Mostly The Stranger ones. Specifically ones where I realize someone is different and not me being replaced.
Sure many of the others would be terrifying, but only on an instinct level for me. Nothing would be more deep-set horrifying then seeing a family member/friend who is no longer who I knew them as.
Consider: pre or post change The Stranger. Cause pre and post change entities are all on an entirely different level. Hard to really compare the statements.
Like for someone that is mortified of the actual condition where you think someone/everyone have been replaced by doppelgangers, I think I'd still prefer dealing with somthing like Not Gram/Not Sasha than sayyyyy being trapped on the "Merry Go-Round of Hell" in MAG 165: Revolutions.
Having your sense of identity stripped from you, stealing someone else's, only to have that stripped from you and not even recalling your real identity, again and again and again, forever...
That's probably the worst stranger statement for me by far. Even by the scale of S5's horrors that one had a unique effect on me.
I can’t think of a single entity I would like to be with post change. All of them are equally terrifying in my brain.
Personally, I just think prechange, and The Stranger is more horrific
MAG 15 Lost John's Cave, MAG 36 Taken Ill, 170 Recollections, and 172 Strung Out. All of them horrify or disgust me in a way I can't even explain. The last two made me feel unwell more multiple days after listening to them, and just thinking about them makes my skin crawl.
Lost John’s Cave really freaks me out, to the point that I skip it altogether on re-listens. Weird bc I’ve gone caving a bunch of times and really enjoy it… no claustrophobia at all. But this episode fucking TERRIFIES me!
I've listened to the worms one over and over. It's one of my favorites. I've made the joke to my husband before "would you love me if I were a worm?" Now i can't say that sentence out loud bc I can now imagine being a worm and it makes me nauseous.
Let me tell you I'm jealous. I'm so sensitive to the uncanny valley that I haven't been able to play a videogame in like 15 years. The NPCs and animatics freak me tf out. Don't even get me started on monkeys and apes lol
Edited for typo
Lost Johns Cave.
I can't even imagine *why* someone would want to squeeze themself through passages where there's no room to turn around if you get stuck, let alone *dive underwater* in one. What if you miscalculate the distance, or worse, overestimate your ability to hold your breath for a long-ish time? When the narrator (forgot her name, sorry) is going through the first water passage and struggles to find the exit, and John goes "....clunk" I was physically out of breath. The statement in itself unsettled me more than the ending.
The horror for me is how realistic that one can be. It seems less likely that you’ll be turned into a worm for example, but manipulative or abusive medical professionals are all too common in our real world.
The same goes for Locked In. I greatly appreciated Johnnys preface to the episode and wish there was a similar one for Wonderland.
MAG 172 Strung Out terrifies me. The Spider by itself is unnerving ofc, but the real thing that gets me is the hooks. The idea of them piercing in and out your flesh, yanking you around, pulling at your skin as you go around stage. It makes me squirm so much when I listen to it. The theme of addiction defo doesn't help either.
Anything involving illness or parasites (aka, any corruption statement except for the ant one from s5). Also anything involving medical horror, so Wonderland and Wellbeing would suck too. Conversely, the statements I’d most enjoy to be part of are really any of the lonely ones, but especially 186 (which is my favourite and almost concerning how much of a call out it is). I also wouldn’t mind meeting Mike Crew or Peter Lukas, but I would absolutely hate meeting John Amherst or Jane Prentiss.
The eyepocalypse worms one (buried) perhaps. Or the ants one. All the s5 statements are pretty horrible because there's no out, you don't get to go home at the end of the day and give your statement to the magnus institute
MAG 21: Freefall and MAG 75: A Long Way Down are both statements that left me feeling dizzy, and stuck in my brain permanently.
MAG 177: Wonderland is probably the one I want to experience the absolute least though. I dont see many people talk about it, but that episode filled me with a certain sickening dread that nothing else ever has - just a little bit too real for me. Well, maybe more than a little bit...
Anything to do with the buried, the vast or the spiral.
I hate being constrained in any way, I hate being unteathered at heights, and I could not live with being gaslighted constantly and not being able to trust my senses.
But I think the statement that fucked me up the most was the guy trapped in a computer program. Idk why it just makes me cringe.
MAG 15, I hate the Dark with a passion, and being stuck in absolute darkness would be the end of me. That episode is so terrifying I need breaks while listening to it
MAG 86, Tucked In. The blanket never did anything. Also the description of finding his friend's body.
I am afraid of the dark irl but my biggest real fear is heights. I am not especially afraid of depths, though, or of huge creatures. So The Vast episodes don't hit me all that hard (though I do like them).
anything that would kill me 😭 honestly most of them would have me shitting my pants but the one in the late-series where the doctor repeatedly tells the listener their mental illnesses aren't real and just goes full on gaslight on out asses is the only episode where i should've heeded the trigger warning; super traumatizing.
The Kind Mother or A Long Way Down. I’m estranged from my mum due to her being a horrible person, but if she suddenly changed and everyone was convinced she’d been that way all along I think my brain would actually break. I think my fear of that is more Spiral than Stranger though, it feels super gaslighty. LWD horrifies me bc I hate man-made high structures and being convinced on to the top of one then getting ‘lost’ is actually my worst nightmare.
The taxonomy one, with the tax collector. Meeting the Anglerfish (or smth like it)+realising youve been talking to a puppet the whole time makes for a horrifying combination.
Tucked in put a even deeper fear of the dark into me I was like a small child for the next week I had to have a light or a lamp of some sort nearby and found a extremely heavy comforter and that’s how I slept through the southern USA heat.
Anything tied to the Buried. Im afraid of a number of the fears, but the idea of being trapped in a tight space where I can barely move with no telling of when or if I’m getting out has actually happened and has made me lose my shit terrified
I think any of the eternal undying torture ones from S5 are kind of a gimme, so: probably the insomnia one? It's a bit closer to reality than the supernatural horror, since hereditary fatal insomnia is a terrifying real life thing. As someone who deals with chronic sleep issues, and thinking of how ill and anxious I feel after just a few nights of inadequate sleep, the idea of a human body lacking the ability to fall asleep and just staying awake until it expires from the stress is horrible.
At first I’d say maybe one of the Spiral ones but PROT 007 (Give and Take) messed me up so badly. The absolute nightmare of being compressed with no help while being surrounded by people is terrifying. The antiques are terrifying. The fact that they don’t stop smiling and laughing is terrifying. The compression of their bodies and the gunfire is terrifying. All of it is terrifying.
Oh and if we’re going for it PROT 012 is pretty much a living nightmare as well, I don’t really need to say much else I think.
Lost John's cave. I mean, Not!Them would be terrifying but at least I could just kill them. My favourite statement and the one that disturbed me the most when i first listened to it was 105 Total War so that would also be pretty harrowing. Might have been extra scary cause I listened to it at midnight (I listen to them to fall alseep sometimes, this was a mistake when I listened to Book of the Dead in my tent on the Scouts watersports weekend)
So hard to pick just one, but 195, Adrift is high in my list. An eternity spent drowning in freezing cold water. Come to the surface, nothing but water everywhere, try to swim but get too tired and drown again, with no end. Gah. That's horrifying. Also the buried subway car gets an honorable mention.
lost John's cave. I skip that episode every time I relisten. which is wild bc as far as manifestations of the buried go, I'm far more terrified of drowning that small enclosed spaces
OK, if I'm taking the question as having to be the statement giver, MAG 155 - Cost of Living. Feeling how awful death is going to be, and that it's going to be forever, and then having to make the choice to either accept that horrible fate or condemn someone else to it to save yourself. Combines the fear of being the monster, and the fear of infinity quite horribly.
If I'm taking the question as being any character in a statement, MAG 64 - Burial Rights. I do not want to be mummified alive and then entombed for several thousand years, unable to die or move or see or hear or feel anything but myself very slowly dessicating and with no release seemingly possible.
Hmm I cannot stand small spaces, so definitely being in the coffin or the episode where the lady gets trapped in the cave with her sister... i would NOT survive
Edit: The episode is MAG15, Lost Johns' Cave
MAG 27 A Sturdy Lock is the episode that I Cannot listen to when relistening to the show. I always have to skip it because it triggers my nighttime paranoia hardcore. I work in healthcare, so the fate of Alenka Kozyl in MAG 36 Taken Ill is also terrifying, but I could handle being the statement giver in that one.
Post-change would have to be the ants. Really anything Corruption gets me because vermin are viscerally terrifying but the ants are the worst for me.
Also worth adding to the discussion that lost John's cave is one of my absolute favorite episodes and one I'll pick out if I'm only relistening to certain eps.
Pretty much any of the hellscape ones! I'm not sure which one would be the worst.
If you remove the last series, then I would probably pick the meat supermarket slaughter house one.
I think you might have to divide this between pre-and-post change statments. Cause the change entirely rewrote the rules of reality and its really not fair to compare pre and post horrors lol.
Honestly? I haven't caught up with anything TMAGP but any of them, really. There is not a single statement where I'd go "..well that happened. Mooooving on!" 😅
I'm going to discount the last season because the forever war, the hunt, the carousel, the worms, and everything there is literal hell.
Probably The Kind Mother would be the worst
I do not want to be a worm
That's the one. I'd rather be book of the deaded than wormed.
I’d rather be in that web theatre than this
Yeah, it's gotta be this one.
Which episode?
Mag166, it's called worms
Babe, I'd still love you if you were a worm.
Mostly The Stranger ones. Specifically ones where I realize someone is different and not me being replaced. Sure many of the others would be terrifying, but only on an instinct level for me. Nothing would be more deep-set horrifying then seeing a family member/friend who is no longer who I knew them as.
Consider: pre or post change The Stranger. Cause pre and post change entities are all on an entirely different level. Hard to really compare the statements. Like for someone that is mortified of the actual condition where you think someone/everyone have been replaced by doppelgangers, I think I'd still prefer dealing with somthing like Not Gram/Not Sasha than sayyyyy being trapped on the "Merry Go-Round of Hell" in MAG 165: Revolutions. Having your sense of identity stripped from you, stealing someone else's, only to have that stripped from you and not even recalling your real identity, again and again and again, forever... That's probably the worst stranger statement for me by far. Even by the scale of S5's horrors that one had a unique effect on me.
I can’t think of a single entity I would like to be with post change. All of them are equally terrifying in my brain. Personally, I just think prechange, and The Stranger is more horrific
MAG 15 terrified me the most on my first listenthrough, but on my second MAG 66 scared me more. Yeah, nothing scares me more than the Buried.
Same here!!
MAG 15 Lost John's Cave, MAG 36 Taken Ill, 170 Recollections, and 172 Strung Out. All of them horrify or disgust me in a way I can't even explain. The last two made me feel unwell more multiple days after listening to them, and just thinking about them makes my skin crawl.
Lost John’s Cave really freaks me out, to the point that I skip it altogether on re-listens. Weird bc I’ve gone caving a bunch of times and really enjoy it… no claustrophobia at all. But this episode fucking TERRIFIES me!
Honestly same this is terrifying!
Any Stranger ones but The Worms is truly the fate I do not want.
I've listened to the worms one over and over. It's one of my favorites. I've made the joke to my husband before "would you love me if I were a worm?" Now i can't say that sentence out loud bc I can now imagine being a worm and it makes me nauseous.
100% ep 170. Although I feel like I would die in almost any Stranger related statement because I just don’t experience uncanny valley.
Let me tell you I'm jealous. I'm so sensitive to the uncanny valley that I haven't been able to play a videogame in like 15 years. The NPCs and animatics freak me tf out. Don't even get me started on monkeys and apes lol Edited for typo
Lost Johns Cave. I can't even imagine *why* someone would want to squeeze themself through passages where there's no room to turn around if you get stuck, let alone *dive underwater* in one. What if you miscalculate the distance, or worse, overestimate your ability to hold your breath for a long-ish time? When the narrator (forgot her name, sorry) is going through the first water passage and struggles to find the exit, and John goes "....clunk" I was physically out of breath. The statement in itself unsettled me more than the ending.
Wonderland. There were quite a few in season five that got to me but none as much as Dr David.
The horror for me is how realistic that one can be. It seems less likely that you’ll be turned into a worm for example, but manipulative or abusive medical professionals are all too common in our real world. The same goes for Locked In. I greatly appreciated Johnnys preface to the episode and wish there was a similar one for Wonderland.
Yep. Far, far too close to real life for me. And I know I'd be so fucking vulnerable to it.
Jesus Christ all of them. Especially the newest TMP ep
Which one is that? The one where Alice and Sam search through the ruins of the old archives?
No… Mr Bonzo gets… smash-y
no, you should watch it but summery: mr bonzo gets murdery
Being in the coffin. Horrifying.
MAG 172 Strung Out terrifies me. The Spider by itself is unnerving ofc, but the real thing that gets me is the hooks. The idea of them piercing in and out your flesh, yanking you around, pulling at your skin as you go around stage. It makes me squirm so much when I listen to it. The theme of addiction defo doesn't help either.
Anything involving illness or parasites (aka, any corruption statement except for the ant one from s5). Also anything involving medical horror, so Wonderland and Wellbeing would suck too. Conversely, the statements I’d most enjoy to be part of are really any of the lonely ones, but especially 186 (which is my favourite and almost concerning how much of a call out it is). I also wouldn’t mind meeting Mike Crew or Peter Lukas, but I would absolutely hate meeting John Amherst or Jane Prentiss.
MAG 163, MAG 174, MAG 21. Mostly MAG 21 and MAG 31 though
Anything that ended up killing them, otherwise it might be scary but I'll be fine... actually no, I don't want the stranger showing up.
The eyepocalypse worms one (buried) perhaps. Or the ants one. All the s5 statements are pretty horrible because there's no out, you don't get to go home at the end of the day and give your statement to the magnus institute
The blanket never did anything one for sure.
MAG 21: Freefall and MAG 75: A Long Way Down are both statements that left me feeling dizzy, and stuck in my brain permanently. MAG 177: Wonderland is probably the one I want to experience the absolute least though. I dont see many people talk about it, but that episode filled me with a certain sickening dread that nothing else ever has - just a little bit too real for me. Well, maybe more than a little bit...
The Jordan one from season five, or the medical one. It's not even scary, it's just straight torture
Anything to do with the buried, the vast or the spiral. I hate being constrained in any way, I hate being unteathered at heights, and I could not live with being gaslighted constantly and not being able to trust my senses. But I think the statement that fucked me up the most was the guy trapped in a computer program. Idk why it just makes me cringe.
MAG 15, I hate the Dark with a passion, and being stuck in absolute darkness would be the end of me. That episode is so terrifying I need breaks while listening to it
MAG 86, Tucked In. The blanket never did anything. Also the description of finding his friend's body. I am afraid of the dark irl but my biggest real fear is heights. I am not especially afraid of depths, though, or of huge creatures. So The Vast episodes don't hit me all that hard (though I do like them).
Mag 032. Jane Prentisses stament. It makes me itch almost as much as she itched.
anything that would kill me 😭 honestly most of them would have me shitting my pants but the one in the late-series where the doctor repeatedly tells the listener their mental illnesses aren't real and just goes full on gaslight on out asses is the only episode where i should've heeded the trigger warning; super traumatizing.
Basically any corruption one. Pain and suffering I can handle, bugs and disease? Worse fate than death for me.
The Kind Mother or A Long Way Down. I’m estranged from my mum due to her being a horrible person, but if she suddenly changed and everyone was convinced she’d been that way all along I think my brain would actually break. I think my fear of that is more Spiral than Stranger though, it feels super gaslighty. LWD horrifies me bc I hate man-made high structures and being convinced on to the top of one then getting ‘lost’ is actually my worst nightmare.
The taxonomy one, with the tax collector. Meeting the Anglerfish (or smth like it)+realising youve been talking to a puppet the whole time makes for a horrifying combination.
Jesus Christ keep mag 16 away for me I do not die by chocking on spiders
Any of the Corruption ones. Fuck the Corruption, all my homies hate the Corruption
MAG 166. It’s actually my worst nightmare
MAG#12 First Aid.
Tucked in put a even deeper fear of the dark into me I was like a small child for the next week I had to have a light or a lamp of some sort nearby and found a extremely heavy comforter and that’s how I slept through the southern USA heat.
MAG 184 Like Ants. Gave me myrmectophobia
160, cause that means I’m about to fall into my own personal fear hell
MAG 168, specifically Danika gelthorpe's hypochondria gone wrong
Anything involving the Buried. Being crushed for eternity with no hope of ever dying doesn't sound very appealing
Anything tied to the Buried. Im afraid of a number of the fears, but the idea of being trapped in a tight space where I can barely move with no telling of when or if I’m getting out has actually happened and has made me lose my shit terrified
Pretty much any Rot episode would probably work to make me go insane in about two seconds.
ANY OF THE BURIED
Being one of the flowers in the Flesh Garden or being on the Merry-Go-Round. The “it’s beautiful” line
I think any of the eternal undying torture ones from S5 are kind of a gimme, so: probably the insomnia one? It's a bit closer to reality than the supernatural horror, since hereditary fatal insomnia is a terrifying real life thing. As someone who deals with chronic sleep issues, and thinking of how ill and anxious I feel after just a few nights of inadequate sleep, the idea of a human body lacking the ability to fall asleep and just staying awake until it expires from the stress is horrible.
At first I’d say maybe one of the Spiral ones but PROT 007 (Give and Take) messed me up so badly. The absolute nightmare of being compressed with no help while being surrounded by people is terrifying. The antiques are terrifying. The fact that they don’t stop smiling and laughing is terrifying. The compression of their bodies and the gunfire is terrifying. All of it is terrifying. Oh and if we’re going for it PROT 012 is pretty much a living nightmare as well, I don’t really need to say much else I think.
I legit can’t listen to the ants one in season 5, so probably that one
Lost John's cave. I mean, Not!Them would be terrifying but at least I could just kill them. My favourite statement and the one that disturbed me the most when i first listened to it was 105 Total War so that would also be pretty harrowing. Might have been extra scary cause I listened to it at midnight (I listen to them to fall alseep sometimes, this was a mistake when I listened to Book of the Dead in my tent on the Scouts watersports weekend)
MAG 184 would break me. Ants are my big phobia. I'd have gone insane within a few hours.
172. Eugh..
mag 150, the cheadle one.
So hard to pick just one, but 195, Adrift is high in my list. An eternity spent drowning in freezing cold water. Come to the surface, nothing but water everywhere, try to swim but get too tired and drown again, with no end. Gah. That's horrifying. Also the buried subway car gets an honorable mention.
lost John's cave. I skip that episode every time I relisten. which is wild bc as far as manifestations of the buried go, I'm far more terrified of drowning that small enclosed spaces
Piecemeal, the idea of slowly painfully losing parts of myself and there is nothing I can do about it until I die is terrifying.
Puppet of the spider on stage. Nope
So many of them scare me but the domain from Fire Escape left all my nerves on high. It’s just absolute despair.
"The blanket never did anything"
You can't get me spider web! I'll never tell you 🤣 In all seriousness, Ep 65, binary. I'm a compsci major that fucked me up
Piecemeal is the one that makes me have full body shivers every time. I'd rather not go through that.
OK, if I'm taking the question as having to be the statement giver, MAG 155 - Cost of Living. Feeling how awful death is going to be, and that it's going to be forever, and then having to make the choice to either accept that horrible fate or condemn someone else to it to save yourself. Combines the fear of being the monster, and the fear of infinity quite horribly. If I'm taking the question as being any character in a statement, MAG 64 - Burial Rights. I do not want to be mummified alive and then entombed for several thousand years, unable to die or move or see or hear or feel anything but myself very slowly dessicating and with no release seemingly possible.
TMA 177, Wonderland - the Dr David episode. It's the only one I always skip when I relisten, though there are others that touch closer on my phobias.
Hmm I cannot stand small spaces, so definitely being in the coffin or the episode where the lady gets trapped in the cave with her sister... i would NOT survive Edit: The episode is MAG15, Lost Johns' Cave
Most of the one that have to do with worms. Alot of those statements are terrifying lol
MAG 27 A Sturdy Lock is the episode that I Cannot listen to when relistening to the show. I always have to skip it because it triggers my nighttime paranoia hardcore. I work in healthcare, so the fate of Alenka Kozyl in MAG 36 Taken Ill is also terrifying, but I could handle being the statement giver in that one. Post-change would have to be the ants. Really anything Corruption gets me because vermin are viscerally terrifying but the ants are the worst for me. Also worth adding to the discussion that lost John's cave is one of my absolute favorite episodes and one I'll pick out if I'm only relistening to certain eps.
Pretty much any of the hellscape ones! I'm not sure which one would be the worst. If you remove the last series, then I would probably pick the meat supermarket slaughter house one.
I think you might have to divide this between pre-and-post change statments. Cause the change entirely rewrote the rules of reality and its really not fair to compare pre and post horrors lol.
Pre or post change? Post change MAG 165: Revolutions, I think.
Honestly? I haven't caught up with anything TMAGP but any of them, really. There is not a single statement where I'd go "..well that happened. Mooooving on!" 😅
I'm going to discount the last season because the forever war, the hunt, the carousel, the worms, and everything there is literal hell. Probably The Kind Mother would be the worst
I’m with the lost johns cave people
I would hate anything by the Corruption or the Flesh…disease, worms, and rotten meat / flesh, etc. Or MAG 65 Binary, that one is my Roman Empire.