magnuspanoptes

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(guy who shall say voice) i shan’t say

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Have some S1 Jon when his biggest problem was being bored by a statement.

It's summer, it's hot down in the archives and Martin just needs to take five for some fresh air. He is fine.

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The house will give the girl knowledge, if she will only promise not to leave it.

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blonde elias fancast

elias fancast

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my goat all your posts hit the nail on the head and im thoroughly obsessed witj them so ive come to recommend the locked tomb series its got the exact flavor of fucked up that jonelias has got. the first book gideon the ninth has SOME juicy bits with dulcinea grooming gideon into the role she wants her to play (trying not to spoil too bad but) but then the second book harrow the ninth goes CRAZYY with it. what if you were an 18 year old deeply traumatized and confused girl and god himself is desperate to have crazy unhealthy daddaughter shit going on with you thats like so obvious in a way much of the fandom glosses over but they SHOULDNT!!! ITS SO GOOD AHH!!!!! and theres a bajillion very obvious lolita parallels between the two. plus add that to the magicians apprentice which is a short story written by the author (tamsyn muir) that REALLY ties in their whole dynamic with lolita. im pushing my john/harrow agenda so bad sorry. head from a girl you wish was your daughter. shuffles away

its worth noting that the cover and advertising and frankly much of the fandom itself has done the books SUPER dirty i believe the tagline is “lesbian necromancers in space!” its not about lesbian necromancers in space. its about how this guy ended the world and rebuilt it and became god and then proceeded to lock himself up in a spaceship and groom one of his teenaged nuns about it to perpetuate the exact cycle of violence and imperialism he used to end the world in the first place. ITS JONELIAS

damn okay that's the best locked tomb pitch i've seen so far. i have read and liked muir's magician's apprentice and floralinda & the fourty something (?) flight of stairs and i did read like 40 pages of gideon the ninth years ago but wasn't deeply compelled by it to finish reading (weird comic prose narration that i did not find funny) but thank you for sending this!! definitely a lot more willing to give it a second try now.

and if you want something else with a central theme of consumption/cannibalism as a metaphor for colonial expansion with two guys that have a jonelias thing going on between them stream ravenous 1999 now. and prometheus and alien: covenant have a relationship between the android david 8 and the scientist elizabeth shaw which is hitting all the jonelias bullet points: violation of bodily autonomy with biblical themes! simultaneously worshiping and objectifying the other as an anatomical specimen in pursuit of your scientific endeavours! committing a massive atrocity and saying i did it as a GIFT for the beloved! "it must feel like your god abandoned you"! except to be honest those movies are on a screenplay level kind of mid... bad even (like i think they would've really benefited from not restricting themselves to alien 1979's narrative structure, they were more mystery than horror anyway and they kept deleting good scenes from the final cut for i don't know what reason) but ridley scott was doing some momentarily insane things in them like there are two fassbenders in covenant and they are [redacted] and I LOVE DAVID he's my deranged blonde boy he's a genocidal hater he was in love—i loved her of course! and they need to make another one where he continues his silly experiments in space which will probably also have an atrocious screenplay i guess but i'll have a blast every time michael fassbender is on screen so it all works out for me.

okay right got a bit carried away there but thank u <33 i'm putting gideon back on my speculative fic backlog

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might I ask. what are the things you see about jon from the fans that annoy you the most. I love your tma opinions and i wanna this if I'm not alone in the ones I'm thinking about

well almost everything i say in my jon tag is in response to popular takes of his character but it has to be the way he's widely engaged with as an oblivious funnyman protagonist who makes a series of looney tunes-esque choices over the course of the podcast and while that makes for a good joke post now and then it's unbearable to me because the thing that people choose to make fun of is his pathological need to know, which is a trauma response (which. i think the podcast is a bit influenced by controversial texts like 'the body keeps the score' in the way it writes about trauma through avatars and jon's marks are absolutely doing this—the effects of trauma being literally imprinted on his body as the archive. but it's fantasy and not realism so it doesn't bother me).

but as i was saying. jon's traumatised as a child in a very specific manner—through a book, through the act of reading (as you'll see, it's what elias hires him for as the archivist) and crucially he does not get to finish reading a guest for mr spider, he isn't able to knock and open that door. and doors in this podcast are all about boundaries in the gothic mode: the fear of physical violation (of the body, of the self) because beyond that closed door there is a terrible, numinous force and if you open the door, it will enter your world and alter you—unity with some monstrous other—which is how avatarhood is initially conceived of as gothic terror but later it's also about sublime transcendence in the romantic sense—unity with something divine—it's why there are a lot of statements about avatars falling in love with their parasitic patrons (this too is jonelias) so that's his formative traumatic experience and the cornerstone of his characterisation, that he couldn't finish reading the book, couldn't open that door and someone else was taken in his stead. this will transform into a lifelong need to Know, when he goes to the magnus institute he'll keep reading statement after statement and open every single door elias nudges him towards and encounter every fear entity as he's both repulsed and transfixed by all that horror (at a hundred thresholds you pressed on!) in order to get to the bottom of it all so someone else is never taken in his stead ("a strange conviction that. if i had been able to face that thing myself, maybe i could have saved him") it's why he's such a good pick for archivist, this is exactly the kind of person elias and the web (which traumatised him in in this manner to begin with) need for their ritual. this is terrific writing to me personally and why i shrivel up and die whenever people trivialise it or worse. identify it as a character flaw.

there's also another thing, that i can't properly discuss because it would require a level of rigour i'm not capable of right now—i have no problems with anyone's race or sexuality or any other headcanons neither do i think all headcanons need to align with themes all the time like it's not real. we're all playing with our toys here. but this is a horror podcast that has overt political themes which you can't really headcanon your way out of because the popular indian hc that people have for jon doesn't quite work with what jonny sims has written. like if we're strictly engaging in textual analysis only, aside from the fact that jonny sims is an affluent white author who's writing from that perspective so the podcast will immediately let you know if a character is non white (often he's racist about it. the tom haan plot, among others) jon, to me, was very much implied as being middle class white for a simple reason: the way the magnus institute and the eye manifests in the story is tied to jonah magnus performing the watcher's crown during britain's imperial century. it's conceived as a metaphor for imperial control (and he calls himself king of a ruined world), specifically the way the control of an empire hinges on its monopoly over knowledge. the 19th century was a time of obsessive knowledge gathering as a way to better govern and exploit and expand their territories—the maps, the surveys, the censuses, the state sponsored knowledge gathering expeditions into the colonies, into the polar regions because knowledge is a tool of power and is used to construct systems of control. robert smirke and jon and elias and gertrude all acquire it through hegemonic exploitation which then reinforces that hegemony (of the eye, of the institute), that work of obsessive codification and classification in order to conquer the entities in the process of which jonah destroys so many lives to come out on top (and his apocalyptic vision of the world is a panopticon—knowledge as a mode of surveillance and discipline and then punishment), is a role that jon directly inherits as early as S1 when he isn't even an avatar yet but his job is to extract narratives of trauma from people through dispassionate office protocol. like he's not just exploited he's also written to be someone with a certain amount of hegemonic privilege that repeatedly shields him from a worse fate (S4 is blatant about it, screamed when jon started going on about hey melanie maybe i can change it from the INSIDE) and while this one's not annoying per se and i'm not saying the podcast about eldritch fear gods is only an allegory for this, it's not. it's a podcast about eldritch fear gods first (and i think their political commentary is significantly weaker than vampirism/avatarhood as a metaphor for trauma), i've just never seen anyone discuss this. probably because it's a good way to get mauled

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The little-known 10th circle of hell, known as "Favorite character is extremely popular but you are also extremely particular and everyone is wrong".

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eulogy for the archivist

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people in the notes of that joneliasgertrude post are reminding me yes well but jon didn't actually do that. that's not true. not to me.

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Currently listening to tma for the first time in 5 years and stumbled on your blog and just want to say your takes are so awesome and your analysis is so enlightened its so refreshing after what the 2020 fandom was like

thank you <3 this is like the fourth time someone has said this and i feel my reading of the podcast doesn't have much overlap with what's the popular interpretation here so it's always good to know some people are compelled by it!

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there's a specific thing the podcast is doing with the joneliasgertrude dynamic where elias and gertrude exist as models of behaviour for jon. the two of them are obviously mirrors, they're both introduced as these careless at best and incompetent at worst managers and then post-S1 gertrude and elias get parallel developments, that they're not quite as oblivious as established within the mystery genre structure of the podcast and knew more then they previously let on which culminates in S3 jon learning both his boss and his predecessor were deranged professional liars with a body count. and. this is also the trajectory of audience perception of jon: he's introduced as an oblivious protagonist who is later revealed to have been involved in an early traumatic encounter with a fear entity and then in S4 he's outed as a professional liar with a body count. he's been feeding and has lied about it to both his colleagues and the audience. i ♥️ when there's doubling. jon's quite literally inheriting their combined mess—"as far as i can tell, the only battles i’ve been fighting have been yours and gertrude’s." (MAG 102)

so at that point he's presented with a choice, if he wants to survive his transformation he'll have to start seeing other people as consumable objects, strictly true in a survival sense because he needs to feed—it's what elias wants from him. and true in a utilitarian sense if he wants to finish gertrude's work because the world of magnus archives offers no solution to that dilemma of consumption. that fear cannot be wholly conquered, only briefly evaded through the ritual sacrifice of another life. gertrude and elias have both partly figured this out, as exhibited in their shared indifference for the lives of other people. and what they're both doing is playing god, the only meaningful relationships they have with the people around them is the kind an entity has with its avatars or avatars with their victims. elias says, "people exist to be watched, used, and discarded. this much at least gertrude understood"—people exist to be consumed. the same ideology applied to opposite aims of saving and destroying the world and is the driving dilemma of jon's own arc. an instruction he finally heeds in MAG 200 when he gets his own turn to play god. jon who is both saving countless other worlds and destroying his own, because like gertrude it's the ethical calculus that makes sense to him, because like elias he wants to live beyond fear just once, because in truth jon is the product of gertrude and elias's murderous divorce—both in character and circumstance. he officially becomes the archivist or is 'created' so to speak the day elias ends his partnership with gertrude.

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have you by any chance read Valente's Deathless. It's not good retelling by any means and overall quality is *debatable*, but some lines have insanely delicious jonelias potential (nothing in me was not made by you. I was six when the rook came—six!; if I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything)

yes i have! i can't speak of its merits as a retelling of the folk tale, but i did enjoy it as its own thing. and it's conceptually a death & the maiden (well. life) story so it works for jonelias. the marya monologue of nothing in me was not made by you! is very jon & elias/the web. and have you 🫵 seen this

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NBC Hannibal S03E05 - "Contorno" // MAG 111 - "Family Business" // MAG 101 - "Another Twist" // MAG 160 - "The Eye Opens" // The Winter Prince, Elizabeth Wein // Kenosis // NBC Hannibal S03E12 - "The Number of the Beast is 666"

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jon sims as the gothic heroine

Secrets Beyond the Door, Maria Tatar // MAG 1 - "Anglerfish" // MAG 161 - "Dwelling" // MAG 127 - "Remains to be Seen" // MAG 67 - "Burning Desire" // MAG 40 - "Human Remains" // MAG 160 - "The Eye Opens"

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I love your analysis posts. It was really nice to find your blog and see that someone besides me has realised that Jon is a Gothic heroine. Your edits are also fantastic. I was excited when my friend finished 161 because it meant I could send them your edits.

oh thank you!! this is very sweet 💜 haven't posted here in a while because the relisten's indefinitely on hold but hopefully posting will resume, i do want to get to S4. and yes jon usually gets the viktor frankenstein comparison (which i'll have to think about, jonah makes for a better comparison here) but he truly belongs to the group of feminised gothic heroes in the vein of jonathan harker like if you're locked in then the gothic heroine jon bit is very obvious i know quite a few people who get this!

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some of you have never had your notp be the most popular ship in the fandom and it shows