read the spinoff transcript episode about the Institute. and wow they really hate Jonah, to ruin his character like that for the sake of the cheap fanservice

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oh godddddddddd i haven't heard abt this pls god no.....

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wait in what ways do you think he was mischaracterized? i don’t remember there being much on his personality and whatnot

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genuine btw

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Original Poster

@iiinkos what do you mean not much on his personality... to make this short: the way he dies is pandering to the common fanon of stupid rich capitalist Jonah. when he is simply not one. this death follows the idea of him mistreating his workers when he doesn't. the only ones who get mistreated are the *current Archives staff* but that wasn't because he's against workers' rights. it also shows him as kind of stupid, that he was killed like that. with his canonical fear of death, it doesn't make sense for him to not take precautions against it. another thing that was stupid of him was marking the Institute as "Other" attracting unnecessary attention, when he could have just. called it a research institute that it is. you can clearly see his personality being warped after second half of s5, going from a shrewd, cunning antagonist to just. an incompetent stupid villain that the fandom imagines him to be. which to be clear is inaccurate

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@kairos-polaris I could keep going

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@kairos-polaris we don’t know enough about this jonah to fully come to the conclusion that he was a stupid idiot who didn’t plan for his death? all we know is that he was killed by a mob, not that he didn’t try to take precautions. and in between the 1800s to the present there’s likely been a lot of workers rights changes n shit. it was normal then to be more exploitative than today, and jonah doesn’t seem like the kind of person to go out of his way to act kind to his employees when he doesn’t need to. also, artefact storage exists and it traumatized sasha, and likely many others since it’s just a normal department of the institute. plus, sasha’s experience in storage was one of the reasons gertrude wanted her as her successor. can’t mean that their work experiences were fine and dandy. and again, we don’t know how this jonah went through things or what his motives would be. we don’t know if there was a specific motivation behind marking it as other. and other is technically an accurate descriptor of an institute dealing with spooky shit, or “the other”. i don’t remember him shifting into incompetent and stupid in the second half of season 5? idk

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Original Poster

@iiinkos it doesn't matter if "other" is accurate or not, what matters is that it attracts attention from the government that you wouldn't want when running an Institute dedicated to alchemy. it also doesn't matter if it was normal to exploit workers and whether Jonah would partake in that because there is nothing to suggest that in canon. oh he is very much played for incompetent idiot in s5 with the Web reveal that meant actually he doesn't get the credit for the ritual, it was all thanks to the Web. in addition to Jonny explicitly saying that his death was meant to be humiliating. but what I meant was the writers shifting the narratives to fit the wants of the fandom causing characterization to suffer. protocol itself a fanservice fest. the problem with that is that this kind of depiction is not only in line with the fanon but also will be used when talking about Archives!Jonah. something *you* are doing. if you are going to say that we can't know his motives since it's a different version of him (and we do know his desire to learn despite the cost it may present to others) then you can't be turning around and saying that he got beat up by "Melanie's past lives". also I think it kind of doesn't make sense comparing unsafe working conditions in a mill and a research institution dedicated to the paranormal. and also there were still people very much. not traumatized, like the library department

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oh no i haven't caught up yet

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Original Poster

I wish they'd remember he is a character beyond the charicature

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The only way this could get worse would be if he was implied to be involved with a Lucas 🤦

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I would be on the news

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@kairos-polaris On a logical level it just proves how different people can be across universes, but I bet it's going to bleed into TMA-oriented posts as well

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Original Poster

@naamah-beherit yes! I wouldn't have a problem with it if I didn't know they wouldn't base their understanding of Archives Jonah on it (well I would still be upset but yknow). it's the same they did with og Elias, using Protocol Elias to characterize Archives Elias (which I should have taken as a sign of the direction they are going in)

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Maybe don't go into a shows tag just to hate??

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Original Poster

I wouldn't if people wouldn't post character hate in the character tag ☺️

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Original Poster

@kairos-polaris also I wasn't even hating on the show? I was hating on the writing choice to pander to fanon over properly characterising their character

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Simon has a completely different relationship with the world's hopeless lack of happy little columns from Jonah, who was born in the Enlightenment and has a fondness for spreadsheets only seen in the most zealous of bureaucrats.

the magnus archives will give us a character who learned about the horrible things infesting reality and tried, for a time, to stop them, before eventually realizing that there was nothing to be done to do anything more substantial than slow them down, gave in out of a desire for any control over the inevitable, did get everything he wanted in the end, and the fans will make jokes about him being gay and homophobic while acting like hes an idiot the whole time

(edit: i accidentally left out three very crucial words here)

feeling controversial so. daisy elias fandom misogyny parallels

one is a queer woman masculinized because of the belief that violence and single-mindedness are masculine things (plus the idea that masculinity is “less work” and “less effort” and so she’d become more masculine as she becomes more dedicated to the hunt, despite that. not generally being true, Especially for people societally recognized as Men) while the other is a queer man repeatedly feminized due to his indirect control over varying aspects of the plot and treated as more incompetent because of it

literally just begging yall to acknowledge the stereotypes you’re perpetuating while posting. please. someone being violent doesn’t mean they’re masc. someone being manipulative doesn’t mean they’re feminine

*throws @zeph-b at you*

OW FUCK THAT HURT

Even if Jonah were involved with someone, he would never pick out his body according to their tastes. He has never once in the entire show given an indication that he cares about others' preferences or that he'd modify his choices in the slightest to accommodate anybody else.

okay how do you figure gertrude got the job though. like

The thing is, I'm not saying I'm particularly against Jonah being rich, because seeing all the people he frequented in the 1800s, he must have been -- and I also assume that when you're opening an Institute at that time to study the paranormal and your friends only treat it as your little Special Jonah Excentricity, you must have enough money that you'll only get teased and not fully judged for it.

It's just that, unless my memory is severely failing me, it's also obvious that Jonah was all-in when it came to the Institute; that his friends were also telling him to chill a bit and to relax and not work as much. And I feel it's so much more interesting to have him be an academic losing himself to the study of fear (being enough of a recluse that his friends want to coax him out, and yet still good enough at the social game that he HAS friends coaxing him out to begin with) than just a... random Rich Son owning Mills who Just So happen on the Side to have the Institute.

(And I'm not even against Jonah, as a rule, being a snob about social classes either? Like. I don't buy it fully, but being from a higher social statut WOULD, at least early on, give him so biases which: fair enough I guess, even if it's not really... visible in text at least in TMA for me.)

Also like, actually, erasing all of TMA from memory, it's also kinda weird even if we just consider the Protocol World? I KNOW they didn't say it was Jonah's diary when we had the episode, but like, please???? This was so much like Jonah it would be absurd to invent a whole other character for it. So i've got to assume that whatever "official" information Georgie found on the Institute and its founders are just like. what it is. an "official", easy story to digest, that does not reflect the truth whatsover of what happened to Jonah. If anything, STILL not knowing the full truth about him WOULD be the one consistent thing we get about Jonah. Like who knows. Maybe he had a cousin with the same name. Maybe trans Jonah is real, Jonah Magnus was the first born son who died and Jonah was like "stealing the name for me btw".

Anyhow. Whatever. Fanfiction of fanfiction. i need to stop thinking about this.

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