on a slightly less shitposty but related note, there are two things that i think are very disturbingly telling about jonahlias as a person in the pipe murder scene:
1) the fact that there is absolutely no verbal indication he’s going to do it. sure, he says some ominous things about how jon isn’t going to need your help, leitner, but he doesn’t sound angry. he doesn’t sound like a man planning a brutal murder. they have a perfectly pleasant conversation and then, mid-sentence, jonah hauls off and begins beating leitner to death with a pipe.
2) the fact that he kept hitting what was clearly a corpse. he didn’t just murder this man. he beat him to death and then spent a good 10 seconds hitting the dead body over and over again.
conclusion: jonah is absolutely full to the brim of such tightly repressed rage that it can, will, and does burst out without a second’s notice, and once the rabies switch has been flipped he’s going to take as much of it out on whatever’s in front of him as he possibly can. you will not know it’s going to happen until it does, and you’re probably not going to be in any state to remember what happened afterwards.
he is a genuinely terrifying and unstable person hiding behind a thin veneer of smug confidence, who can be driven to impulsive acts of great violence, and he’s the only one who knows what his own buttons are.
Ever since I read that one scene in that one fic about him breaking a wine glass and threatening Peter with the stem this has been my SHIT if you have headcanons I am Listening Intently
Heyy those are some Good Tags
hi i’m alive and awake and i DO have headcanons! i’m gonna reblog this version because tumblr user @everythingisalot has some very good tags here that i agree with, which form part of the basis OF my headcanons.
(also is this the fic you mean? bc it is a VERY GOOD FIC YES excellent characterization)
but basically… yeah, one of the things i find fascinating about jonah as a character is how determined he is not to be a victim. there are a lot of reasons someone could end up with this as a motivation, and being who i am, i like to imagine it’s because he has been before and would not ever like to experience it again.
it’s interesting because part of his whole schtick is seeming like less than he actually is? the way he gets by in the world is by presenting himself as this harmless, boringly normal head of a laughingstock institute dedicated to quackery and bunk. we don’t really get to see james wright or richard mendelson, but the elias bouchard persona spends 2 seasons acting vaguely befuddled and out of touch and ineffectual while pulling the strings behind everything. (considering that gertrude didn’t even really pay much attention to him until he switched into elias, i would imagine that this has been an ongoing thing.) even peter says that jonah hustled him by losing over and over again to convince peter to bet ever higher stakes.
so on the one hand you have a man who works hard to make sure people underestimate him and think he’s less than he is. on the other hand, you have a man who, the moment he is actually threatened, acts quickly to comprehensively destroy the threat, consequences be damned.
(putting the rest under a cut cuz it got long)
and i think it is cases where he feels threatened! it’s where he feels like someone could disrupt his plans or actually hurt him. daisy was a hunter, and could have actually hurt or killed him, so she needed to be brought to heel right away and shown that he was a much bigger monster. leitner threatened to undo all his careful work with jon. melanie probably couldn’t have actually killed him, but she was becoming an inconvenience.
it’s really like annabelle says: make them either under or overestimate you. if people think he’s a harmless, stuffy, dull bureaucrat, then he’s safe. if they think he’s an all-seeing monster pulling the strings of their lives, able to reach into the depths of their psyches and tear out their most vulnerable secrets, then he’s safe.
if they know that he’s just, more or less, a man, who is planning horrible things for them and can be disrupted and thwarted, hurt and even killed, who has weaknesses… then he isn’t safe. so he has to make sure that doesn’t happen.
he’s always scared. he lives like an animal in a trap, constantly gnawing at his own leg and clawing out at anyone who gets too close. he’s afraid of death, he’s afraid of his plans being disrupted, he’s afraid of the being found out. and he’s the kind of person who takes fear and turns it into anger.
(as an aside, i 100% agree and believe that the eye is jonah’s worst fear. how people come to entities and become avatars is interesting, it’s this mix of what draws you in vs what terrifies you the most. with jonah i feel like he lived the sort of life where he was always putting on an act, always watching to see how it was being received, always trying to see who was watching him and what they knew. he was afraid of being found out. he was afraid of people knowing. he was afraid of being seen. and in him the eye found both a perfect acolyte and a rich well of terror, because this is another case where in order to prevent himself from being a victim, he would do it to other people first.)
and this comes into his relationships. he has to be in control, one way or another. pulling strings, manipulating people, predicting their responses, watching what they do. the thing he hates more than anything is not being in control and not being able to see or know or predict what’s going to happen.
as for his relationship with peter, well, that’s its own whole other post really. but i think he’s a person who wants to be noticed, paid attention to, and reacted to, while peter is an extremely non-reactive and neglectful person. i think the scariest thing to jonah is feeling like he doesn’t really matter, and i feel like if/when peter starts making him feel that way, he’ll lash out just to start shit just to feel in control of the emotional tone of the relationship again.
