I’m genuinely tired of people only talking about Jon in terms of him being an addict with no self-control.
At some point y’all are going to have to recognize that what you’re implying is that his boss, without his knowledge or consent, spiked his ‘food’, thereby making him addicted to a drug only his job or unwilling victims could provide… and it was his fault for not fighting against it hard enough.
Let me repeat.
Y’all are saying. That A MAN WHO WAS NON-CONSENSUALLY DRUGGED. THAT HE WAS NOT AWARE OF. UNTIL HE WAS ADDICTED. SHOULD’VE FOUGHT HARDER. TO NOT HAVE BECOME ADDICTED. EVEN THOUGH. HE WASN’T AWARE. UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE.
Cool cool cool. Cool. Awesome. Glad to have that settled. Gonna think about how Jon super enjoyed being basically roofied so much that he started purposefully roofieing himself cause it was so great. Gonna think about how his personality really emphasized how much he wanted to be roofied. Really nice work all. Totally “reading comprehension”-ed your way into that LOVEliness.
As you may recall, my brother is currently listening to TMA for the first time. Today they turned to me and said: “Wait. Jon’s in America, this is his chance! Jon, get a gun!”
Can people stop bringing up Jon playing as a skeptic and denying the veracity of the statements in season 1 as a way to label him an idiotic, annoying, dramatic piece of shit… for five goddamn minutes.
Can people also stop bringing up his 180 from that to the paranoia and stalking in season 2 like it wasn’t a result of him being violently shown that reverse psychology wasn’t going to save him.
And for that matter, can people stop downplaying and turning everything Jon went through in season 3 into jokes as though he deserved it for being that ‘idiotic, annoying, dramatic piece of shit’ in season 1.
jonny sims has publically said that most of his writing filters through the lens of addiction, which he has personal experience with. that’s a very private topic and the details are nobody’s business, but this post discusses addiction (non graphically) as context for tma being–so it claims–an exploration of agency and personal choice.
for more context, relisten to 172, the statement about francis, the addict who’s literally puppeteered by the web. the entity that controls and manipulates people drags them through the cycle of abuse on physical hooks. it’s pretty on the nose! note that francis’s will doesn’t break, in the end; the spider physically moves their hands to force their relapse. it is unambiguous that francis does not choose their fate; a credit to them that the story doesn’t afford jon.
there’s never explicit confirmation that the web is similarly involved with jon’s addiction to cigarettes and then to eldritch voyeurism powers, but it is absolutely deeply involved in jon’s life. jon becomes dependent on beholding to survive in a way that, factually, isn’t all that different from irl chemical dependency. withdrawal from real substances can cease function of your body and mind. it can kill you and make every moment until then miserable. you might find yourself doing horrible things for your next fix, even hurting people–though probably not by personally eating their trauma.
but let’s rewind. if we’re talking choice and agency, the million dollar question is how much did jon have in what went down, most specifically the ritual? objectively: little to none. jonah’s plot would have succeeded eventually. if jon somehow bucked his plans, jonah would have tried again with someone else. as many times it took.
this
is long, but you read the original post so i assume you can handle it.
sorry if i come off aggressive here, tone is hard. i want to engage with
what you said the same way you did for me, so i hope i don’t make you
feel shut down.
so, first and most importantly, i want to say that i did not intend to speculate
on any personal baggage jonny may have with addiction from his own life
and experiences, and i apologize if i did so and/or appeared to do so.
i
don’t know whether jonny was referring to an addiction of his own or
that of a loved one; i don’t know his actual feelings on this sensitive
matter; and none of that is my business. i don’t want to analyze
what jonny feels about addiction in his heart of hearts or whether jon’s
story involves projection on jonny’s part, and it’s not my place.
i
appreciate your (and jonny’s!) preference for a full
death-of-the-author approach to tma, but i sage personally see full dota
as a good thought exercise to supplement the reading by taking a
different perspective, vs the single basis for analysis. the
context of the writing was relevant to my point in this one, and i
totally respect you not wanting to incorporate things outside the text
in your interpretation, but i did want to do that. i wanted
to acknowledge the fact that addiction influenced the writing and then
discuss how the concept manifests in the text in light of that context.
i hope that clarifies where i’m coming from!
I think much of my reactions regarding Jon Sims is colored by the tenth episode of the third season of the Trollhunters series of the Tales of Arcadia saga.
I think much of my reactions regarding Jon Sims is colored by the tenth episode of the third season of the Trollhunters series of the Tales of Arcadia saga.
ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE
To preface this, I need to address that I am aware that the genre and audience of both series are vastly different. Likewise, the way they go about showing the themes I’m mentioning will be vastly different. However, I don’t care.
First off. Lets talk about power, knowledge, and consent.
Jon and Jim were given incredible powers and responsibilities; Jon as the Archivist and Jim as the Trollhunter. Jon and Jim were given both limited and unlimited information regarding those powers and responsibilities; Jon was being groomed and lead around while Jim was being trained and mentored. Neither Jon nor Jim knew what would happen when they took on those powers and responsibilities; Jon wasn’t aware that he would become the kind of thing that traumatized him as a child and Jim wasn’t aware that by picking up Merlin’s amulet that he was signing up for a hidden war. The main difference between the two’s powers and responsibilities is simply that while Jon’s were sinister in nature, Jim’s weren’t. Jon, despite his clear desire to Do Good, did damage. Jim, on the other hand, took on a mantle of Good and succeeded in that effort.
Before I progress to the discussion of how Merlin’s Evil Bath Bomb is parallel to Jonah’s Evil Chain Email, let’s talk about them.
Jonah Magnus is the titular Magnus who’s archive Jon works as Head Archivist. Merlin is who Jim fights for the glory of, calling his name to don his armor. For a lengthy duration of both series, while the implications of the two are brought up at times, we’re not under the impression that we’ll ever interact with or learn much more than we do of either or their reasons for what they did. At least until the final seasons of both series, thereby coloring everything prior. Jonah made his Institute, we learn, to effectively become immortal. He dabbled in eldritch things he shouldn’t have and became corrupted from his lust of immortality and power. Merlin, as he is the Arthurian figure, was a wizard who ostensibly Did Good. His goals were to protect both Trolls and Humans from powerful threats.
To facilitate their goals, Jonah and Merlin used Jon and Jim as pawns. Chess pieces in a game neither knew the rules to until it was too late. Whatever evil Jonah sowed and whatever good Merlin did was through them and their numerous predecessors.
Throughout The Magnus Archives, Jonah (through his possessing of Elias Bouchard’s body) tells Jon that he has choices. That Jon is the only one who is responsible for the choices he makes with or without the information given to him. Starting with him accepting the position of Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute. A title he didn’t know would lead him down a path of doing inhumane things. A title he didn’t know would mean he was, in effect, no longer human at all.
Once Merlin come on the scene towards the middle of season three of Trollhunters, it’s clear that he has ulterior motives and plans for Jim. That Jim, as the first human Trollhunter, was never supposed to stay human. During the aforementioned episode, Merlin espouses on Jim’s choices. Saying that this final decision was his and his alone, that he couldn’t force him to even if he tried. In the end, Jim does go along with the plan of shirking his humanity to end the war for good.
This? Is bullshit.
Neither of them would or could have ANY idea what would happen after those pivotal moments. In what world is becoming an eldritch being that eats peoples fear an expected outcome to taking a promotion? And why would him reading a world-ending statement, like he was forced to do under the likelihood of death, be in any way his fault? In what world is leaving the choice to become more capable of preventing an Eternal Night to a SIXTEEN YEAR OLD, in any way okay? In that same vein, why would the power to stop a war be given to a SIXTEEN YEAR OLD anyway?
So what I’m saying, what summarizes this all, is that Jon and Jim were groomed into what they became and I can’t fault Jon for anything he did as a result of that.
You can get small TMA commissions (a little drawing or short fanfic) in exchange for donating to 1 of 10 Gofundme’s of Palestinians in Gaza (starting May 17th)
There are about 60 artists signed up already who have volunteered to work for free for this to happen. Until May 16th, you can join too!
The project is fanmade and has no connection to Rusty Quill
after all these years people describing the archival crew as “found family” is still hilarious to me like yeah. family in the sense of youre trapped with all these people you dont get along with due to circumstances outside your control i guess.
Look, man, cards on the table, I don’t remember what surname I gave Rosie. The wiki says Zampano, so I guess, yeah, I gave her the name of the fictional writer in House of Leaves.
There is a certain degree of fandom when the fan wiki is more reliable than the creator for dredging up certain details, and TMA hit that sometime in mid season 2
Anyone want to make a podcast with me where we discuss and dissect every episode of The Magnus Archives? It’ll give me an excuse to finally do my relisten and annotation of the transcripts.
i think the reaction to characters being unfair to jon is a good example of how fandom often lacks nuance and has a lot of black and white thinking. while it absolutely is ridiculous and unfair to say characters are evil and terrible people for being mean to jon, it’s just as absurd to say how they treated him was justified and there was nothing wrong with it. i think people have split into two extremes on this issue, which misses the point that the entire podcast is about how people react and interact and change when dealing with fear and extreme situations like this, not about who’s right and who’s wrong. jon was consistently treated with less empathy than the other characters treated each other, and held to a different standard. the other archives staff are much more willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and while they’ll criticize each other at the end of the day there is much more tolerance for each other’s issues than there is for jon’s. that is undeniable. they see each other as humans who make mistakes, and jon as a rabid monster who cannot be trusted. from their perspective, jon is someone standoffish and unfriendly who always pushes too far and asks too much and has growing powers that directly come from the entities responsible for their torment. he is both their superior in terms of his job, and he is essentially the favored child of their jailer. basically like elias, but significantly more present and vulnerable and less of a distant untouchable threat. he has enough power over them (or at least association with those who have power over them) to make them resent him, but not enough to stop the torment or prevent them from lashing out. when you and everyone else you know are humans who are trapped together and suffering, and your boss is locked away feeding on fear and turning into a dangerous monster like the ones who keep hurting you, you’re probably not going to be feeling particularly empathetic towards him. you’re not going to stop and think about how he’s a victim in all this too, because you’re not in a stable enough space to do that and you don’t know his perspective on any of this. that makes sense. it doesn’t excuse the way they treat him like a violent animal, but it does explain why they would have that us versus them mentality. also, all the info on the other archive staff’s emotional state from season 3 and onward, the stuff that explains why they acted the way they did, all of that is from occasional lines and overheard interactions. small pieces. jon is the main character, and we hear the details of his experiences and struggles and trauma and breakdowns and suffering. he is the protagonist and his is the perspective the listener lives in. therefore, he is going to be much easier to be sympathetic towards. if melanie was the protagonist, or even another avatar like annabelle or mike crew, people would be much more understanding of them, because it is easier to be sympathetic when you know every reason why a character acts the way they do. if we listened to melanie for hundreds of hours, her lashing out and getting violent towards characters that didn’t deserve it would be much more understandable. we hear what jon is going through, so we know his life is hell and he is a genuinely good person faced with impossible choices and absolutely terrible situations out of his control. the other characters do not have that perspective and understanding. i just think it’s possible to acknowledge that some characters did treat jon terribly, he didn’t deserve it, and it doesn’t make them irredeemable monsters.
I drew this way back when the series ended and only now have decided to post it. Kismet means I only think of MAG 200 when I hear these lyrics so now I’m subjecting y’all to it. Okay thank you :)
Some sketches of an extremely self indulgent post-series AU. Just… Jon being a single ‘dad’ and working as a barista can be something so personal, y’know?
Did more sketches. Still don’t have an actual plot yet though. Maybe someday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
M…m…more…
What’s this???? It’s… LEVAA WITH THE SINGLE!DAD BARISTA JON TMA AU!!!!
And now comes in the beloatheds. Except Martin. Currently he’s ‘Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Fanfic’. He’ll probably be on the next batch. Idk.
Enter Martin. Planning on finally making the master post for this later.
Did some sketches of a version where Daisy ‘survived’.
Because this is my self-indulgent AU and if I want this type of fluff I will draw it.
Second one of the three @magnusforgaza commission I did! 🍉
If you want an illustration and helping out people in need, check out their post for more info! Lots of other artist joined as well, and I plan to do more if anyone interested. 👁
Post coffin Jon and Daisy for @pinkelotjeart - thank you so much for donating!
