swear I needed them for something and—damnit Heinrich where am I supposed to get tampter—and who is this silly little Englishman from bloody Mayfair—

Yeah, it still feels like November. Thanksgiving passed by like a shot

It’s snowed here once and it was all gone the next day, so that isn’t helping.

With a follow-up request to focus on any of the pre-game entries! Here goes.

So this whole thing is a continuation of my experiments with horror and comedy—differences, similarities, punchlines, opposing sides of the same coin, all that. And point of view does so much. Think of Daniel’s story in Amnesia from Alexander’s point of view, how we see him make shit up on the spot to tell Daniel, the general weirdness of Brennenburg Castle, everything—it’s actually hilarious.

In a similar vein, the pre-game stuff must have been ridiculous from Alexander’s point of view. He’s spent so long schmoozing, directing, maybe investing (or at least influencing investors) all for the cause of that Algerian expedition, all of which goes disastrously wrong. Hubris, etc. And then out of nowhere, Daniel’s desperate correspondence. It kind of feels to me like that scene in The Holiday where Cameron Diaz has just broken up with that guy, so she’s storming and raging around her McMansion in fury, and then she finally concedes that she needs a proper vacation, but she doesn’t know the way forward from the hole she’s dug herself into with her endless work, and then out of the blue she gets that email from Kate Winslet about doing a house swap, which she immediately agrees to, so she gets on the first plane to Surrey and manages to get railed by Jude Law on her first night there. And Kate Winslet gets to make friends with Eli Wallach and gets an awesome relationship with Jack Black, who is fire in this movie.

Yes, so, it’s exactly like that, with Alexander as Cameron Diaz, and Daniel is Jude Law, but his secret isn’t that he’s a widower with two children but instead that he is completely unhinged and addicted to laudanum.

Add on to that the Early Modern and the Renaissance and you’re so right! It’s because I was there!

No, but really, historical research was+continues to be part of what I do. I find that sexuality and the ways it can/cannot/is/isn’t expressed is crucial to understanding a time period, yet at the same time is underresearched, both within and outside of the cisheteronormative mold. This is both due to our weirdly fluctuating relationship with taboo and the erasure/revisionism of sex outside its part in reproduction—in many ways the post-war paradigm is more conservative than much of the early 20th and late 19th. A lot of confirmation and survivor bias and all other manner of fallacies come into it, but it’s also because many primary sources haven’t made it or weren’t recorded in the first place. Partly because we’re talking about private correspondence or objects that might have been destroyed—but also, we mustn’t forget that literacy wasn’t as evenly distributed in many parts of the world as it is now, so that’s a whole swathe of stories that will remain untold and unrepresented—mostly rural and, once the industrial revolution came along, the urban working class. Which is likely to be where the ‘only aristocrats got to be queer’ fallacy comes from. But for these and all other experiences, as they like to say in the biz, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence...

And just because you’ve got me thinking about it, I’d like to share these two works with you: Des Grieux and Teleny. These two novels—novellas, really—were round-robin projects undertaken in London, 1890s. The manuscript was passed around and completed anonymously by a group of people—they could have been anybody, though textual analysis guesses that parts of both could be attributed to Wilde, and to be honest, anyone who is familiar with his work could probably identify some of his literary tics. That, and it would have passed through his social circle.

The best part? They read exactly like slash fic. It makes one proud to be part of a lineage. It’s really interesting to see the variance among the contributors. Some make the protagonist go through exquisite pages-long Queer Yearning (Oscar. Oscar we know it’s you) and others just have him shag the maid because why not! &c.

And besides, there’s nothing funnier than watching cishet historians twist themselves into little pretzels to explain certain correspondence away as ‘they were such good friends’ or ‘they had a passionate intellectual dispute’ and oh my god i cannot believe anyone actually believes that what happened between frederick the great and voltaire was anything but the messiest of messy jealousy/breakup drama? hello??

Oh yes, it really is. But also there is a lot of humour in it, especially when you take a step back from the situation and deconstruct it—eg eldritch creature doesn’t know much about humans, so it signs up for a class. Ragtag crowd must go off to save the world, but are implored to save their receipts as well so that in case they succeed and make it back they can have them expensed. That sort of thing. (Think Hannibal’s puns. A lot of that type of thing, even more on the relisten... the eyes have it.)

But what I like most about it is that it’s aware of exactly the story it is telling, why, how, and the audience it wants tells it to. A ‘by us and for us’ type thing. And as a self-confessed cosmic horror nut—and content creator—I can say that a serious problem in the genre is its refusal to take accountability for the Lovecraftian tropes it is based on, a laziness at best and resistance at worst to interrogate, subvert, and reclaim them, which is a shame as they are so ripe for the taking. Lovecraft was a bigot even back in Lovecraft’s day and to deny that his views are reflected in his narratives—to deny that those narratives run as a current through horror going back to the genre’s inception, as exploitation of fear of ‘the other’—is something I no longer have time for.

And The Magnus Archives gets it so, so right because the way it presents horror elements never delves into exploitative sexual violence, or any of those old stereotypes of mental illness, racism, anti-semitism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia etc—which when deconstructed unfortunately form a large part of the backbone of ‘the canon’ of horror. This means that in dispensing with these entrenched narrative shortcuts people who have faced marginalisation and discrimination can actually enjoy it. If I can sum this up, its central question is more what is fear rather than who should I fear, and I feel this is the shift that is required in horror if it is to remain something that is relevant going forward.

I think you’d enjoy it. It’s a gorgeous, subtly-layered thing and a lot of thought and love clearly went into it, and its biggest strengths lie in the quality of the writing, sound design, and VA work.