● ⬀ ⬈

morning-softness:

phantomrose96:

phantomrose96:

On my current “relisten of random Magnus Archives episodes” I got to the s2 episode where the supplemental is everyone throwing Jon a “Stop Stalking Us on Suspicion of Murder” intervention party.

And they manage to convince Jon is wasn’t any of them because the cleaned-up CCTV footage exonerates them.

Except

screenshot of a Magnus archives transcript that reads "I’ve been examining the CCTV feeds Elias gave me. It… it does seem to provide everyone with a solid alibi, and no one is seen entering or exiting the archives except Gertrude. At least not before Elias goes down and discovers the blood."ALT

Except

a crop of the above transcript with a bright highlight on the phrase " At least not before Elias goes down and discovers the blood."ALT

Jon… Buddy……

Jonathan “smartest man in the room” Sims: “Thank God. Everyone has a solid alibi. Including Elias who followed Gertrude down into the tunnels alone but don’t worry he was just down there to find the blood and he wasn’t down there killing her or anything. That would be lying.”

tags from mid-nighttiger that read "#lmao #you really think an evil bodystealing avatar of a fear god would do that? just go to the archives and tell lies? #the magnus archives"ALT

This is wild because Jon leaps right to suspecting the tape has been doctored. “I mean, the CCTV is so corrupted that the police can’t just use it immediately, and then they happen to finish restoring it just when I start really digging into the murder!? And if it was an option, why not clean it up when she first disappeared!?” (Episode 65)

And Leitner even says the same thing in Episode 80, that Elias could have potentially interfered with the CCTV. “Simple mechanical eyes? In his place of power? You think he can’t control everything they see? Assuming such interference wouldn’t ruin them beyond recovery, of course.”

But neither of them just consider that maybe during the time Elias claimed to discover the body, he was actually committing the murder first.

Which always led me to think that Elias wasn’t down there for very long, before coming back up and calling the police. In Episode 65, Tim says “You’ve spent a month staring at that footage – double-checking every moment, timing every tea break, looking at me like I somehow staged it,” so we know Jon was very concerned about timing and would have presumably been suspicious if Elias was down there for a long time when he was supposedly just discovering the body. Jon—after a month of careful checking—came to the conclusion that none of the people shown on tape had enough time to commit the murder while they were in the Archives before they reappeared on tape, which renewed his conviction that the murderer had used the tunnels.

This is exactly the kind of addition I needed, from someone who remembers all the hyper-specific details I do not remember.

This leads me to the ONLY conclusion I can arrive at which makes sense to me, which is that Eliajonah–as an avatar of The Eye–is able to manipulate how much people pay attention to him. And every time Jon looks over at him he’s just the picture of doey-eyed “who? me? wittle old me?”