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.
I still can’t decide if I prefer the rumours about jonelias being true or if it’s funnier if they aren’t and every time they come to the other’s office they really just talk the whole time
season four jon saying he never researched jonah magnus but intuiting that something big is coming and then proceeding to not research jonah magnus at all. don’t make me laugh he was a huge nerd even before he became a literal knowledge absorbing vampire you’re telling me he wouldn’t have researched the man who founded the institute he sold his soul to. fake. season four should’ve had a whole episode about jon looking for information on jonah and all the past institute heads too but the beholding is comically foiling all his attempts, like that time in mag 154 when he kept dropping the tape in which eric reveals how he escaped the institute.
also choosing to believe the intent behind this moment was this. and not that it was wasted on the plot irrelevant guy who died two seasons back and doesn’t matter to jon’s arc at all
everyone and their dog expressed something similar to this sentiment. but. isn’t it so beautifully fucked up that Jon’s and Elias’s voices are so similar that when Jon reads his surprise letter they almost seem to melt together. of course, Jon always gets very in-character when he reads them, but this is a special case. whenever I remember that episode, I always remember it being read in Elias’s voice, and then I have to remind myself that it was Jon. and that, on a meta level, is very amusing to me
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.
