2024-08-03 2:59:22 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

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i saw the ask about how people taking elias’s “you didn’t want this but you did choose this” speech literally is wrong and you can’t trust it because elias was trying to manipulate and groom and emotionally abuse jon and therefore everything he said was bullshit and just. wow. did you forget that the main theme of the podcast is choice and the blurriness of free will? did you miss the entire arc where jon began to willingly give himself to the eye? did you miss how the story makes it clear that becoming an avatar requires voluntarily becoming a servant of your patron? no, it’s not a contract with set terms and conditions, but anyone who becomes an avatar knows damn well what they’re doing, and jon was well on his way to avatarhood before elias even knew who he was.

also, it always strikes me as a little silly when people try to label elias as a groomer, and say he’s a bad and untrustworthy person because of the emotional manipulation. like yeah he was manipulative! that is correct! remind me, how many violent mass murders have been committed in this podcast so far? how many of the “good” main characters have personally killed people and committed atrocities?

shrimpler:

> magpod-confessions:

> > .

> they’re talking about my confession, so i just wanted to respond with a bit more depth since theres a character limit in the comments..

> you argued that one of the main themes of the podcast is the blurry line between fate and free will, and yeah! i was talking about that! the line gets blurry when you’re being groomed and manipulated and unknowingly nudged by circumstance and people beyond your control

> jon was in fact groomed and violated by elias throughout the show, thats just the truth of the situation. and elias was using manipulation tactics in that conversation with him…its not too crazy to point out how the central antagonist of the show who’s notorious for his extensive manipulation is in fact manipulating someone!

> one of the main themes in the show is the blurriness of choice, sure, but it’s also fundamentally a dissection on how fear affects different people and what people are driven to do under desperate circumstances under fear and traumatic stress…we as people are made irrational by fear, and that’s apparent with most of our cast. all the main characters have made bad and immoral decisions in some capacity (some more than others, like daisy vs someone like melanie for example) but that doesn’t take away from the fact that elias is still a bad person who definitively emotionally abused the protagonist ? i’m not sure what saying “the main characters are bad too so you cant say elias is bad!” proves…two things can be true at once

> you ask if i’ve “missed the arc where jon willingly gives himself to the eye” which in my opinion is a very gross oversimplification of his character arc. if you’re referring to season 3, he had barely realized this was happening to him but was already becoming physically reliant on statements by that point and was told by ELIAS that the literal world was at stake, and that jon was the only person who could save it .. what choice does he have then?? in his perspective he HAD to keep feeding into the eye because he was made to believe the fate of the world was at stake because of the unknowing, and then by season 4 he was then fully reliant on statements and would experience extreme physical repercussions if he didnt continue taking them … the idea of free will and consent become blurry under abusive circumstances where you’re being continuously manipulated (this situation also ties into the addiction allegory, which is another whole complicated topic that i won’t get into right now)

> the point you made about how the show tells us avatars knew exactly what they were doing is Also a very gross oversimplification of the shows themes…did YOU miss the part of the show where the audience is made to watch as our protagonist slowly becomes one of these avatars due to circumstances beyond his control and desparate decisions he made under helpless situations, causing us to sympathize with him therefore having to reevaluate the simplified views we had of the other avatars? did you miss how characters like agnes and gerry showed us that its never quite that simple, how certain circumstances we’re placed under cause us to make desperate decisions because it’s all we know to do? how situations leading up to avatarhood are extremely complicated especially when its all someones ever known? how the show DIRECTLY criticizes the whole “avatar and human” system because it forces very complex ideas into strict boxes of good or bad, monster or human, perpetuator or victim? how humans will find a way to simplify and categorize very complicated things under a strict narrative? its barely even subtext, its TEXT!

> the bit about how “jon was becoming an avatar before elias even knew him” is just kind of ridiculous to me..are you referring to when he was a child?? or when he first joined the institute and didnt even know what the fears or an avatar was?? what?? how is that possibly his own choice? was it not literally revealed to us that the web has been subtley nudging and manipulating him since he was a child? are you implying its his choice because he read some childrens book, really? this part just kind of confuses me, it seems like you’re just going through mental gymnastics to defend elias at this point instead of actually discussing the nuances of choice and consent.

> the podcast shows how the concept of choice isn’t a simple thing, and how sometimes, we just don’t have one to make because of situations we’re backed into that make us desperate . jon’s situation is fictional, yeah, but to me it’s very much applicable to real life abusive situations, and the way the fandom discusses the show sometimes seems reminiscent to how people irl will blame victims and claim they chose their situation. this fandom will often take things in the podcast at face value and say very victim-blaming-esque things under the guise of “WELL A BIG THEME IS FREE WILL!” without even wanting to discuss the nuances of that theme. that’s kind of just what my initial ask was talking about

> the literal embodiment of manipulation and deception set jon’s path for him, placing him in desparate situations where he often was denied agency and had very limited choices. the show tells us this.

I already said this but I want to add this again that I think a very important part of the podcast is what abuse and violation does to victims, how sometimes, a literal predator (Jonah) can take a very traumatic thing which deeply hurt them and over which they had no control over (Jon’s childhood trauma) to twist it in a way that would help a predator to gain control over the victim and later paint it as “the victim chose it.”

To me, the podcast is about how abuse, grooming and violation chips away at a person’s control, self-esteem and the ability to make correct decisions, often ostracizes and isolates them. Just like Jon, people in abusive situations don’t often have social network of support because the abuser stripped them of that too, and just like Jon, they start blaming and loathing themselves, denied kindness or understanding which they need to heal. No one took Jon’s side. In fact, characters surrounding him believed JONAH, who painted Jon as a monster. His words, “you chose it,” were nothing more than guilt-trip Jon, knowing that Jon, already suffering from guilt, would fall for it and hate himself, as well as others (Basira, for example) would blame him too. This is absolutely terrifying and sadly, if we take away the supernatural part, very realistic too. For me, the podcast is about that. How sometimes, someone can use you and hurt you without your knowledge or consent, cloud your judgement with constant gaslighting and emotional abuse to trip you into serving their goal, and sometimes, you can do nothing to prevent it. What happened to Jon can just as easily happen to anyone, because people like Jonah exist and the problem lies in them, rather than in their victims’ “wrongdoings” or “mistakes.”

But I see that many people in the fandom take this and treat this as “Jon was SO asking for this because he did X and he did Y” and you know what’s funny? It is NEVER a question of what JONAH did. Never. No one questions HIS actions. It is ALWAYS about Jon or how wrong was JON or how JON “shouldn’t have done this and shouldn’t have done that so this is his fault actually cause free will etc etc.” You know, almost like in real life no one questions the actions of the aggressor, it’s always the victim who has to justify their behavior and prove that they were, in fact, hurt and didn’t want it.

And I’m used to it. I mean, I come from somewhere where this kind of victim-blaming rhetoric is (unfortunately) a very wide-spread thing (as you can guess, typically against women.) But hearing it in supposedly progressive spaces, I'm… flabbergasted, honestly. And I know the podcast is just the podcast and it’s entirely fictional and no one actually got hurt, but I can’t shake the feeling that saying “It was Jon’s fault entirely” may kind of gradually shape the way we as a society (a progressive society, too) view and treat victims. I hope it’s not the case, but for someone who knows irl people who were severely emotionally abused and got blamed for it (and who blamed themselves) it’s painful and upsetting to hear.
Anyway, I just want to repeat this: Jon was groomed, force-fed trauma, drugged against his will, consent or knowledge, violated, made to compromise his bodily and psychological autonomy, got stripped off his agency, humiliated and traumatized, with Jonah Magnus in ep 160 taking full control over him and violating him completely. It is cruel, it’s disgusting, it’s repulsive, it’s abusive, and I view everything that happened as Jonah Magnus’s fault, because HE knew what he was doing, HE actively, actually chose it without remorse, he planned and orchestrated this for his own benefit, and then, as typical abuser, painted it as Jon’s choice and Jon’s fault, in typically abusive, manipulative ways.

Everything else is confetti.

And using mental gymnastics to justify and defend Jonah’s behavior to paint Jon as the villain is… well, let’s say I’m not interested in this kind of “perspective” at all.