#and for the record I'm not really fussed by the 'jonahs harem' thing

[organchordsandlightning]

been thinking a lot about the Jonah Magnus backstory I like

in that he was born the only son of a wealthy lord and was genuinely pretty intelligent but lacked ambition and work drive, to his father’s dismay. He mostly grows up around his father/mother and the staff that work the estate.

I like the idea that he does have a connection to the Eye, personified mostly through his habit of watching the guests/staff through a telescope from the attic. He gets nothing out of schmoozing, but he does get an unexpected pleasure out of knowing everyone’s dirty little secrets (whether to get them fired or just to get a sense of Undeserved Superiority, because his father might complain about him but at least he doesn’t fuck behind the stables)

He lived a pretty pampered life that sheltered him from most everything, except one day, he gets a chance encounter that acquaints him with the concept of dying.

(My preferred one is that he’s coming back from a hunting lesson, sees his father has destroyed his telescope, and - after his hunting instructor tries to admonish him about something minor - jonah shoots him through the chest in a rage impulse. He doesn’t mean to kill him, he was just. Angry.) 

And Jonah is no fool, he knows what death is. He hunts and has had elderly relatives die and has read about it in books. But seeing someone die flips something in him, some sort of fear that he didn’t know he had. His life is fine, he supposes, but the idea that it could just end? That easily? Terrifies him.

His father can excuse a lot of things, but shooting a member of the staff in broad daylight is going to cause some concern. Besides, Jonah finally needs to learn a good work ethic.

He bundles him off to London with an apprenticeship and a lot of money. Jonah immediately drops the former and engages in a life of nepotism, because hey, might as well enjoy life if it’s all going to end? He certainly doesn’t make any friends among the lower class of London, but he is rich and seems to know where the best places to find a good time are (because what better way to watch people?)

Except, one day, one of his ‘friends” ends up dying (how I write it, they’re wandering around London almost blind drunk and he pitches into the Thames, because the late 1700s/early 1800s was wild in London) and Jonah has another crisis. What’s the point in enjoying stuff if it’s not going to matter one day? 

In drunk misery, he tries to stagger back home when he runs into - in his opium-addled mind - the most beautiful building that he’s ever seen. The windows are exquisitely crafted to look like an eye, staring down at him, and Jonah genuinely f eels like he’s being watched. that’s how to live forever, he thinks to himself. One can live forever through the act of creation, surely. And he goes over and looks and sees it was built by Robert Smirke. 

long story short, because he’s still a Magnus and his family is still wealthy and jonah can schmooze when he wants to, he ends up apprenticing himself to Smirke for ages. that’s what introduces him to the fears.

(as an aside, while I think the privilege is still very much A Big Reason, I also think Smirke sees in Jonah a gigantic fear of the Entity that he’s started to call the End. He’s never found someone with such an acute fear of it and brings him along, initially, as more of a secret case study. Except holy shit, this rich weirdo is actually really, really good at getting people’s secrets).

fast forward ten years (during which, he gets connections to the rest - bennett and lukas and all sorts) and jonah finds himself frustrated with smirke. Smirke’s so concentrated on architecture instead of research and refuses to align himself with any one Entity; meanwhile, Jonah realizes how much more they could Know if they aligned themselves with the Eye. they could be granted abilities beyond anything they could ever imagine. and Jonah starts to serve his patron. 

Eventually, Smirke discovers this and it causes a schism between them, because out of everyone, Jonah ought to know that aligning yourself with an Entity never does anything good. Jonah thinks Smirke is an old-fashioned fool - and he’s started to get fed up with architecture, anyway, though he starts to understand the power of attaching the Entities to physical objects. Instead, he takes all of his contacts and his wealth and starts a research library in Edinborough. Named after himself, of course.

Jonah starts having dreams - beautiful ones, really - of a world rewritten, lasting forever and granting him what he wants most. And, his dreams croon to him, if Jonah does this ... then the Eye will grant him as much time as he needs. Jonah would live forever, both in this world and the next. And of course he’s not going to say no.

while I’m not particularly fussed about it when people write Jonah with a tragic backstory (or, alternatively, a rags-to-riches one, even if both are valid), I’m really partial to Jonah being born highly privileged and his aversion to dying coming from a place of sheltered fear. He just gives off the vibe of ‘how much can a banana cost, Michael?’ and, to me, it explains his willful ineptitude for certain things [the Institute being very poorly run, Jonah knows how to improve it but doesn’t really care to] and his arrogance, right to the end.