2025-07-22 16:05:33 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

magnuspanoptes:

> there’s a specific thing the podcast is doing with the joneliasgertrude dynamic where elias and gertrude exist as models of behaviour for jon. the two of them are obviously mirrors, they’re both introduced as these careless at best and incompetent at worst managers and then post-S1 gertrude and elias get parallel developments, that they’re not quite as oblivious as established within the mystery genre structure of the podcast and knew more then they previously let on which culminates in S3 jon learning both his boss and his predecessor were deranged professional liars with a body count. and. this is also the trajectory of audience perception of jon: he’s introduced as an oblivious protagonist who is later revealed to have been involved in an early traumatic encounter with a fear entity and then in S4 he’s outed as a professional liar with a body count. he’s been feeding and has lied about it to both his colleagues and the audience. i ♥️ when there’s doubling. jon’s quite literally inheriting their combined mess—"as far as i can tell, the only battles i’ve been fighting have been yours and gertrude’s.“ (MAG 102)

> so at that point he’s presented with a choice, if he wants to survive his transformation he’ll have to start seeing other people as consumable objects, strictly true in a survival sense because he needs to feed—it’s what elias wants from him. and true in a utilitarian sense if he wants to finish gertrude’s work because the world of magnus archives offers no solution to that dilemma of consumption. that fear cannot be wholly conquered, only briefly evaded through the ritual sacrifice of another life. gertrude and elias have both partly figured this out, as exhibited in their shared indifference for the lives of other people. and what they’re both doing is playing god, the only meaningful relationships they have with the people around them is the kind an entity has with its avatars or avatars with their victims. elias says, "people exist to be watched, used, and discarded. this much at least gertrude understood"—people exist to be consumed. the same ideology applied to opposite aims of saving and destroying the world and is the driving dilemma of jon’s own arc. an instruction he finally heeds in MAG 200 when he gets his own turn to play god. jon who is both saving countless other worlds and destroying his own, because like gertrude it’s the ethical calculus that makes sense to him, because like elias he wants to live beyond fear just once, because in truth jon is the product of gertrude and elias’s murderous divorce—both in character and circumstance. he officially becomes the archivist or is ‘created’ so to speak the day elias ends his partnership with gertrude.