well almost everything i say in my jon tag is in response to popular takes of his character but it has to be the way he's widely engaged with as an oblivious funnyman protagonist who makes a series of looney tunes-esque choices over the course of the podcast and while that makes for a good joke post now and then it's unbearable to me because the thing that people choose to make fun of is his pathological need to know, which is a trauma response (which. i think the podcast is a bit influenced by controversial texts like 'the body keeps the score' in the way it writes about trauma through avatars and jon's marks are absolutely doing this—the effects of trauma being literally imprinted on his body as the archive. but it's fantasy and not realism so it doesn't bother me).
but as i was saying. jon's traumatised as a child in a very specific manner—through a book, through the act of reading (as you'll see, it's what elias hires him for as the archivist) and crucially he does not get to finish reading a guest for mr spider, he isn't able to knock and open that door. and doors in this podcast are all about boundaries in the gothic mode: the fear of physical violation (of the body, of the self) because beyond that closed door there is a terrible, numinous force and if you open the door, it will enter your world and alter you—unity with some monstrous other—which is how avatarhood is initially conceived of as gothic terror but later it's also about sublime transcendence in the romantic sense—unity with something divine—it's why there are a lot of statements about avatars falling in love with their parasitic patrons (this too is jonelias) so that's his formative traumatic experience and the cornerstone of his characterisation, that he couldn't finish reading the book, couldn't open that door and someone else was taken in his stead. this will transform into a lifelong need to Know, when he goes to the magnus institute he'll keep reading statement after statement and open every single door elias nudges him towards and encounter every fear entity as he's both repulsed and transfixed by all that horror (at a hundred thresholds you pressed on!) in order to get to the bottom of it all so someone else is never taken in his stead ("a strange conviction that. if i had been able to face that thing myself, maybe i could have saved him") it's why he's such a good pick for archivist, this is exactly the kind of person elias and the web (which traumatised him in in this manner to begin with) need for their ritual. this is terrific writing to me personally and why i shrivel up and die whenever people trivialise it or worse. identify it as a character flaw.
there's also another thing, that i can't properly discuss because it would require a level of rigour i'm not capable of right now—i have no problems with anyone's race or sexuality or any other headcanons neither do i think all headcanons need to align with themes all the time like it's not real. we're all playing with our toys here. but this is a horror podcast that has overt political themes which you can't really headcanon your way out of because the popular indian hc that people have for jon doesn't quite work with what jonny sims has written. like if we're strictly engaging in textual analysis only, aside from the fact that jonny sims is an affluent white author who's writing from that perspective so the podcast will immediately let you know if a character is non white (often he's racist about it. the tom haan plot, among others) jon, to me, was very much implied as being middle class white for a simple reason: the way the magnus institute and the eye manifests in the story is tied to jonah magnus performing the watcher's crown during britain's imperial century. it's conceived as a metaphor for imperial control (and he calls himself king of a ruined world), specifically the way the control of an empire hinges on its monopoly over knowledge. the 19th century was a time of obsessive knowledge gathering as a way to better govern and exploit and expand their territories—the maps, the surveys, the censuses, the state sponsored knowledge gathering expeditions into the colonies, into the polar regions because knowledge is a tool of power and is used to construct systems of control. robert smirke and jon and elias and gertrude all acquire it through hegemonic exploitation which then reinforces that hegemony (of the eye, of the institute), that work of obsessive codification and classification in order to conquer the entities in the process of which jonah destroys so many lives to come out on top (and his apocalyptic vision of the world is a panopticon—knowledge as a mode of surveillance and discipline and then punishment), is a role that jon directly inherits as early as S1 when he isn't even an avatar yet but his job is to extract narratives of trauma from people through dispassionate office protocol. like he's not just exploited he's also written to be someone with a certain amount of hegemonic privilege that repeatedly shields him from a worse fate (S4 is blatant about it, screamed when jon started going on about hey melanie maybe i can change it from the INSIDE) and while this one's not annoying per se and i'm not saying the podcast about eldritch fear gods is only an allegory for this, it's not. it's a podcast about eldritch fear gods first (and i think their political commentary is significantly weaker than vampirism/avatarhood as a metaphor for trauma), i've just never seen anyone discuss this. probably because it's a good way to get mauled
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