2020-08-05 9:18:37 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

ang3lba3:

> edoro:

> > Hey, here’s a nice low-stakes TMA take for my first real post: I think the basis for thinking Elias has only killed two people, Gertrude and Leitner, is mostly Peter being surprised he got his own hands dirty; Peter is not actually a reliable source for information about Elias, given that Elias has been hustling him for years in order to set up the climax of his big apocalypse plan, and I think that accepting that at face value is buying into Elias’s own hype.

> > (aka that is exactly what he wants you to do)

> > I definitely think that he’s the kind of person who prefers to carry things out from afar and not be directly involved. He’s a manipulator and terribly conscious of his own image. He prefers to get people to do it to themselves if at all possible, and if he can’t accomplish that, he’ll get someone else to do it to them. Getting hands-on is a last resort for him.

> > But in the two occasions we did see him do it on voice in podcast, he didn’t hesitate at all. It was very smooth and practiced, even casual. No real lead-up, no psyching himself up, not even really any audible change in attitude.

> > I think he’s the type of person to rules lawyer it so that he can claim - however implausibly or transparently - that he didn’t really murder people, but you can only stretch “deliberately doing an action you know will lead to someone’s death isn’t actually murder, per se” so far. Sometimes an evil immortal avatar of fear has to just get his hands dirty.

> > And even if we say that he’s managed to go 200 years without ever meeting someone he had to directly off himself - that he’s always been able to get it taken care of at arm’s length, and that doesn’t really count as him killing them - the two people statistic should be at least four, because it needs to account for James Wright and Richard Mendelson, who are both indisputably dead as a direct result of his personal actions.

> > (Elias Bouchard is a strong maybe. We don’t know whether or not he’s still around in there, after all.)

> > In conclusion, this man prefers plausible deniability but is absolutely a casual and unrepentant murderer.

> is it popular opinion that he’s only killed 2 people? honestly, my impression after reading seasons 1-4 was “small bureaucrat thinks of nothing but murder all day”

I mean, you’re objectively correct, this man is an entire neutron star’s worth of incandescent swirling rage compressed into the body of a 48 year old 5′4′’ twink, but I have seen a surprising number of people just casually say it, usually in terms of like, comparing various murder and horror actions of various avatars.

(Also usually somewhat jokingly, like, “Well Elias has only murdered TWO people so he isn’t even THAT bad, Daisy/Gertrude/The Admiral has a way higher kill count!” when we all know he is a morally repulsive little man. But I’m a pedant so I had to say something about it.)