can i get the mischaracterisation of jonah/elias rant please 🙏

Why of course, tumblr user cult-of-the-eye. I’m glad you asked.

Putting it under a cut cuz there’s…..uh. A lot

I think the fandom blatantly misrepresents Elias/Jonah in ways that completely contradict canon and it baffles me. One such example is Elias being really cryptic and ominous in fanfic, especially in season 1-2 and fix it fics, when he’s not like that at all. He’s really good at making himself seem painfully normal to the point where the rest of the archival staff are surprised to hear he killed Gertrude. He’s incredibly passive as an antagonist, only taking action when he feels like his plans are threatened. The majority of the podcast, he’s just sitting back and looking pretty while everyone else does the work for him. As such, he would not be overly evil bc it would give himself away. Imo his ability to blend in and seem normal makes him scarier bc no one would suspect he’s the bad guy and by the time you find out, it’s too late. The fandom just turns him into a typical ominous antagonist and it’s so boring.

Another common misinterpretation of him I see is that he has a short temper. I think ppl think this bc he killed Leitner, but that wasn’t out of anger. Again, he only gets his hands dirty if he REALLY feels like he needs to. He killed Leitner because he was a threat to his plans and he didn’t see any other way to ensure they would go through. He’s so used to knowing everything that happens in the institute, and then suddenly this old guy pops out of nowhere and threatens to derail his whole operation, so he panics and kills him. In other situations where he should be angry or scared, he is infuriatingly calm because he knows he has the upper hand. Leitner was such a special case that Peter was shocked to hear Elias killed him. Quit giving Elias the basic “bad guy with short temper” treatment it’s SO BORING

(CW: SA mention. Skip to the end of the section if you don’t wanna read it)

I am so so sick and tired of people writing fics where Elias is a sexual predator/r*pist. It’s so out of character. HE IS NOT PRONE TO VIOLENCE. He has literal fear powers. He can get his way without causing physical harm. I understand that some people write those things to process their own trauma, which is completely valid, but I often don’t see it treated with the weight it deserves. Sometimes it’s just thrown in there to make Elias seem creepier which is. Really weird. It’s used as nothing but a general hand wave to be like “look this guy is bad.” WE KNOW THAT. Please let him be horrible in more interesting, more fictional ways. Or (even worse) it’ll be used as some sort of comic relief??? Like the reader is meant to go “ewww Elias don’t touch your employees without their consent haha you’re so weird” which is really gross imo

(Okay all done)

I like lonelyeyes don’t get me wrong, but I think the common fandom interpretation is WILDLY out of character for both of them. It does not benefit either of them to be married and divorced 20 times and they don’t care about each other enough to go through all that. It’s also common for Elias to be the one initiating the divorces, usually over petty squabbles, due to his short temper which is, again, not canon.

I also think the fandom has a HUGE problem with how it engages with Jonah’s queerness. There’s actually an interesting conversation to be had regarding Jonah being queer, especially in the 19th century. The fear of being found out (something that aligns with The Eye) was very real for queer people back then, and it was accompanied by a fear of death. Jonah’s queerness could add depth to his character but no. Instead of thinking about that, it’s jokes about him being a slut and making him trans as some sort of punishment. All too often is his identity mocked instead of analyzed. He is a bad person, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not an excuse to make fun of his queerness.

The fandom has an understandable disrespect for him as a person, but it leads to them not wanting to take him seriously as a character, which is really sad because he’s actually fascinating. For the love of god actually take a look at how he is in the podcast and stop dumbing him down

Tl;dr: The fandom takes away the most interesting aspects of Elias/Jonah’s character and dumbs him down into a cliche, short tempered, overly evil villain, which is very disappointing bc he’s really fun to analyze

Soooo yeah. Those are my thoughts :P there’s a lot of them lol but Jonah’s been taking up a lot of brain space lately and it’s led me to think about the fandom’s treatment of him