it’s kinda crazy how like. 90% of the people who interact with jonah as a character completely skip over the sentence I first attempted prevention but the cause seemed hopeless. paying heed to his own words (which are to be held true or the statement wouldn’t have been caught on tape) he did not decide to seek power when he first discovered them (he felt curiosity and fear); nor he did so when his companions became entangled with one of the Entities; NOR when the Rituals became an active threat. he was curious, he studied them, he attempted prevention. discussing privilege around jonah is like kicking a dead horse and I shall never go there but it’s insane to me how his first instinct (or choice, either way) was not to exploit the powers to his gain and to bring the Change into the world itself but to stop it from happening and only inverted his route upon discovering that his crusade was meaningless, that there was no hope for any concrete damage control. this is why I will always, always object to any conception of jonah magnus that doesn’t start with him as a good person. sorry.
(somuchbetterthanthat’s tags)
I definitely see him as someone who started off, like the archival staff, fascinated but also horrified by the dread powers and their effects, and wishing to stop the horrors they might inflict on himself and others. This said, Jonah wishing to *prevent* the ritual and Jonah purposefully invoking one both stem from his desire to master fear, to make it happen according to his desires and needs, to control his experience of that which he fears. I see him as a character who, analagous to others in the enlightenment and onwards, saught to master fear using understanding, as scientists of the time were trying to use science to comprehend and control previous unknowns.