Relationship of Peter and Elias is from one half Elias being cryptic and refusing to elaborate on anything and from the other half Peter pretending to misunderstand literally everything Elias says.
I bring you new lonelyeyes headcannon about how Peter and Elias got together!
Jonah was boasting to Simon about his seduction skills and how they over the years only got better. And so Simon made a bet with him about whether will be Jonah able to seduce person of his chosing. And Simon of course chose young Peter Lukas.
And so Jonah tries. To Simon’s amusement he is not very successful no matter how hard he tries. Not even the tricks that worked on Mordechai works on Peter.
So when Peter all annoyed asks him what’s his deal and why cannot he leave him finally alone frustrated Jonah admits the bet with Simon.
However Peter is at the moment annoyed by Simon who keeps beating him in cards and so he makes a deal with Jonah and pretends to be seduced by him.
Based on how was Simon’s and Jonah’s bet formulated it could even lead to fake marriage!
Anyway unfortunately they catch feeling along the way!
Oh wait this is fake dating AU… hah I did not realize till now… Anyway I will probably add this on list of my fanfic plans…
All the little eye accessories (eyeccessories?) we tend to give to Elias are on the front side of his clothes. For example eye pin, eye tie, eye buttons…
But if he wanted to include any eyes on his outfit (eyefit?) wouldn’t he wanted some eyes to watching his back as well?
Big eye on his back probably wouldn’t be very subtle… But maybe little eyes at the back of his shoes?
I haven’t been very online lately, but I figured it would be fun to post some miscellaneous meta/fan theories, ranging from “I think this is absolutely true,” to “canon compliant patches on plot holes,” to “look, this is the most absolutely ridiculous idea, but I love it.” In no particular order:
1. The reason Gertrude bound Gerry Keay in the skin book was to prevent him from becoming reborn as a fully-realized Avatar of the Eye. Much like Oliver, Trevor (who also had cancer), and even Jon himself, Gerry died and would have returned with full Eye powers if not for Gertrude’s actions. He already had some improved skills as we see in MAG 162 when he’s chatting with Gertrude in the archives, and it seems like his zeal for eyes and eye iconography is already paying off. What I wouldn’t give to read the AU where Gertrude gets waylaid trying to put Gerry in the skin book and he comes back as a freelance Eye Avatar (Gerry Keay, Private Eye???), messes with Elias/Jonah/The Web’s plans, and occasionally pops up as Jon’s mysterious benefactor. Obviously in this AU, his many eye tattoos become actual eyes. You’ve seen Jon with his hundred Archivist eyes - it’s only fair that Gerry gets his chance to look extra cool, too.
2. In MAG 196-7, the reason the Web, unlike the other Fears, is self-aware is because people started imagining it like that - it changes as it takes the shape that people give to it. Once people started fearing “the Web” proper and not just manipulation/lack of control, it took on its own personality.
3. This is also why the Fears end up splitting in Smirke’s way as per MAG 200 - he saw some legitimate faultlines, but as people came to believe in Smirke’s taxonomy, and it became hegemonic, the Fears started to reshape in that way. This would connect to MAG 183, Monument, where Jon argues that the hubris of people like Smirke giving systematic shape to the Fears is what let them come through. This could be compatible with an account of the fears as having a variety of culturally specific forms insofar as: a) other societies had their own accounts of the Fears, but did not share the Victorian mania for taxonomy, and thus didn’t regard them as easily-definable entities; and b) there was a broad enough range of views of the fears and which were salient in different cultures but none ever became dominant enough to produce really robust faultlines that went all the way through.
4. The spiders are there because spiders are associated with trickery/wisdom/storytelling in a lot of mythologies. A lot of what the Web/Annabelle is doing is like this.
5. Annabelle has a more complicated relationship with the Web than we see in canon - mostly because she’s such an interesting and charming character, and I think it’s interesting to explore how she would relate to, and maybe even try to outsmart/outmaneuver a patron that is more conscious than the others. It seemed like there were interesting points in 196-7 where there was slippage between her speaking as herself and her speaking as a herald for the Web, and the question of what that’s like would be really interesting.
6. The coin in the Schwartzwald tomb that had “for the silence” embossed on it is actually evidence of historical alliances between the Eye and the Lonely. Yes, I mean LonelyEyes but make it medieval Germany. I don’t know if this showed up ever in canon, but I always associated the Lonely with a sort of uncanny quiet.
7. The mummy from MAG 64, Burial Rites, has an apocalypse Domain. It was really weird.
8. Wakefield Prison was a Domain, and Father Burroughs its extremely unwilling Avatar.
9. Jon with tattoos. I am not the first person to say this by any stretch of the imagination, but I absolutely believe it to be true.
10. Jon sees Gerry, willing to be overtly alt and not take any bs about how he presents himself, and is filled with a mix of admiration and envy: he’s being buttoned down at the office to seem more credible, but he resents the anxiety that makes him do it, resents the wishy-washy indecisiveness that makes him reach for his long-sleeved shirts every morning before work. In my hypothetical AU where Gerry is still alive, Jon ultimately cultivates a healthier sense of self-expression (rather than the eventual “screw this, I give up, might as well wear my depression pajamas comfy clothes” approach I imagine Jon takes in canon - especially S3).
11. Martin definitely went to a few open mic poetry nights, perhaps when he first moved to London, but he was kind of awkward and didn’t end up making any friends, and eventually stopped going, realizing that he was trying very hard to go through the motions of meeting people and being social, but somehow totally failing to connect with anyone.
12. There were undercurrents of Jmart relatively early on, but both of them were probably initially upset to realize they had crushes: “oh no - I like him? Eugh!” Basically the fun feeling of knowing you’re starting to like someone, being irritated about that fact, and then insisting that no, it’s only that that particular person is irritating, not any emotions you might have towards them.
13. Elias has some eye-themed accessories, but they’re discreet and tasteful. No! That tie pin is absolutely not..KITSCHY! Peter, how dare you say that!
Jonah Magnus is a night owl. He would get too caught up in his studies and completely lost track of the time. Also gentleman gatherings are at the afternoon or evening anyway so no reason not to stay up all night reading books.
But!
Elias Bouchard is an early bird. During the years Jonah become more organized and gained fondness for having everything perfectly scheduled. There’s no need to rush and read five new books a day. Also! How could he miss the best part of the early morning - delicious trauma of so many miserable people traveling to their horrible badly paid jobs?
been thinking a lot about the Jonah Magnus backstory I like
in that he was born the only son of a wealthy lord and was genuinely pretty intelligent but lacked ambition and work drive, to his father’s dismay. He mostly grows up around his father/mother and the staff that work the estate.
I like the idea that he does have a connection to the Eye, personified mostly through his habit of watching the guests/staff through a telescope from the attic. He gets nothing out of schmoozing, but he does get an unexpected pleasure out of knowing everyone’s dirty little secrets (whether to get them fired or just to get a sense of Undeserved Superiority, because his father might complain about him but at least he doesn’t fuck behind the stables)
He lived a pretty pampered life that sheltered him from most everything, except one day, he gets a chance encounter that acquaints him with the concept of dying.
“He likes me. I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things.”
“Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.”
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
My favorite line of Basil talking about Dorian which perfectly fits my headcannon of how Barnabas would describe Jonah…
Has Elias ever divorced and then almost imidately proposed to Peter just because he wanted wedding cake?
Elias insist on eating the cake all by himself and not sharing. Isn’t it more lonely that way, Pater! Peter is in crisis because: yes, it sounds lonely to let Elias to eat the whole cake alone but also he wants cake too…
me literally every single time i visit archiveofourown to peruse fanfiction: “omg archive… just like in the magnus archives…”
This literally being the first fandom I’ve ever actively searched for fics: Oh that’s nice, the Magnus Archives created its very own website for fanfics and called it Archive of Our Own
On that note… What do you mean that “Do Not Archive” is not nsfw tag made specially for the Magnus Archives?
Jonah thought he wouldn’t feel anything after losing Barnabas that he doesn’t care that he can sacrifice him to satisfy his curiosity… In the end he was suprised that Barnabas’ death really hit him…
On the other hand he expected that lost of Peter would make him feel something. Yes their relationship was always a one of convenience and all the feelings were just a performance for sake of it…. But somewhere deep inside Jonah thought it will - it might make him feel something. He was genuinely suprised how indifferent he was towards Peter’s death. He was even a bit disappointed by that. He hoped to feel something again…
Magnus archives AU where there is four assistant but they got through the whole tma without encountering any supernatural because they’ve always taken a day off when some big event is happening…
I already share few of my Jonahbas headcannons but may I interested you also in some of my headcannons about Jonathan Faneshawe and his relantionship towards Jonah Magnus (Jonahtan… Jonahshawe? Okay neither of those are probably a real ship names… Does it have a real ship name…?)
Jonathan Fanshawe was from good enough family and he could have lived quite comfortable life treating rich men but he was always much more interested in gaining new knowledge though he was excusing it to himself that examination of dead bodies and illnesses will have bigger impact and might do more good.
He might have even partly work as a coroner - government or judicial official who is empowered to conduct or order an inquest into the manner or cause of death (since he could just request Von Closens body for post-mortem)
He was also performing operations/autopsies in Operating theater* in which students and other spectators could watch surgeons perform surgery. Jonathan was regularly going off the script and trying to do his own inovations. It caught Jonah’s attention as he might have been sneaking there in his own pursue of knowledge. However the univesity was less thrilled and Fanshawe was eventually forbbiden to continue his practice there.
Jonah was trying to make acquaintances with Fanshawe who couldn’t be less interested after just getting dismissed. But in the end Jonah managed to hunt him down on the cemetery where Fanshawe was trying get bodies to experiment on in a less legal way**. Being caught in such an incriminating situation he had no other choice than to listen to his proposal of cooperation.
Jonah wanted to help him even though he still lacked enough monetary means. He got much more important thing: plenty of connections in higher society to whom he could introduce his new good friend ’who was an amazing doctor’ and ’yes indeed all the rumors about him were not true at all!’
Jonathan was overall quite introverted and not so much interested in most of the small talk and pointless conversation but when someone asked him about a topic which was of his expertise he started to ramble about it as much as Jonah did
*I wanted him to be doing public autopsies but after a deep research I found that they on the contrary seem to be illegal to perform. However if anyone have some better reliable source about it please let me know!
**funfact - grave robbing for fresh corpses was quite a thing in the beginning of Victotian era. The grave robbers were called Resurrectionists and they were selling the bodies for autopsies. Fanshawe wanted to simply cut the middle man.
Important question: what social media is Elias using? The amount of personal information people are putting on the internet is something catching an eye of any Eyevatar.
Anyway I think he has facebook and he added to his friends list every single employe of the Magnus instute no matter how much private or in secret their facebook is. He keeps randomly asking them why haven’t they accept his friend request until they do. He also force those who doesn’t have an account to create one.
He also made them all join some group where he keeps posting announcement, bad memes and bad motivation quotes. He use lots of emojis mostly incorrectly.
However I will leave up to you to decide whether he keeps doing all those boomer stuff just to be obnoxious or because he really doesn’t have such a good grasp on modern technology as he would like to think…
As soon as my finals are done, I’m going to relisten to S5 and make a whole thing about Jon continually throughout season 5 framing the apocalypse through the pain and suffering everyone is going through and the need to end the source of the suffering versus Martin continually seeing the humanity in others even when he can’t communicate with them. And in that, how both of their perspectives shape the final decisions they made on how to deal with the fears. Mainly, Jon so focused on destroying the entities that he loses sight that the reason to destroy the entities is to save people and Martin throughout the journey so focused on saving people that he never lets himself see the bigger picture ever.
