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Jon was a better pick for head archivist (the profession not the godhood) than Sasha according to me, a Jon apologist/Sasha stan with a masters degree in information science

1) a disaster pit of an archive like Gertrude's requires a work horse like s1 Jon, not someone easily lost in the weeds like Sasha. For a body of information that huge, with subject matter that broad (even just 15 fear subjects is broad when you consider the overlap and highly subjective, contrasting nature of the statements), you want to create as little work for yourself as possible until you've built a foundation. Ergo, in this early stage you want a project manager who has the ability to burn through busy work, resists distractions, and remains open to his team's input for future endeavors while keeping them on track.

I also have a hc that a disorganized archive bolstered the Eye's hold rather than undermined it because that meant that only Eye-aligned people had the ability to navigate it. So in a normal case, I'd assume they could just call up one of their sister archives and borrow their database or taxonomy, because why reinvent the wheel, but here I suspect that messy records were an industry standard designed to lure in people with a craving for tidy answers. It's possible that no-one at any location had successfully organized their statements, or at least not before getting indoctrinated with some mark or another and abandoning the task.

2) Referring to statements by their dates isn't a bad idea when first tackling a project this unclear. When you create a spreadsheet map of your body of information (literally just a giant inventory list), I was taught to also provide an ID column to designate each collection item with a uniformed shorthand for easy, clear communication and notes. Think dewey decimal. It can be something simple as sequential numbers or dates. Why use dates and not statement giver names? Confidentiality is likely a behind the scenes factor in statement acquisition. Some of the statements are anonymous. Some names double. And the series demonstrates that statement givers rarely visit twice in one day, much less twice a week or month, and even if there are, they can tack a .1 on the end or something. This shorthand ID key will likely change no matter what once they familiarize themselves with the content enough to build a more thoughtful catalogue. So since that makes this a placeholder anyway, dates as a good-enough-lets-keep-moving ID would be my pick, too, ESPECIALLY because of point #3

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Op this is the hottest tea, the freshest take, thank you, i learned a lot

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FINALLY! SOME GOOD FUCKING FOOD!

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so Jon actually had recorded hundreds of statements before episode 40. The only reason it appears to be 1 a week is because we only hear the “real” ones.

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Also Sasha stapled documents and I have yet to forgive her for that

More like this

"jon shouldn't have axed the not!them table, Sasha would have known better if she was archivist" as tho Sasha my beloved didnt pause her escape from a worm corpse to square up against that same table-monster's sinister shadow with just her fists and hubris

Inspired by this post

I adore corruption arcs, so I graded how well the non-archivist characters would have damned humanity if they had been the archivist.

  • Sasha James 11/10, would be an ideal archivist, this plus her height is probably why the stranger monster targeted her before she could peak
  • I have a soft spot for any au that knows Sasha has never seen a brain cell in her life and that any unhinged!Sasha au is really just a regular Sasha au. Picture it with me. Sasha and Jon have parallel archivist tracks, until Sasha (my beloved show off) decides: you know what would make me more efficient at snooping? Becoming a Human Google. And things accelerate. The Web doesn't even need to bother with subtly magic lighters, it slaps all 14 marks on her at once by pulling up next to Sasha in a windowless van with "free secrets 👍" written on the side.
  • After the Unknowing, Sasha takes over the institute from Elias instead of Martin and Peter. With Tim dead, Jon in a coma, Martin lonely-snatched, Melanie compulsively homicidal, Daisy in the coffin, and Basira on autopilot, she quickly bonds with Rosie, the ultimate nosiness enabler. Sasha is a fully marked archivist for a good long while, but doesn't start the apocalypse right away because she's eager to read ALL the ominous notes Elias left, so the watcher's crown statement is in her to-be-read pile. When the apocalypse starts (Rosie: "Hey, Sasha, I just read something extra fucked up that Elias wrote, wanna see?" Sasha: "God yes."), she books it to become the pupil with Rosie as her anchor. Mayhapse an anchor-archivist polycule with Archivist Jon and Martin? Mayhapse Jon is just a normal eye avatar here and deeply invested in all of Sasha's eyepocalypse statements, so it's Sasha and her plus-three? Mayhapse it's a race across the eyepocalypse wasteland between Archivist Sasha and Archivist Jon to usurp Jonah and become the pupil?
  • Tim Stoker 2/10 dude's here for a good time, not a long time
  • Do All of Jon's Friends Subconsciously Hate Him, or Does He Just Need to Sleep? Both, it's both.

    At one point, Jon explained that during S2 he had just enough Eye powers to sense that someone around him (Not-Sasha) was duplicit, but not enough Eye powers to shape that into anything more tangible than just a bad feeling.

    I think this fledgling-power-by-entry-level-Eye-association might explain why the entire cast is pointedly more reasonable and forgiving of each other's flaws than Jon's. If he was marked and followed for the Web's mAcHiNaTiOnS as a child, then the archival assistant's low level Eye powers from research and statements might have had them develop a similar spidey sense (lol) warning that some sinister, manipulative, cause-to-effect force was orbiting Jon. Even if Jon himself was objectively causing at least as much/little harm as the assistants. After they all have at least a little bit of Eye exposure, that exposure combined with their trauma incentives turned into a cocktail of semi-legitimate-if-you-squint distrust toward Jon's motives.

    The exceptions being

    1) Sasha: she was lost too early for enough Eye exposure, but idk, maybe she was also one worm infestation away from squaring up, we don't get much of her POV on Jon.

    2) Martin: he's apparently naturally compatible with the web so sensing those powers in Jon might be less alarming or less effective on him. What's more, he thought spiders were cute, so maybe he did pick up on Jon's web vibes and took things in the opposite direction as everyone else lol

    Question- how well do you think the Monster Pig Or the Admiral would have done as the archivist?

    Extension of this post where I graded how well the non-archivist characters would have damned humanity if they had been the archivist.

  • Monster Pig 6/10, points awarded for initiating a pacific rim style apocalypse with himself as the kaiju, points deducted because he's a successful one pig union against the fear bosses and would literally eat the rich.
  • Idk if we ever got more meat on the bones re monster pig's entity influence but I interpreted him as a flesh/slaughter duel alignment. This avatar apparently walked off an ax chop but also "couldn't be bothered" to kick the lock off the barn door and help himself to some real havoc. Instead of seeking out brains to eat in cafés like Jon, he was content with letting havoc come to him instead and you know what? It worked? Like a black hole, the lack of fucks given created a vacuum which pullef both Gertrude and Jon to him.
  • He refused to terrorize any more than necessary. Fear bosses and their insatiable hunger be damned, Monster Pig will punch his time card every day at 4:30 p.m. and say "I'm done cannibalizing Toby the pig for today, see you at 8:00 a.m., Comrade Dylan Anderson." Antichrist point deduction for eating the cogs in TMA's capitalism metaphor
  • The marks would be a non-issue, he can apparently survive attacks ranging from stabbing to pennywise, the clown he ate. He has a ton of weird scars, so he may already be fully marked, which restores some points. But he still insists on doing it strictly within work hours, and will otherwise go on strike a la fucking off to a new farm and eating the competition.
  • I like the weight of Jon's "I don't want to end up just another mystery" compared to how he's MIA in the end, not because it went against what he said he wanted, but because when he said that he didn't really have anyone in his life at the time who would have been invested enough to go through that same Fear Bullshitery and learn, in full, what became of him.

    Now, wherever he is, even if some people don't know exactly what became of him, the person who matters most to him knows exactly how Jon's mystery ended.

    I'm confused about why people think Melanie and Sasha were on good terms just because Melanie asked to say goodbye to her before leaving for India considering 1) Sasha had all the same flaws that Melanie said she hated in Jon and 2) Melanie openly hated Jon but still sought him out three times.

    Melanie also apparently made Tim and Martin cry within her first month(ish) of magnus archive employment, so we're sleeping on the funniest reality of all: Melanie holding four seperate, ongoing nemesis relationships with Jon, Sasha, Tim, and Martin. She reaches one desk, stirs the pot, accuses them of gaslighting, moves on to the next work station, rinse and repeat.

    We can argue over the nuances of Jon's s5 character arc all we want but the single biggest problematic plot hole is the suggestion that Jon has not once thought to use his Sight to locate 2k20 lord and savior, the admiral

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