“jon turned into the monster that destroyed his childhood” close. jon turned into the book that destroyed his childhood. he functionally became a leitner. jon’s not just any devouring monster, he’s an archive of stories, he’s the frame device of the podcast (Because you do not administer and preserve the records of fear, Jon. You are a record of fear—MAG 160), he eats his victims the way those books did. every leitner has a story to tell, and often its victims end up trapped inside it, becoming a part of the tale—this is exactly what jon does as the archivist, when he reads/takes/compels (eats) a statement he is re-experiencing and storing within him the subject’s fear, each new victim is then incorporated into his mental collection of nightmares (You are a chronicle of terror). elias’s murder of leitner then has another layer of narrative meaning to it. it’s a marking of territory, of course, because jurgen is about to reveal important information to jon which will presumably ruin elias’s plans for him.
mag 80 - “librarian” / mag 160 - “the eye opens”
but it’s also about the transition from a world with artefacts as a source of isolated horror consuming and transforming individuals, which leitner and his books are symbolic of, to one where one being - the archive (jonah magnus’s archive), which has been marked by every fear and therefore holds within it the essence of every fear—devours and reshapes the entire world.
