I have to stop the rituals from ever succeeding -> someone is going to succeed, and everyone will suffer anyway, so why should I be among the sufferers? -> even if nobody succeeds, I will never be free of pain and death and fear in this human condition. I am willing to sacrifice everyone to craft my ritual, even if they wouldn’t fall victim to the fears otherwise.
i love male characters who are extremely stuck-up and “inside the box” [like, proper, way too formal, cold, almost boring] from an outside perspective but their brain is actually an assembly of the weirdest shit you could possibly find
At some point during seasons 1-4 Elias says something ominous to Jon and then adds “an old friend of mine used to say that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”. Jon blinks once, twice and then answers: “Elias, that’s just a quote by Oscar Wilde”.
Silence. No one ever mentions this again.
Fast-forward to the middle of the apocalypse when Martin sees Jon stumble and suddenly say, completely unprompted: “He was friends with Oscar Wilde??????”
Gertrude, speaking into the camera for an office-style mockumentary: “I have reason to believe my current boss, Elias Bouchard, is actually the body-swapped reincarnation of my previous boss, James Wright. In fact I believe he is every head of the Magnus Institute dating back to Jonah Magnus himself. He’s been careful to hide all evidence but I’ve caught him in a key slip up.”
–*camera cut to Elias Bouchard sitting in a library chair, Gertrude filing away books behind him*–
Gertrude: “Oh excuse me James can I sneak through?” Elias: “Oh, yes.” *scoots chair* “Sorry about that.”
–*camera cut to Gertrude opening the door to Elias’s office*–
Gertrude: “Excuse me Francis but do you have a moment?” Elias: “Sorry, what was that?” Gertrude: “I was asking if you have a minute, Richard.” Elias: “If it’s quick, I have a meeting in 10 minutes.”
–*camera cut to Gertrude and Elias standing in a Starbucks*–
Elias: And where do we pick up— Gertrude: The table over there. I ordered ahead for us. Elias: *studies the table, lights up subtly and grabs the coffee cup second from the left, camera zooms in on the label that says Jonah Magnus. Elias walks away while Gertrude makes eye contact with the camera.
The Elias wearing obvious eye-motif stuff is fun but improbable. He’s a subtle evil emplopyer, he probably wears a Magnus Institute patterned tie and maybe socks and that’s it.
What’s funnier is imagining Elias dressing like a Normal Boss and Peter Lukas turning up in Season 4, going ‘well I’ve got to play the part’ and deliberately wearing eye-covered everything. Shirts, trousers, a captain’s hat covered with googly eyes.
“What do you mean Elias doesn’t dress like this all the time? Sorry Martin, complimenting my eye-tie counts as an overly personal remark. I can’t hear you, my eye-earrings are jangling too loudly”
*guy who’s trying to pretend he’s not trapped* big fan of narratives. big fan of the ceaseless and repetitive flow of events given life by an audience and mutated by their perception
I don’t think Elias has the ability to Compel people like the Archivist can. I don’t think he can make anyone answer him truthfully. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s not what he wants. It’s quite easy to lie to him. He doesn’t need to hear the words to Know.
Words are faulty. Ideas, concepts, experiences are too hard to translate perfectly, completely into words. There is always information lost between the speaker and the listener, details that aren’t conveyed between what one is trying to say and what the other interprets their words to mean. And when Jonah read centuries old tomes, he mourned that he could not know the full, lived experience of the writer’s life from the few words that were inked onto the parchment. He mourned the knowledge that was lost between the words.
So while his collection grew into an archive focused on written and narrated accounts, his powers focused elsewhere.
His interview with og!Elias demonstrated quite beautifully! You can lie to him, quite easily in fact. You can try to hide behind a mask, but Eyes are the windows to the soul. Meet his gaze, and he can See quite easily what you’re trying to hide. And when he Sees, he sees as they saw.
Their fear, their firsthand experience becomes his experience. He longs to live, and he will live uncountable lifetimes through the lives of others. Through the eyes of others.
I genuinely forget Elias is evil sometimes; like, I don’t forget he’s a murderer, but it’s so far from my mind to do a moral reading of his actions that it’s a shock to remember people don’t sympathise with him. “He ended the world.” Yeah, and? He was coping.
Level 0: Elias is evil, so I hate him.
Level 1: Elias is evil, but I still enjoy him as a character.
Level 2: Elias is evil, but I understand his actions even if I don’t condone them.
Level 3: Elias is evil, and that’s sexy of him.
Level 4: But I was so caught up in the euphoria of Elias being a prey who made himself into a predator that for a moment I forgot morals in fiction are important to some people.
Jonah Magnus got the equivalent of nonstop internet access in the 1800s when no one else around him knew the phrase “touch grass” that’s why he’s like that
I love Elias ‘Jonah Magnus’ Bouchard so much. I love this 200 year old man who loves spreadsheets and passively watching horrible shit going around him; I love him for how he heard there are horrible Fears Entities in the world, had his mentor tell him 'we need to balance them out!’ whilst all their friends where picking a side and becoming horrible monsters or tragic victims and went “actually I’ll pick one and just learn how to play the game until i’m untouchable”. I love a man who was so afraid of death he decided he would just not die and then found a way to do it for decades without being found out. I love that he has all this terrifying fear power and he oftentimes uses it to know where there is cake in his institute.
He is a scholar. He is a boring boss. He is a smug evil prick who relishes into his evilness and power. He tells his employees to do admin to feel better. He sighs when he has to torture them because they keep try to kill him. He’s impressed and horny when someone successfully challenges his expectations. His idea of comfort is to ask philosophical questions about humanity. He only starts to take actions in order to manipulate this one guy into being the key to his ritual and his equal.
I love a man who realized all the rituals meant nothing, went 'very well’ and instead of like, calmly going 'this means i’m in peace" went “well i’m going to be the first one to succeed by thinking of what my good mentor had said once. they all need to be together, balanced out.” and then he DID succeed. He did have his apocalypse. And it was glorious and he loved every second of horror it was.
I love a man who never once apologized for being selfish, evil, and power hungry, and embraced all his flaws quite so willingly. And who, at the end, dying, all of this going to dust, watched his most beautiful creation, his most perfect work, his legacy, rise to take his place as king,, and merely told him good luck.
I am a recreational Noticer. I love to Notice Things and Make Connections and Identify Patterns. This is one of my favorite activities and it requires me to behave in compulsively silly ways online.
In real life, this manifests itself by suddenly asking a coworker “so how long has your wife known about your mistress?” Because he stopped bringing in a packed lunch and I saw him scrubbing lipstick off his neck one day when he “went to the bank”
