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!
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.
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.
