I saw a post recently about how people treat Jonah/Elias like he’s way more evil than all the other avatars, and I completely agree that he’s not. He is however, hateable in a way many can relate to hating.

(This ended up way longer than I thought it would, so I’m going to put the rest under the cut)

Pretty sure most people aren’t able to relate to “yeah, this guy ripped my ribs out of my chest” or “that woman engulfed my hand in flames” or even “that’s the clown that murdered my brother.”

They can relate to “ugh, yeah that’s my creepy boss” or “yeah, that person has gaslit me and tried to manipulate me on multiple occasions” or even just “that bastard, he’s always so smug, like he knows something I don’t.”

There is also of course the fact that his evil plan actually worked, so he seems more evil cause he actually succeeded in the whole apocalypse thing. And of course most of his evil actions we see had a very direct impact on the characters we all know and love.

But no, he’s not more evil than most of the other avatars, I think people just forget the other, more mundane, things to hate about other avatars.

Jared was a bully. Mike Crew had no care for the people who died in his search for an escape. Jane was a toxic friend. Jude enjoyed watching people’s lives collapse. These were things about them before they became avatars.

Also, I don’t think people are as sympathetic as they could be to Jonah. (I am NOT excusing his actions, just hear me out.)

I would say one of the most sympathetic avatars (not counting Jon) is Michael, he was sacrificed to The Spiral without ever truly knowing what was happening. (Although, he’s not really Michael Shelly after that, so you could argue Michael Shelly was never an avatar, but that’s a post for another time.)

We get Annabelle Cane’s statement but it’s vague on whether or not it was true. Personally I do think it’s true, it was a statement and I don’t think you can lie during statements, so she also has a sympathetic angle.

Mike Crew got chased by something and was forced to become an avatar just to escape it. Oliver Banks just wanted to sleep. Jane was scared and looking for love. Simon Fairchild, if I remember correctly, just loved the sky. Even Peter Lukas arguably didn’t have a choice in becoming an avatar. (I honestly don’t really remember Jared and Jude’s story and don’t care to check right now)

So many other characters get, at least some, reasons to be sympathetic or understand where they’re coming from, but Jonah doesn’t. All the old statements are of people Jonah is hurting or has stood by as they got hurt. We don’t get a statement really telling us how he became who we see today. (Not counting the fact that we do see how he “became” Elias Bouchard, via eye swap.) The most we get is his statement in ep 160, but even that’s a very brief mention to what drove him to such extremes.

So anyway, now I have some headcanons as to Jonah’s life when he was still Jonah Magnus. As corny and tragic as it sounds, I do think Jonah probably watched his family die, and not all at the same time, I think he would have seen his family die in a lot of various ways.

I think he watched his mother die from childbirth, I think he probably had some siblings that died before they were even a day old, I think what siblings he did have were away when their father died, leaving him alone with his father’s corpse, I think he probably caused the death of some of them and the guilt of that faded away to the back of his mind. And I don’t think it stopped at his family, death seemed to follow him, or at least everyone around him, his friends and colleagues, his family, even just the mere acquaintances he made during his research.

I think as the ones around him died they were all in pain, but he wasn’t, he watched with morbid curiosity as people died, saw the agony they were in and feared it. And so, what was he to do but try to best it, to avoid the suffering that everyone around him seemed to accept as inevitable.