I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!
Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.
And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.
Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.
So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.
And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.
And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.
This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.
When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.
1K notes
·
View notes
I'm watching a video on ancient Fanfiction.net drama and the creator is going over all the dumb rules FF.net has that I forgot about (no 2nd person perspective writing, no interactive stories, no explicit 18+ stories, no incorporating song lyrics into your fic, etc, not to mention the systemic problems like the lack of an archival system).
We are so fucking lucky to have AO3 nowadays, you guys.
557 notes
·
View notes
[ID: A full-body drawing of Jon and Martin from the Magnus Archives kissing in a supply closet. Jon is a thin tall Indian man with long, dark curly hair. Martin is a fat white man with short hair and glasses who is slightly shorter than Jon. The drawing is rendered in murky green colors, with highlights in yellow. Martin leaned back against a shelf, tilting back under his weight, causing items on the shelf to fall backward. Jon is pressing Martin into the shelf, holding Martin's face in one hand and holding on to the shelf to keep it from falling with the other. Martin clutches Jon's shirt, and holds the back of his head. They are illuminated from above by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
The supply closet is cramped and dirty and filled with many items on shelves. Items include cleaning supplies, boxes, and crumpled paper. Strings of black magnetic tape hang from various shelves and from the ceiling. A mop hangs on one wall near a bucket labeled "MOP WATER (HAUNTED)." There is a CO2 fire extinguisher on the ground, close to a tape recorder, with spools of magnetic tape unfurling from inside. There are two jars labeled "???" on different shelves. One of the jars appears to have eyeballs floating in murky water, while the other has a vague bulbous shape inside that could be a large worm or an organ of some kind. Two ghostly faces are hidden in the drawing, one under a shelf and one in a box. End Image ID]
KISS A MAN IN A HAUNTED CLOSET (still technically kinda in time for @jonmartinweek :3 office romance prompt)
5K notes
·
View notes
so I see a lot of people going "hahaha wild that Jon thinks everything (such as the apocalypse) is his fault when it REALLY isn't" and they would be correct but I keep thinking about why it is that he's like that. I think a lot of people simply put it down to "that's just how he is as a person" when I really think it's more of a combination between personality, how he was brought up (not that well) and the web.
in mag 81 he's never that specific about what his grandmother was like, and is very clearly trying to make her sound better than she actually is. but to me it sounds like she instilled a feeling that any and all problems that occurred throughout his childhood was his fault, or made worse by him. I'm thinking something like "I'm feeling so bad right now because I have to pick you up from school every day." and if she did do this, clearly it worked because he is, in his statement as an adult, retroactively pinning the blame for all his childhood problems on himself for being a "deeply annoying child". I really think that it's not normal to think you are to blame for someone else bullying you and that it was probably caused by his grandmother making him think he caused everyone's problems.
the mr spider event shocked him in a lot of ways but one of the main things that shook him was that he felt like he could've prevented what happened and he could've saved the guy's life. obviously this is ridiculous - it's clear to us that the web pulled him down the exact path which would lead someone else to interrupt his reading and get captured themselves. however Jon does not know this and clearly thinks he should've done better. I think that this, along with his upbringing, started the distinct way of thinking that he has where he decides that everything is his fault.
the web knew this would happen and then utilises it to make sure his crushing sense of responsibility causes him to get all 14 marks and then to, unwillingly, play his part in removing the fears from the universe.
539 notes
·
View notes