ALEX: Hi! And welcome to the Q&A at the end of Season 2. How are you feeling, Jonny?
JONNY: Relieved and… eager.
ALEX: Eager?
JONNY: Raring to go at Season 3.
ALEX: Ah, well, you’ve changed your tune. None of, none of this “Oh, what’re we going to do?”
JONNY: Er, well, I mean, we’ve had a long discussion about what we’re gonna do and it’s ooh, it’s nasty.
[CHUCKLES FROM BOTH]
ALEX: It’s not nice. Right, so, we have quite a lot of questions to get through this time.
JONNY: Right, well, I will try to keep my answers…
ALEX: So, we are, we are going to be blasting through a number of questions.
JONNY: Gonna try and keep them quick.
ALEX: And I apologise in advance, it’s a running joke that I do not know how to pronounce, like, basic people names, so I’ll do the best I can.
JONNY: Sure.
ALEX: So… this first question is from @pluviosity on Twitter. “Section 31 seems to be almost as shady as the Archives. Will we ever hear from Basira again?”
JONNY: Obviously that’s quite a spoiler-heavy question. I will say that Section 31 is – and Basira – the Archive is certainly not done with them but at the same time they’re probably… Section 31 is not gonna be as much of a focus as, I think, as it was in Season 2.
ALEX: Yeah, fair enough. Moving on. I have a few from cannonlongshot.
JONNY: Sure.
ALEX: “Are there any real world people, aside from the single most obvious one, you, that any of the characters or statement givers are based on?”
JONNY: To be honest, John the Archivist is not actually… that much like me aside from sharing a name but… I don’t really know. I think I generally tend to take aspects of either myself or people I know and then extrapolate them into characters.
ALEX: Well, you have a massive knack for taking every single person that we know who is both involved and not involved in production and stealing their names to make all logistics a complete nightmare!
JONNY: Yeah, I’ll take their names! I’ll take their names. Because I need a lotta names and you guys have some… you guys have some fine names. But in terms of the actual characters I tend to take elements of people I know and flesh them out rather than importing people wholesale.
ALEX: Yeah, I think that’s a lot safer as well. From personal experience there are very few people, who when they see themselves down on a page, go “Oh this is a good thing!”
ALEX: Okay, er–
JONNY: Especially if I’m going to kill them with a horrible monster.
ALEX: Especially if you’re gonna kill them horribly, yeah, fair point, okay.
ALEX: “Will the Magnus theme tune be replaced by Band on the Run for the duration of Season 3?”
JONNY: [Deadpan] We couldn’t get the licensing.
ALEX: Licensing is really expensive!
JONNY: Or we tried Carry On My Wayward Son, er…
ALEX: Walking in Memphis, but you’d be surprised how few statements you can really get, just from Memphis.
JONNY: I’m going to be doing, er, my own cover of Band on the Run, acapella… er, but we’re still waiting to hear back from Legal on that one.
ALEX: “As a percentage, how many of audience questions should we expect to be ‘solved’ – in inverted commas – by the end of the show? Do you imagine it being, sort of, fairly open-ended, with room for people to discuss no-one knowing really what’s happening, or are we looking at a tight wrap-up?”
JONNY: Ooh, that’s a surprisingly tricky question. A lot of it depends on… I mean, especially percentage-wise, a lot of it depends on how much store you put by smaller mysteries. I think, most big questions will have either answers or closed discussions, if that makes sense? I think there’ll probably be a lot of competing theories about the exact nature of certain things that happen but I don’t think anyone’s going to be walking away actively confused.
ALEX: But similarly we couldn’t answer every single red string and nuance thing ‘cause otherwise we… the last season would just be Q and As…
JONNY: Yeah.
ALEX: …There wouldn’t be any content left. Next question is from isengrim, I think I’m saying that right, “Was the thing that Leitner described as having ‘too many teeth and limbs like knives’, the same entity, or at least the same kind of entity, as the ‘werewolf’ from Magnus 31?”
JONNY: I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say they’re not the exact same entity but they’re… you could call them “brothers”. They’re of the same ilk.
ALEX: Next one’s from kea. “Where do you find or meet all of our incredible guest voice actors?” So not… not us, then.
JONNY: To be honest, mainly people we know. Because for the first two seasons we haven’t been in a position to really pay voice actors and we’re both, I think, very keen on professional work should be absolutely compensated…
ALEX: Sure.
JONNY: Luckily, we both come from very… dramatic sort of backgrounds, so we have a store of people who we’ve been… well, we’ve been burning though them.
ALEX: [chuckles] No, you’ve been killing them all!
JONNY: I’ve been… we’ve been burning them.
ALEX: You’ve been burning them! Okay, um, another question, again from kea. “How have you felt about the fandom reacting to the major moments? As an example, Michael appearing for the first time.”
JONNY: I mean, generally beforehand, quite nervous. After the fact, gratified. So far, at least. [Alex chuckles] Because whenever you have a big moment, a big reveal, there’s always that sense of “What if they don’t like it?”, “What if they… what if they take the wrong things away from it?”, “What if I’ve got this big revelation and no-one understands what’s going on anymore?” So far, every significant moment that’s been like that, I’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by the reaction, though.
ALEX: See, from my perspective I always think of it in terms of a game where… you have your pieces, and you have it set up, and you think you know how it’s going to play but eventually you just kinda have to let it play out and hope. And, and that’s the scary bit, certainly, at my end.
ALEX: Next question’s from quinzelade. “Does Jonny read the fan fiction we write about his show?”
JONNY: Right. Well, er, the short answer is “No.” The long answer is, I did right at the very beginning when there wasn’t a lot. A lot of this comes down to not wanting to inadvertently steal. Or, indeed, be accused of it, if something that happens in the show is too close to something that happens in fanworks. I mean, essentially, once there’s more fan fiction than you an easily keep up with, it becomes sensible to just not read it because being influenced, you don’t want to be stealing other people’s ideas. And it’s easier if somebody does say, “That happened in this fanwork,” to be able to say, “That’s a coincidence, because we don’t read them.”
ALEX: Okay, this question’s from Kelsey Dawn Scott and it’s one I, I personally, y’know, feel quite strongly about.
JONNY: Right, right.
ALEX: “Is Martin going to be okay?”
[JONNY SUPPRESSES DARK LAUGHTER]
ALEX: And I know the answer to this one.
JONNY: Right, well, er, just to put this… to bed, once and for all… no, Martin is not going to be okay.
ALEX: I don’t think anyone’s going to be okay. I think that’s–
JONNY: No, no-one’s going to be okay.
ALEX: That’s basically how horror works.
JONNY: Martin, especially. Martin, especially. He’s not going to be okay.
ALEX: [plaintively] Stop saying things like this.
ALEX: I’m going to move on from that question.
JONNY: Yes, no, please, please do.
ALEX: Next one is from Elise Tilemma. “How is the format of the show going to work now that the Archivist is no longer in the Archives? Since there are no ‘statements’, unless he finds them, is Season 3 going to be more centred on the Archivist just as a character, or will supporting cast fill his role at the Institute?”
JONNY: I’m not going to get into this one in too much detail because it’s got elements of spoilers for what will be happening in Season 3. I will say that the episodes will still, primarily function as standalone statement-story with surrounding plot…
ALEX: And we’ve always said that.
JONNY: Absolutely. It will, at least for the beginning part, be bouncing back between the Archivist and the Institute. But I’m not going to say any more than that.
ALEX: Yes, yeah, yeah. In that case, sort of linked to that actually, we have Luigi Malinis. “Are you planning for more unconnected, foreign stories?” For example, things based in Asia, basically spooks from other, other countries, because we’ve been quite, obviously, Western European-focussed, so far.
JONNY: Yeah, we’re very, we’re very, er, I mean, England-centric, to a certain degree. But yes, I’m very much hoping to expand the scope of the statements a bit. Realistically, it’s always going to be a minority for two reasons. Firstly, they take a lot longer to research and write. Because these are not cultures that, I myself, am from, I am always acutely aware of potentially doing them a disservice. There’s a lot more time that needs to go into research and checking and just making sure that I’m doing them justice.
JONNY: Also, to a certain degree, whereas with a lot of your classic Western monsters, I feel in a position to take them and… twist them a bit, have a bit of fun with them, see what, what I can do with them. I’m never a hundred percent that comfortable with…
ALEX: It has an appropriationist vibe.
JONNY: Yeah, I don’t want to do that stuff with creatures from other cultures. So there’s… so the short answer is yes, I would, I am very hopeful of going a bit more global in term of our stories over the next few seasons but the majority of the story is going to remain centred on Britain, basically.
ALEX: So tied to that is a question we get quite a lot actually. Simple one, really. “How much research do you do for each episode?”
JONNY: It varies wildly. Um, usually, I would say, at least as much time as I actually spend writing the thing. If it’s not something that I myself have direct personal experience of, I will generally do as much research as I can beforehand. Something like Fatigue [MAG074], for instance, didn’t need to do any research at all. I have not slept plenty. Um, but anything where it’s a job or an experience… I mean, I’ve never been caving, for instance. And that was a lot of research, for instance. Never been, never been diving, um, all this sort of stuff. So, there’s a lot of research.
ALEX: Never been locked in a space station.
[NOISES OF JONNY BEING NON-COMMITTAL]
JONNY: Er… I mean… define “locked,” define “locked”?
ALEX: [jokingly] There was that one time… Yeah, sure.
JONNY: It’s not really a space “station”… It’s fine.
ALEX: Another question here, from Adriana Rojas. “Are there any book plans in the mix? Because we would all love to have another addition to libraries of forbidden books.”
JONNY: I’m gonna have to bounce this one to Alex a bit. Certainly I’m very keen to get, er, certainly the statements as they, as they have been broadcast and transcribed in a book format. In terms of wider or additional stuff, no current plans but who knows.
ALEX: Sure, so sort of stepping in here to talk about the wider picture, it’s another one of those yes/no answers. Are we interested in this kind of thing? Yeah, like obviously, but at the same time, it’s a case of these things take a lot of infrastructure and a lot of time to set up and similarly, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, the Archives were made for audio, were made for an audio format. And elements of that mean that you can’t just… you can’t copy and paste to a different medium. So, yes, it’s a thing were interested in, no, it’s not a thing that I can say, guess what, this is happening next week.
JONNY: I am pretty confident that by the end of The Magnus Archives as a whole, we will be putting them out in some form of book.
ALEX: Yeah, I can come down and say that. Yeah, absolutely.
ALEX: This one’s from Simon Freeston. “Where do you get your inspiration for the monsters and the books?”
JONNY: Everywhere. Literally everywhere. I am constantly aware that I need to find spooky ideas for things, and if any of my friends are listening to this, any conversation I’ve had with you in the last two years, I’ve been secretly looking for spooks that I can steal from you.
ALEX: Okay, now this one’s diving into a bit more of the meta. It’s from Erin Lindsey. “Will we learn more about Elias’ history and motives?”
JONNY: Yes.
ALEX: Good. Moving on. Ali Maloney. “When are we going to get a live show?”
ALEX: So, this is one that I think I should probably step into again on the, sort of, logistics side.
JONNY: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll leave that to you, Alex.
ALEX: So, we are hoping to do some live shows next year. I cannot go into more detail than that, because, again, massive amounts of time, money, effort, planning and I don’t want to start giving out times and programmes, when things are very much still up in the air.
ALEX: Another question, again from Ali Maloney. “I’m massively impressed with Jonathan’s writing and would love to know how he got to this point?”
JONNY: Oh, thank you.
ALEX: “What were you doing before The Magnus Archives?” A question we’ve answered, again, before.
JONNY: But, er, I mean, the answer is writing a lot of stuff that I never finished. I’ve always been doing some form of writing to one degree or another…
ALEX: Plus space piracy.
JONNY: Oh and… oh yeah, and, er [chuckles] and, yeah, the, previously the most complete works I’ve done were with The Mechanisms. So, concept albums. And it’s, it’s storytelling and lyrics, so while less… voluminous? [Alex laughs] than The Magnus Archives, er, there’s still quite a lot of work and writing gone into that. Aside from that, just a lot of unfinished projects and…
ALEX: Well, you design a lot of games as well, don’t you?
JONNY: Oh yeah. Er, that’s when I’m procrastinating. My brain will often just start designing games. Which is interesting but irritating, sometimes.
ALEX: This next one’s from Daniel Morales. “Will you go further into the history of Mary Keay and the Magnus Institute?”
JONNY: The Magnus Institute, absolutely. Mary Keay, yes, to a certain degree but she’s not going to be the focus.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. This one’s from Steve Bread, via Reddit. “Much of the exposition in the finale seemed to directly address fan theories about the wider story arc, especially all of the stuff about dimensions and gods and things like that. Was this a deliberate nod to the Red String Brigade?”
JONNY: That’s more of a complicated answer than it might seem at first. On the one hand, yes, because The Magnus Archives, for all else it is, it has a lot of mystery elements and I always feel, with this sort of mystery, you owe it to those people who are invested in the mystery to play fair with them. When you’re revealing something, you want to be clear and if they have particular theories that you are aware of, it’s only fair to address those theories as directly as you can without breaking anything.
JONNY: Also, there is the fact that, within the world of the actual story, John and Martin… I mean, they are the Red String Brigade in the, in the world. They are trying to make those same connections, they’re trying to figure the same–
ALEX: I mean, they’re literally getting a paycheque to do it.
JONNY: Yeah, exactly. So it’s very useful, actually, to have a group of people who are trying to figure these things out on the outside, to look at and think, “Ah, that’s what people think is going on that moment. That’s probably the sort of questions that the characters will be asking.”
ALEX: I would tack onto that, as a sort of additional thing, is that we’re all, we’re all spending our time right now in a kind of golden story age. By which I mean, we’re all drowning in stories and content to consume and so on. But, obviously, as part of that, is we’re all trained to listen to stories now. And part of that is, I mean, I doubt anyone who’s listening to The Magnus Archives has never heard a horror. And part of that is, you are trained to think about these things in certain ways, these stories take certain shapes.
ALEX: So, honestly, genuinely, as much as we have been, sort of, monitoring the meta, there is an element when we started out where it was, like, “Look, things that people are going to think are: gods, dimensions…” and, like, it’s, it isn’t a huge leap, it’s more about the specificity I’d say of where the meta comes in.
JONNY: Yeah, the stuff that’s, er, the stuff that generally is a response to the forums or the Tumblr or the Reddit, or this sort of stuff, is very rarely the wide-scale stuff, er, like “Ooh, are they gods”, “Is it different dimensions?” It’s generally the really specific stuff, where someone on one of the message boards will have said, “Oh wait. What happened to this character?” and I’ll think, “Oh yeah! I’ve never actually… I’ve never actually specifically said what happened in that case. I’ll drop a line or two in there just to clarify that.”
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. Another one from Steve Bread.
JONNY: Sure.
ALEX: So, “With this in mind and without giving anything away, can we say if there are any plot elements that haven’t been as discussed as much as they probably should?”
JONNY: To be honest, no. You guys are really on it.
ALEX: Yeah, you really are!
JONNY: Your real problem is overthinking things. The number of times I’ve seen a theory that’s like, “Oh, you’ve figured it out then?” and then, the next one will be like, “Oh, no, that can’t work.” [voice drops to stage whisper] It does.
ALEX: So, last question, again from Steve Bread. This one, again, I’m probably going to have to field. “Overall the voice acting for the series, and this season, this latest season especially, has been excellent.”
JONNY: Oh, thank you. And thank you on behalf of everyone else.
ALEX: Yes. “And judging by some of the guest cast surnames, we’re guessing that you’ve relied a little bit on family and friends but we could we go into more detail about the casting process?”
JONNY: Sure.
ALEX: So, to pull back the curtain again. When we originally set this up, we didn’t have big infrastructure, we didn’t have any kind of pipelines, it was very much us doing the best we could with what we had and it, like I said, it relied a lot on previous contacts from theatre industry for me, again, friends who have been doing this, that kind of thing. However, I would say going forward, we are looking at formalising casting and so on.
ALEX: However, unfortunately, for a few, let’s be honest, quite obvious reasons, it’s not going to be open casting calls to any and all fans because a) we will drown, we will just drown under people who want to be involved, which is absolutely, like, flattering, but a logistical nightmare when you put the business hat on. And the other element is as well, as we’ve been saying, we are trying to get this formalised in terms of proper pay for professional actors and so on. Part of that, I’m afraid, is that going through standard channels, which would be things like eventually we’re looking at agencies and casting call networks rather than just putting out a general shout-out, I’m afraid.
ALEX: So, this next question is obviously relating to a certain bit of poetry, the excerpt which made its way in, specifically, “How would Martin fare in a Vogon poetry contest?”
ALEX: I have a response here from Anil–
JONNY: Oh yeah, I was going to say, because the majority of the poetry isn’t actually written by me. Anil, who runs our social media, is actually a poet. And so we’ve, we’ve drafted him in to do most of Martin’s poetry, overseen and I add a little bit here and there but most of it’s his work.
ALEX: So, for all of the Patrons out there, you’ll have already noticed that certain extra bits of Martin’s poetry have managed to make its way into the Patreon feed. So if you’re not already subscribed to it, there’s a really good reason. But I do have Anil’s–
ALEX: There’s some aggressively mediocre poetry on there!
ALEX: I have Anil’s answer here, which is: How would he fare? Probably not well; Martin’s poetry is pleasantly middle-of-the-road. It’s not great but it doesn’t want to make you tear your ears off, either. That said, Anil himself, has placed 2nd and 3rd in genuine Vogon Poetry Slams…
JONNY: Which are a lot of fun, if you ever get the chance to go to one.
ALEX: So… sort of, as an answer.
JONNY: Make of that what you will.