#i love drawing elias being ridiculous <- committing crimes

[wojtekaneko]

Get bonked silly librarian man

[taxinealkaloids]

Hi! I was wondering if you would like to say something ab your Elias, Gertrude, and Agnes dynamic because if yes I would love to hear it

(Also, your art is absolutely amazing. Sjdhwhdhehdheh thank you so much for drawing 💖)

Thanks! I’d like to start posting art more consistently but I’ve been so busy.

Also, YES absolutely I would like to talk about Them, at some point it’d be nice to present all this in a more organized manner but for now I’ll just throw some thoughts at you. (under a cut because it ended up being a bit on the lengthy side oops)

My general concept for these three is that due to Gertrude and Elias being connected through Beholding (I like to treat this bond as a lot more substantive than it was shown to be in canon because frankly it’s a crime that it wasn’t further explored and utilized as a plot device) at the same time that Gertrude and Agnes are bound due to Gertude’s semi-failed attempt to cripple the Desolation, the three have all ended up stuck in the same spiderweb, so to speak. I haven’t quite decided if the Web meant for Elias to get roped into this or if, like in canon, the extent of it’s plan was to weave Gertrude & Agnes together. I think it’d be interesting if they were all meant to get tied up together because I like to think of the mother of puppets as a better schemer than she ended up being in canon and because it adds another layer of mystery for the three of them to deal with (ie, what exactly is the Web hoping to achieve here? None of them are sure how extensive the plot is, so it’s an unknown factor; something that fundamentally does not agree with the base nature of anyone eye-aligned.) This connection manifests itself by causing the three to occasionally walk in each other’s dreams, randomly receive each other’s thoughts and feelings, and even have brief body-switching experiences where it’s like suddenly one person’s consciousness is in the other’s body (like the characters in Sense8 do, if you’ve seen that show). In general those episodes only last a few seconds but are extremely disorienting. There’s definitely quite an adjustment period when all this starts happening and everyone’s dealing with the sudden random urges to commit arson or fill out Excel spreadsheets. It’s especially a danger for Elias and Gertrude who are both trying to hide things. Having your mind occasionally taken over by the very person you’re trying to hide those things from is incredibly antithetical to that goal. I have a lot of half-formed ideas for problems that could arise due to these kinds of things happening unpredictably at undesirable times, I think it could range from very dramatic to absolutely hilarious which is fun to play with.

I imagine any sort of plot around these 3 would revolve around trying to unravel the Web’s plot and figure out what exactly the nature/purpose of their connection is (and potentially sever it). However, they can’t work together to solve it, because of course they’ve all got layers upon layers of ulterior motives and are nearly as concerned with sabotaging each other as they are with sabotaging the Web (which, of course, is what the Mother was counting on).

Elias: if I play my cards right here, I could potentially use this to figure out and stop the Web and the Desolation

Agnes: If I play my cards right here, I could potentially use this to figure out and stop the Web and Beholding

Gertrude: I could stop all three.

And so instead of pooling their resources they’re all going behind each other’s backs and lying about it and using their bodyhopping/mindsharing/dreamwalking occurrences as opportunities to spy on each other and/or surreptitiously glean info from the others without them knowing that’s what’s going on. This is a ridiculous undertaking, honestly, because even if they weren’t semi-telepathically linked and therefore likely to figure out what the others are doing anyway, Elias is watching most of what the other two are doing at all times and usually knows when they’re lying. So a lot of their group conversations are just…everyone tells everyone else blatant lies about what they’ve been up to, everyone is aware these are blatant lies, and no one calls anyone out because…. pot, kettle, you know?

Agnes is generally pretty happy to share her experiences with the Desolation w/ Gertrude; she’s never gotten a chance to talk about them to anyone outside the cult and likes Gertrude’s straightforward, free-from-religious-bias responses to what she has to say. Gertrude is able to get a lot out of her just by asking and she’ll even reveal quite a lot to Elias, though that’s usually more by accident. She wants to talk and often lets slip more than she means to.

Gertrude is a bit more wary and holds those of Beholding’s secrets that she knows a bit closer to her chest; she doesn’t want to tell any associate of the Lightless Flame something that could potentially help them trigger a Desolation-flavored apocalypse.

Meanwhile Elias doesn’t so much hold his secrets close to his chest as “keep them in a hermetically sealed double-locked encoded safe in the secret basement of his brain” and there’s no way anyone’s drilling him for information without him clocking it right away and subtly shifting the conversation to a more advantageous subject (for him). The instant Agnes and/or Gertrude show up in one of his dreams he immediately switches whatever it is to the most banal, irrelevant scene ever, like being stuck in traffic or doing his taxes. (What’s the point in living so long if you can’t even control your own dreams, right?)

(Gertrude and Agnes: Really? THIS is what you dream about??)

(Elias, completely stonefaced: Yes.)

While Elias tends to favor gathering and analyzing information to fully understand a situation before acting on it, Gertrude (and to some degree Agnes) feel more productive when they’re actually out doing legwork. So Gertrude’s breaking into Elias’s office to scan his files, she’s vanishing halfway across the country to chase a lead without so much as a day’s notice, Agnes is taking a page out of the Beholding avatars’ book and conducting “interviews” for information (she starts with her cultist minders and spreads outwards from there) but instead of using the Beholding power of compulsion to help the conversation along, she’s using the less delicate but undoubtedly effective Desolation method of “fire really close to the subject’s face”, and Elias is…doing none of this but rather simply watching the other two do it and ending up with the same information in the end. Works out for him!

The main problem here is the fact that with everyone trying to go behind everyone else’s backs all the time they end up impeding each other’s efforts to get the Web pinned down and, with them also spending so much time focusing on stopping each other’s entities, the spotlight is shifted off of the Web. so their behavior is really playing into the Mother’s hands (all eight of them).

In terms of general interpersonal relationships:

Gertrude and Elias are…not friends. Both are pretty sure they’re smarter than the other and definitely entertain frequent fantasies of murdering each other when one’s finding the other particularly infuriating. Despite that they actually end up just...hanging out a lot because they both have a habit of using their friends to death (which is why it’s a good thing they’re not friends). They have the same sense of humor though and honestly they probably don’t find the other’s company as distasteful as they like to claim.

Plus, the entire archive staff is scared of at least one if not both of them, and the fact that they seem to spend so much time in close collaboration doesn’t make anyone more inclined to establish social connections with either one. So they’re kind of workplace allies by default. (Honestly most of the staff assumes they’re sleeping together and because this rumor raises infinitely less questions than “they’re working to prevent the incorrect apocalypse from happening before they can make the correct apocalypse happen” they let it propagate)

(tbh it probably happened once but they both agreed to never mention it again.)

Also, I think Gertrude knew near immediately that Jonahlias was in no way the same person as Elias-Elias but didn’t do anything because tbh she didn’t care for og Elias and liked him better now that he’d apparently been taken over by some sort of bodysnatching monster (though obvs she would NOT admit that).

So, like, first meeting she had w/ him after his promotion she walks in, takes one look, and internally is like “ah. This man is no longer Elias Bouchard. Thank God, maybe I can actually work with him after all.”

Likewise, the instant Gertrude walked in with her soul tied up with the Desolation’s Messiah he noticed but said nothing about it. (I think the mark left on her by the Desolation would show up as something he could physically see; she mentioned in one of the statements that the bond hurt so maybe her flesh always looks a bit like it’s being set on fire from the inside out to someone with supernatural vision powers and he just has to pretend this isn’t alarming.)

For his part, Elias genuinely likes Gertrude. Most of the time. At least some of the time. He respects her and her utter ruthlessness for sure, but she’s extremely strong willed and nigh impossible to intimidate and he fluctuates wildly from being like “she was the perfect choice for Archivist, I’m so glad I picked her” and “I need to kill her right now immediately and get a new Archivist, I cannot work with this one”.

Agnes is…an interesting case because due to her bizarre upbringing she has a hard time figuring out what she feels about anything, ever. She wildly fluctuates from being overly sensitive/worried about hurting others to being absolutely sadistic, and can jump from a calm/withdrawn state to pure rage in an instant. She’s largely still figuring out who she wants to be while struggling with the fact that she’s not meant to get to pick who she wants to be at all.

Gertrude and Agnes find each other absolutely fascinating, they both think the other is the most compelling person they’ve ever met (or, rather, not met, it’s complicated). Agnes likes having a connection to someone outside the lightless flame cult, and likes the idea that Beholding’s archivist (who is rather infamous among lightless flame cultists and unanimously feared) ‘belongs to her.’ (Gertrude would maybe not entirely agree with that perspective but she doesn’t…hate the idea either).

Meanwhile, Gertrude knows their bond is part of a bigger scheme and on some level, the Web is tying them all in knots, and really she should be looking for a way to sever the bond. And she will! She’s definitely planning on figuring that one out. Elias accuses her of putting it off in order to find out more about Agnes and the lightless flame, and yeah, maybe she is, but so what? That’s useful information. And Elias must agree, or he would have sounded more upset. (He does agree, but he also dislikes the idea of Gertrude being part of someone else’s scheme and he REALLY dislikes the idea of being part of someone else’s scheme himself.)

Elias finds Agnes interesting the way one would find, say, a new species of venomous snake interesting; there’s a lot to be learned from careful observation and the implications of it’s existence are intriguing but you don’t want it near you. Her volatile nature makes her unpredictable, which makes her dangerous.

As a result he tends to use what knowledge he has about Agnes, the Desolation, and her fate as leverage to make his incineration less appealing. This works, for the most part; while Agnes finds it extremely irritating she also does want to hear what a Beholding-aligned non-cultist can tell her about her nature. She just does not appreciate Elias’s insistence on being infuriatingly obtuse all the time.

Agnes also does not appreciate the idea that the Archivist does not, in fact, belong entirely to her and that she has to share custody with this guy. Who even is this guy. She’d like to set all his paperwork on fire. (Really she’d like to set HIM on fire but Gertrude said she couldn’t.)

One thing Agnes does admire (or at least find interesting) about Elias is his usage of compulsion to get people to tell him things. She can definitely appreciate the usefulness of that, having grown up with a bunch of crazed zealots who refused to give her a straight answer about anything, and even ends up employing similar tactics herself, as I mentioned earlier. She knows Gertrude and Elias have very different perspectives on how compulsion should be utilized and privately, she agrees with Elias. If one has an advantage, why not use it? She doesn’t tell Gertrude this, nor does she tell her about the “interviews” she conducts, though she often wants to.

All three of them have very unique brands of incredible interpersonal tension with each of the others, so when they’re all sharing a dream at the same time the atmosphere is less “electric” and more “nuclear reactor meltdown”. They’re not sure that they could actually kill each other through dream-to-dream communication (Elias doesn’t think so, so probably not) but chances are that’s gonna be put to the test at some point.

I actually started drafting a fic about all this at one point lmao just cause I had so many ideas for specific scenes I thought would be interesting but realistically I’ll never have time to finish that. Still I definitely want to expand on all this because I’m obsessed with their potential AND the actual canon of tma pretty much never went into it so….my house now. Thanks so much for indulging me on this sdkjfhskj I thought this would be so much shorter than it ended up being