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I'm going to blatantly copy and paste things I said on Discord here, but.

Something I find interesting is that there was no way for a human to know exactly what the post-change world would be like. Jonah threw himself into that unknown rather than face the possibility of death, he assured himself of his place in the new world almost blindly. I don't think he just never stopped to consider that in two centuries. I think the goal of being the only victorious fighter, of transcending everything mattered more to him than the specifics of what could happen. This leads me to conclude that what he fears of death isn't the unknown per se but the thought of the utter powerlessness that comes with it; he wanted to place himself beyond it, and whatever that entailed (good or horrific) he wanted it to be by his own hand.

This (the desperation to not be a passive victim) is why I think him having a history of hurt is compelling. There is a sense of inferiority in being hurt. The idea of being shaped by misfortune or external influence feels like an outright violation. But if you look at your hurt straight on, and say, "no, this won't merely shape me; I am mine alone" and intellectualise it until it's so far beneath you it can't touch you... You can reach the illusion that it never affected you.

And that's why you can't let yourself be hurt again, can't let it touch you. That's why, I think, Elias's first response when threatened is to strike first and to do so brutally. I think that one of the things he fears most is fear itself. The idea of being prey.

#This isn't the post I was looking for but it's apropos.#It's about free will. It's all about free will.

@elias-rights / elias-rights.tumblr.com

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I'm going to blatantly copy and paste things I said on Discord here, but.

Something I find interesting is that there was no way for a human to know exactly what the post-change world would be like. Jonah threw himself into that unknown rather than face the possibility of death, he assured himself of his place in the new world almost blindly. I don't think he just never stopped to consider that in two centuries. I think the goal of being the only victorious fighter, of transcending everything mattered more to him than the specifics of what could happen. This leads me to conclude that what he fears of death isn't the unknown per se but the thought of the utter powerlessness that comes with it; he wanted to place himself beyond it, and whatever that entailed (good or horrific) he wanted it to be by his own hand.

This (the desperation to not be a passive victim) is why I think him having a history of hurt is compelling. There is a sense of inferiority in being hurt. The idea of being shaped by misfortune or external influence feels like an outright violation. But if you look at your hurt straight on, and say, "no, this won't merely shape me; I am mine alone" and intellectualise it until it's so far beneath you it can't touch you... You can reach the illusion that it never affected you.

And that's why you can't let yourself be hurt again, can't let it touch you. That's why, I think, Elias's first response when threatened is to strike first and to do so brutally. I think that one of the things he fears most is fear itself. The idea of being prey.

Something about Jon blaming himself for how he was bullied as a child (a form of victimhood and powerlessness) as a way to retroactively claim agency in the same vein as Jonah emphasizing he's done everything because he wishes to.

Jonah not allowing himself to be compelled (and making his account of his motivations and anxieties so dry compared to how he talked about Jon's own terrors) can easily be read as him refusing the Eye the opportunity to feast on his fear. But I think that the Eye is probably feeding on his fear and refusal of being fed on by the Eye. It's awfully elegant.

Elias Bouchard is real and literally all that matters.

If your Elias Bouchard design looks like Argentine ex-president Mauricio Macri, I'm stealing something out your house!

Melanie-Jonah parallels drive me insane, and I would love to see them explored outside of my own fic that I'll probably never finish or post.

See, Melanie does not lash out at anyone unless she feels they have personally victimised her. Jon, Jonah, and Jared Hopworth are acceptable targets to her because they questioned her credibility, did non-consensual surgery on her, trapped her in the Institute, or attempted to kill her. She doesn't want to be trapped or belittled or a victim; she wants a measure of autonomy. Her anger is a function of her fear: she refuses to be a victim. It makes me think of how when Jonah's plans were threatened by Jurgen Leitner's sudden appearance he panicked and his tightly repressed violence slipped out of his control.

It's the same mechanism: the fear of being a victim cannot be expressed as fear because fear makes you a victim of itself, but anger is empowering; anger makes others be hurt rather than you.

The thing about Elias is that... he's careful. He likes everything to be in a well-appointed place. He's welcoming of happy little coincidences along the way and very resourceful and adaptable, but he also needs to have a structure in place. He has the prosaic but practical system of donations and paperwork when he could feasibly use his powers to obtain money and torture any auditors that try to pester him as they come, but that's less efficient and less safe. It's not sustainable. Much like body-hopping, it does not grant him the security of a long-term plan. He cannot deal with threats as they come indefinitely; he would always fear that this may be the one that does the trick. Therefore, he maintains an image of legitimacy. He schedules. He destroys the world just to be at the top. So no, he couldn't have kept body-hopping forever and be satiated.

What do you think is the most 'human' part of Jonalias?

Human is a very abstract quality, isn't it? It's a bit ironic that the monsters considered antithetical to humanity are sustained by human fear, I've always thought. The line is explicitly blurred in canon, which we see as early as with Jane Prentiss and her terrified devotion.

But I think I know what you mean. Pain, death, and fear are immanent to the human condition; the desire to transcend these shackles is, therefore, the drive to become inhuman (this must not be equated with being evil; the only reason why Jonah's actions can be considered immoral is that his method for approaching divinity requires the suffering of others, not that there is something intrinsically wrong with not wanting to be human or an inherent moral purity or impurity in humanity). Ironically, this urge, actuated by fear, is in itself very human.

So, I'd say that the closer Jonah becomes to freeing himself of the weight of death the further away he gets from his humanity, and vice versa. Jonah is, in my opinion, a human person trying to carve himself into a god, and the closest he comes to his goal is when the Beholding makes him a part of its apotheosis. He becomes one with the sickening dread that has always haunted him, but it doesn't sink its claws into him; it merely passes through him because it recognises him as one of its own. To escape death, he must embrace it, wield it, and become it.

So I'd say Jonah is mostly human, especially since his motivation is fundamentally human. And he's at his most human in the moments after his agonised bliss is interrupted and he's faced with the reality of his imminent death; whatever criticisms I have of how that scene was written, there's something very poetic about that.

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