magnuspanoptes:
and he said quite earnestly: “Now, if you chaps will only listen to me for a few minutes, I will guarantee to convince every one of you that although the original Jonah may be dead as a herring, his spirit still lives, and every now and then gets into some unlucky landsman who insists on going to sea and brings misfortune to every ship he sets his foot on.”
MAG 159 - “The Last” // “Afflicted with a Jonah; The Sea Captain’s Fear of Parsons’ Sons” (PDF). The New York Times. 6 March 1885 // MAG 160 - “The Eye Opens”
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.
kairos-polaris:
Jonah Magnus thrives on knowing more than others and using that knowledge to his advantage, he is almost always two steps ahead and even when he isn’t he can still turn that to his advantage. This is something that defines him both as a character and as a person. Which is why so many jokes making fun of him have him not know things, causing him to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable. Those jokes rarely if ever make sense because there are so little things Jonah doesn’t know about and to get him to not know something is a complicated, convoluted process. Which is fine, but I am a miserable boring asshole who prefers character hate to be canon compliant or at least make sense
Another common thing is the idea of the Eye not telling Jonah things “for funsies”. The Eye isn’t sentient enough to have a sense of humour and judging by the way it doesn’t let Jon Know things about Jonah in s4, has no interest in making Jonah’s life harder. Jonah is also just better than Jon at Knowing things intentionally because he has been doing it for so much longer
magnuspanoptes:
forgot to say this in that post but very funny how people think elias will just turn into a cartoon fail villain if someone other than jon was archivist and would have all his plans foiled within five minutes. i know people do it because they hate him and can’t engage with his character sincerely for like, five seconds, but be serious. he’s an extremely competent villain and if your fave is not named season five jon or gertrude (and even she got shot), they would not. in fact. survive him :)
