the secret sauce of jonah magnus is refusing to become a victim in a world where that is fundamentally impossible so you damn your whole species to the slaughterhouse for the privilege of being its administrator hope this helps <3
my favorite thing about tma has always been the avatars who love the fears they serve, who show that love so vibrantly that, for just a moment, they sway you into feeling like you could learn to love that fear the way they do. when jane prentiss said “not loved as you would understand it, a deeper, more primal love, a need as much as a feeling” and when jude perry said “as the heat warped my bones and bubbled my flesh, all i heard was the loving exaltation of my god” and when mike crew said “falling had always held a special place in my heart, that wonderful border between terror and delight” and when manuela dominguez said “and at his words i felt afraid, and my heart soared in terror and elation as my eyes brimmed with tears, for i knew he spoke the truth” and when hezekiah wakely said “i had never felt such safety as within the crushing weight of earth all around me, the pressing embrace of the buried.” do you get me
hey bro can i open up ur rib cage and rummage around in there until im up to my elbows in blood and then hold ur heart in my hands? no bro i promise it wont look gay i swear.
my god i haven’t thought about them in years… but yes, i do have them.
jonahbas strikes me as a first young love that was never allowed to separate. the chaste kiss between two children that was frowned upon, and then as they both grew in a world that could easily have both of them ruined for that fact, they were forced to stay close lest that knowledge risk being unveiled. beholding fear and all <3
in his letter to jonah, barnabas is the only one of magnus’ letters that has a certain degree of entitlement. all the others- albrecht, jonathan, robert, sampson- either treat him as an equal colleague or the soured relations of an equal they can no longer stand. but barnabas? he expects jonah to save him. he demands it. that displays a level of intimacy one wouldn’t expect from our mr magnus. it strikes me as them having something older and deeper. and, in all likelihood, something that should’ve ended a long time ago.
put yourself in jonah’s shoes. you have this person whom you truly care for. you care for him enough to keep his bones by your side for 200 years after his death. but as you look into the world of fears and, even before that, traipse through the dog-eat-dog world of 1800s noblemen and their petty god fearing disputes, you realize that he Knows things about you. things that could lose you everything you’ve built up so far. things that could get you killed. and you do still love him, of course, you have always loved him. but he’s a liability. a danger.
it’s much easier to observe rather than make the commitment yourself, no?
hiii hello. just posted chapter one of look to your laurels. it’s the fic where jonah magnus time travels to the future and meets elias and they’re both kind of gay about it.
the joy in jon’s voice whenever he puts a piece of the puzzle together is so endearing. and ofc I <3 whenever he reverently calls sth ‘monstrous’ beautiful
darlingggg. ik Elias is frothing at the mouth listening to this
god i don’t know how ANYONE listens to mag 161 and comes away with the impression that they always thought elias was this horrible boss to secretly hate (i mean i do know, it’s memetic mutation and it bothers me), the whole thing, which is exemplified in the birthday bit, is that they were a bit nervous because, as tim said, “double boss”, but he was personable and they liked him and he put in effort to get in good with them and they not only liked having him around and felt comfortable with him (real sasha’s last lines literally included her chuckling fondly over a quirk of elias’s) but that they trusted him with stuff, whether big or small, that they trusted him to look after them (and probably why tim got so angry at elias not doing anything about jon’s season 2 behavior, cuz he trusted elias to step in) which is part of the TRAGEDY.
it’s why we AND the archival crew are meant to take it as hard as we do when we realize that he (appears to) genuinely doesn’t care about any of them and whether they live or die. it’s the classic horror trope of thinking that there’s a greater power there to save you, mrs voorhees arriving at camp crystal lake to comfort alice, only to realize that no, this is even worse, this is someone who is going to cause you harm. his switch from “good boss who cares about his employees and wants to help them and is friendly with them” to “that guy who brutally pipe murdered a dude and WILL kill/psychological destroy his employees if they defy them” is suppose to hurt the audience and it hurts the characters. it’s that horrible gut feeling of not just realizing that no one is coming to help you, but that the person you thought would do so, the person you trusted and wanted to do so, not only isn’t going to, not only can’t be bothered, but will actively contribute to the problem.
and if i see anymore “season 1 era the archive crew secretly all hate elias and thinks he sucks” fics i will start throwing bricks in the street.
So I do agree with most of this and that’s the dynamic I prefer my archives crew to have, actually. But, there is one thing that slightly bugs me. When Elias gets down to the Archives, Sasha goes “Elias?” in a slightly wary tone and i CANNOT figure out how we’re supposed to be interpreting this. Maybe her being still slightly pissed at not being promoted? Tbh I’ve been reading it as the writers retconning things slightly and making the archives crew always having been slightly wary of elias when. I don’t think that’s the vibe they should have at all…
Kind of the samey thing and I guess it could just be them being nervous but the whole interaction seemed a bit. Idk cold? Especially the “happy birthday archivist” and the fact he keeps being sorta creepy and pushing the cake bit it really seems like idk. They forced the “he’s a mind reader” bit when really he should have just been chill with them and I think they should have laughed at his jokes too.
But, yup. Definitely. Elias is a chill manager and while I don’t think any of his employees would be like, throwing their lives down for him I certainly thinks they’re comfortable with him because he knows how to inspire trust and quite frankly he has absolutely no reason to hurt them at this point. The thing with Elias is that he’s not sadistic until he’s pushed way past the limits of antagonism (like with Melanie and Martin)
Anyways the conversation in MAG39 over the fire alarm with sasha and elias is still one of my favorites he’s just so chill and proactive and so well meaning
“I’ll allow it” dude is nicer than half the managers ive had
okay actually jm is boring because, unlike what they tell you in the posts, m*rtin is NOT a monsterf*cker/lover. he wants jon to be human unless he wants jon to clock an avatar he personally doesn’t like and has no patience for any weird thing that jon does even if that weird thing is for jon’s survival, he just REJECTS jon’s monster qualities until they suit his needs/wants. whereas the tma world is full of so many REAL monsterf*ckers/lovers/friends, because it DEMANDS a comfort within a certain monstrous morality (never an acceptance of bad as good but an understanding of what people, human or not, will do to survive)…….. m*rtin just comes off as a class-a boring-ass nag who can’t come out of his tiny boring office world to appreciate a glorious monster bf even when said glorious monster bf is BEGGING for acceptance. if you can’t appreciate the monstrous qualities of your monster bf then you don’t deserve him. thank you for coming to my tedtalk, this was the intro and it continues for another 4.8 hours and it has 93 powerpoint slides
so. are we all in agreement that elias would fuck his clone? im not hearing any disagreement on account of the fact that I’m still writing the post so I’ll take that as a yes!
furthermore, are we all in agreement that jonah magnus is very fun to fluster and also just generally fairly cute? this is a universal opinion, right? right?
so anyway. jonah (still very much a fledgling avatar, probably in like his 20s) time travels to the present day, a little before gertrude’s death. he gains a crush on elias that only gets stronger after finding that elias is his future self.
on elias’s part, he is having a fascinating experience being able to look at a past self from the outside. and also he is enjoying flustering jonah. so much.
haven’t really gotten to Plot from this point, unsure if I will, but two things I’m considering (but am undecided on)
archivist jonah. he’s already marked by the end (to me) and also the spiral on account of how he got to the future. and it’ll be convenient for elias to have an archivist he knows will agree with his plans (and who he can manipulate as easy as breathing)
Someone smarter than me please make a post about how like. Jon spent most of season 5 five correcting people when they referred to Jonah as Elias, but when he actually spoke to him again himself, he fell back into those same patterns as well and instinctively referred to him as Elias because I feel like there’s some excellent points to be made there but alas I lack the braincells to make them myself
weeping thinking of Jonah saying he knew deep down this would never last, thinking of Jonah in the last seconds of his life probably scared out of his mind but also he’s not really dying is he, he’s staring into jon’s eyes, jon killed him but jon is his, his creation, his work, his his his, so really he died from his own hand, and isn’t he what he has been doing for centuries, a little death every few decades to survive beyond bodies, his legacy has killed him but there is a part of his soul that is anchored in jon’s heart and that’s why he gets to say good luck and that’s why OBVIOUSLY if there is a somewhere else Jonah is here also, a phantom limb escaping from jon the moment Martin also brings the knife to his chest—
At some point during seasons 1-4 Elias says something ominous to Jon and then adds “an old friend of mine used to say that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”. Jon blinks once, twice and then answers: “Elias, that’s just a quote by Oscar Wilde”.
Silence. No one ever mentions this again.
Fast-forward to the middle of the apocalypse when Martin sees Jon stumble and suddenly say, completely unprompted: “He was friends with Oscar Wilde??????”
Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”
Hello Jon. Apologies for the deception, but I rather wanted to make sure you started reading, so I thought it best not to announce myself…
This may well be my favourite cosplay shoot I’ve ever done, it was so much fun and Scott was just brilliant as Elias. So creepy haha. And Egg is an utter genius, taking the double exposure in camera so that it wouldn’t have to be edited in post. Blew my mind.
jonelias is so dear to me. elias watching jon and realizing softly Oh, you are just like me. jon, a couple of years later, realizing, devastated Oh, I am just like you
The thing about Simon Fairchild in The Magnus Archives - the thing that’s fascinating to me - is that he didn’t have to do anything wicked to become an Avatar. He did wicked things later, once he’d become an Avatar, but to achieve Avatarship in the first place, all he had to do was make beautiful art of the Vast and fall in love with it.
And it seems as though the Vast fell in love back such that when he fell, the Vast couldn’t bear to see him perish, and so he flew.
Simon goes on and on about how insignificant he is, but the literal god of the insignificance of humanity is invested in him, personally.
The other fascinating thing about Simon is that despite almost certainly having been raised Catholic and experiencing his miracle in a literal Catholic Church, he does not attribute his salvation to the Christian God. I wonder what drove that realization?
i think the hottest look you can give someone after they commit acts of unspeakable violence is approval. like don’t get me wrong if there’s lust there too that’s great, but staring at someone with gore dripping down their chin and coating their hands to the wrists with undisguised appraisal and admiration. maybe giving them a little nod as if to say ‘well done’. THAT’S what says “yeah we’re gonna fuck nasty later”.
“i could fix him” well i could pat him on the head and tell him he’s a good boy
i love dread in a story i love hurtling towards something terrible and wanting to stop but the only way to find out what happens is to keep getting closer to it
I made an oc who was an avatar of the end and made him and jonah kiss (because I thought it would be interesting; death is jonah’s worst fear, and I was curious what can I do to explore that), but then I didn’t manage to come up with a name for him so he’s just. sitting here untouched
it’s so insane to me how differently jonah treats jon compared to how he treats everyone else. throughout his life he treated people like tools, like something “to watch, to know, and ultimately to discard”. he doesn’t care about their suffering as long as it benefits Him. but even though he separates himself from other people, puts himself on a higher pedestal, it never seems to apply to jon. with jon it’s always “our master”, “our victory”, “the world that we have made”. everyone else is for us to use. the world is our playground. he’s been living with this “use or be used” mindset for centuries, always on the run, never safe, never trusting anyone, just to meet jon and decide to include him in his life-long plan… and yes, part of this was out of the necessity (he did need to get an archivist for this to work), but if it was purely transactional, then why would he say all that. gayass
Oh, I have so many thoughts on this.
Let’s start with the fact that Jonah Magnus outright stated he chose which Fear to serve and try to make supreme - to the fanatical level that the writers he’d be a cleric in DND.
Jon, however, was chosen. Jonah wasn’t chosen. And yes, Elias tried to say he had chosen Jon in MAG 160, diminishing any specialness on Jon’s part, but in the same letter, said that the Web had already marked Jon, essentially gift-wrapping him, and implying Jonah’s choice wasn’t as important.
(That letter was all over the place, too, and I still believe it’s because Jonah both desperately wanted to be seen by the only other person on Earth who could understand him… and was simultaneously terrified of what would happen when Jon came, so Jonah half-heartedly beat him down with words and birthdays to try to keep him away. BUT ANYWAY.)
He mocked Jon for making choices, as if to blame him, then ensured Jon would do what he wanted by trading Martin away at the risk of his own life.
He fought for two hundred years to make the Eye supreme, and when he succeeded, the special magical Panopticon nest he’d planned ended up being made for Jon.
The Eye cared for Jon more than for Jonah. (Yes, it could feel things, in spite of what Gerry thought, which we know because it was fond - a personal emotion - of Martin.)
I fully believe Jonah was envious yet resentful, obsessive and dismissive, fixated but loathing, needy and superior, all at once, when it came to Jon. If he hadn’t been conflicted, he would have tried to prevent Jon from coming for him… but he kind of wanted Jon to, in spite of any reason.
So instead of a practical solution -
(E.g. call in a favor from the Flesh and paralyze Martin, guaranteeing Jon stays in Scotland to take care of him forever)
- we get Jonah released from being the Pupil, pulled out of an insane Beholding-daze that was blissfully too much for him, seeing Jon, and instead of anything like, “What are you doing here?” we get this:
Does this seem like the reaction of a man who never planned to see Jon again?
It didn’t surprise him. In the moment before his brain came back online, he recognized Jon and wanted to tell him the wonderful dream he’d been having.
I don’t have the urge to tell people I hate my wonderful dreams.
We. This isn’t a necessarily sexual thing, understand; but it is a deeply human one.
Jonah was disappointed at the knife. (“Ah.”)
He pleaded to live, but not like one would an enemy. Even at the end, he thought Jon might understand.
And he was sure he did understand Jon. His last words? “Good luck.”
Absolutely could be a “fuck you.”
Or.
It could be a near-genuine wish from a servant of the Eye who knew how lonely being the Beholding’s own could be.
Anyhow here’s the timeline for heads of the Institute i was talking about. Part 1. Disclaimer some of this information is canon but most are my own headcanons or like. Literally stuff i made up on the spot.
Jonah Magnus (1818-1872)
Born 1785, which makes him 33 when he founds the Institute.
Trans!!
Pocket-sized (like REALLY short. He wears the tallest heels known to mankind and still only manages to be kinda short), auburn curly hair that gets a bit wild, thin eyebrows and face, button up nose. Those cheekbones bring all the boys to the yard. There’s a sharpness to him that remains even as he ages. Ngl he’s a ball of energy and can’t really be stopped when he gets into a mood.
Did the Eye extend his life? Probably did
In 1867, attempts the Watcher’s Crown after Smirke’s death (he was 82 then, Smirke was 93)
It fails, he gets Panopticon powers, starts making preparations to both move the Institute and move his counsciousness into another body.
Disappears in 1872, at 87. Body is never found.
Julian Morgan (1872-1898)
Julian is a name that means Youthful. Little easter egg lmao
Ngl he kinda looks like Ben Meredith because I thought it was funny.
Facial hair!! Jonah went a bit buckwild. He will calm down after this don’t worry
Has a face that flushes easily, straight nose and dark, striking eyebrows, full lips. Big ears. He has light, straight hair. Jonah likes having light hair, it reminds him of his original but without being, you know, a ginger (he was bored of the jokes). Neater hairdo than Jonah ever had. Soft voice.
Finished moving the Institute to London, overseeing the construction of it. He didn’t like leaving his body too far out of reach. (<-author has no idea how long it takes to make a building btw)
Was 34 when Jonah took over, 60 when he died. Jonah got scared of death and strokes and allthat and perhaps switched sooner than was necessary.
Michael Lewis (1898-1903)
Another Michael!!!
Round/full cheeks, very nice skin (circus approved for sure), thick eyebrows, curling mustache. Dark and curly-ish hair, is starting to bald. He does look a bit older than he is, he was 29 when Jonah took over and 34 when he “died”. Is perhaps a bit on the shorter side.
I don’t know what happened to him, but something sure forced Jonah to switch out vessels sooner than he was expecting.
Anyways, we’re done for this part! I still need to color the others lol. And give Richard a weave. Planning on doing some full body outfits too. Bye for now! Also @jonahfagnus you wanted to see so here goes
Anyway literally no line makes me go more insane than “The Chosen one is simply that… Someone I chose.” the INTIMACY, the ROMANCE, the PURPOSEFULNESS OF IT ALL. No, Jon; I don’t believe in any other fate than the one I make; and I decided you’d be part of mine.
ALT
