Fanfic rec of the night: look to your laurels by sleepycats_2 [ongoing, Elias/Young Jonah selfcest with Jon in the mix]. Its Jonah characterisation is incredibly endearing. He has a praise kink with himself. If you even care.
half-formed (malformed) thought of jonah seeing jon, going “oh, you’re just like me”, and moving to protect/hurt him in ways jonah himself was not protected. but i can’t get any further than that nor elaborate on it
elias exquisite character because he spent 79 episodes being a non-entity i couldn’t even tell apart his voice from jon’s then the second pipe murder happens he arrives with his story presence off the charts and immediately starts calling cops stupid to their face and makes an insanely funny john doe joke about leitner and also coyly lets the audience know that he was aware about martin lying on his cv and then proceeds to trap melanie in a faustian bargain the second she anxiously confesses to being at the end of her rope and then calls the cops on himself AGAIN (he’s already done this two times. gertrude’s disappearance / gertrude’s body in 40) and gets away with it toooo all while clearly having the time of his life. truly nobody was doing it like him.
i genuinely think that if you’re not one of the people he’s deeply invested in fucking with (ie, Archive staff) elias is actually genuinely a pretty decent boss. and i imagine that given i don’t think the Institute is a big workplace, everyone’s had at least a few conversations with him and like, doesn’t hate him.
idk. i just can’t see him doing shit like kicking up a fuss about people needing to take time off, or needing schedule changes, even for asinine stupid reasons. maybe he fucks with his employees a bit to feed the eye but not in ways which make him a horrible terrible boss (Archives staff not included).
It’s not even that I think Elias dislikes humanity. On the contrary I think he loves humanity. He loves tons of little things linked to it, as well, he loves paperwork, he loves cakes, etc. But he’s such a passive man. I feel like the interesting thing is if Jon makes him take a much more active role than he’s grown used to over the decades. Elias tends to react, if he must, and only if pushed far enough. But Jon gets him to take action first.
genuinely kind of fucked that the fandom perceives jm as the “jon is happy forever and capable of making his own choices” ship and je as the “jon is unhappy and his partner is an asshole towards him who controls his choices” when. you know.
The cousin of “he would not say that:” he would not keep saying that. It was a one off funny line for one particular situation. Every memorable line does not need to become a running gag.
sorry but I fundamentally disagree with any au or alternative situation or like. whatever that has jonah reconsider or deviate from his plans because of his attraction or love for jon (not even as “don’t want to end the world anymore”, but any significant adjustment or alteration [even in the negative] made specifically to include his fondness for jon in the picture). jonah has planned this for 200 years and once set on a course of action has pushed himself to sacrifice most of the people who had meant something to him in the first place. i highly doubt he held no ounce of affection for them (in his own words!!!), and I find it rather insulting to think that love could change that. im sorry but for some people this is just not a top priority lol
elias being aroused by the compulsion is so, like, the implications. the archivist’s compulsion is meant to be a violation of the highest degree, it’s an act of domination over another being and results in complete loss of autonomy for the victim, because statement feeding (and avatarhood as a whole) is also consumption (“he looked at me like he had just eaten a perfectly cooked steak”, 142 // “i’ve always thought a man’s eating habits were his own private business”, elias in 148), jon was eating them so his god wouldn’t eat him, just as his first encounter with the powers was a story about being devoured by a monster. so. why would elias like this, why is he excited by it. because he’s two hundred years old and has spent most of those years hiding his true self as jonah magnus while serving the fear of being known/found out—that alone makes him an excellent source of fear for the eye to passively feed on. but he also describes jon’s compulsion as “tingly, but sort of freeing” in 92, as if the prospect of having his entire self finally, forcibly revealed under the eye of their god after all this time will be a moment of ecstatic release, because he takes so much gloating pleasure in revealing his secrets to jon in 160, because he wants to be Known, the only thing he objects to is the revelation coming at a wrong time because that would ruin his plans. and, of course, the whole loop of jon extracting a statement <–> elias being compelled, which in turn is feeding the beholding, works as a great metaphor for sex. the gratification the beholding rewards them with for the act can only be experienced by the two of them, because nobody else will gladly feed jon their fear and only his archivist can compel jonah. like. all im saying is there was no need to make [PLEASURED EXHALATION] a thing and then never bring it up again. because whats all this then.
prev, no, he IS scared! jon can destroy his mind, jon can make him relive every excruciating second of his worst, most traumatic memories. when was the first time he properly feared his own mortality? did he ever get injured or ill to such an extent that he thought he was going to die right then? this is magnified by the fact that after 160 the only thing that can kill him is jon. he did all that to jon (and everyone else) to escape the fate of perpetual victimisation only to find that fear again in jon. what if jon gets bored of him, what if jon finally decides to break his mind, and i’m assuming he no longer has any way of Knowing what he’s thinking and what he’ll do next, because jon’s powers have eclipsed his. guy who has never kept faith in anything other than himself is just going to have to believe that the monster he made is not going to break him beyond repair. he’s terrified, actually. i’m just saying he also derives sick sensual pleasure from it (as does jon. statement extraction is eroticised subjugation and/or possession of another’s will and he’s finally getting to victimise elias in return for everything he’s done to him and it feels good!), because elias’s mind is being unravelled by his own masterpiece and he’s a vain little shit like that. so, very important to remember that jon is scaring him but elias is simultaneously delirious with want.
a lot of stories treat romance like it makes the relationship between two characters self explanatory and to be honest it doesn’t
story: they’re in love :)
me: why?
story: what do you mean? they’re in love :)
me: what do they bring to each other’s lives? what do they admire about one another? what draws them to each other?
story: love :) :)
me: ok… so what is that going to look like now?
story: like love :) :) :)
me: are their personalities going to clash at all? are they going to have arguments? learn to compromise for each other? will they need to adapt to sharing their life with another person? is it going to be smooth perfect harmony from day one? are they going to be always together? see each other sometimes as their occupations allow? how does this relationship affect their lifes.
ALT
