Saw a take that made me remeber why I’m a jonah magnus warrior, how are we forgetting he’s still a human person (regardless how much he tries not to be) who can get confused and experience fear and shock and be scared of dying….
the only way jonah magnus could have been with his lovers without betraying them is for all his ambitions to be crushed beyond repair. horrible! guy you’re hopelessly in love with will only truly love you back if he has been Broken As A Person
and if you’re in love with him and you realise that would you even actually want him to love you back? because then it wouldn’t be the same man you fell in love with. and if you love him would you wish that devastation upon him?
to love jonah magnus and to actually understand him is perhaps to actually want him to never love you back with the same intensity as you love him. yay ❤️
one of my favourite things about 19th century pairings with Jonah is that most of them end with a betrayal, and none of them really survive. you can spin whatever story you want, but you will have to base it on the tragic ending of that story. love never wins; Jonah does. Jonah does! it’s so appealing to me that, at their very core, they are supposed to fail. because that is what it means to love Jonah Magnus – to be failed by him.
I can’t stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They’ve both known it from the very start!
Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks “If i can help her, maybe there’s hope for me too.” Then he can’t save her. The next time they meet, she’s a monster. They’re both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.
And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: “Maybe if we can help each other, there’s hope for us both.” But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.
Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she’d become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn’t be Helen.
So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.
And this is a direct threat to Helen’s world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he’s been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she’d tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want’s to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they’d both had choices.
And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.
This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she’s so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.
When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. “If i can help her, maybe there’s hope for me too.” he thought. But he couldn’t help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.
(guy who really wants to go to build a bear but can’t afford it voice) i just think my silly guys should go on a date to build a bear
jonelias: they could get matching bears and like, record each others voices into the sound things. if Jon knows that elias is jonah, he could record him saying “my dear jonah” for the bear to play which is a thought im going a little insane about. and ngl I think elias would have fun dressing up the bears. calming scent in Jon’s plush perhaps because you know Jon is stressed as hell. i don’t think they’d sleep with the plushes or anything though. (also if you take the hc of age regressor Jon there’s that dimension too). yeah they probably wouldn’t go to build a bear in the first place. thinking about it anyway.
eye4i: did you know they didn’t have proper plush toys in the 1800s. jonah deserves a proper introduction to the idea of plush toys, and the Experience of build a bear would certainly make a memorable introduction. plus, the Childish Whimsy of it all. he would feel silly about the heart ceremony but secretly enjoy it. and he’d like customising it to his desires, though he wouldn’t want a sound in it I think. scent definitely though. and he’d also think dressing up the plush is silly but he’d still do it and have fun with it and maybe want to get a few outfits. he’d find the whole thing overwhelming as a whole but he’d have a nice time and it’d help him acclimate to the modern day. also I think elias would think that jonah is very cute trying to take in the whole experience of it and learn from it.
treyead: so take everything i just said about eye4i but Jon is there too. Jon and Jonah debating at length the best outfits for the plushes, the best scents, the merits and downsides of getting a sound put inside the bear. jonahs lack of cultural familiarity with build a bear will not stop him doing his best to argue his point. elias is standing there, watching the near-argument breaking out between his Archivist and his mini-me, and he’s fond and amused and if he had popcorn he’d be eating it.
I am soso curious about this actually. Also I want to think about my favoritest blorbo and make other people think about them also. So here’s a poll with some Jonships. Can be platonic or romantic. Choose whichever speaks to you most. (Note: this is favorite jonship ASIDE from j/mart. If that’s your fave, pick your second fave here or pick none/no preference please, not other).
No pressure but if you rb w/ tags explaining your choice I will love you forever. Also would appreciate reblogs for a larger sample size.
I don’t want to work I want to think about Jon and Elias making out in their offices and always forgetting – alright sometimes forgetting on purpose – that they both have an open door policy (Elias because he wants to be an Approachable Boss, Jon because forever ago he Made a Face when someone knocked at his door first so his assistants just stopped and now even if he snaps they know he’s all talk no bite) which means that, every now and then, someone WILL stumble on them with their clothes and hair in disarray which WILL lead to bickering about whose damn fault it is this time which will only lead to more kissing to shut the other up, all the while the mortified/aggravated/annoyed/shamefully curious employee of the day will just. stand there or run away.
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