Thinking about. JonElias precanon. Jon being Elias’ little pet project. Jon and his lack of a father figure immediately latching on to the slightest amount of special attention from an older man who he admires.
Magnus fandom, 2016: We’re horny for this lady made of worms!
Me: Huh. Unexpected, I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Magnus fandom, 2024: We’re horny for this guy made of needles!
Me: Of course you are, my children. Be free.
Magnus fandom 2024: We’re horny for this bulbous oozing clown man!
Me: I think 95% of your are being facetious, but the true 5% can go with god.
Magnus fandom, just now: We’re horny for a member of the British Aristocracy!
Me: Gross. No. Absolutely not. Sick freaks the lot of you. I am officially kinkshaming. You disgust me.
Eh, the Elias thing happened so gradually that I acclimatised to it, like a frog in boiling water. But also, I understand why if you’ve never actually encountered them you think aristocracy just translates to “old, rich and british”, but it really doesn’t. It’s hard to articulate if you’ve never actually met any, but they are just deeply unsexy on an almost spiritual level. A revulsion of the soul.
It’s finished! Nikola Orsinov kidnapping Jon sent me spiraling so I had to paint it. The horrors he endures😵💫🥺 poor Jon. I don’t think the creators meant to have the wax figures melting but that’s how it is in my head
taking poison damage from thinking too hard about how tma capitalizes on the horror of not having all the information by slowly taking away said information from the listener
elaborating: seasons 1-3 are firmly rooted in the viewpoint of Jon. The audience knows just as much as he does about the goings on around him, and sometimes even more (such as with Sasha being killed by the not!them). There are very few points in which Jon has more information than the audience, and most of said information is discovered and deciphered within the confines of the podcast episodes.
Season 4 is where this starts to change. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that Jon is rapidly developing supernatural knowledge, but at the same time this is basically giving him a get out of jail free card. As the audience, you assume Jon is still giving you the information when he finds it, because that’s what he’s been doing up until this point. You assume he’s still doing all this for the noble cause of saving the world. Hell, it’s not even until over halfway through season 4 that you learn he’s been stalking people and taking their statements (the guy who does have a history of stalking, of paranoia, of taking things to far - but you don’t want to think about that, because he’s the protagonist, the voice you’re supposed to trust), and only then does the audience fully come to realize how much he’s been lying to you and how little you can take his words at face value.
And then there’s season 5. If seasons 1-4 were spent looking over Jon’s shoulder, season 5 is spent looking over Martin’s - the man who does not have eldritch knowledge, who doesn’t wish to know every little detail about the horrible world he’s found himself in, whose only source of information is from his partner who is trying to protect him from what he did. And at that point…you really cannot say anything about what’s going on in Jon’s head for definitive fact aside from what he explicitly says out loud. You’re stuck with a bundle of uncertainties. You don’t know how they’re going to put the world back. You don’t know Jon is planning to kill Helen before he’s at her front door. You don’t know Jon is going against the group’s plans until he’s already at the top of the Panopticon. You’re not the watcher anymore - you’re the one being watched.
Elias is such a character. He is morally awful. I love listening to him talk. I hate him. I love him. I have the tag of his name blocked on tumblr. I go back to episodes just to listen to him speak. I want to kill him. I see fanart of him and, on instinct, go “ohhh hot mama.” I do not trust his motives ever. Do not leave me in a room alone with this man.
Based on their conversation in mag 17 and some of Jon’s comments in season 1 I’m convinced that Jon was a constant pain in Elias’s ass from the minute he started at the institute. I also think that’s a big part of why Elias chose Jon to be Archivist. Just…
ALT
The way they talk to eachother, Jon is, as always, unnecessary snippy and abrasive. Elias is patient but quietly exasperated. There’s a definite familiarity there. They’ve had many conversations like this before. Then at the end of the episode Jon says
ALT
I like to imagine that Jon’s been in Elias’s office at least once a week since he started badgering him about whatever case he’s working on. How many times has Elias had to give the old “record and study, not interfere or contain” speech?
Im just obsessed with Jon and Elias’s comfortably antagonistic pre canon relationship. Like obviously Jon respects and maybe even looks up to Elias as an authority on his chosen field. But he’s also comfortable enough with him to be his unadulterated bitchy self around him.
It’s harder to tell what Elias thinks of Jon since at this point he is keeping his true nature under wraps. But I like to think he’s got an exasperated affection for Jon. Kind of like a pet who’s constantly getting into shit but is so cute you can’t truely get mad at them.
Jon is an insufferable bastard and so is Elias even though he’s (kind of) pretending not to be. Knowing Elias I bet he loves arguing with Jon, probably purposely riles him up because it amuses him. Of course Jon also enjoys arguing with Elias, it’s like one of his main ways of communicating. They are have an ideal bastard for bastard relationship.
I bet the first time Jon came to Elias insisting they should do more with a case he was like, yes finally, this is exactly the obnoxious little guy I’ve been waiting for. Yes Elias chose Jon because he was marked by the spider but I think he also chose Jon because he liked him and was a little bit obsessed with him.
jonah magnus is so funny. he wanted so so badly to be codependent on a cosmic level with his employee and worship his weird fear god with him forever. but he got fucking rejected and said employee instead ended up with the guy he hired like. as a joke. fail
really looking forward to the elias reveal in protocol where he shows up the office and alice comes to the horrible realisation that her weed dealer is related to gwen
i don’t want to make any empty promises because i have a bad habit of going ‘i have this cool idea and im gonna do it!’ and then never finishing and following through but…im working on a jonelias animatic… and i’ve actually finished a storyboard for it?? (well, 90% finished)..so maybe ill get it done? it’s in a rough state though, atm.
im getting too in the weeds here thinking about the institute layout
i did an elevation sketch to get the general Vibe and window placement of the institute bc i have some internal shots with windows but now im thinking about the placement of the other departments and that’s really not necessary
I love tmagp but also i miss my guy telling me after every horrifying case that they were on drugs and insane and nothing actually happened. come back s1 jon you were so funny 🙁
I’ve now finished season 2 which felt like it went by quite quickly. I am a few episodes into series 3 and it truly does just get better and better. All my favorite qualities of the podcast keep getting expanded on which is of course enjoyable. I re-listened to #67 and started to question my design of Agnes. I wanted her to have a dazed look since the whole episode goes on about how odd she is and not quite human even though she looks alluring. But then I realized she was described as tall which I totally missed the mark on, oh well.
I’d really love to be the dungeon master for a The Magnus Archives inspired game of dungeons and dragons. Like, warlocks get their powers from the fears, and different classes skew towards feeding different fears, but you can’t knowingly choose which one, random checks and actions push you in different directions.
You have to make saving throws if you’re trying to resist becoming more monstrous, and you roll with advantage when using them. If you’re enough like an avatar and you go too long without feeding your fear, you start having disadvantages at everything except feeing your fears.
If you have an anchor, you roll with advantage when resisting losing yourself to powers like the Lonely. You have to choose your anchor, and you have to interact at least once every few sessions for them or it to stay your anchor.
And maybe there are twists like, the rituals actually could destroy the world, and you don’t know if it will fail. That is left up to a coin toss by the dungeon master, and you won’t know until the ritual has passed, but the party has multiple opportunities to learn more about and stop the rituals.
I don’t know. That just sounds fun to me.
And I genuinely want to do this. If other people do too, interact with this post or message me or send an ask. I want to meet and get acquainted with someone (over tumblr or discord or something) before I play a campaign with them.
I know he’s kind of a polarizing character, but I have to say, Elias Bouchard truly is Iconic. When you hear the twist of “the boring middle manager was actually secretly an evil eldritch monster the whole time!” you sort of assume that the boring middle manager persona was just a facade, but no, he really does seem to just enjoy dull administrative work. He’s both exactly as boring as he seems on the surface and profoundly fucked up in ways you couldn’t imagine. He’s practically omniscient and playing 4-D chess with everyone, but he responds to even slight hiccups in his elaborate scheme with acts of extreme violence. He beats an old man to death with a metal pipe and when someone brings it up later he goes, “Yeah I may have overreacted there.” His employees are constantly trying to murder him. He broke out of prison just so he could give a dramatic monologue. He had a weird gay thing going on with seemingly every man he met in the past 200 years. He loves scheduling.
i love that i finally have motivation (and time) to do an animatic, and ive started my first one and it’s going really well, and then i remember this other idea i have had for a YEAR now but just never really had the motivation (or time. or skill. didn’t know how to edit videos lmao and anatomy was rough) and now i feel like i could do it. but i also need to finish my je animatic first, otherwise it’s never getting done. and finishing it’s gonna take me a long while at the pace im going at (which is okay, i want it to be polished). aaaaaaaaa too many ideas not enough hours in the day
anyways here’s a frame im rly proud of :P
(this window alone probably took me two hours - and only 15 minutes of that was actually spent drawing it. i spent far too much time dawdling and trying to figure out what i wanted the design to be, the ratios, height, where the eye motif would go, how it would look from the outside, what other windows would be in his office, if it would match the aesthetic of the architecture from the time. yeah, i got wayyyy into the weeds on this one)
Everyone jokes about Elias and Peter and all the reasons they get divorced over and over again over the course of their very long lifespans, and those jokes are hilarious, but it begs the question: if there are so many reasons (extremely petty ones, too) for them to break up, what reasons could they possibly have to get back together? And honestly I find the answer to that more interesting and fun to work with than even the jokes about them getting divorced.
And there is not a cute, fluffy answer to this, like I’m gonna be honest with you. The interesting thing about LonelyEyes for me is the fact that it is completely dysfunctional, so if you’re hoping for anything cute in this post, it’s probably not going to be your cup of tea.
Here’s the thing about Elias and Peter: they’re both drama queens, and the reason they can work as a couple at all is because the types of drama they enjoy are complementary. Elias loves being the center of attention, pulling people’s strings, and feeling like everything and everyone is revolving around him precisely as he planned. He has to have the upper hand on everyone else constantly. In a relationship with a normal person, that would never work (see the numerous letters to him from people being like “I am choosing to cut off contact with you because you are crazy.”) Any attempt at emotional intimacy turns into a chess match, which is alienating and frustrating for anyone actually trying to make lasting connections with someone. Who could stomach that?
A dude who thrives off making no meaningful connections with absolutely anyone, that’s who. Peter doesn’t care about emotional intimacy. Being close to people is the exact opposite of what he wants, but at the same time, he still needs people.
He talks about how he wants to be alone a lot, but if he really wanted to be totally alone, he wouldn’t keep coming back to mingle with the rest of society. He keeps coming back because being around people but never being able to connect with them is something he’s experienced since he was a child, so it’s safe and familiar to him. The type of loneliness that he craves isn’t the physical absence of people; it’s the presence of people but the absence of connection with them. That’s something else that a normal person would never be able to stand, but that Elias would never have a problem with.
So the bottom line here is that both Elias and Peter need to be around other people to find fulfillment. The kinds of fulfillment they crave are complete poison when paired with normal people, but they’re perfectly complementary when paired with each other. Elias can play as many mind games as he wants with Peter, and that won’t ever drive Peter away because he too enjoys drama, and he knows that since Elias is too busy trying to be the center of attention, he’ll never actually try to connect with him in a meaningful way. They both get what they want, and in it’s own terrible way, it works perfectly.
Then of course they’ll break up because Peter made one too many terrible puns and this time! This time it’s the last fucking straw! But of course it’s not going to be the last fucking straw, it’s never going to be, because breaking up and getting back together again is just part of the game, and the game doesn’t get to continue if they stay apart permanently.