god i love this. I LOVE THIS. obviously we know gertrude kept the archive in disarray on purpose, but i’m also sure that a good chunk of that was just that like. the archivist has no drive to catalog. the archivist needs to know, not to record or to sort or to label. jonah of course keeps his mementos, his trinkets, his tokens, and talismans. jonah hoards the letters sent to him by long dead paramours. jonah collects objects of power. jonah logs and records and researches. but the archivist just. feeds.
this also sort of aligns w my working theory that in terms of avatars/monsters the dividing line is sort of like that old bit about how it’s fucked up that goofy is like a clearly sentient person-adjacent creature but pluto is just a normal dog
like jonah magnus is obviously purposefully eye-aligned, he draws his powers from it and he orchestrates the watcher’s crown. but he’s is also so much more driven and in control than like, the creature that lived in the ming vase, for example. or the thing crawling around under alexandria. or the big slimy tentacle thing that haunted benjamin hatendi. like peter lukas and maxwell rayner and simon fairchild they’re all such active agents in service to their patrons.
but jon is just. hungry. and some of that is for sure his own lack of agency between elias and the web. but it’s also i think that the archivist is more of a monster than an avatar.
the joy in jon’s voice whenever he puts a piece of the puzzle together is so endearing. and ofc I <3 whenever he reverently calls sth ‘monstrous’ beautiful
darlingggg. ik Elias is frothing at the mouth listening to this
Someone smarter than me please make a post about how like. Jon spent most of season 5 five correcting people when they referred to Jonah as Elias, but when he actually spoke to him again himself, he fell back into those same patterns as well and instinctively referred to him as Elias because I feel like there’s some excellent points to be made there but alas I lack the braincells to make them myself
Hello Jon. Apologies for the deception, but I rather wanted to make sure you started reading, so I thought it best not to announce myself…
This may well be my favourite cosplay shoot I’ve ever done, it was so much fun and Scott was just brilliant as Elias. So creepy haha. And Egg is an utter genius, taking the double exposure in camera so that it wouldn’t have to be edited in post. Blew my mind.
ALT
