there’s something hauntingly beautiful about elias blinding john with ignorance, leaving him to starve and ache for the knowledge he desperately tries to obtain and hand feeding him that desired sacrament, taming his willful archivist so he will crawl back for more
I’m still frothing over the fact that Elias wasn’t allowed to speak in MAG 200 and specifically got cut off when he was talking about everything he’d Seen as the Pupil of the Eye. that was the culmination of his plan, this obsessive pilgrimage towards knowledge that both he and his ritual sacrifice were on, in a cosmic horror world. but knowledge took a backseat to l*ve and like an objective truth monologue that cheapened the Fears and their narrative.
Elias wasn’t on an obsessive pilgrimage towards knowledge, he wanted immortality and used The Eye as a path to get there
people can have multiple interests? immortality was perhaps his primary aim, but he never passed up an opportunity to expand his knowledge. he abandoned Mordecai Lucas to the Lonely despite caring about him (‘collected his bones mournfully enough’) just to see what would happen, because ‘he had to know’. he was always interested in esoteric knowledge; when their little group was each pledging themselves to an Entity, Smirke specifically asks him to stop following the Eye. he stole the library in Schwartzwald despite knowing it could harm yet another friend. he runs an educational institute, not a neuroscience or genetic engineering lab (with which, too, he could have connected the esoteric as with the Anabelle Cane experiment).
and, as you say, he used the Eye specifically. not Terminus, not the Corruption (cockroaches can survive anything logic), not the Extinction (become post-human to avoid human death), &c.. I feel like he wouldn’t have chosen the Eye, nor been so effective an acolyte, had he not had a genuine affinity to the Eye’s domain of knowledge and curiosity. he chose his God and he fed it well.
different version of tma where End-aligned Jonah runs a hospital instead of an institute and marks his head surgeon by making him repeatedly (unknowingly?) kill patients who come in with Fear-encounter injuries. and also eat them physically
