Canon Jonah Magnus is way funnier than fanon Jonah Magnus. Why does everyone try to change him. He’s perfect.

Everyone writes him like Stereotypical Creepy Looking Villain Who Is Easily Angered Into Mistakes but he’s so much funnier than that. He’s trying to destroy the world and put everyone in perpetual misery specifically to avoid someone doing that to him first and his Secret Fear Factory is a shitty paranormal research institute full of offices and bureaucracy because he genuinely prefers it that way. The highlight of his week is on Wednesdays when he does the scheduling for next week and the protagonists trying to get out of their shitty fear jobs use this against him. 

He almost never gets angry at anyone because he genuinely does not care, he does actually try to be reasonable and convince his employees not to try to kill him or break his stuff, and considers using his See Everything Powers and Evil Mental Torture powers on them to be a strenuous inconvenience. When he is annoyed or threatened enough to pull out the Evil Torture Mind Powers in self defense, he just does it and then washes his hands of it and goes back to being the Totally Normal Institute Manager he genuinely enjoys being. Dude could hire and blackmail people into doing all the boring tedious parts of his job but he just likes doing them himself. 

Half of the dude’s character is how Totally Normal he is. Whenever someone has a big revelation about his evil mind powers or his secret immortality or about how he’s killed someone or screwed them over in some way he completely takes the wind out of their sails by acting like this is a normal thing and he forgot they didn’t already know, like they’re inquiring about when they need to attend a new HR seminar by. He treats them like they’re being unreasonable and need to keep up and it’s funny every single time. He’s so good at being a Helpful but Incompetent Office Manager that it’s usually impossible for the protagonists to tell how much he knows and whether he’s screwing them over on purpose at any given time (he always is). He considers little matters like “my employee keeps trying to kill me” and “my employee got me sent to prison for murder” to be minor inconveniences and never holds grudges against anyone because he genuinely doesn’t care about them enough to be angry. 

It’s never stated why he has so little control over what the Head Archivist decides to do at any given time; he just seems to hate micromanagement. He let Gertrude do whatever the fuck she wanted for 50 years no matter what danger or inconvenience it caused (it’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of attacks on the archives during Gertrude’s day were from people who were specifically pissed off at Gertrude’s actions) and only killed her when it was necessary for self-defense. The whole thing is just a sitcom to him. Everyone is an NPC in his Destroy the World Adventure and he doesn’t seem to take anything personally. He’s Owen Burnett who thinks he’s David Xanotos and it’s the funniest fucking thing.

He overreacted and killed ONE GUY with a lead pipe and now half the fanfic treats him like an incredibly weird little murdergoblin who can be incensed into making mistakes with a bit of namecalling and throws his Eye abilities around constantly. The canon version is so much funnier.

(MAG 108: Monologue)

I’m pretty sure all of us listeners were convinced for the first 39.5 episodes that Elias was genuinely nothing more than an oblivious manager. The pipe murder was shocking, and I understand why that stuck in people’s minds — but as the narrative indicates, he never did that before and never does it again. It really is unusual for his style. And it makes sense that he would avoid violence — he’s devoted his life to running away from death. He’s not going to put himself in unnecessary danger.

When the series starts, he’s already doing his revised plan for the Watcher’s Crown, with Jon as the Archive. But the last time he tried the Watcher’s Crown (using Milbank Prison) was in the 19th century, ca. 1867. And he didn’t realize there was a way to successfully do the ritual until Gertrude figured it out in 2015. That means he didn’t try to complete a ritual for almost 150 years! He just built his institute over the panopticon and… vibed, I guess. Stole bodies, blocked other rituals, gathered statements, terrorized random civilians, etc.

Point being, this man spent over half his life as a manager, until he figured out how to (he thought) escape death, and even as he was doing that plan, he still enjoyed being a manager. And imo, that’s what makes his character, as the primary villain of the series, so unique and interesting. Because he does use it villainously: for pretty much all of his most notable, gruesome inflictions of Eye abilities on the cast, he insists on framing it in a managerial way. Melanie forcibly learning about her dad’s death: her performance review. Martin burning statements: it’s unprofessional. When the entire protagonist cast shows up to confront him, he offers Basira an employment contract. Outside of that (ex: Daisy’s “statement never given,” Gertrude’s murder) his attacks are reactionary, they get rid of blatant threats to his institute. Because his character really just seems to enjoy the white collar life. Why would you ever take that away from him?

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(P.S.) A while ago I saw another post which opined that Jonah Magnus would not recognize himself in Elias Bouchard. Comparing the active audacity that Jonah Magnus seemed to live by (as indicated by the letters written to him) against the staid passivity of spooky boss Elias Bouchard, I think that’s very interesting and very true. Jonah Magnus was (in)famous in his social circle for his occult interests, such that his acquaintances would hit him up with anything weird they experienced, because they all knew he was just into that stuff. Elias Bouchard goes over budgets, as he “normally does on a Tuesday.” Jonah is your incredibly weird little murdergoblin — Elias is your manager.