Jonelias was literally made in a lab to drive me insane. Weird religious undertones. Constant manipulation. Villains exception in the worst way possible. The only one who could possibly understand what Jon’s going through and it’s the absolute worst person to do it. They are bound forever and there is no way to undo it. Weird undertones everywhere you look. They piss each other off constantly. They’re the only ones who actually know this much about each other, and it means they can hurt each other in ways nobody else can. There’s even weird mind reading. Perfect dynamic, no notes.
i love jon as our tormented sicklyguy but tbh, maybe uncommon opinion, i really enjoy elias as like a closeted sicklyguy too. or maybe this is just me projecting ‘sicklyguy’ onto characters as one myself. who knows or cares. anyway, i just really like something-ambiguously-wrong-with-him elias. your boss who’s not quite right health-wise, obviously, but there’s no way you’re going to find out precisely How So. he doesn’t quite want that, and you can’t Look anyway. maybe jonah was originally some flavor of chronic-whatever and it’s just happenstance that elias is as well. maybe all of his bodies have been & it’s not happenstance at all. maybe the eye keeps it in check. maybe it doesn’t. certainly i like the idea that eye avatars are prone to migraines, as a base. to me jon has every fucking disease and does very little about this fact. i’m giving him my genetic and neurological bullshit. he even goes to physical therapy he’s like the perfect guy to assign this to. elias though? this one you have to trust me on. he can have EDS & POTS too. if we believe.
jon’s ‘there’s nothing wrong with him’ about jonah in mag192 is so funny tbh. do not worry this is healthy and normal behavior for the pupil of the eye <3 yaaay
Kept thinking about how weak and disorientated Jon gets when cut off from the Eye, which got me thinking about Martin having to help him as his state got worse.
Surprisingly, instead of getting angsty, I ended up with Jon being carried around like a ragdoll.
Here and then I think about Elias being a genuinely boring person to 99% of the world by the time it’s the 2000s and all his circle of Good Society Gentlemen Horny for their weird Academic friend obsessed with Ghosts Stories are dead.
Not just boring, but easily dismissed, as well (“waste of a suit”), (“A dull little man” // “Gertrude was the one who scared me”).
And I don’t know, it always drives me a little insane in the BEST way. I love it. I love that his little joys in life are spreadsheets, filing, The Horror Stories of Other People that Are Not Him Thank You, and cake. I love that he is mild, that he looks utterly inoffensive, that he’s passive and only shows glimpses of how Cruel and /how much he enjoys being Cruel/ in very specific situations (1. i have all the power and everybody in the room knows, 2. They want to see an evil man i’ll show them an evil man 3. EVERYTHING I WORKED TOWARDS FOR CENTURIES IS SET INTO MOTION I AM WINNING)
It makes it extra tasty, with that additional external point of view from characters, that Jon explicitely says that Elias is the most knowledgeable man he knows when it comes to paranormal: Jon actively seeked out Elias enough to be aware of that. It’s also delicious to have him say “Elias is a hard man to pin down” because it means that Jon RECOGNIZES that Elias is not just his boring, inefficient superior; that there are myriads of other things he’s yet to uncover about him and all.
I think it’s nice for us all boring people to have represention in villainy. I said it over on bluesky and all but I know in my heart his perfectly tailored three-piece suits are all different shades of grey (Ah,,), except for the black ones that are for fancy events, and the “extravagant” navy blue ones for “fun” events like Institute parties.
he has inside jokes with himself with his cufflinks and that’s basically it.
as much of a fan that i am of eldritch!jon as far as S5 designs go, (which i very, very much am to be clear) personally i conceptualize him as being stunningly normal. like genuinely, stunningly, unusually normal — something seemingly untouched in a fundamentally altered world. he is ‘privileged’ in passage through this not-space and its horrors and its shows, he’s deemed special. i even like to think of him as appearing much healthier than he has since S1. almost as if rested, refreshed, recovered.
jonah on the other hand? i think he looks absolutely fucked. not in a transformation way or in a ‘cool’ way, i just think the role of the pupil of the eye in all its misplaced, misassigned glory, him as a mere placeholder even after everything, i think that would be very taxing on him. pointedly not enriching. physically decimating. ‘agonized bliss’ does not negate the agonized part or the truth of him not being powerful enough to appropriately control that position and exist through it as opposed to having himself overwritten and used as a vector to the degree that we saw. so in a sense i like to think that he looked remarkably normal in vulnerability. ‘powerful’ yes, but not him personally. not really. not anymore. omnipotence and omniscience as a falsehood.
theres truly no item like the humble cigarette to show that a character is stressed and/or depressed. like we gotta hand it to the cigarette industry. nothing quite as immidiate as showing a character do an everyday ritual thats slowly killing them
[ID: A digital drawing of Martin and Tim from The Magnus Archives on a pale peach background. They are floating and holding onto each other, nose to nose. Tim is jumping into Martin’s chest, blushing with a wobbly smile, as Martin smiles back, also blushing. There are hearts around both their heads, more around Tim’s than Martin’s. end ID]
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“dance card’s open ;]”
been seeing some martim around lately. made me miss em <3
S2 snippet animation. Was meant as a break from my studies lately. Ended up taking a week haha ha
———
[ID: A short animation featuring Jonathan sims from the Magnus Archives. Jon is a brown man with short tussle dark hair and bags under his eyes. He wears a blue suit over a grey shirt, with a matching blue tie.
In the first half of the animation he is fidgeting with a green pen, waving it around as he speaks to Elias Bouchard off screen.
Elias: “I’ll have a copy made for you one one condition. Be. Careful. No more impetuous subterranean adventures, understand?”
Jon (mumbling): “Yes, of course, of course.”
There is a pause in the animation where only a blank dark beige colored screen is shown, before the next bit of dialogue continues. This time, the animation takes place in a stoneway that has a dark atmosphere. Jon in this scene is more paranoid and scared. His pen is replaced by a tape recorder.
Jon (frantically): “Supplimental: I’m in the tunnels. I was exploring, and I got lost.”
At the end Jon jumps in surprise at something to his left. /End ID]
the first law of tragedies: the end is already written and inevitable. the second law of tragedies: your actions are all your own and you can choose to get off this ride whenever you want. the third law of tragedies: we both know that you are never going to do that.
it goes deeper. that statement is about getting involved with someone you should’ve known better not to (but it’s not meant as a cautionary tale, jack talks about agnes as if she was an inevitability), and it’s obviously meant to be a straight parallel with jon’s own, current obsession with finding out what’s going on at the institute, i.e. with the beholding. but the secret he is obsessed with figuring out is, well, it’s elias! elias killed gertrude. the tunnels are hiding elias’s history as jonah magnus. the entire institute exists to serve elias’s goals. elias has an apocalypse planned out with jon as its lynchpin. of course, jon doesn’t realise any of this yet, but burning desire is about his need to know—about elias.
MAG 67 - “Burning Desire” & Jon in MAG 47 - “Lost in the Crowd”
elias being aroused by the compulsion is so, like, the implications. the archivist’s compulsion is meant to be a violation of the highest degree, it’s an act of domination over another being and results in complete loss of autonomy for the victim, because statement feeding (and avatarhood as a whole) is also consumption (“he looked at me like he had just eaten a perfectly cooked steak”, 142 // “i’ve always thought a man’s eating habits were his own private business”, elias in 148), jon was eating them so his god wouldn’t eat him, just as his first encounter with the powers was a story about being devoured by a monster. so. why would elias like this, why is he excited by it. because he’s two hundred years old and has spent most of those years hiding his true self as jonah magnus while serving the fear of being known/found out—that alone makes him an excellent source of fear for the eye to passively feed on. but he also describes jon’s compulsion as “tingly, but sort of freeing” in 92, as if the prospect of having his entire self finally, forcibly revealed under the eye of their god after all this time will be a moment of ecstatic release, because he takes so much gloating pleasure in revealing his secrets to jon in 160, because he wants to be Known, the only thing he objects to is the revelation coming at a wrong time because that would ruin his plans. and, of course, the whole loop of jon extracting a statement <–> elias being compelled, which in turn is feeding the beholding, works as a great metaphor for sex. the gratification the beholding rewards them with for the act can only be experienced by the two of them, because nobody else will gladly feed jon their fear and only his archivist can compel jonah. like. all im saying is there was no need to make [PLEASURED EXHALATION] a thing and then never bring it up again. because whats all this then.
