The Magnus Archives was the first true tragedy media that I ever enjoyed *as a tragedy*. Yes, it's a horror podcast, but at its root it is tragedy layered upon tragedy. An ouroboros of dramatic irony and grim, terrible decisions that could not have been made any other way.

There is something deeply compelling about meta-aware tragedy once you've experienced Bad Things that came from your own decisions. There are times in everyone's life where you can practically *feel* the Bad Things that will come about as a result of your actions. You know it. Maybe everyone knows it. And you feel absolutely powerless to act in any other way. You feel the imposed strictures of a narrative - be it self-narrative, or something imposed from the outside.

It's in search of this exact catharsis that I've been re-listening to The Magnus Archives, and it is delivering in spades. There are other horror podcasts, but few other *tragedy* horror podcasts. It's a hard thing to pull off - in and of itself, a bit of a tragedy.

There is also, of course, something tragic purely in the way that The Magnus Archives itself has become less exceptional and more rote over time. The wake of all fantastic media seethes with imitation and iteration - no bad thing - and what was once a peak of the present becomes just another point on the flat horizon of the past.

In this, it shares a fate with a lot of media I enjoy, Homestuck included. This is not, however, why it reminds me of Homestuck. No, it reminds me of Homestuck because they both have in-progress sequels that... worry me.

Homestuck's sequels (Epilogue and Homestuck^2) and The Magnus Protocol both make me feel like I'm watching a tragedy play out.

Looking into the audience, past the sage and weary nods from anyone familiar with Homestuck at literally any point in its history, I can see some confusion.

Homestuck started as a (partially) audience-driven internet serial comic about a video game that ended the world. It ended up as a multi-media, author-driven sprawl of a story that reached an incomplete and unsatisfying ending, many of its (dozens of) important characters left in limbo.

There are enough deftly-woven themes of cycles within cycles, layered schemes, and fatalistic predestination to keep people writing thinkpieces on it for decades to come, to be sure. But the final act and end of Homestuck was a harsh and unglamorous severance of an intricate and unfinished pattern in lace.

Nonetheless, this is not why The Magnus Archives reminds me of Homestuck. But it is why that feeling of an unfolding tragedy is so familiar. Why this feeling goes far beyond just the typical half-worry of "does this *need* a sequel?"

Detour into the Homestuck Epilogues

There are a lot of criticisms of Homestuck's Epilogues. The format-switch likely didn't do it any favours - once treated to a text-and-visual smorgasboard that was occasionally either animated or interactive, fans were instead faced with an extended text-based Choose Your Own Adventure format with only once choice and two long, opposing paths. Candy and Meat. Saccharine and grimdark. Restrictive.

For many people, the Epilogues also felt... punitive. There's no other way to describe it. Almost *cruel and spiteful*. Like the whole thing was mocking not just everyone who wanted closure, but the entire community that wrote post-ending fanfiction. Became invested in the characters. Cared about what happened next.

I don't think that's the best way to view it (anymore). I think it's reasonable to conclude that, for all its (many) flaws as a work, the twin-forked Epilogues tome is just... metacommentary on the myth of closure.

It posits that we, the audience, are *doing* all this much-decried damage to these characters ourselves, just by insisting on more story. These characters could have lived their lives, but our insistence on voyeurism mandates more conflict, more stakes, more stories that push them into making mistakes and changing as people.

Thus, the twin paths of the Epilogue. The candy-coated character resolution that ultimately truncates itself, and the gritty, meaty plot-based progression that undoes or undermines so many tied-up threads and refuses to resolve any new ones, let alone old and dangling ones.

The trouble is, Undertale did it first, and better, and without the cruelty. Well, okay, with *some* cruelty, but... look, we're detouring again, okay? Stay with me, this does have a point.

Detour into the Undertale Endings

While Homestuck followed up on a genuinely incomplete ending with a meta-commentary on how futile it was for an audience of any media to expect closure, Undertale tied itself up as a self-contained body of work that *encouraged* you to put it down and never come back.

In brief, Undertale was designed around being replayed. Its core design allowed players to solve conflicts as a pacifist, and the meta-plot heavily encouraged discovering this and leaning into it across playthroughs to achieve the "best" ending. Its villain, effectively, was someone who had access to "saving" and kept on playing, toying with the lives of the characters. Voyeuristically murdering and reloading, over and over, exerting total control.

So, when you complete a total pacifist playthrough, there is no extra incentive to go back and play again. You're discouraged, explicitly. You don't get rewarded for restarting. You don't get rewarded for going back and starting again after everyone (well, the cast of characters) is happy and safe. Why would you be?

Once things end, you can't go back and experience it again without undermining that. Without it feeling lesser. Hollow. Without, eventually, after enough repetitions, becoming bored and experimenting with a murder-everyone run... becoming just like the villain.

The fact that it was produced by someone (Toby Fox) who was involved in the making of Homestuck, *and* was followed up by a piecemeal sequel? One that remixes the original *and* explores the perils of leaning on media for escapism? Mostly just the cherries on top of this already rich and sumptuous meta-commentary cake.

So, no, I don't think Homestuck's Epilogues needed to be anywhere near as scorched-earth as they were to get the message across. Undertale did it better, and kinder.

But you can maybe see why these lines of meta-commentary, these themes of voyeurism and closure and fatalistic tragedy, all run parallel to The Magnus Archives. But that's not what makes one remind me of the other, remember?

Un-detour back to The Magnus Archives

The ending to The Magnus Archives was good, even with its odd twist into (what else) meta-commentary. I don't want to leave the impression that it ends as openly or abruptly as Homestuck. It's a tragedy, so bad things happen. We never get to know for sure how bad some of those things are. That is, one might say, the point.

So when it was announced that there would be a sequel? The Magnus Protocol? I felt that bone-deep weariness. Does this need a sequel, sure, but what *kind* of sequel can you even tell without undermining the original or diving head-first into the chorus of full-throated meta-commentary?

You can't write a sequel to Hadestown. Even if you can, you can't. Not "shouldn't", but can't. It's a tragedy with a very specific arc.

I feel much the same way about The Magnus Protocols. You can maybe have a dracula-of-the-week format, but with so much about the horror-filled world already revealed, what's left? What's to be gained? What else is to be explored and beheld by the all-greedy eye of the audience?

Like any good detective mystery, the inescapable conclusion is that the events were never what was special - it was how they were withheld from us. The mystery box is always more fascinating and compelling than a filled-out fanwiki.

So that's really it - the mere *threat* of a sequel was enough to link Homestuck to Magnus in my mind. A tragedy that didn't need (didn't *deserve*, in the punitive sense) a sequel, but is getting one anyway.

I may hope it doesn't undermine itself with meta-commentary, or spite, or anything of the kind. I may hope its presence doesn't cheapen the original - or, at least, I may hope that if it does, it operates via the kind of recontextualisation that made so many twists in The Magnus Archives so gut-wrenching. But none of that matters.

Ultimately, the most important thing (despite all this hand-wringing) is that I hope it's enjoyable. I hope everyone involved has *a lot of fun* making it, regardless of how it turns out. Hell, I hope everyone who listens has fun, even if it *does* do all the things I'm dreading.

Also, despite the presence of the Ceaseless Watcher? I do still hope that the navel of The Magnus Protocol remains *firmly* un-gazed.