August 2025

A very popular thing that I despise is the certainty of some fans that in season 1 jon was cold and unempathetic, and that he treated the people who came to give their statement heartlessly and cruelly.

And that’s just not true??? He tried to provide them with whatever comfort he could in his position as an archivist, which amounted to him giving them space and cautiously offering to refer them to a specialist. He was meant to record, research and categorize their stories into little boxes. What was he supposed to do, say “of course I believe that you found yourself in an endless foggy field and the only thing that brought you back to reality was your dead husband’s voice” like that’s anything other than logically impossible???

He wasn’t a therapist. His job wasn’t to try and make these freaked out people feel better. His job was to literally pick apart, sort and categorize their experiences into little boxes, which he dutifully did. He was actually quite a decent archivist, with enough curiosity to research the statements carefully, and enough cautiousness to not get killed in the process. That’s why he was doomed

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