The Stranger Explained (The Magnus Archives Entities)

Hey y'all, I'm Afton G. Kier and today we're looking at the next Entity from the Magnus Archives in my new series where I do a deep dive on each and every Entity. This time around, we're starting up the dance to talk about I Do Not Know You! From Nikola Orsinov to the Calliophone and everything in between, we're examining the Stranger. As always, please consider liking and subscribing to support the channel. Anyways, I've been Afton G. Kier, and good night, YouTube people!
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Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:40 Shilling
1:58 Overview
3:26 Characters
11:56 Artefacts
13:23 Locations
14:06 Rituals
17:12 Domains
18:47 Connections
20:02 Analysis
23:58 Closing Thoughts

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Thumbnail Art is The Stranger "Tarotesque" (Dark) by Grace Holsten

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Music:

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The Series

The First TMA Video

Every Video!

[dexterhopkins]

I've always thought that a pet would be a really interesting (and slightly hilarious) not!them. Like imagine a statement from a father who has a golden labrador and then a tiny pomeranian comes home and all of your family just goes along with it? That'd be creepy (and again, hilarious) I think

[Creative_At]

Something That I find interesting about The Stranger is it's ties to the Circus and Fairs, because in times before the internet, they were a prime feeder of The Stranger. Picture this, you are living in a small town of 20 or so people in the middle of no where. You know everyone, everyone knows you. If something happens, you know about it instantly. You can have a perfect interaction with everyone.

Then they come. A group of people from elsewhere. They come, set up shop in Mr. Whatnot's abandoned field, and then open the gates. Strange colors fill your eyes, unknown scents fill your nose, you partake in activities that you could have never thought of. And all the while, the outsiders that opened the circus or fair do activities that should be impossible for people to do. They swallow swords, breathe fire, their bodies contort in odd manners. They all were masks and heavy makeup, so you can't tell their true feelings or emotions. You try and talk to them, but theirs something wrong. You don't know them well enough to have meaningful conversations, and what you can learn is but the surface of who they truly are.

Then, after the weekend, they're gone. You'd expect their big-top would take longer to take down, but it doesn't. They're just gone Monday morning. You will probably never see them again, these outsiders, with their strange games and abilities, masks to hide themselves, and unknown personality are gone, forever. Maybe they come again, maybe another group like them, but it's always different, a little bit uncanny. If one of their number were to come without mask or makeup, you wouldn't recognize them, and they would have probably worn many different masks and makeup schemes over the course of one night, so you couldn't even place them if you had talked to them. And sometimes, these outsiders would disappear with someone. The blacksmiths son, or the orchard keeper's daughter. Or they give something. Maybe the old miller has a weird plant he likes to burn now, maybe the general store owner's wife now has a cough, not unlike one the lion tamer had, and now the doctor has it to.

You know this is linked to the strange people from elsewhere that brought the carnival to town, or maybe not. You wouldn't know. You don't even know what one looks like underneath the mask. You didn't spend enough time with them before they left to recognize their voice.

If that doesn't scream Stranger, I don't know what will.

(Also, this is literal the first comment I have ever made on Youtube, sorry for any mistakes or anything)

[trollkienofficial]

Alright, I need to talk about this, because I'm hungarian and whenever my country is mentioned in foreign media i'm obligated to foam in the mouth. So. Wolfgang von Kempelen (or Kempelen Farkas in hungarian) was a real dude. The mechanical turk was also a real thing he built. Of course it was not like. Eldritch horror, It was just a funky "machine" he traveled around with and played chess to entertain people.

Also I find it very funny that the two known Unknowing rituals were attempted by Eastern Europeans. Like, we really do be keeping busy.

[VinnieBeatrice]

What I find interesting about the Not Them is that the people who remember the original victim are those who aren't very close to the person or have a contentious relationship. Like Melanie was the one who pointed out Not Sasha after meeting her only once. The lady whose mom was taken and the guy whose cousin was taken weren't close to their family members and seldom saw them. Amy Patel wasn't close to her neighbor William

[TheLuckySpades]

Fun fact with the Anatomy Class students: Max Mustermann is the German equivalent of John Doe, and I think the rest also follow this pattern, so they are all named for the unknown victime/placeholder

[aaronjohnson]

The stranger could also represent how little the characters actually do know each other. Like, sure, relationships get stronger, but a lot of the inner lives of a character is lost on most of the other characters.

[spook]

The Stranger is easily my favorite entity and one that could've actually claimed me at one point lmao.
One of the most unsettling episodes was the one where the narrator (I believe they're meant to be a psychopath or just extremely low empathy?) starts looking into "Philosophical Zombies" and then encounters a guy who is certainly not sentient, eventually leading to them punching a hole in the dude's face revealing... nothing inside. Just the thought of it still spooks me a bit.

[meep_cubed]

I kind of like to think of the stranger being a branch off of the slaughter, because being forded to see anime combatants as something not quite human, and the dark, as you can’t quite understand or know what exactly is wrong with the stranger

[lalas]

The Stranger is my favorite one! I was in a really boring play back in 2021, and season 3 is what kept me from climbing the walls during rehearsals. I adored listening to the part where you described the different roles for the Unknowing. It's the most "theater kid" apocalypse ritual ever, and honestly I have no choice but to stan... from a far enough distance away that it won't affect me. One thing I wanted to point out is that the corps de ballet isn't really a who- it's _several_ whos, typically. In actual theater, it's just the dancers in a ballet that aren't leads or soloists. Nikola has backup dancers for her nightmare ballet and it's wonderful.

For my own analysis, I do find The Stranger and The Slaughter to be similar like others have said, but I also think that it has a decent amount of overlap with The Spiral. After all, what is the not!them but Capgras Delusion made real? I know that I irl have had moments during periods of extremely bad mental health where I was genuinely terrified that I'd get so bad that I'd forget who and what I am. The Slaughter comes with an immediate threat- an enemy soldier in a war, a really shit band who's music starts a sudden bar-fight where everyone dies, an inexplicable massacre in some remote Scottish small town, loved ones lashing out from nowhere and harming you. With The Stranger, the only thing that could be considered a threat is that somehow reality _broke._ Yes, the anglerfish and the not!them kill you, but if it was just a big scary monster that kills you then it'd be Hunt and not Stranger. Werewolves make sense. You can "get" a forever-war. A skin-clown and the worker of clay are much more alike than the calliope from Strange Music and a ghost bullet that makes you stab people.

Still, I guess the whole point of Smirke's 14 (and the Extinction) is that they aren't exactly an accurate or good way to carve up the Fears that reign the world of TMA. Everything has bits of everything else in it. The Stranger could feasibly just be a more focused Spiral, or a less bloody Slaughter, or a more theatrical and less tasty Flesh. It could even be Vast, what with the deep-sea's uncanny critters and the whole "unknowable" thing.

The Stranger is the feeling of seeing a bigfin squid when you aren't a squid nerd. It's that one story of a guy inexplicably dancing jerkily behind the protagonist with an impossible grin as he follows them home. It's, well, how coulrophobes see clowns and how pediophobes see dolls. Close enough to something recognizable to just be wrong enough to set that one part of your brain running. Not only "I do not know you", but also "how are you here?" It's real neat! I love thinking about it, and I love that this series of videos exists!

[Daisyisnotaflower]

4:23 I like to think that that might be because of survivorship bias. We only know of the not-them because of those couple of people who's memory isn't altered. How many cases are there where that person doesn't exist? No-one would ever notice something was up

[watercraftworshipper]

Something I find interesting about the stranger is that it seems to have a weirdly large amount of overlap with the slaughter. They're both heavily tied to music (specifically pipe music), and they both cover xenophobia, or at least the fear of foreigners who intend you harm. Also, their names sound kinda similar.

[fractalfan]

With regards to the storytelling theory, another way the notion of a character is related to the Stranger is that a literary character is at its heart an illusion of a personality with an existence independent of the story. When this illusion is broken, for example with the characters acting in an unrealistic way because of a plot contrivance, it bothers the audience, but most often it causes annoyance rather than fear.

[Dachi]

I feel breakon and hope are burried aligned, theyre indebted to a life of work. Delivering and sowing fear. Once they have nothing to do they fall apart

[bookworm]

I find that the stranger and the spiral are twins in a similar fashion to the vast and the buried. They inherently fears of opposite things. The spiral is all about the familar turning against you. Being fooled by that which you know and trust. The stranger appears to embody fears of the unfamiliar, thing you have no context for or what context you do have is of no help. So they are both enemies and the closest of allies. After all, if you senses to betray you can you, do you really know anything?

[the_pipster]

3 of the 7 anatomy students are transgender which automatically makes them the best characters also excuses the murder thing <3 (erica to max mustermann, john to jane doe, and jan novak, which is traditionally a male name used for a character who is referred to by she/her pronouns)

[olajza]

Perhaps I'm reading to deep into things but I thought it is implied in the conversation between Sarah Baldwin and Nicola Ursinov (during the unknowing) that the Angler Fish (or I guess the organist) doesn't construct separate entities but is more like a hivemind behind them all.

Still it's hard to be sure from the bits and pieces that we were given.

[LovelessGod]

Something that I’ve noticed is that the person that can always see through the Not!Them’s illusion is always someone who either doesn’t know the victim very well or has a neutral/not good relationship with them. Melanie, who didn’t know Sasha very well, was the only person who could see through it. In the case of Graham Folger, Amy Patel was notably kind of off-put by him and the person whose mother got replaced had a rather rocky relationship with their mother. The person whose cousin got replaced had kind of a neutral relationship and didn’t seem to particularly like them. I think it will always be someone who knows the person but maybe isn’t on the best terms with them. Idk if this means anything or if it’s just a small detail but it’s something I’ve noticed.

[asterkuklov]

The stranger is absolutely one of my favorite entities. Through, I have to admit that now I know the kind of fear the stranger is intended to represent, a stranger in the sense of a person you know nothing about, when I first learned of it I had a bit of a different idea. At first, I didn’t interpret the name “stranger” as someone I did not know, but as literally the word “strange”; because that’s what the stranger is to me: strange. The other fears all have a concise, understandable concept, such as the eye, the fear of being watched, the desire for knowledge, very easy to digest. Yet the stranger never made sense to me. skin clowns, live dolls/mannequins, calliope music, a weird nonsensical dance/theatrical performance as a ritual, all these things never connected/fit together in one category for me, and it was so hard for me to understand what made them scary in the stranger’s context. Like yes, they’re scary, but I just can’t comprehend why. I don’t know, I don’t understand. So that’s what the stranger is to me, the concept of not knowing, not understanding; something being so unfamiliar/foreign that it just breaks your brain. Like the literal embodiment of strangeness.

Also, fun fact! As a Russian speaker, the другой цирк does translate to “the other circus”, but the word другой in Russian can also be generally used to imply something is different, strange. So the other circus’s name can also be interpreted as the strange circus lol, just thought that was a fun detail:D

[SeerOfTime]

Revolutions is also one of my favorite statements in the series.

[joshuachamplin]

Awesome work so far. Keep up the good work. Anyways, have you considered talking about how people become Avatars? It's an interesting subject which I think doesn't get enough attention. Maybe you could speculate on how Avatars could cut their connection to their Entities since we've only seen how Avatars of the Eye regain their freedom.