and he said quite earnestly: “Now, if you chaps will only listen to me for a few minutes, I will guarantee to convince every one of you that although the original Jonah may be dead as a herring, his spirit still lives, and every now and then gets into some unlucky landsman who insists on going to sea and brings misfortune to every ship he sets his foot on.”
i have no idea who gwendolyn bouchard is but i support all those posts about her being a jonelias child of divorce or whatever because in honour of hannigram and loustat i think jon and elias should have a teenage daughter (adopted, she came to the institute to give a statement and it turned into a whole thing. and yes, she gets nightmares about the archivist) - with whom one of them has an incomprehensible subtextually incestuous, abusive relationship (hannibal with abigail and lestat with claudia in amc iwtv, so yea okay it’s elias who’s going to be Weird with the daughter for taking up jon’s time) and who tragically ends up dead sometime around her 19th birthday directly due to their actions and this causes a temporary rift between the two of them but not enough for permanent seperation because they’re both fundamentally selfish people and for elias at least the daughter was always going to be second to jon because she wasn’t going to give him his apocalypse, was she. also before (or directly after) she dies it’s slowly revealed that she had unconscious ties to the web and this breaks jon’s heart because he really thought there was this one thing of joy in his life that was not marked by the fears.
92 is so surreal like elias just said okay now that i have confessed to two murders would you all kindly leave me alone with my vulnerable, traumatised employee whose predecessor i killed and also close the door on your way out thank you :) and they just. did that. not a single person objects to this, not the two (former) cops, not even martin (“come on.” walks out and shuts the door ????). and like two minutes later jon starts CHUCKLING at one of elias’s comments and it wasn’t even funny. it literally wasn’t funny.
brutal pipe murder and jon’s murder of elias are the only times someone is violently killed on tape in a very personal way and both scenes are a mirroring. elias continues hitting leitner well past the point of necessity, jon also drags it out instead of aiming for a clean cut, there’s pleading involved (“Elias, it doesn’t have to be like—” // “P-Please Jon!”), and they’re both sudden deaths. neither elias nor jon broadcast their intentions to the audience, they just do it. also emphasised by the way jon is initially held responsible for leitner’s murder, but at that point in time elias correctly notes that he doesn’t have it him to do something like this. yet.
everything about this is giving that jon learned it from elias, jon observes elias doesn’t threaten and then he kills elias in the exact same manner. even their murder motives match, elias has to kill leitner so he can take his place in the narrative as the world of the magnus archives transitions from artefact based horror to the apocalypse. he has to kill leitner so he can end the world. jon has to kill elias and assume his place as the pupil of the eye, so he can end the world. and elias wishes him good luck for it. it was your own rotten luck that i chose you and ruined your life in my attempt to escape the fears, but good luck with your own attempt to be rid of them. in those final seconds when he’s bleeding out, he really does hope jon might be able to surpass his attempt of conquering the fears and in doing so, finish his original work. NORMAL RELATIONSHIP!
the way jon’s dreamscape in 120 is the apocalypse in microcosm. the episode is named ‘eye contact’ because at that point in time it’s the closest anyone’s gotten to manifesting the eye within their reality. also ties in very nicely with the apocalypse working on dream logic, the archivist functioning as a tourist, as a voyeur through these memories/domains, the lidless eye blotting out the sky and drinking all that fear in. it IS a dream! jonah’s original dream—dreamed up and then made material by jon. jonah calls it the “nightmare kingdom” in his 160 statement and then again in 200, “i was having the most wonderful dream”. i’ve always wondered what was the point to it, why did he have to record that 120 statement, and it’s so obvious now. jon’s dreams must’ve felt like a glimpse into the paradise he had planned for himself (or rather them—"the time of our victory is here") and it’s a future that can be glimpsed through jon alone because jon is the conduit. that statement is both meant for his personal amusement and as a veiled message of sorts. this is what i have in store for us. this is what you will give me. i hope you can continue your growth without my guidance, jon.
fun s4 detail is that it’s a mutual veiling on jon and elias’s parts. jon is forbidden from seeing elias and elias cannot be a witness to any of jon’s marks either because 1) the slaughter mark takes place deep within the tunnels, at the very least he had some trouble looking 2) flesh within the domain of the spiral 3) buried is inside the coffin 4) “Ny-Ålesund is a stronghold of the Dark, meaning I can’t see inside.” 5) no reason to believe his sight extends to the lonely either. all in clear contrast to jon’s s1-s3 marks which happen out in the open and within his sight. like. it was their divorce era.
he gets infantalised a lot, like, he was out there causing real harm right in s1 because he was an ass to traumatised statement givers, which people don’t give a lot of thought to because statement givers don’t register as ‘real people’ to most listeners so his scepticism is always played for laughs. and i don’t think jon has low empathy. i try to avoid pathologising characters because that enters headcanon territory very quickly and i’m not great with those, so i just prefer textual analysis. i’ve talked about this before, he perfectly knew what he was doing, he knew they were all true stories, and the reason he was reluctant to acknowledge their truth is because it would’ve required vulnerability on his part, i.e. feeding beholding his own fear. he says it outright in MAG 39 - “Because I’m scared, Martin! Because when I record these statements it feels… it feels like I’m being watched […] The scepticism, feigning ignorance. It just felt safer."—and this is basically the bureaucratic version of what he will do later as an avatar, feed on someone else so your god doesn’t feed on you. that bit of s1 characterisation is important to me because then you can’t handwave his s4 feeding choices as simply psychological urges he has no control over, he has always been like this (which is a very human response, i don’t find this contemptible. it’s good writing). the other thing about jon is that people engage with him as a guy who 'lost all his friends’ because of the monstrosity downward spiral, but that’s not true either. he’s clearly meant to be a guy who was out there gleefully burning bridges in seasons one and two and that attitude of his is the primary reason nobody wants to associate with him when he starts displaying his weird guy powers. the weird guy powers are bad enough but on top of that he did not endear himself to anyone (see, tim and melanie) with his previous behaviour so when he actually decides to do bit of a heel turn in s3 by seeking human connections, that comes back to bite him. which is, again, good writing and why i think jon is a very compelling case of the 'asshole smart guy’ archetype, because there are. consequences.
tma has that thing where wider audience perception does not align with the podcast’s authorial intent (and by wider audience perception i mean. what people were posting when the podcast was airing. i’ve read a fair few posts from 2020 so i know), like, it’s clear to me that the supporting cast isn’t made up of “"good”“ people, and the podcast is self aware about this (of course it is! why do you think they were written like that to begin with?), basira and martin and georgie weren’t accidentally conceived as varying degrees of hypocrites with a case of "i do not see it”. and to be clear. i’m not sneering at any of them, i post about jon eating people so i’m not in a position to sneer at a character for not wanting to associate with the people eater. so none of them are being framed as righteous or good when they make that 199 decision. just as basira isn’t right in s4 when she makes excuses for daisy while treating jon with hideous contempt. they’re being portrayed as flawed, scared people choosing to protect themselves at the expense of someone else, an all too human thing to do. i’m pointing this out because i keep seeing posts about how the podcast isn’t self aware about any of this and that’s just not true lmao this feels like a case of having spent too much time reading found family posts from 2020 (more likely than you think! it happened to ME. back in august when i used to have a way worse and uncharitable opinion of s4 and s5 mainly because other people’s opinions kept pissing me off) i would suggest re-listening, because you need to engage with the text on its own terms instead of getting mad about posts about the text.
it’s fascinating how, in the end, the group of survivors (excluding Jon, sort of) made the same choice as Jonah did. faced with the question of “do I have the right to doom the universe/many other universes to endless suffering to ensure my safety and comfort?” they both said yes, I do. Jonah definitely did more self-reflection than they did, but the end result is the same. it’s so great. no matter how much any of them hated Elias, they ended up siding with his view.
there’s a lot of discussion about how Jonah is not inherently evil, how his actions are actually deeply understandable and relatable once you stop to think about it, but there’s live examples of that within the show itself! except they are deprived of that freedom he was talking about so passionately—they don’t know what they did. they don’t want to. they are good people—aren’t they?—and they made the only choice there is—didn’t they? (these repressed feelings will haunt them forever)
I do agree with this (and some other people in the tags saying it felt annoying to them). I feel like this is the issue with s5 in general; sometimes it does something interesting, but it feels accidental because it’s like the podcast itself doesn’t acknowledge it properly. I was trying to explain my issue with s5 jmart to someone who doesn’t listen to TMA and at some point I said “I know that it sounds like the text addresses what’s going on between them, but when you listen to it, it doesn’t actually feel like it does”.
there were some instances of that before s5 (the main one to me is the Jonah issue, by which I mean that they made an incredibly compelling character and then seemingly refused to use him to his full potential? though it’s also worse in s5), but it’s especially bad there. it’s probably partially because you’d expect that everything that was glossed over before to have a satisfying ending here, which largely didn’t happen.
I can’t really pinpoint what it is exactly that makes me feel that way, but I get what you’re talking about.
i think teen jonah meeting current jonah would be a psychologically scarring experience for him. current jonah would be mostly unbothered (if not for the creeping reminder of how defenceless he’d been. one more reason to end the world), but his teen self? damn. soul-crushing
every time I think about the fact jonah called himself the heart of the institute enough times and consistently enough for other avatars to know about it I get sososo giddy. ridiculous endearing man
i like helen but very aggravating that she’s the one who is narratively positioned as the devil on jon’s shoulder (all the s4 conversations on feeding and later every s5 encounter) and not. elias. obvious choice of guy gothic villain dracula figure who should be the one to tempt him into transgressions. but they have like two conversations in private after 92 and in both of them jon’s too distracted with the clown kidnapping and melanie and martin so it’s not even about them. not good
the thing about the podcast is that it cooked with jon and elias’s characters (individually and then together) in a way that it never did again with a single major supporting character. however they were terminally uninterested. in any of that.
it’s fascinating how, in the end, the group of survivors (excluding Jon, sort of) made the same choice as Jonah did. faced with the question of “do I have the right to doom the universe/many other universes to endless suffering to ensure my safety and comfort?” they both said yes, I do. Jonah definitely did more self-reflection than they did, but the end result is the same. it’s so great. no matter how much any of them hated Elias, they ended up siding with his view.
there’s a lot of discussion about how Jonah is not inherently evil, how his actions are actually deeply understandable and relatable once you stop to think about it, but there’s live examples of that within the show itself! except they are deprived of that freedom he was talking about so passionately—they don’t know what they did. they don’t want to. they are good people—aren’t they?—and they made the only choice there is—didn’t they? (these repressed feelings will haunt them forever)
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