in which the jongerry WIP finally gets some actual jongerry in it
“So what do- I do?” “Mmh?” Gerry asks, and swallows hurriedly. “What, if you find another one? Talk to Gertrude, I guess.” “I’m not really… allowed,” Jon says. He’s really not – interaction with the Archives at all is the remit of senior researchers and senior researchers only (not that that’s always saying much) but if he wanted to talk to her he’d have to go through his supervisor, which means it would probably get back to Elias, and after everything that went down with the Declerc case… “Do you have a phone?” Gerry blinks. “What?” “I- sorry, I shouldn’t have-“ “No, no, I do, I just- I didn’t think you’d-“ “-don’t worry about it, I can-“ “Here,” Gerry says firmly, and grabs Jon’s hand. Jon freezes up, every muscle locked into stiffness and every sense focused on the sensation of Gerry’s fingers against his, remarkably warm despite the breeze and the chill. Jon has to hold in a gasp at the heat. Gerry, oblivious, hooks a Sharpie out of a pocket and scribbles something down on Jon’s palm: [ELEVEN?] numbers, no dashes, in a remarkably graceful script. He tips Jon’s hand to the side, inspecting it, and then says “God, you’re freezing. Why didn’t you say something?” Jon struggles for words, for a moment, and then when Gerry’s eyes flick up to meet his manages to get out “–this was more important.”
I just need to know which of the choices from that poll I made was correct 😔
Oh god oh fuck I looked for spoilers to The Hilltop and though I didn’t find any, really, I did see something and now I’m positive I’m going to VOMIT when it’s released and I can watch it oh my god oh my god oh my god. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. There’s going to be GIFSSSSSSS. SOMEONE SEDATE ME.
Jonny Sims: I am literally the worst casting for the Archivist, I apologise in advance for making you hear the voice of Jonathan Sims coming from (gestures) this body.
Also Jonny Sims: (proceeds to perfectly and amazingly embody the Archivist for 2 hours and 30 minutes)
Thinking about how trauma and reconciliation presents itself in The Magnus Archives and Moon Knight. Thinking about how both Jon and Marc were traumatized at young ages by watching someone they knew die in front of them, among other things. Thinking about how they ended up in positions where people are hurt or worse because of them in direct cause of that formative experience. Thinking about how they’re not given any forgiveness for that pain by those they hurt… however…
Thinking about how Marc is told his trauma wasn’t his fault and despite still not being forgiven for his actions because of it, in the end he’s able to choose a different way and will eventually be able reconcile with those he hurt and forgive himself.
Thinking about how Jon was told his trauma was the reason everyone around him was being hurt and that it wouldn’t matter if he tried to fix anything, it would still be his fault simply for existing, and he would never deserve forgiveness.
Thinking about how a key component to this is how both of them are unable to be open about that trauma. Thinking about how both pushed away any support system they had out of a misguided need to protect them. Thinking about how Marc had people begging him to be open about it and his feelings in order to understand and help him. Thinking about how Jon was consistently ignored or silenced when he eventually tried to make his emotions and actions known. Thinking about how both of their support systems were also dealing with trauma. Thinking about how Marc’s support system never once thought of his trauma as lesser than theirs. Thinking about how Jon’s support system only ever saw his trauma as an excuse that belittled theirs. Thinking about how Marc’s worked with him while Jon’s worked against him.
Thinking about how it wasn’t love that saved Marc, at least not the kind of love that’s valued, but the simple recognition that he wasn’t alone in his pain and how that meant placing his heart in their hand for protection. Thinking about how love saved Jon’s world, if not him, but the kind of love that meant giving someone the ability to kill you and knowing they would because of it rather than in spite of it as that’s all he knew love was.
Thinking about how trauma and reconciliation presents itself in The Magnus Archives and Moon Knight and how cynicism will always be weaker than hope.
Literally will never recover from the character Jon Sims. Cursed by spiders from age 8. Acted skeptical of horrific entities while fighting said entities. Tried to cut off his own finger repeatedly. Partook in an enemies-to-lovers romance in which only he believed them to be enemies. Short. Kidnapped at least 3 times. Surrounded by queer women who are constantly threatening to kick his ass. No understanding of pop culture. Possessed by a purveyor of apocalyptic beat poetry. Said the first “I love you” in the show, directed at a cat that was biting him. Called a merry-go-round “thrilling.” Metaphysically disassembled anyone who was mean to his boyfriend. Said “good lord” unironically. Asked a murderous Russian clown why she didn’t sound Russian. He was even bi
And ace! And he was neglected as a child, and he found the idea that his grandmother thought he might like to read picture books when he was eight years old insulting, and he was bullied, and he could never read more than one book from the same author, and he eats rum raisin ice cream, and he knows what a meme is, and he start going grey before he hit 40, and and and…
He’s such a plethora of things. We spent 200 episodes with him so we know a great deal about him, but we’ll never know it all. He’s one of the most fleshed-out, well-developed characters I’ve ever encountered in any piece of media or literature. Most novels I’ve read don’t contain quite so many personal details about the protagonist.
The culminating effect of all the minutiae we learn about Jon, and all the experiences we as the audience endure alongside him, is that TMA evokes in its audience an unmatched feeling of verisimilitude. Jon seems more authentically human, more real, to the audience (or to me at least) than most characters I’ve encountered in literature, television, or even other audio dramas. Because our focus character is Jon, and Jon is such a convincing facsimile of a real person, the whole fictional world he occupies is more easy to immerse oneself in than it would be otherwise.
Of course, that phenomenon can’t be solely attributed to the authenticity of Jon’s character, both in terms of writing and performance. But I would argue that it’s a major factor.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. All this to say I too will literally never recover from the character Jon Sims
So in Georgies statement, she talks about how she temporarily lost all emotions, then took a gap year to recover them. After that she said was when she meet Jon and was “almost able to live on her own” which makes me think that at around the time of their break up is when the rest of her emotions finally broke through. Imagine how volatile she would have been at that point. Jon, of corse, would neither know why, nor I imagine handle it well at that stage of his life; but I kinda think Georgie would have been the reason things ended badly between them. Jon just reacting to her sudden strange bursts of emotions. In most fanfic I’ve read, it was something Jon did, and I imagine he would see it that way too, but I think it was really Georgie who would have insighted what ever happened between them
I like it how first we realize jon sims was raised by an elderly woman and like ohh! makes a lot of sense right lol. and then we realize he was an orphan neglected through most of his childhood and now being an adult still truly believes he was a deeply annoying kid because that helps him to cope with the fact the last person who was supposed to care about him unconditionally did not. because, as far as he thinks, there was always something fundamentally wrong with him, making him unlovable to people He cares about. and we’re like. Ohh. makes a lot of sense right
feeling controversial so. daisy elias fandom misogyny parallels
one is a queer woman masculinized because of the belief that violence and single-mindedness are masculine things (plus the idea that masculinity is “less work” and “less effort” and so she’d become more masculine as she becomes more dedicated to the hunt, despite that. not generally being true, Especially for people societally recognized as Men) while the other is a queer man repeatedly feminized due to his indirect control over varying aspects of the plot and treated as more incompetent because of it
literally just begging yall to acknowledge the stereotypes you’re perpetuating while posting. please. someone being violent doesn’t mean they’re masc. someone being manipulative doesn’t mean they’re feminine
I am deranged about Dr. Manuela Dominguez. Her backstory compels me so (as I too am an aspiring physicist who grew up in a regressive religious environment) but her conduct makes me want to engage her in a duel. I have never met anyone else who really seemed to give a damn about her either way and would love to discuss her with you if you ever feel like it. This is an open invitation to rant
HAHAHAH. YOU’VE ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD.
Listen. I went to Catholic school. From pre-K to 3rd grade. My earliest memories are of being terrified of the light of God. Because all sinners are unable to look upon it without fear. And I knew before anything else that I was a disgusting sinner simply for being born. How else was I supposed to imagine an afterlife, at barely five or six years of age, as being anything but a void of sight and sound. Utter darkness except your consciousness. How else was I supposed to feel when Manuela said “…and ‘let there be light’ the most evil words ever spoken…” but totally and completely understood on a level I never knew possible. Much like how she felt about Maxwell. Speaking words from my soul I never knew were there until spoken. Of course I attached to her and her sermon. Of course I wanted her to accomplish my long held desire to destroy the Sun. And that’s not even getting into how my brother fed into my fear of the monsters in the closet and under the bed at that same age by informing me that they can crawl under the blanket to get you, inciting me to be afraid of sleeping without any light up until I was IN COLLEGE. I was always going to be this way. I was always going to be Dark-aligned. Manuela was always going to be my favorite Avatar. Feeding into my own thoughts? Preaching to the choir??? What else is religious fervor BUT that?
TLDR; every ex-Catholic is an acolyte of the Dark, dipshit, it came free with our fucking guilt.
I am deranged about Dr. Manuela Dominguez. Her backstory compels me so (as I too am an aspiring physicist who grew up in a regressive religious environment) but her conduct makes me want to engage her in a duel. I have never met anyone else who really seemed to give a damn about her either way and would love to discuss her with you if you ever feel like it. This is an open invitation to rant
Listen. I went to Catholic school. From pre-K to 3rd grade. My earliest memories are of being terrified of the light of God. Because all sinners are unable to look upon it without fear. And I knew before anything else that I was a disgusting sinner simply for being born. How else was I supposed to imagine an afterlife, at barely five or six years of age, as being anything but a void of sight and sound. Utter darkness except your consciousness. How else was I supposed to feel when Manuela said “…and ‘let there be light’ the most evil words ever spoken…” but totally and completely understood on a level I never knew possible. Much like how she felt about Maxwell. Speaking words from my soul I never knew were there until spoken. Of course I attached to her and her sermon. Of course I wanted her to accomplish my long held desire to destroy the Sun. And that’s not even getting into how my brother fed into my fear of the monsters in the closet and under the bed at that same age by informing me that they can crawl under the blanket to get you, inciting me to be afraid of sleeping without any light up until I was IN COLLEGE. I was always going to be this way. I was always going to be Dark-aligned. Manuela was always going to be my favorite Avatar. Feeding into my own thoughts? Preaching to the choir??? What else is religious fervor BUT that?
TLDR; every ex-Catholic is an acolyte of the Dark, dipshit, it came free with our fucking guilt.
My friend, I cannot believe you left so much beautiful writing in the tags of your answer, so I’m gonna rb with those & tell everyone to look at the damn tags.
We are on the same wavelength. I was brought up in a different denomination, but between my love for science, my lesbianism, and the simple fact that I was born a girl? I honestly cannot remember ever feeling truly welcome in a church. I cannot recall having ever been comforted more than I was terrified by what I was taught about God.
(I initially wrote a long rant about the most egregious bits of doctrine I was raised on, but decided to cut it out for the sake of brevity. I’m sure you already know most of what I was going to say.)
On the other hand, I often found solace in mentally removing myself from what was happening here, on this little rocky world, and reading about or contemplating the true heavenly bodies— stars and their ilk. When studying physics and astronomy, I sometimes feel a kind of religious ecstasy that I never experienced at Sunday school.
The more I learn about the scope of the Universe, the more absurd it seems that an omniscient, all-powerful, all-loving God would be so invested in the minutiae of humanity’s day-to-day activities. If there was a being who snapped His fingers to trigger the Big Bang, why would he waste his infinite time on the petty affairs of humanity rather than marveling at the beauty of the wondrous phenomena taking place all over the cosmos He had made?
So if you can’t tell, I’m an atheist now as well as a devotee of the Vast (a Vastard, if you will). But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the beauty and tranquility of the Dark. While I had a normal degree of fear of the dark in childhood, and my vivid imagination conjured for me some interesting monsters (including, funnily enough, a small army of flesh-eating creatures who lived under my bed & would crawl under my blankets and eat me if I didn’t tuck my blankets around me properly), I now hate wasting electricity by turning on the lights, day or night, when I can see and navigate perfectly well in the cool dark of my home. I also enjoy walking and driving at night whenever I can, and my favorite job of all time was giving evening shows at my university’s planetarium.
Anyway. The Daedalus trilogy is perhaps my favorite part of the whole Magnus Archives series, and I understand exactly why Dr. Dominguez evokes such feelings of love and self-identification in you. Jan Kilbride’s statement did something similar to me. Thank you for sharing!
Oooo. Thank you for that!!! You’re reflecting some of my own thoughts and much more eloquently than I.
Truly, Jan’s statement on the vastness of space touched on why I am terrified of space and space travel. Being unable to find the ground beneath you and nothing to keep you from drifting?? Awful.
People keep on forgetting that the not them makes subtle changes and not full blown race changes (it’s funny yes but not accurate)
Like the episode where a girl’s mother got eaten by the not them she talked about how it was only subtle changes like changes in the way she smiles, her hair is curlier and she sounds slightly different
It’s enough of a change that you can tell it’s not the same person but also enough that it can really easily manipulate people into believing it’s them
Got reminded that there are people who think Jonah Magnus is a compelling character and think he’s sexy and write non-con fanfics of him and Jon, who is canonically asexual and also was groomed by him.
i really like jane prentiss’ statement because it’s objectively a good piece of writing and voice acting, but also because of the random diss towards the spiral is so funny???
I have a thought. About a ‘somewhere else’ fic. Wherein the whole ‘sever them’ thing initially applies to Jon’s memories as well. That they wake up in a hospital and Jon, once he’s stable enough, remembers nothing. And Martin decides it’s too much to handle and ‘lets Jon go’ or whatever. And they get new identities, with Jon spending a lot of time in recovery and Martin periodically checking in on him from a distance. Blah blah blah. Eventually leading to Martin trying to get Jon to fall in love with him again and/or regain his memories by visiting the cafe Jon works at on the regular and striking up conversations that Jon mostly reciprocates and. Like. The climax being that Jon had actually regained most of if not all of his memories after about like three or six months of them being there. He just decided it was better for them both to have a fresh start. And Martin is like ‘okay but it’s not good and even if this really hurt me I can’t not want to still be with you because you’re the only one who knows about our world’ but Jon insists and just throws the whole ‘but we wouldn’t have’ scene in his face and they don’t get back together. I will emphasize again JUST HOW MUCH they will not get back together. I don’t know anything else that would happen or how it would end I just can picture how to Martin it would be like a romance and for Jon it would just be a drama.
Can we talk about just how suicidal jon was in those last few episodes and the whole last season really. He wanted to end it because he was suicidal and that rips me apart
Probably gonna post the first completed part I have of this on my AO3 tonight after some base editing. Maybe get a light under my ass to finish part two.
People call Jon arrogant for his paranoia in season 2 but like… If I found out the last GIS technician at my work (my predecessor ish) was freaking murdered and left in some mysterious tunnels under the office after months of reading about terrifying worms that lived in the sewers I was doing GIS for and their leader worm Queen stole my colleague’s phone and threatened me with it by my job title like it was something of import, I would be pretty paranoid too 🤣🤣🤣
I just received another text message. From you. “Keep him. We have had our fun. He will want to see it when the Archivist’s crimson fate arrives.”
Yah if I got some text about the GIS technician’s crimson fate arriving then months later found the last GIS technician’s rotting corpse hidden under the building I wouldn’t be doing okay either
*appears in front of your bed while you’re trying to sleep* do you ever think about how Tim was the one Jon trusted the most? when he reads Oliver’s statement abt Gertrude dying he says he has Tim look into it because he “doesn’t entirely trust the others not to have written it as a practical joke” (quote from memory)
neither Sasha nor Martin seem like the kind of people who’d do that and I think Jon is aware because he throws the “entirely” in there so it seems like he’s doing his Jon Thing of everyone is a suspect just in case
except Tim
think about that and then how he treats Tim in season 2 and try not to start biting things
i don’t think jon sims would ever intentionally have a child, however. he would absolutely accidentally acquire one pheonix wright style and become absolutely enamored with them.
like someone he was close to gets murdered by one of the powers in front of him and he blames himself for not being able to stop it. so in typical jon guilt complex fashion, he takes it upon himself to adopt their young child. one day the kid’s school is canceled and he can’t find a sitter, so he brings the kid to work and everyone in the archives is losing their shit. sasha and tim are teasing him about being soft and trying to get embarrassing stories out of the kid. martin spontaneously combusts.
Hi! Big fan of your work. I was at MCM in May and went to the Rusty Quill panel and I was going to ask this months ago but kept forgetting about it. I ask with much concern (I might have misremembered your exact words, I hadn't slept, maybe my brain just made this up): was the thing about the body parts getting mailed to the PO box true or was it a joke?
Thinking about the fact that canonically Jon was talked about behind his back by not just his ‘friends’ but by other workers at the institute. Thinking about how Jon canonically doesn’t have friends throughout the podcast and beyond. Thinking about how this is just an extension of the fact Jon was unwanted and shown how unwanted he was as a child by not just his grandmother but by a boy twice his age and likely his peers as well. Thinking about how isolated and hated he was even before he started on the path to becoming the Archivist.
Remembering that Jon was the top suspect for Gertrude’s murder simply because he was her replacement is almost funnier than him suspecting any of his coworkers
Basira goes down into the basement of an old Institute with an embarrassing reputation among everyone from academics to youtubers. She shoulders her way through a labyrinth of cardboard boxes and loose files entombing a thoroughly traumatized office worker, who just got back from physical therapy for the horrific injuries he sustained on the job.
Ah, she thinks, this man murdered an old woman he might have met once so he could have this highly appealing and enviable job.
What if I headcanon that one of the things Jon’s bully stole from him was something that had belonged to one of his parents. What if I add to the immeasurable pain I feel over baby Jon.
His grandmother passes and his tiny London flat has no room for all her things and the memories they bring. It’s okay, didn’t need it much anyway.
He goes on the run with no time to even go home to grab a spare change of clothes. Who knows what was lost or broken as the police search his flat and his lease expires.
He wakes up from his coma, and even the change of clothes he kept in his office is thrown away. It’s okay, he’s used to this now. What’s losing everything he owns when he’s already lost his life and humanity?
He flees to Scotland, barely glancing at what he leaves behind as he stuffs a bag with bare essentials. For once, his hands aren’t empty, because Martin’s is gripped in his.
He hasn’t bothered to collect keepsakes for years; it’s only a matter of time before he loses it all again. But Martin gifted him a teacup with a cat on it after he caught Jon smiling at it. Jon leaves it behind when they set out to save the world.
At the end, he hopes for Somewhere Else, knowing that even that fragile thread of hope will leave their bloodied hands empty. It’s alright. It’s alright. He’s come to expect to lose everything he touches.
Heyy so you know how Jon keeps losing everything he has. His friends. His family. His personal belongings. Parts of his body. Parts of himself. You know how Martin has always kept everyone at a comfortable distance. How he’s grown accustomed to the feeling of alienation he feels inside.
What if. Being together brings them comfort. Because they know that eventually, one day, they will both leave. Martin will disappear. He’ll distance himself so far from everything that troubles him that he’ll be too far for Jon to reach out to. Jon will turn away. The guilt, the hunger, the profound sense of otherness will consume him and he will seek a place to hide like an animal feeling its end drawing near. The distance between them will grow so large they won’t be able to reach out and pull each other close once again. And they will be left with nothing one more time. Just as it always had been.
The moment Jon and Martin got in a relationship they both saw only its inevitable end. Every gesture, every word tainted with the feeling that this won’t last. Let’s hold hands for as long as we can, because we both know we want to let go.
I enjoyed doing it a lot and if anyone wants me to do another one please let me know!! I know for a fact there are many more quotes to be used because Jon is Beloved, even though I make fun of him a little bit in the video. It’s out of love 💜
ALT
