god i love this. I LOVE THIS. obviously we know gertrude kept the archive in disarray on purpose, but i’m also sure that a good chunk of that was just that like. the archivist has no drive to catalog. the archivist needs to know, not to record or to sort or to label. jonah of course keeps his mementos, his trinkets, his tokens, and talismans. jonah hoards the letters sent to him by long dead paramours. jonah collects objects of power. jonah logs and records and researches. but the archivist just. feeds.
this also sort of aligns w my working theory that in terms of avatars/monsters the dividing line is sort of like that old bit about how it’s fucked up that goofy is like a clearly sentient person-adjacent creature but pluto is just a normal dog
like jonah magnus is obviously purposefully eye-aligned, he draws his powers from it and he orchestrates the watcher’s crown. but he’s is also so much more driven and in control than like, the creature that lived in the ming vase, for example. or the thing crawling around under alexandria. or the big slimy tentacle thing that haunted benjamin hatendi. like peter lukas and maxwell rayner and simon fairchild they’re all such active agents in service to their patrons.
but jon is just. hungry. and some of that is for sure his own lack of agency between elias and the web. but it’s also i think that the archivist is more of a monster than an avatar.
