The Queer Monsters of The Magnus Archives

The obsession that many queer people have with monsters has always fascinated me. Nearly every queer person I have ever met has had some sort of fixation on the monstrous, abnormal, and taboo, whether it’s horror media, true crime, or a general interest in the occult. While this sort of interest is not unique to queer people, it certainly seems to be more pronounced in queer communities. Certain queer subcultures, such as voidpunk, are entirely focused around comparing themselves to monstrosities and supernatural entities, and many queer people self-identify as inhuman. 

This kind of disidentification with monsters and inhumanity was discussed at length in the YouTube video essay “Outsiders: How to Adapt H.P. Lovecraft in the 21st Century” by hbomberguy (Brewis). In it, he analyzes H.P. Lovecraft’s body of work and adaptations of it that are either queer, or can easily be read with a queer lens – a bit of an odd phenomenon given that Lovecraft himself was widely regarded as homophobic and a bigot (Brewis). In the final segment of the video, hbomberguy poses this central question: “Why does [Lovecraft’s] work resonate so well with people who the man himself would have hated even more than he hated everyone else?” (Brewis 22:20) His answer to this question posits that Lovecraft’s exploration of themes of feeling “othered” by society, though partially influenced by Lovecraft’s agoraphobia, bigotry, and hatred of others, relates as well to the experiences of many marginalized people, including queer people. For example, he calls particular attention to  H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Outsider” which is a narrative about a character who has been trapped in a castle his entire life, never having had contact with the outside world. When he finally escapes, people act in horror and run away. He realizes upon looking in a mirror that he is a horrifying monster (Brewis 23:21). As hbomberguy notes, “All of [Lovecraft’s] best works draw into close focus not just generic fear of outsiders, but the anxieties and fears that come with being an outsider. Of being in a world that doesn’t really understand you and perhaps of not being fully able to understand yourself” (Brewis 23:39). 

Hbomberguy also discusses his own relationship with the movie Cthulhu, a little-known, loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella,“Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The movie’s protagonist is gay and struggles just as much with homophobia from his family and former community as he does with the supernatural elements of the story. Hbomberguy states that he hated the movie when it first came out, but after realizing he was bisexual, he saw it in a whole new light. “It knew what it felt to sit in a room you just can’t leave, and have a piece of your personhood interrogated. It knew how it felt to be seen as an outsider” (Brewis 7:34). This feeling of being an outsider, he argues, is one that nearly every marginalized person can relate to, and its centrality to Lovecraft’s work means it is an essential theme to include in any adaptation (Brewis 7:34).

While hbomberguy only analyzes a few works in his video essay (several short stories by Lovecraft, the movie Cthulhu, Guillermo del Toro’s movie The Shape of Water, and a few others with similar themes), I believe his conclusions can be applied broadly to frame analyses of many pieces of horror literature and other media inspired by Lovecraft’s works. One such piece of media, the podcast The Magnus Archives, uses queer identity and monsterhood almost interchangeably. Notably, as the main character turns into a monster, he simultaneously enters a queer relationship. These two events are interlinked in the story and occur congruently. 

More broadly, The Magnus Archives is a story about humans becoming monsters. In the universe of the podcast, people can choose to become servants, or “avatars” of eldritch deities representing different fears. These avatars gain certain (often ambiguous) powers related to the deity of which they are an avatar, and are given the mission to inflict the fear the god represents on as many unknowing people as possible, in order to “feed” the god. The podcast centers around “The Magnus Institute”, which “investigates” the supernatural events people who encounter these deities and their servants experience. In reality, the institute is a cover for “The Eye”, one of these deities which represents the fear of being watched. The main protagonist, Jon Sims, who serves as the Institute’s archivist and the person who takes and reads statements from victims of the Fears, finds himself slowly, almost unwillingly, becoming an avatar of the Eye. In the season three finale, he falls into a coma (Newell ep. 120), and by the time he reawakens midway through season four, we learn he has fully turned into an avatar. Concurrently with this, Jon falls in love with, and at the end of season four begins dating, his coworker Martin (Newell ep. 160). While his transformation into an avatar does not necessarily cause or result in his relationship with Martin, this relationship is tied into his transformation into an avatar in an important way. By this point in the series, Martin is one of the few people in Jon’s life who is able to see the human Jon remaining underneath the monster he has become, and this relationship and support is one of the only things that keeps Jon going through the apocalyptic hellscape of season five, after the world has been destroyed by the fears, and determined to find a way to set the world back. This brings up some questions: while the experience of being an avatar can be seen as a manifestation of the Lovecraftian “queer monster” (the Outsider), it seems that the literal queerness of the characters is often in opposition to and fighting against the characters’ status as monsters.

The connection between being an avatar of a fear and queerness is a complicated and multifaceted one, with several conflicting ways one could interpret it. Throughout season four, Martin becomes drawn into serving the Lonely, a different fear, and nearly becomes an avatar himself. However, he ultimately manages to reject this, choosing not to cut himself off from others as his love for Jon wins out (Newell ep. 159). The way monsterhood connects to queerness seems to be jumbled occasionally in the podcast. On a literal level, rejection of the Fears is important to the story arc of the queer main characters, but on a more metaphorical level, we can see hbomberguy’s ideas about queerness inflicting an outsider status and in turn a monster status in these arcs. For example, Jon is rejected by his former friends and coworkers due to his perceived status as a monster, while Martin intentionally pushes all of his friends away as he makes, even partially, a similar transition. In a metaphorical sense, parallels can be drawn between the way humans transition dramatically into avatars, having a “coming out” as a monster so to speak, and queerness. The actual queerness of the characters is almost unnecessary, although several of the most prominent avatars are either queer or queer coded. For example, one character, Jude Perry, is a lesbian who fell in love with a female-presenting human manifestation of her god (the Desolation, aka fear of pain and loss). Another avatar character, Nikola Orsinov, is not explicitly queer but is heavily transcoded (she is a female presenting character created from the dead parts of a man).

While the podcast’s queer themes are interesting enough in their own right, the podcast’s fandom (largely made of queer people) demonstrates the resonance of monsterhood with the queer community. The fandom acts in some ways as a collective, through social media posts and memes, as well as through its individual members, who frequently exhibit a kind of self-identification with queer monsterhood in incredibly notable ways. The reclamation of and association of horror and specifically horror monsters with queerness and queer identity seems to reflect José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification”, when people in marginalized groups use and make their own the “dominant” culture (Muñoz) . In this way, queer people obsess over and see themselves in monsters, in a way incomprehensible and strange to non-queer people who are unable to see themselves in the figure of the Outsider in the same way. In this way, members of The Magnus Archives fandom envision themselves as avatars. It is a common thing for people in the fandom to invent versions of themselves as avatars. For example, one of my best friends—a genderfluid bi person—has a version of herself she draws who is an avatar of The Spiral (the fear of going insane, not being able to trust your senses). This unpublished artwork is included below with permission from the creator. Certain elements of the Fears and their avatars, ones often seemingly not intended to be read as queer by the audience, are transformed into queer symbols and messages by the audience. For example, avatars of The Flesh (fear of slaughterhouses and being turned into meat) are able to reshape and transform bodies grotesquely, which many people in the fandom joke could be used for gender affirming surgeries. For another example, the Spiral takes two human forms throughout the podcast, one male-presenting and one female-presenting, leading many people to read this human manifestation as genderfluid or otherwise genderqueer. Avatars of the Stranger, inhuman mannequins, are often interpreted as nonbinary by the fandom. Nikola Orsinov’s gender on the fan wiki is listed as “plastic.” (The Magnus Archives Wikia, "Nikola Orsinov") This kind of queer disidentification with the podcast’s horror devices (body horror, lack of identity, and inhumanity become trans allegories in the mind of the fandom) in a way unintended by the cishet creator is omnipresent in fandom spaces and is reflective of the way many queer communities engage with and interpret horror media.

The Magnus Archives is a perfect microcosm of the larger trend of queer or queercoded Lovecraft and Lovecraft-inspired works discussed in “Outsiders: How to Adapt H.P. Lovecraft in the 21st Century." Like Lovecraft’s own work, certain queer themes can be read into the text’s horror and characterization of the nature of its monsters—although The Magnus Archives does have significantly more literal, in-canon queerness than Lovecraft’s works. But the derivative works created by its fans, whether memes, fanworks, or analyses, often reimagine and reinterpret as queer various aspects of the podcast that are likely not so intended. While the podcast itself can be interpreted through a queer lens, the transformative nature of fandom shows that disidentification among queer people with horror genre antagonists and monsters is overpoweringly present in The Magnus Archives fandom, in a way far beyond what even the actual podcast, itself a fantastic piece of queer media, had to offer. 

Works Cited

Brewis, Harry. “Outsiders: How to Adapt H.P. Lovecraft in the 21st Century,” YouTube, uploaded by hbomberguy, 3 Jul. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8u8wZ0WvxI.

Gildark, Dan, director. Cthulhu. Regent Releasing, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soDSk0e9-ok.

Lovecraft, Howard P. "The Outsider." In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI. Arkham House, [1926] 1984.

Lovecraft, Howard P. "The Shadow over Innsmouth." In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI, Arkham House, [1936] 1984. 

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Newell, Alexander and Jonathan Sims, creators. The Magnus Archives. Rusty Quill, 2016-2021, https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/.

“Nikola Orsinov.” The Magnus Archives Wikia. https://the-magnus-archives.fandom.com/wiki/Nikola_Orsinov.