it’s fascinating how, in the end, the group of survivors (excluding Jon, sort of) made the same choice as Jonah did. faced with the question of “do I have the right to doom the universe/many other universes to endless suffering to ensure my safety and comfort?” they both said yes, I do. Jonah definitely did more self-reflection than they did, but the end result is the same. it’s so great. no matter how much any of them hated Elias, they ended up siding with his view.
there’s a lot of discussion about how Jonah is not inherently evil, how his actions are actually deeply understandable and relatable once you stop to think about it, but there’s live examples of that within the show itself! except they are deprived of that freedom he was talking about so passionately—they don’t know what they did. they don’t want to. they are good people—aren’t they?—and they made the only choice there is—didn’t they? (these repressed feelings will haunt them forever)
i like helen but very aggravating that she’s the one who is narratively positioned as the devil on jon’s shoulder (all the s4 conversations on feeding and later every s5 encounter) and not. elias. obvious choice of guy gothic villain dracula figure who should be the one to tempt him into transgressions. but they have like two conversations in private after 92 and in both of them jon’s too distracted with the clown kidnapping and melanie and martin so it’s not even about them. not good
the thing about the podcast is that it cooked with jon and elias’s characters (individually and then together) in a way that it never did again with a single major supporting character. however they were terminally uninterested. in any of that.
every time I think about the fact jonah called himself the heart of the institute enough times and consistently enough for other avatars to know about it I get sososo giddy. ridiculous endearing man
“I’ve never forgotten the first, of many, funerals attended for one of my fellows lost to the dread powers. It was in that moment, sitting in those pews, it struck me. I must never let myself die.”
i actually don’t see Jonah as someone who was promiscuous in his youth. I think he’d be too scared to be open about his sexuality like that.
Oh he flirted plenty, but everything had plausible deniability. He knew just the way to wrap men and women around his finger. Keep them coming back for more but never *truly* giving them what they wanted.
He had a reputation in his circles for being charismatic and likeable, but… odd. When questioned about his bachelor lifestyle he simply said that he was far too busy with his work to be married.
I do think a part of him would be relieved he couldn’t experience romantic desire- he saw it as something he was above. But amatonormative society has its way of digging in and making him question if something was wrong with him. If he was cursed. It certainly led to resentment for his friends who became preoccupied with women and children and starting a family.
in the same way as positioning jm as a healthy and happy couple is annoying, claiming they’re a pinnacle of “toxic yaoi” or whatever is annoying. no, they’re not. they’re simply not that interesting
there is a conversation to be had about their relationship in s4-5 specifically. how they stick with each other just to have some illusion of normalcy (which is especially important to Jon) despite not knowing each other all that well. how Martin treats him in s5 – belittling and dehumanizing him, laughing at him, enjoying his newfound powers, and then blaming Jon for enjoying it too. kinda fucked up! but the reason why I don’t find them very appealing to me (despite very much enjoying fucked up relationships) is that 1) they have no underlying chemistry that would make their suffering count, 2) all of that is not really a conversion on its own, it’s more of a specific example of how Jon’s monstrousness is being treated by most people, if that makes sense? like, Martin is not special for blaming Jon for being an avatar. almost everyone does that. the only thing that sets Martin aside from everyone else is that he is in a romantic relationship with Jon, and therefore, he feels like he has the right to treat Jon like his unruly pet. the fandom has picked up on it too, whether they know it or not – their relationship is often seen as Jon’s only redeeming, “human” quality (which is why there are so many “love makes you human” takes). how very brave Martin is for taking it upon himself to tame this morally inferior beast that Jon has become! (though, to be honest, Jon is being infantilised even in early-seasons depictions of him. and again, Martin is the only person actually capable of fixing him, of course)
it’s just an extrapolated version of what Jon has been hearing for seasons now. it’s a case study of how people treat him. but, again, it’s not very unique. there are people who have far more interesting relationships with Jon’s non-humanness – from Daisy and Helen to, of course, Elias
…or something like that
man, even the ant guy has a more unique relationship with Jon’s avatarhood.
this may be me & my “literal decades of near-constant fawn response” talking but the way everyone seems to think jon and daisys friendship is like, peak really miffs me
there will be a show with two guys in a fucked up power dynamic that is the core of their relationship and all the posts will be like “i love them but i hate the power dynamic” and all the fic is like “what if there was no power dynamic” or “what if the power dynamic was switched”. like okay actually i think the imbalance is fun and awesome. anyone else
okay actually jm is boring because, unlike what they tell you in the posts, m*rtin is NOT a monsterf*cker/lover. he wants jon to be human unless he wants jon to clock an avatar he personally doesn’t like and has no patience for any weird thing that jon does even if that weird thing is for jon’s survival, he just REJECTS jon’s monster qualities until they suit his needs/wants. whereas the tma world is full of so many REAL monsterf*ckers/lovers/friends, because it DEMANDS a comfort within a certain monstrous morality (never an acceptance of bad as good but an understanding of what people, human or not, will do to survive)…….. m*rtin just comes off as a class-a boring-ass nag who can’t come out of his tiny boring office world to appreciate a glorious monster bf even when said glorious monster bf is BEGGING for acceptance. if you can’t appreciate the monstrous qualities of your monster bf then you don’t deserve him. thank you for coming to my tedtalk, this was the intro and it continues for another 4.8 hours and it has 93 powerpoint slides
its a shame that elias would never allow himself to be turned into a vampire because it is very hot however he wouldn’t want to be dependent on blood like that. which is interesting because you know, the eye, but i dont think elias sees himself as dependent on the eye or even really separate from it. he is the heart
I’ve said it a billion times before and I’m sorry but it is my genuine belief that if Jon and Elias were captured together they would be SO unsufferable to their kidnapper AND argue with each other constantly the rest of the times that by the time they’re being saved (or sexily save themselves but) the kidnapper would mostly feel RELIEF.
get the beholding avatars out of my sight. this was too much.
