i love when ppl draw elias bouchard wearing like anachronistic ass emerald green waistcoats and a monocle in their fanart bc it makes s1 so much funnier to think about. like you know what? yeah actually if i was jonathan sims and my fucking freak of a boss dressed like that and did an evil monologue voice at all times and paid me to read ghost stories in his basement all day, i would also probably be like “yeah this is a deeply unserious job and i am the only normal person here. sick paycheck tho” and then clock the fuck out without ever thinking about those fuckass statements again!! like what are we dunking on him for!! who would chalk that up to anything other than “my weirdass boss has clearly taken his eccentric edwardian magician LARP too far but goddamn if that check doesn’t come in every month”
EYE DONT KNOW ENKUGH ABOUT MAG TO MAKE A FAIR JUDGEMENT HERE BUT THAT SOUNDS AWESOME. EYE WANT A BOSS LIKE THAT
season 1: I’m Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of Magnus Institute, London. My professional opinion is that this is all horseshit and everyone that isn’t me needs psychiatric help. Statement ends.
season 2: Supplemental: God lives inside the printer and he keeps telling me my assistants are murderers. I am inclined to believe him based on the fact that Martin told to have a nice day. Innately suspicious behavior.
season 3: My only friends are my ex-girlfriend, her cat, and the many scars I’ve gotten from various monsters and fear cultists.
season 4: You know, just being socially adept would solve a lot of my problems. Unfortunately, I was traumatized so thoroughly by age eight that I learned the best way to make friends is to blink at them slowly until they get the idea. This does not work when your evil patron god uses eyeballs to devour fear.
season 5: Either Jonah Magnus tells us where he took all the good cows, or my boyfriend and I bash his head in with a lead crowbar. It’s his choice.
I love it when people draw Jonathan Sims as being such a wimpy lil twig of a man that it looks like I could either effortlessly break him over my knee like a stick or eat him like a green bean depending on how scared stiff he is keep up the good work people
best moments in s5 are when jon remembers that being an all-knowing demigod doesnt make him any less of a shivering wet cat when it comes to doing literally anything
martin, for all his faults, at least knows when he’s being self-destructive. he is acutely aware, even. jon, on the other hand, will look directly at daisy and say “it’s all very rational, my back up plan for if I couldn’t get you out of the coffin was that it would just kill me and if that didn’t happen I was hoping that you’d just kill me.”
jon knows that depression and ptsd exist but he thinks he’s immune to them and that all his fantasies about being put down like a dog are merely the reasoned thoughts of a scholarly mind
or, to be fantastically blunt: jon doesn’t think he’s suicidal, he thinks he’s right
It’s so interesting how Michael Shelley (the human) was so trusting, caring and so honest, but that lead to him being deceived, tricked and lied to and made him become the living embodiment of lies, delusion and confusion.
I think that’s why the Distortion chose Helen over him. Michael still had that small human part of him that was the exact opposite of the Distortion.
Michael the Distortion doesn’t want to be Michael because of how the nature of Michael Shelley and Michael the Distortion contradict; one is honest and trusting and deceived while the other one lies, deceives and confuses, and this robs the Distortion of its purpose. The only reason Michael even became the Distortion is that he had the map to help him.
Michael the Distortion wants desperately to be understood, for someone to know the injustice of what happened to poor Michael, and so he lets Jon take his statement and know the honest and bare truth.
Michael got “distracted” with the feelings of Michael Shelley, leading to the door to the Distortion being locked for him and Helen becoming the Distortion.
Leaving Michael once again discarded and disposed of, for simply being too honest and human. Ironic how the first time he’s discarded is when he opens the door, and the second time is when the door does not open for him anymore.
do you know how fucking mad it makes me that the hilltop hole in reality and the panopticon tower can feasibly be read as yonic and phallic symbols of power. can you understand the level of rage I feel.
jon being silly-goofy for so much of season 5 (“methinks the spider doth protest too much,” playing I spy, etc) but it’s because the eye is in full power and pumping him with so much dopamine that he actually has the energy to goof around. he’s full of energy and endorphins but it’s all because he’s powered by everyone else’s suffering. makes you think.
He can finally be more open, more himself now that the only ones truly watching him are Martin and his own eyes high above.
S5 Jon crushing my damn soul because he could have been like that the whole time. That’s not only still Jon, he’s the most Jon he’s felt in ages despite everything that’s happened.
He’s not just a strict boss, or a depressed wet cat. He has the capacity to be silly, and snarky, and play games with his boyfriend. He can be genuinely fun to be around, but somewhere along the way he lost a lot of that. He had to lose damn near everything before he could finally let go enough to be that again, and it’s still such a tragically short time.
Ok and I’m alive??? I’m alive??? I am so alive??? And I feed on the fear that’s behind your eyes??? And I need you to need me it’s no surprise??? I’m alive??? So alive??? I’m alive???
trying to figure out how jon would realistically relate to his queerness is a bit of a never ending conundrum, because, on the one hand, he’s a super emotionally repressed and ashamed person who spends a lot of his arc at turns feverishly adhering to and trying to free himself from a highly gendered performance of class. his instinctive response to feeling vulnerable is to cover up his emotions, deepen his voice, exaggerate his accent, and make it look like he’s above all those weak-willed credulous idiots to disguise the fact that he very much feels like a weak-willed credulous idiot. he’s so used to ignoring his emotions that he can’t even figure out what they are when directly asked by his dearest loved one, and he’s got a, shall we say, Bad relationship to his body and his feelings of ownership over it.
on the other hand, he uses terminology like “male presenting” in his own private notes, he exclusively wears his ex gf’s clothes for two months without batting an eyelid, he has basically no reaction at all to finding out other people in his social circle are queer, he dgaf about experiencing homophobic microaggressions, and his romantic relationship with a man is potentially the only thing in the entire show that he isn’t paranoid about fucking up and losing. to me this paints a picture of a person who has manged to internalize really quite crushing and life-altering queerphobia about everything except, somehow, for his actual queerness. he thinks he’s a lily-livered spineless wimp and an inhuman heartless abomination but that has nothing to do with his biromantic asexuality.
ALT
