Jonelias thought of the day is that Elias must come across as so stuffy and boring to those at the Institute - which, you know, very much helps hide his true nature - but as an avatar of the Eye and a man determined to avoid the End, Elias is someone whose entire being revolves around the interplay of knowledge and experiences. He’s compelled to Know it all and his efforts to avoid death invite him to Experience it all too, a fascinating combination of passive observer and, by virtue of being a 200+ year-old in search of true immortality, an active participant too. This is a man whose longevity and thirst for knowledge invites an obsession with life that contradicts the ‘Sits in his office doing nothing but spreadsheets all day’ image he’s learned to cultivate. (Though, to be clear, he does love the spreadsheets.) And I don’t just mean “obsession with life” in the sense of him avoiding the finality of death, but actually loving the act of being alive.
i am once again losing my fucking mind over the concept of one-sided jonhelen. helen says to jon “she liked you.” and what that really means is “she made me like you”. the distortion inherits feelings, we know it inherited michael’s anger. imagine being both the water and the blood bleeding into it, you feel yourself dissolving into someone else but you are the someone else you’re dissolving into. and then you are one, and you have feelings that were never meant to be yours.
just as michael’s hatred of gertrude made him terrorize jon when he was the distortion, i like to think that helen’s love for jon made her follow him around the way she did. she wanted to be around him, and she couldn’t understand why.
there’s also the lack of dignity of it all. going from trying to kill someone to being hopelessly in love with them within a moment. being essentially forced into that unrequited love, and knowing that any second, if they just looked in the right direction, they’d know. a being of pure delusion falling in love with a being of infinite knowledge and exposed secrets. the only person capable of uncovering the truth about her is also the person she’s in love with. she continues to willingly put herself into that situation where her very being could be torn into at any second.
i am inventing fucked up scenarios you haven’t even considered okay
[image ID: a bust shot of Jonathan sims hands towards his face. He is surrounded in pink flowers and backlit by a mysterious green circle. The whole image is warm with pops of green. End ID]
THE STARING MAN — The man takes a long drag of his cigarette, and it is only now that you realize he has not blinked this entire time. “You have a story for me,” he finally says. It is not a question. It is a statement of fact.
I know we all laugh at Jon for taking one look at the Arachnophobia statement (MAG016) and going “DRUGS. POPPYCOCK. HUMBUG.” but like-
This is early s1 Jon who has stated out loud that he believed his colleagues might try to haze him, who is afraid people might knowingly try to get to him.
Jon’s prissy, high and mighty attitude after the statement ends might just be him performing confidence to the people he knows has free access to the tape - his fellow archive workers. Especially after his earlier slip ups (wondering about hazings and oh, wanting to personally screen every new statement before the research department can even start working on them).
If you think about the statement as a fake planted by a coworker who wants to humiliate him, it’s chilling. It has so, so many details that run parallel to Jon’s own life, that we can safely presume nobody at the archives should know about given how private Jon seems to be.
Even disregarding the obvious - that would be the supernatural childhood spider trauma - there’s the lonely, workaholic existence, the smoking, the childhood wandering, the feeling of having your body controlled by an outside force, a goddamn cat named after a military rank.
Who knows what other details fit perfectly with Jon’s life that we as the audience don’t know about.
And the statement giver is looking into getting psychiatric help. He’s trying to establish if he’s in need of anti-psychotic medication. To the audience this might seem as a pretty grounded and potentially positive way to try to move past the trauma of the spider haunting.
But to Jon? Who is holding a piece of paper in his hand with something that could represent proof that someone is looking into his life? It might as well be calling him insane.
Jon was deeply marked by the Spiral by the end of it all, wasn’t he.
Also, like, reminder that Jon, deep down, knew the statement was real because he wasn’t able to make a digital recording of it.
His two alternatives in this situation was to be in denial about it and direct his unease and ire at his immediate surroundings… or accepting and internalising that the cause of his childhood trauma is still out there, killing people just like him.
You know what - I read your tags and I could literally hear in my brain the tone of Grandma Sims going “don’t be ridiculous, Jonathan”
The way she might sigh, or roll her eyes, or-
And like
I think that is especially impactful because I absolutely think Jon cared about her opinion, in lack of any other. He didn’t rebel like a lot of us do when we’re young - he never tried to distance himself from the things his grandmother stood for. He did the OPPOSITE. He tried to emulate her. He tried to live up to her expectations.
He berated himself when he made mistakes, because that’s what she would have done. He faked being a full decade older to make himself seem more authorative and experienced, because in his grandmother’s home, that’s how you got to have a say in important matters.
She worked hard, she pretended to be fine to onlookers, she did things even if they were painful, she didn’t ask for help and Jon looked at her and thought “that’s what an adult is”.
hnghgk. come to think of it, this reading of Jon’s grandmother would mean that a lot of his best traits – his moral sense, his sometimes overboarding empathy, how he handles deep loss and insurmountable odds by carrying on and just trying to do the best that he can with what he is given – are echoes of her, things he learned and admired about her
think I may have figured out when jon’s birthday is meant to be in the most mundane way possible. in one of the q+a episodes (too lazy to figure out which atm) (edit: s3 extended q+a!), jonny said that the archivist’s just meant to be “[his] age,” and given that the birthday party scene seems to take place fairly soon after the new archives staff got together in autumn/winter 2015, I think jonny might just have given him his own birthday, november 3.
3 november 2016 is the date of mag 55 and that actually gives a whole new flavor to this supplemental
ALT
it’s the birthday boy’s first vaguely good day in at least four months, probably longer. god.
also: one year ago to this day, all his assistants crowded into his office and threw him a party and they had a nice time together. that’s not what this birthday is like at all. I’m rotting.
the skirt in question. Tried to recreate it to the best of my ability but I’m not the most patient person when it comes to patterns😔 also him being scarless is an informed choice this is Jon if he was more Archivisty. in my head. he has less scars partially because he didn’t get as many but also because the eye healed them and turned him into what he sees as himself. This is what I hc happens in s5 too. btw. Ramblings ramblings. Anyways.
taking poison damage from thinking too hard about how tma capitalizes on the horror of not having all the information by slowly taking away said information from the listener
elaborating: seasons 1-3 are firmly rooted in the viewpoint of Jon. The audience knows just as much as he does about the goings on around him, and sometimes even more (such as with Sasha being killed by the not!them). There are very few points in which Jon has more information than the audience, and most of said information is discovered and deciphered within the confines of the podcast episodes.
Season 4 is where this starts to change. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that Jon is rapidly developing supernatural knowledge, but at the same time this is basically giving him a get out of jail free card. As the audience, you assume Jon is still giving you the information when he finds it, because that’s what he’s been doing up until this point. You assume he’s still doing all this for the noble cause of saving the world. Hell, it’s not even until over halfway through season 4 that you learn he’s been stalking people and taking their statements (the guy who does have a history of stalking, of paranoia, of taking things to far - but you don’t want to think about that, because he’s the protagonist, the voice you’re supposed to trust), and only then does the audience fully come to realize how much he’s been lying to you and how little you can take his words at face value.
And then there’s season 5. If seasons 1-4 were spent looking over Jon’s shoulder, season 5 is spent looking over Martin’s - the man who does not have eldritch knowledge, who doesn’t wish to know every little detail about the horrible world he’s found himself in, whose only source of information is from his partner who is trying to protect him from what he did. And at that point…you really cannot say anything about what’s going on in Jon’s head for definitive fact aside from what he explicitly says out loud. You’re stuck with a bundle of uncertainties. You don’t know how they’re going to put the world back. You don’t know Jon is planning to kill Helen before he’s at her front door. You don’t know Jon is going against the group’s plans until he’s already at the top of the Panopticon. You’re not the watcher anymore - you’re the one being watched.
The first rule of tragedy is to be yourself. The second of rule of tragedy is to be literally anyone else. The third rule is that however much you try, there is no escaping being yourself forever.
