Jon is so much stronger than me because if everyone I knew including my boyfriend were telling me that I’m better off dead then I would’ve caved in and killed myself for real
Hypothetically speaking, could this be applied to Jon Archivist Sims
Jon is so much stronger than me because if everyone I knew including my boyfriend were telling me that I’m better off dead then I would’ve caved in and killed myself for real
I’ve already said on here multiple times how Martin’s season 5 development was all over the place. But now that I think about it, Jon was also underdeveloped.
Some time ago I’ve said that it felt like Martin was needed in s5 so that Jon, as an all-seeing being, could explain things that he knew to him and the audience. But besides the fact that he’s all-seeing and barfing up horrors and it feels even more awful than reading the statements, there isn’t much said about how it impacts him as a person. We don’t know exactly what is it that he sees, all we get is brief glimpses of horror that he describes aloud when overloaded with information.
The audience stays in the dark in regards to Jon and his thought process. He doesn’t talk to the tapes about anything other than the horror surrounding them which is only needed so that the audience knows where the episode is meant to play out. and it doesn’t really have any importance to the plot other than to set a scene. Plus since Martin actively shuts him up whenever he tries to say something about the Fears themselves, we can’t even know any of the more basic info that Jon is said to be aware of. The audience is just suddenly locked out of Jon’s pov and instead we got the Jon-Martin relationship treating them as a singular entity, with Jon only filling the role of the “inhuman” partner.
It’s like. Up to this point, the audience got to consistently witness Jon’s development. When we met him, he was putting up the skeptic act. Then we saw his fear-induced paranoia. Then he was staying over at an ex-girlfriends house and frantically searching for clues. Then was the whole operation to stop the Unknowing. After that there was Jon’s coma, and the audience got to see him be slowly consumed by his patron and be abandoned and hated by nearly all his coworkers. We got first row seats to whatever he was going through at the moment.
But for the majority of season 5 all that we are presented with is the JonMartin apocalyptic hike, Jon slaying some of the avatars they come across, and Martin complaining about how scary it all is and how the avatars are evil. Maybe I’m wrong, but the only few moments the audience got to actually see Jon’s point of view and the self-hatred that being the one who started the apocalypse have forced upon him was when he got repeatedly ignored during the discussion regarding his life and the fate of the universe.
Idk maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s just because I dislike the way season 5 was written. But I feel like in most of the episodes JonMartin were reduced to just being a couple.
Well if *I* got promoted to a higher position and there was no one available to train me and my colleagues were whispering behind my back about me not being qualified for the job so I felt like I had to prove them wrong somehow, and I got an assistant who had worked there longer than me and very clearly had zero clue about the job he was supposed to do, then I too would’ve despised him. How was Jon supposed to come off as a responsible archivist if one of his assistants refused to read the statements because they “spooked him”. I’d have felt like I was being sabotaged
Hypothetically speaking, could this be applied to Jon Archivist Sims
Hey, I'm someone with actual Learned Helplessness (and it's a thing I have talked about in therapy). And I love projecting that onto Jon. Please continue. You're doing great.
Okay 💗 yay 💗 (I’m gonna be honest when I saw the beginning of that ask I thought you were gonna tell me to kms so this is a pleasant surprise)
Anyway, since this is not something I myself have experience with, and the information about it that I do have is very limited, then I might as well be wrong. But here is how I see it:
Every single time Jon tried to do something with good intentions, it either didn’t change anything at all or made things worse. Trying to get rid of NotSasha resulted in freeing a dangerous entity from its imprisonment, got him falsely accused of Leinter’s murder, and cost him his job and apartment. The first statement giver whose story he directly acknowledged as true, Helen Richardson, didn’t even get to leave the Institute’s building before getting “eaten” by the same door that had been haunting her. He tried his hardest to stop the Unknowing only to find out it would’ve collapsed on its own, and that Tim sacrificed himself for nothing. There are probably more examples but I can’t really recall any more rn
Anyway, after trying his best to change anything then repeatedly failing, plus (in the later seasons) being hated by literally everyone he knew, I imagine Jon developed a belief that nothing he could do would ever change anything, and so he stopped trying entirely. I don’t really remember any of the s4 metaplot but I think this best applies to the Jon from that period.
Of course later he found out that every singe action he had taken was influenced in some way by his boss or some cosmic being and that none of his choices were truly his own and that trying to fix things caused him to be the main sacrifice in a world-ending ritual. (There was also something in s5 about Martin insisting that they help the people trapped in domains and Jon refusing because it’s impossible/it wouldn’t change anything but he was implied to Know™️ that through the Eye so I dunno)
This is probably all wrong but I don’t feel like digging through the transcripts right now so just take it