#mag again

But then later in mag 67 we get this: “she was tall, with long, straight, auburn hair”

So I’m thinking there are a few possibilities here.

1. Writer error (we know Jonny mucked up dates a lot, not out of the question)

2. Agnes has dyed her hair (as in, she’s not a natural redhead most likely, unless she was dyeing it at a young age in mag 59)

3. Her hair color changed over time naturally - this is known to happen. My brother had white-blond hair that became a darker ash blond as he grew up. Idk about the science of that personally tho so not sure how feasible the change from brown to red would be

4. Ronald Sinclair (mag 59 statement giver) was colorblind.

According to a quick google, as many as 1 in 12 men are red-green colorblind, which makes it difficult to distinguish between reds, greens, and browns. Statistically speaking, it’s likely we had at least a few colorblind statement givers. Personally I dig this as a headcanon because it would involve a level of detail orientation that Jonny is often exceptional with, despite a handful of blips/inconsistencies.

1. Graham Folger!!!! I love this poor paranoid gay. I’ve seen some theories about him being a burgeoning eye avatar based on the way he acted in MAG03. I think to some extent his paranoia could be explained as a side effect of the Not!Them being close, but Graham owned the table long enough to refurbish the thing - so either the Not!Them was drawing out its campaign of terror for funsies (or maybe waiting for someone like Amy Patel to terrorize after replacing him).... OR Graham had managed to protect himself to some degree until he had an unlucky moment. Considering his frantic writing (”KEEP WATCHING”) and the fact that the Eye and the Stranger are often painted as antithetical to one another, I like to think the latter is most likely. 

2. Oliver’s origins!!! We know Oliver started dreaming about a year after having what he describes as a nervous breakdown, which was semi tied to the breakup we now know was with Graham Folger per Jonny’s confirmation. NOW. The thing that jumped out at me this go around listening to MAG 11 is the fact that we don’t really get an explicit inciting incident that led to Oliver’s ties with the End. Most avatars have some kind of trauma or past event that led them to their own strange relationships with fear, but Oliver’s description of what led up to the dreams is a bit vague. I’ve been thinking on that and here’s my thought.

(cw next 3 paragraphs for discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation)

Oliver had a nervous breakdown in which he felt his life was falling apart. His first dream starts while sleeping on a friend’s couch and is described like so: “I found myself standing atop the very peak of Canary Wharf and overlooking the Barclays building where I had spent so many hateful hours.” Then, he leaves this area by straight up just falling: “my forward motion brought me over the edge of Canary Wharf’s roof and I fell. I plummeted, I don’t know how far, until I hit the ground with a crack.”

Oliver doesn’t ever explicitly describe himself as being suicidal, and doesn’t say he attempted or considered suicide - but I think a high level of ideation is very likely given his circumstances. What better bait is there for the End to latch onto than someone who doesn’t fear it, but regularly considers welcoming it? I recall once, when I was struggling with my own ideation, a friend of mine confessed that he was terrified of dying, and there was a hurt, cruel part of me that almost wanted to laugh at the thought. There’s a rather blasé attitude about mortality that’s easy to fall into when you’re suicidally depressed, and that kind of attitude can just as easily inspire fear, fascination, or obsession. Quite possibly a blend of each of these, in Oliver’s case.

Looking back on my own experiences with depression and how they shaped my attitudes towards the world, it does kind of jive with his character. It always struck me how Oliver just sort of rolls with what he’s given in a rather fatalistic way, like “oh well it doesn’t matter we’re going to end up dead anyway.” Him being habitually suicidal meshes with that pretty dang well.

(end of suicide cw)

3. Oliver and Graham!!! We don’t know a ton about their relationship. We know that they were together a moderate amount of time, because they were living together (Oliver ended up on a friend’s couch when the dreams started) and we know that the breakup happened before Amy Patel because he was living alone at that time, and was dead at the end of it. We ALSO know that Graham owns his flat, inherited from his parents, which means that it’s pretty reasonable to presume they likely lived together in the same flat where the events of MAG 03 occurred. That is to say, they were likely broken up some time before MAG 03, by which point Graham has owned the table for a decent amount of time, having had the chance to refinish the thing.

Here’s my theory: Graham picking up the table was the inciting incident leading to their breakup. Weird spooky vibes start to happen, Graham gets paranoid, Graham quite possibly exhibits spooky Eye related shit while trying to cope with the close presence of the Not!Them. The tension and paranoia turns them against each other and dismantles everything they had, eventually leading to not one, but two people sucked into the nonsense of the fears.

One thing that hits me about this time through is how many big worldbuilding concepts Jonny introduced quite early on in the series, and even if they weren’t codified or named, they were handed to us on a silver platter in a way that smacks you in the face with the benefit of hindsight.

Mag 29 is soooooo full of this. Nathaniel Thorp walks in and tells the story of how he became an avatar, including his own death/becoming (“You said that if I won, then I’d live!” The monk shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”) as well as its setting giving the sort of otherworldly vibe we get from various little pockets of the world that belong to the fears before the change (”It was then he caught the scent of damp. Not the damp of wet earth after a hot day, but the cold damp of vaults and catacombs, slick with mould and glimmering nitre.”)

And then of course at the end of his statement, he shows how he cannot die, and confesses to his own hunger before he has even recognized it for what it is: “There is an aching inside of me. A craving for something, but I don’t know what.”

Obvs we get bigger traces of foreshadowing at the metaplot throughout S1 in the form of Prentiss and Michael flying through, but because they continue to hold significance as recurring characters, I feel like they tend to stick out more, and moments like these tend to slip into the background, even as Jonny handed us a massive chunk of world lore that he wouldn’t end up fully expanding on for nearly another 100 episodes. Gotta respect the dedication to the setup.

“I had Tim look into it, as I don’t entirely trust the others not to have written it as a practical joke and slipped it into the archives. Unsurprisingly, he came up with nothing. Antonio Blake is a fake name, and all of the contact details he provided were similarly fraudulent. It’s almost certainly a joke, a bit of hazing for the new boss, maybe? Best not to engage with it, I think.”

This gives me Several Thoughts:

1. Tim was, at one point, Jon’s most trusted colleague, which is fucking heartbreaking considering where that ended up

2. Despite being depicted as the funny one/comic relief, either a) this type of joke is something Jon wouldn’t consider Tim’s style or b) Jon trusts Tim to take Jon’s worry about it seriously

“There was only one of them that ever spoke, at least to me: a young guy called Vardhan Darvish. He seemed to be the manager, at least as much as there was any clear structure. And unlike his colleagues, he seemed happy, almost eager, to talk.”

shortly after this we have: “He generally came over to let me know about a blown light bulb somewhere in the building, and then stick around for a bit of conversation.I once jokingly suggested he must be breaking the lights himself for an excuse to talk to me. And he laughed, but then got kind of quiet, and didn’t stick around to talk.”