I’m going to blatantly copy and paste things I said on Discord here, but.
Something I find interesting is that there was no way for a human to know exactly what the post-change world would be like. Jonah threw himself into that unknown rather than face the possibility of death, he assured himself of his place in the new world almost blindly. I don’t think he just never stopped to consider that in two centuries. I think the goal of being the only victorious fighter, of transcending everything mattered more to him than the specifics of what could happen. This leads me to conclude that what he fears of death isn’t the unknown per se but the thought of the utter powerlessness that comes with it; he wanted to place himself beyond it, and whatever that entailed (good or horrific) he wanted it to be by his own hand.
This (the desperation to not be a passive victim) is why I think him having a history of hurt is compelling. There is a sense of inferiority in being hurt. The idea of being shaped by misfortune or external influence feels like an outright violation. But if you look at your hurt straight on, and say, “no, this won’t merely shape me; I am mine alone” and intellectualise it until it’s so far beneath you it can’t touch you… You can reach the illusion that it never affected you.
And that’s why you can’t let yourself be hurt again, can’t let it touch you. That’s why, I think, Elias’s first response when threatened is to strike first and to do so brutally. I think that one of the things he fears most is fear itself. The idea of being prey.
I’m so fascinated by the layers of Jonah and Barnabas’s relationship. Jonah didn’t lack affection for him and he still sacrificed him; Barnabas begged for help and yet Jonah’s absence didn’t truly pain him.
I’d say in the TMA universe your only viable choice is to get off the tracks and into the driver’s seat of the trolley. And you can’t get off the tracks without getting inside the trolley.
the thing that really makes elias stand out among the rest of the cast, is that he’s the only (or at least, one of the select few, but definitely the Only major recurring) character who’s unquestionably having fun. everyone else spends copious amounts of time on feeling utterly miserable and it IS miserable around here what with the universe literally tending towards evil, but elias has a) figured out the inherent meaninglessness of it all (well. that’s definitely the not podcast thesis but it was the Would Quite Willingly Doom That World brand of transgressive madness in the name of disobeying the divine order of things that motivated him. compels me. always rebel against the gods) and b) karmic justice is simply not a thing within the world of the magnus archives, there’s no narrative comeuppance for being a bad (or reward for being good) person, so there’s no just deserts to be had here, he died for entirely unrelated reasons and in the grand scheme of things his fate was not all that different from anyone else in the podcast, plus jon also dies mere minutes later. but did he not have fun? did he not ruin everyone else’s lives and have fun the entire time?
I love Jonah because hes one of those rare characters where if given the choice between being tortured for eternity or dying, he would choose the torture.
would he regret this decision? perhaps. But to him, in that moment of choice, he would not consider eternal torment, only the permanency that death promises and the nothingness that accompanies it. Being alive and being in a bad situation means there’s a chance for escape. He would still have a will, a consciousness.
Following this line of thinking I think Jonah would not understand suicidal ideation. He would think it’s ridiculous. He’d certainly see it as an aberration of human consciousness, to want to cease to exist is so foreign to him
can i say something. the capitalist/corporate allegory elias bouchard thing doesn’t really work for me because. well i genuinely don’t think the archives staff is oppressed enough… it’s a hostage situation, they’re not being worked to death. both tim and melanie entirely stop doing their jobs and there are no personal consequences as long as they don’t try to actively quit. when he finally ‘disciplines’ melanie, and while that scene does have that specific kind of theatricality to it (i believe your performance has been satisfactory!), the psychological torture isn’t intended to cow her back into being a good little employee, he’s instructing her to not get in his way. there isn’t a compelling story of labour exploitation here for me even though the worldbuilding surrounding the institute (read: the eye) lends itself very nicely to that kind of thing, especially the surveillance aspect of it—but the fear of being watched within the institute is never interrogated further than just a general, nebulous sense of unease. that power isn’t being exercised by elias as a mode of authoritarian control tactics to increase worker productivity or whatever, he literally does nottt care about all that, he just wants to end the world. like, you have to give me something more than “he’s their evil boss”, for me to be interested in this reading of the character.
Me, talking about tma: oh yeah I love (X character)!!! They are very complex and well-written and I’ve loved watching how they’ve dealt with their trauma and their journey as a person!!
it’s kinda crazy how like. 90% of the people who interact with jonah as a character completely skip over the sentence I first attempted prevention but the cause seemed hopeless. paying heed to his own words (which are to be held true or the statement wouldn’t have been caught on tape) he did not decide to seek power when he first discovered them (he felt curiosity and fear); nor he did so when his companions became entangled with one of the Entities; NOR when the Rituals became an active threat. he was curious, he studied them, he attempted prevention. discussing privilege around jonah is like kicking a dead horse and I shall never go there but it’s insane to me how his first instinct (or choice, either way) was not to exploit the powers to his gain and to bring the Change into the world itself but to stop it from happening and only inverted his route upon discovering that his crusade was meaningless, that there was no hope for any concrete damage control. this is why I will always, always object to any conception of jonah magnus that doesn’t start with him as a good person. sorry.
