When i say words of affirmation is my love language what i mean is “You are a living chronicle of terror.You are prepared. You are ready. You are marked. The power of the Ceaseless Watcher flows through you, and the time of our victory is here.”
See, what gets me is that Smirke and Jonah’s merry band must have felt like such a hopeful endeavour at first. They were witnessing how scientific knowledge was reshaping society in real time (let’s not forget that they lived during the Industrial Revolution). Smirke’s ideas of balance, in that light, make perfect sense. I just wonder when it was that Jonah realised that there would be no answer to neatly organize his new world into happy little columns—and, consequently, when the initial attempts to stop the rituals became a race to complete his first.
randomly got annoyed again today at fandom portrayals of elias as a luddite. you think the world’s most powerful avatar of beholding would be…. behind the times? ignorant to the progress of technology? even if you choose to ignore the fact that the digital age revolutionized beholding as a dread power (going from something tied much more closely to the hunt to something so much more exestential and all-consuming… the surveilance state! online surveilance! wiretapping! data gathering! predatory privacy policies! the zoom boom! etc!!!) and that the evolution of recording technology is how the institute was able to function as efficiently as it did to tell us its story… why would it ever make sense to you that the world’s most powerful beholding avatar would remain wilfully ignorant of… anything. let alone wilfully ignorant of how the vast majority of the world functions and communicates. plus his greatest fear is death!! you think he isn’t up to date on all the most prominent medical advances? that’s just a willful misreading of the text.
i do agree with OP here but i also think the people going off that luddite interpretation aren’t conjuring it from thin air. and this is, unfortunately, one of the disappointing aspects of the show, in that it leaned heavily (and illogically if you ask me) into the “stupid eye” thesis. it sees but it does not understand. which negates a big part of /why/ the eye is scary in the first place.
the eye is scary because the thing perceiving you has the capacity for judgment, derived from which are shame and punishment, self-imposed or not. i’ve made this point before but this cannot be accomplished if the entity in question has no capacity for discernment. no one cares if their aquarium fish is “looking” at them eating a whole cake when they’re supposed to be on a diet vs what that same person might feel eating in public.
the second consequence is, of course, that a “dumb” entity like the eye would have no understanding or ‘passion’ for technology. and, indeed, the web has been canonically shown not only to be technologically-inclined, but also to beat the eye at its own game, so to speak, not only (!! this drives me nuts) by infiltrating tape recorders, devices that, by rights, should fall into the eye’s portfolio but also by, essentially, taking over the very institute, i.e. the eye’s place of power. but, then again, you have the eye also canonically being characterised as the purveyor of knowledge. (?) at the very least, the eye and the web should have been fighting over technology. there are some examples of camera manipulation by the beholding, but overall you can’t deny that the web is shown to be the more technologically-inclined of the two, which i personally think is such a sham. rendering unto caesar, the eye should have been the patron saint of social media, influencers, celebrities, reality tv, zoom meetings, the surveillance state etc.
and i am sorry to say, but taking away fear domains that should logically fall into the eye’s purview, just to prop up and overpower another entity, takes away from the quality of the storytelling. the web can be very scary and powerful, too, on its own, there’s no need to cheaply and nonsensically declaw the eye to do it
randomly got annoyed again today at fandom portrayals of elias as a luddite. you think the world’s most powerful avatar of beholding would be…. behind the times? ignorant to the progress of technology? even if you choose to ignore the fact that the digital age revolutionized beholding as a dread power (going from something tied much more closely to the hunt to something so much more exestential and all-consuming… the surveilance state! online surveilance! wiretapping! data gathering! predatory privacy policies! the zoom boom! etc!!!) and that the evolution of recording technology is how the institute was able to function as efficiently as it did to tell us its story… why would it ever make sense to you that the world’s most powerful beholding avatar would remain wilfully ignorant of… anything. let alone wilfully ignorant of how the vast majority of the world functions and communicates. plus his greatest fear is death!! you think he isn’t up to date on all the most prominent medical advances? that’s just a willful misreading of the text.
i do agree with OP here but i also think the people going off that luddite interpretation aren’t conjuring it from thin air. and this is, unfortunately, one of the disappointing aspects of the show, in that it leaned heavily (and illogically if you ask me) into the “stupid eye” thesis. it sees but it does not understand. which negates a big part of /why/ the eye is scary in the first place.
the eye is scary because the thing perceiving you has the capacity for judgment, derived from which are shame and punishment, self-imposed or not. i’ve made this point before but this cannot be accomplished if the entity in question has no capacity for discernment. no one cares if their aquarium fish is “looking” at them eating a whole cake when they’re supposed to be on a diet vs what that same person might feel eating in public.
the second consequence is, of course, that a “dumb” entity like the eye would have no understanding or ‘passion’ for technology. and, indeed, the web has been canonically shown not only to be technologically-inclined, but also to beat the eye at its own game, so to speak, not only (!! this drives me nuts) by infiltrating tape recorders, devices that, by rights, should fall into the eye’s portfolio but also by, essentially, taking over the very institute, i.e. the eye’s place of power. but, then again, you have the eye also canonically being characterised as the purveyor of knowledge. (?) at the very least, the eye and the web should have been fighting over technology. there are some examples of camera manipulation by the beholding, but overall you can’t deny that the web is shown to be the more technologically-inclined of the two, which i personally think is such a sham. rendering unto caesar, the eye should have been the patron saint of social media, influencers, celebrities, reality tv, zoom meetings, the surveillance state etc.
and i am sorry to say, but taking away fear domains that should logically fall into the eye’s purview, just to prop up and overpower another entity, takes away from the quality of the storytelling. the web can be very scary and powerful, too, on its own, there’s no need to cheaply and nonsensically declaw the eye to do it
aaaaaa yes all good thoughts! see a lot of my thoughts re: the stranger had more to do with how it seemed too material and reliant on physical stuff. the spiral had a literal endless maze, but also had people's lives falling to delusion. the web had literal spiders, but also had the concept of control and all that. so even if you aren't scared of the more obvious manifestations, you still have the chance to be disturbed by the more abstract ideas.
but the stranger (as delightful as its monsters are, i love nikola and breekon and hope etc etc, they just don't feel as clever) relies so heavily on the idea that the listener MUST be scared of dolls or taxidermy or automatons, meanwhile i love all those things! and ive had plenty of nightmares involving the uncanny valley or identity, and concepts like the mandela catalogue scare the shit out of me. but tma never seemed to get to the core of why that stuff is freaky, just "hey wouldn't be fucked up if this happened?"
and like you said, they didn't seem to put much care into why a person would worship the stranger, which is strange (ha) to me because the options feel so obvious? i've met plenty of people who are so concerned with maintaining appearances (not in the Flesh way, in the social way) that they construct false identities and roles to play for themselves, and that seems fitting. idk! something !!
and they could've played with what identity Means more - in a story where so many characters are struggling with the line between humans and monsters, it would've been interesting to have manifestations of the stranger where you're left wondering if the spooky entity is actually a person or not (whether that be through not trusting the statement giver to be a reliable narrator, or through the question of What Is A Person? itself)
idk im sort of rambling jfc i didnt mean for this ask to be so long sorry but yes woo there r my thoughts i do not have many tma friends so i am deprived of enrichment
but tma never seemed to get to the core of why that stuff is freaky, just “hey wouldn’t be fucked up if this happened?”
YES!! i think a great example of how this falls flat is the desolation, actually! because all of the follower’s of the people’s church of the divine host are made of wax
they are no longer human, their physical being is made of boiling, moldable wax
that seems like it should be a stranger thing, right? they’re literally wax works, the unknowing took place in a waxwork museum and the dancers were all waxworks
but the difference is exactly what you’ve just said. the desolation’s followers actually aren’t scary because they’re made of wax. them being made of wax is so far down the list of why they’re scary i literally forget that it’s true most of the time. whereas:
the waxworks at the museum are just scary… because they’re waxworks. weird ones tho.
(as delightful as its monsters are, i love nikola and breekon and hope etc etc, they just don’t feel as clever)
this is really really it!! the stranger’s monsters just don’t feel as clever
i really like your idea about someone worshiping the stranger because they’re so image obsessed!! i would love to hear more about that. i think that would make a very interesting acolyte.
also i was thinking about this last night and i think part of what makes the stranger feel so vast (ha) and disorganized is that fear of the unknown is a fundamental building block of every single one of the fears
the whole point of all the entities is that they take things that are pretty innocuous (wasp nests, ant infestations, garden spiders, tall buildings, stairwells, hallways, security cameras) and turn them into something vile
the characteristic of “the unkown” or “the unfamiliar” is impossible to localize under one entity
also, understandably it took a while to establish all the mechanics of like what a ritual is, how it can be stopped, why people would want it to happen, etc
but it took the gang two full seasons and several major character deaths to stop the unknowing, while the black sun was solved off screen between episodes
and like yes of course like gertrude would be better at finding and stopping rituals because she has 50 years of experience! and yes it gets easier to find and stop rituals as you keep going. but the balance of the story pacing just feels weird, y'know?
this isn’t the only time that i feel like tma does a massive amount of build up for a whole lot of nothing but it’s up there
it’s always funny to me that clowns and specifically horror clowns are one of my favorite things and i really dislike how tma did clowns… just proof you can’t be good at everything i guess
but i am constantly thinking about how the stranger could have been good and how much that would change my own experience of the show since ths stranger takes up the bulk of two seasons
i would love to hear more of ur thoughts on this bc i love the stranger in concept but a lot of it fell flat for me on paper
hi yes i would literally love to talk more about this thanks!!!
so, i think the core issue with the stranger is that it’s just too vague as a fear. it encompasses too much, so it just becomes watered down
like yes on the one hand whenever some of the fears bleed into one another we can reference back to gerry and leitner explaining that they’re sort of like fingers on a hand rather than like…. h*gwarts houses
but fear of the unknown/uncanny can get reeeeally similar to the spiral, and the spiral handles/expresses being unsure of your own perceptions in a much better way imo
like, okay so the stranger focuses mainly on the uncanny valley, which can be expressed with like the fear of mannequins, dolls, clowns, etc. but i personally find it more interesting/compelling to express this with things like cotard’s delusion or capgras syndrome. mostly because statements about those things are going to have a more compelling interiority than anything based around dolls that come to life
so that’s sort of the core of why i find the stranger uninteresting? it’s just so tied to things i don’t find scary. like i’ll be real with you i don’t like dolls. i would feel skeeved out if i were in a room with a bunch of mannequins and it was dark. but the reason i feel things like this is tied to my own (extra)sensory perceptions, not the fact that the dolls are actually alive. does that make sense? like it would be more engaging for me to read a statement about a guy in a mannequin factory who becomes convinced that the mannequins are coming to life at night and changing their positions and he ends up destroying his life trying to find ways to prevent these mannequins from moving and keeping watch over them to make sure they don’t, rather than a statement about a guy who discovers that the mannequins at the mannequin factory are actually moving
and many of the fears have lots of varying manifestations. the spiral is a great example, actually. we have sergey ushanka, the distorition, the worker in clay, the creature that lives in the ming vase, the man upon the stair… these are all monsters that have very different MOs and very different presentations and all of their associated statements have a different vibe
but they are all focused on the mental anguish of their victims in a way that’s thematically coherent
vs. the stranger has:
doppelgangers/changelings
taxidermy
clowns/the circus more broadly
dolls/mannequins
animatronics/automata
soylent green replicant people
and like yes listed out like this it’s very easy to see the connection, but in practice is just feels… messy? why aren’t the soylent green anatomy students the flesh? they would make so much more sense as the flesh. why aren’t the not-them associated with the spiral? especially since they always pick someone who recognizes them and is then faced with the fact that all of their friends/family/loved ones are unintentionally gaslighting them
there’s just too many monsters… and i think also that the stranger really lacks the sort of worship that a lot of the other fears have their avatars express. like i’ve never got the sense that the stranger has acolytes or devotees. and that definitely seems like a deliberate choice rather than an oversight! but then why was wolfgang von kempelen devoted to his automata to the point of orchestrating the first attempt at the unknowing? he’s the only human/formerly human associate we know of the stranger, so why was he the one devotee when everything else that serves/associates with the stranger is a monster?
like it makes sense that if the stranger’s whole thing is replacing people that it wouldn’t have any human devotees, but that’s also boring to me. my favorite part of the fears is the cult of devotion they inspire from their acolytes so that being totally absent from the stranger just makes it really hard for me to… care. spooky monsters. big woop.
i also have personal beef that such a massive part of this entity as a whole and therefore such a massive part of two full seasons of the show are based in and around russia and i have not once heard one single russian word pronounced anywhere in the ballpark of “correctly”
which has larger implications about how this entity which is based on fear of the unknown is so closely tied to a deeply held british distrust of russia/the cultural divide of russia as Other from the rest of europe etc. (why was the previous unknowing attempted in hungary by a hungarian man) and i wrote a long post about that as well but deleted it bc it’s not really what you asked
basically i think the stranger’s clowns suck because it is more fun when clowns want to eat human meat and also fuck you, and that’s not really what the stranger is about, so there’s no room for captain spaulding or art the clown or pennywise or the killer klowns from outer space because that’s just not the vibe
which is unfortunate because clowns that eat human meat and are going to fuck you to death are like. the kind of clowns that make horror clowns fun. for me at least!
god i love this. I LOVE THIS. obviously we know gertrude kept the archive in disarray on purpose, but i’m also sure that a good chunk of that was just that like. the archivist has no drive to catalog. the archivist needs to know, not to record or to sort or to label. jonah of course keeps his mementos, his trinkets, his tokens, and talismans. jonah hoards the letters sent to him by long dead paramours. jonah collects objects of power. jonah logs and records and researches. but the archivist just. feeds.
this also sort of aligns w my working theory that in terms of avatars/monsters the dividing line is sort of like that old bit about how it’s fucked up that goofy is like a clearly sentient person-adjacent creature but pluto is just a normal dog
like jonah magnus is obviously purposefully eye-aligned, he draws his powers from it and he orchestrates the watcher’s crown. but he’s is also so much more driven and in control than like, the creature that lived in the ming vase, for example. or the thing crawling around under alexandria. or the big slimy tentacle thing that haunted benjamin hatendi. like peter lukas and maxwell rayner and simon fairchild they’re all such active agents in service to their patrons.
but jon is just. hungry. and some of that is for sure his own lack of agency between elias and the web. but it’s also i think that the archivist is more of a monster than an avatar.
its clear the other avatars dont actually know the role of the archivist bc while they do regard it as clearly something important they dont understand WHY
they all make their little comments abt how hes a terrible archivist he clearly doesnt have the stomach for this etc etc etc BUT thats literally what makes him a perfect archivist hes so fucking scared and theres no way jonahs plan would have worked with someone who wasnt absolutely full of terror
exaaactly you guys get me…
its not their fault though
they dont even know what his role is supposed to be so they just assume hes the eyes boy but they should have figured how annoying he was is EXACTLY what would be making him so perfect as an agent of the EYE. so they were wrong either way. and laughing at him for being just a new baby dear in all of this
Elias only feeding Jon with small statements, not filling by any means, but enough to leave him wanting more. Enough to make him come back again and again until Jon can only rely on Elias to give him what they both know he needs.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
jonah’s insistance that everything he does is of his own accord and that he’s in complete control of his actions vs. his literal role in the universe. as the eye’s prophet and acolyte. did you want to do it, or did your god want you to do it. is there a difference, if the only thing you truly want is to serve your god. are your wants the same as its, by definition. how much free will can any avatar at all have. sure, you can stop any second you want, but what’s even left of you without this. you say you want to do this, because if you don’t, then all of this has been for nothing. you have to want this. were you silent or were you silenced. ykwim.
What kind of phone do you think elias has? Latest iPhone? Recent Samsung? Google pixel with a great camera? One of those economical chinese brands? An early iPhone he's made last a decade?
What features do you think are important to elias regarding phones? (Storage, camera, ect)
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO this is such a fun question 🖤
i think elias has multiple phones tbh. so in his office he has a corded multiline phone. this is the same unit that everyone in the institute has. they’re slate office gray and they’re old. but they work reliably!! tim keeps referring to them being from the 80s but they are from the early 00s at the very earliest. office tech just looks outdated as soon as it’s manufactured. they work well. you can only dial out from elias and rosie’s lines, the rest are strictly internal.
then i think he has a pretty outdated iphone that he uses for work, which is billed to the institute’s plan. this is a benefit offered to management level staff and higher. phones are not for personal use and therefore come with very limited features and very little data. (the institute has wifi everywhere except the archives, which use ethernet)
and finally for personal use i do think he has a Pixel, actually!! i had a Pixel 2 once and it was my favorite phone i’ve ever owned except it bricked after 1 week. then i got a refurbished one and was angry that i was making monthly payments for a brand new fresh out of the box phone but using a refurbished one. then in exactly one more week the refurbished one also bricked. out of absolutely nowhere. THIS IS A VERY WEB ALIGNED THING TO HAVE HAPPENED IMVHO. but anyway yes i think because of the incredible screen resolution and the amazing camera, he does have the newest pixel. that’s the one that has the very nice leather case on it. peter got it for him and elias told him how nice it would be holding something so fine while his husband doesn’t call him.
i think elias is tech savy and very with the times and i think data security and modern surveilance doesn’t bother him at all so he keeps the shit that needs to be secret secret as HELL and then uses the cloud for everything else. because data insecurity not bothering him was an understatement it obviously turns him on.
So I saw the post about the calliope and Jon going to Elias first and decided to look into something. And I stumbled across something that is even more damming…
In MAG35 Martin signs for the delivery of some things. He leaves the lighter in Jon’s desk drawer. This is when Breekon and Hope bring the table
In MAG36 Tim tells Jon that Elias was asking about the delivery. Jon didn’t know the table was there. He ends the episode with “I need to talk to Martin”. Seems sensible, get all the info before you go answer to your boss. Martin is still living in the archives iirc, shouldn’t be an issue
MAG37 oh it starts with the talk that makes sen-… “…we should destroy the table…” “Elias told me the same thing.” He. Went. To. Elias. Anyway.(he also asked rosie but like) JONATHAN SIMS I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE
I am not joking when I’m telling you that over the course of that season he like explicitly mentions that he’s going to talk to Elias about something or that he already has NINE TIMES if we count the Pre-Launch trailer then it’s TEN
And like sure, sometimes it’s about his concerns regarding the worms (CO2, security), but like you have mag33 where he’s like “I know Elias told me to not look into the Lukas family, but maybe I should bring it up with him anyway” the most stubborn man in London fr
What if. After tma 200. The world goes back to normal without anything supernatural. Elias is back as the boss except he has one body and no more eye powers. Everybody is just back to their normal boring selves otherwise. Except its an office comedy. Everybody seeks revenge and he’s just like;;;; please dont???he can go back to his boring ass scheduling (missed it while he was busy being king of the world) jon has to be used to being. Just a dude again. No more world ending events. People laugh at him when he asks them for statements. He pulls an all nighter and just. Falls asleep. Needs glasses again. He gets robbed on his way home. Fully talking out my ass btw i haven’t even finished the bloody thing i don’t know if thats how it ends
And ahhhhhh sorry for making everything je but them learning to be human again. It’s weird and it feels like a parta you has been cut off. We ruled over the world and now we have to do taxes again. (I mean its not that bad. Elias loves it. Hes not evil anymore he just realises the apocalypse is overrated and paperwork is way better )
What about a y/n fic with Elias where they’re a worker at the institute and one day they get invited into his office and Elias is being all brooding and threatening but y/n can’t stop thinking not so pure thoughts about him in their head and Elias is just like 😀 “I just threatened their hol life and their over here making fantasy’s in their head about me” blushing thinking about it afterwards
jonah magnus possessing someone for the first time. one eye at a time. jonah magnus looking in the mirror, oh, my eyes inside someone else, and they look a bit too different. jonah magnus scared, terrified of what he’s done, staring at his own body. just sitting there. seeing himself fully with his own eyes, a perspective no human is supposed to view themself from. this is how everyone else sees you. jonah magnus examining his own body. this is what my face looked like. jonah magnus picking up the knife again, just out of curiosity. just to see if it still hurts. jonah magnus sitting in his own lap, cutting into his own skin, falling asleep in his own arms, beholding himself.
“elias is a homophobic gay man” you say. i smile and nod. i go home. i pull out my extensive analysis of jonah magnus as a bellusromantic objectum otherkin. i whisper to myself “they’d never understand…” and i weep.
Elias smiles. It makes Jon feel like prey, makes his heart quicken. He doesn’t flinch away from it. Recently, he’s been learning that fear doesn’t have to be painful. It doesn’t even have to be unwanted.
little snippet from an as-of-yet unfit fur posting thing
i think jonelias should always be about jonah’s desperation to be understood. i think he should cling to jon with both hands and sob and beg “please, please, please don’t leave, not you, you can’t leave, i need you, i need you to listen, i need to be heard, i need to be seen.”
“elias is a homophobic gay man” you say. i smile and nod. i go home. i pull out my extensive analysis of jonah magnus as a bellusromantic objectum otherkin. i whisper to myself “they’d never understand…” and i weep.
he’s xenogender too. btw. he’s eyegender. this is true about all avatars. in my brain. because becoming an avatar changes everything about you, including your gender identity. michael/helen is spiralgender. jane prentiss is corruptiongender. etc etc
jonah magnus is that specific genre of aromantic where he only experiences romantic attraction towards objects, concepts, and places. he’s sexually attracted to a lot of people, but finds romance with humans just boring and annoying.
the only relationships he cares about can be categorized into sexual, romantic, psychosexual, and religious. any relationship he has with another character falls into the sexual/psychosexual category. his relationship with the panopticon is inherently sexual and religious, since it’s his church, his grave, and his home. the eye is the only true romantic partner he’s ever had.
i am notoriously a big fan of “jonah magnus did not enjoy being the pupil” but also there is something very important about “jonah magnus did not enjoy being a human” too. i know it’s just a silly little headcanon, but to me, he was otherkin, and being an avatar was the closest he could get to feeling like himself. being an avatar is always about fulfillment, it’s always about filling an empty space within your soul, it’s always about getting what the world has denied you.
and there’s something uniquely tragic about the idea that being the pupil wasn’t what jonah wanted, it was just the closest alternative. it was the best he could get. imagine the closest you can get to a state that actually feels like you is just being reduced to an extension of something that doesn’t even care about you. and it’s torture, but to someone who has never felt human at all, it’s the closest thing to a victory he’ll ever get.
I know he’s kind of a polarizing character, but I have to say, Elias Bouchard truly is Iconic. When you hear the twist of “the boring middle manager was actually secretly an evil eldritch monster the whole time!” you sort of assume that the boring middle manager persona was just a facade, but no, he really does seem to just enjoy dull administrative work. He’s both exactly as boring as he seems on the surface and profoundly fucked up in ways you couldn’t imagine. He’s practically omniscient and playing 4-D chess with everyone, but he responds to even slight hiccups in his elaborate scheme with acts of extreme violence. He beats an old man to death with a metal pipe and when someone brings it up later he goes, “Yeah I may have overreacted there.” His employees are constantly trying to murder him. He broke out of prison just so he could give a dramatic monologue. He had a weird gay thing going on with seemingly every man he met in the past 200 years. He loves scheduling.
He tells Jon he’ll send him a return to work form after Jon got back from being wanted for the murder Elias committed.
And this is a minute after Jon asks if he’s still human.
Then tells him not to worry about a doctor’s note. As if Jon at that precise moment would be worried about that.
[id: a drawing of jonathan sims holding peters headless body. he has long dark hair and is covered in blood from head to toe, presumably from exploding peters brain. his expression is cold. they are surrounded by gray fog and above them are the words “stubborn fool”]
