Thread by @SquidFromSpace

Wednesday once more! That means a wander through dark, fearful places.

This time we're focussing on fires in apartment blocks, so we break the run of accidentally political pieces with one that's very deliberately political.

It's #MagnusArchives Episode 5.09 - "Fire Escape"

I gotta agree with Martin here; fire is absolutely bloody *awful*. It's not my biggest fear - The Corruption and The Buried haven't been shifted from their top spots... #MagnusArchives

...But it's probably the most *common* fear that affects my life, insofar as "What if this burns me?" appears as a thought rather more often than "What if I'm buried alive/get eaten by beetles?". #MagnusArchives

This, I think, is part of what Jon means when he says some fears don't need enhancing. That you just need to manifest them. #MagnusArchives

While there are all sorts of fears (and Fears) that haunt us on a hypothetical level - the number of acrophobics who've actually fallen from a great height being vanishingly small... #MagnusArchives

...Fire, and burns more generally, are something you'd have to be pretty lucky to have completely avoided by the time you read this tweet. #MagnusArchives

So we can link the fear of burning to an actual tactile sensation in a way we can't with a lot of other fears. #MagnusArchives

The burning itself isn't all of it, either. Maybe it isn't even the *most* of it. It's the rawness, the random firing of dying nerves. The puckered tightness of new, tender skin, aching every time you move. #MagnusArchives

And the fact that death by fire would hurt much, *much* worse than the already horrible, days-long pain we associate with the (hopefully) minor burns we've experienced so far just makes it worse. #MagnusArchives

So yeah. Why go to the trouble of constructing a supernaturally super-charged hellfire dimension, when you can just burn people alive in their homes, over and over again, leaving them *just* enough memory of it having happened before to rub salt into the burns. #MagnusArchives

And that still isn't the whole of it. It's just the part of The Devastation that deals with the direct fear of flesh intersecting with fire. #MagnusArchives

Which has never been all that The Devastation in general and the Cult of the Lightless Flame in particular has been about. #MagnusArchives

There is - as the name rather suggests - the issue of devastation as well. The thought of turning your back, and suddenly losing everything to the flames. #MagnusArchives

Hence the focus, from the very beginning of Jon's latest channelled statement, on the importance of having a home. #MagnusArchives

The devastation isn't just (temporarily) destroying lives, but living spaces as well. And that holds a terror of its own, distinct to (though obviously frequently overlapping with) our fear of death. #MagnusArchives

Because our homes, for those of us lucky enough to have them, tend to become more than the places we happen to sleep. #MagnusArchives

Even when some feckless shit of a landlord (and WOW, are we coming back to that) has provided accommodation barely distinguishable from a mould-encrusted shoe box... #MagnusArchives

...(And fucking THANKS, Tory Party, for voting against making it illegal for landlords to rent properties that are literally unfit for human habitation)... #MagnusArchives

...There's still some measure of control a roof over your head and four walls to encapsulate you and your possessions can grant you. #MagnusArchives

This isn't true for everyone, in all circumstances - sometimes a home is so intolerable that someone chooses to become homeless rather than continue to bear the unbearable... #MagnusArchives

...But while I won't dismiss or disregard those who choose to torch their old lives rather than continue to suffer them, they're not the type of person Jon and Martin were going to find in Jude's domain. #MagnusArchives

Those trapped in The Devastation's sprawling, incandescent apartment complex made the choice to stay, finding that some forms of familiarity breed not contempt, but comfort. #MagnusArchives

Until, of course, the flames start licking underneath the door. Until the inferno comes to take its due. #MagnusArchives

This is already a decent start to a statement regarding the apotheosis of The Lightless Flame; the fear that characteristically only takes your life once you've lost everything else. #MagnusArchives

But there's more, obviously, because this is the statement in which Sims finally skewers the target he's been circling around ever since revealing the allegiance of Arthur Nolan - landlords, as a category, are agents of evil. #MagnusArchives

I touched on this briefly when writing up "Infectious Doubts", but this seems like the right time to go into a little more detail about how landlords are a parasitical scourge. #MagnusArchives

They contribute nothing, taking advantage of their good fortune in owning property by extorting money from those who have no other way to acquire shelter. #MagnusArchives

They're living fossils, twisted remnants of the feudal system, when it was simply understood that some people got to own the land, and others had to pay them (whether in coin or produce) just to be allowed to live there. #MagnusArchives

Even the very best of them - and there aren't too many of those - are merely unusually prompt in converting a tiny fraction of the money they steal from you into necessary repairs and safety precautions. #MagnusArchives

Many more drag their feet, treating their legal requirements as appalling impositions, resenting every penny of the money they've taken from you while doing literally fucking nothing which they then can't spend on themselves. #MagnusArchives

And because of how easy the system makes it for them to just wake up one day and decide you won't have a home any more, the link explored here between house fires and landlord caprice is entirely appropriate. #MagnusArchives

"Fire Escape" is explicit on this point - Sabina would like to do the labour necessary to improve her living conditions (work her landlord clearly considers anathema)... #MagnusArchives

...But doesn't dare to, because in doing so she might violate whatever labyrinth of whim and arse-covering that makes up her tenancy agreement, and she and her parents would suddenly be homeless. #MagnusArchives

And all of that is before we get to the real crux of the issue - landlords have a legal duty to make sure you don't burn to death inside your homes. Not all of them take that duty seriously. #MagnusArchives

It's horrifying listening to Sabina dash around her apartment, trying to save herself and her parents from the fire, only to find at every turn that her landlord's laziness has shut down another avenue of escape. #MagnusArchives

A door that sticks. A fire escape that wobbles. A tap that can't be relied upon. A fire extinguisher of dubious provenance. #MagnusArchives

All minor irritants to the landlord, put too far down the to-do list that always and forever starts with "Take money from Sabina". #MagnusArchives

To Sabina herself, though, they spell the agonising death of herself and her parents. Three people dead because it was too much effort for the landlord to do the job he was paid to do. #MagnusArchives

And again, what makes this so horrible is the fact it's so quotidian. We're never going to be forced into endless tunnels, or have our faces snatched from us on a nightmare fairground ride. #MagnusArchives

Finding ourselves murdered by our landlord's total refusal to do their fucking job, though? There's something that hits uncomfortably close to home for a lot of us. #MagnusArchives

Quite aside from anything else, we're not even three years out from Grenfell, an act of mass murder through cost cutting that saw over seventy people die in their homes, and which as far as I can see has led to precisely zero consequences for anyone responsible. #MagnusArchives

And murder is the mot juste here, morally if not legally (I can't imagine giving less of a shit about what counts as legal for landlords - the fix is too obviously and totally in for that). #MagnusArchives

If you take the responsibility - and not coincidentally, the money - for keeping people alive, and you get them killed through cost-cutting and/or a refusal to prioritise their safety (both of which were true regarding Grenfell)... #MagnusArchives

...Then you've murdered them, and I don't give a shit what you say about intent. You said "I will keep you alive", and then decided that was too much effort. #MagnusArchives

"Fire Escape" underlines this point with ash and blood. What possible difference can in make to Sabina whether her landlord was malicious or merely fatally negligent? #MagnusArchives

The Cult of the Lightless Flame is fictional, there are no actual landlords who worship The Devastation. The question is how much of a difference would it make if they *did*? #MagnusArchives

And why do so many people with microphones insist the discussion should be about whether a body count was intentional, as oppose to how to punish the people who caused it? #MagnusArchives

Jon comes to the same realisation here. He starts off on a quest for revenge, but he thinks he needs to know the precise dimensions of what he's seeking revenge for. #MagnusArchives

(Incidentally, I think Martin is right to say it's not fair to make him decide whether Jon's revenge is worth his own pain, though this would have more moral force if last week he hadn't been demanding a man die for the sake of his own jealousy. #MagnusArchives)

He thinks it's important as to whether Jude Perry burned his hand as part of Jonah's masterplan, or just out of base cruelty. #MagnusArchives

But ultimately, it doesn't. Not really. Whether it was self-interest or simple sadism, Jon's hand ended up just as burned. The people inside The Desolation's tower blocks end up just as burned. #MagnusArchives

And nothing ever changes. It could be 2025 by the time we learn who gets charged over the Grenfell fire, and it's entirely possible the answer to that will be "nobody". #MagnusArchives

As of last July - two years after the fire - over two hundred other buildings, housing over 60 000 people in total, still have the same flammable cladding that turned Grenfell into a concrete bonfire. #MagnusArchives

The Tory government responsible for cutting health and safety legislation (there were no sprinklers installed in the building) and the budget of the London fire services are still in power. #MagnusArchives

That's despite the latter cut being the direct responsibility of the current Prime Minister, and despite there being two other fatal fires during the Coalition years that led to calls to the government mandating sprinkler installation... #MagnusArchives

...Calls that, you've guessed it, the government refused to heed. There are still buildings like Grenfell without sprinkler systems, with no new law proposed to change that fact. #MagnusArchives

This is the part that sticks in my mind most when I listen to "Fire Escape". Sabina knowing on some level that it's all happened before. #MagnusArchives

On one level, this is simply noting the nightmare logic of the post-ritual world. #MagnusArchives

On a deeper level, though, it's a reference to how everybody living in shitty, dangerous conditions forced on them by a shitty, dangerous landlord knows that what's been allowed to happen before will be allowed to happen again. #MagnusArchives

And as Jon finds out, even getting rid of one asshole landlord ultimately doesn't make a difference. The problem is structural. Everything is allowed to be on fire, all the time. #MagnusArchives

That said, since the actual solutions to this lie rather outside the scope of #MagnusArchives (though as always, its message that you shouldn't try to stand apart from everyone else is a good start)... #MagnusArchives

...I'll still take removing Jude Perry from the world as a win. #MagnusArchives

Right, Enough ranting about politics for one thread, I think. Let's do the ratings:

1. The Sick Village
2. Dwelling
3. Fire Escape
4. Revolutions
5. Curiosity
6. The Worms
7. Roots
8. A Cosy Cabin
9. In The Trenches

#MagnusArchives

And that's the last embers stamped out. I'll be back next week with a thread on #MagnusArchives Episode 5.10 - "Recollection".