FINAL GIRL JON SIMS

magnus archives as a gothic text enjoyer

[magnuspanoptes]

navigation -

bluebeard tag: #kept under lock and key

doubling tag: #surely he's the same

jon gothic tag: #gothic hero(ine) jon sims

jonah gothic tag: #c(o)unt magnus

avatarhood tag: #a man's eating habits

comparatives tag: #misc comparatives

audio edits tag: #my edits

^ most of these are subcategories of #jonelias posts (yeah i know). jon tag is: #jonathan sims and elias/jonah tag is #elias bouchard. every post doesn't go into one of these tags, but all original posts are here: #*

i tag more serious, analysis adjacent posts as: #tma text

idrc if you look at anything here except that i'm once again asking you 🫵 to listen to THIS

current re-listen thoughts tag is: #tma relisten

asks are always open and all answered asks are tagged: #asks

[birt-art]

"Statement of Gerard Keay, deceased" 📼💀

[magnuspanoptes]

and what do we have to say about gertrude reviving gerry from the dead to take away his choice of potentially coming back as an avatar of the eye vs elias being ecstatic about jon 'dying' during the stranger's ritual so he could make the choice to come back as the archivist

[thewizardofschnoz]

[charnel-grounds]

James Hutton, “Thee Devouring Teeth of the Sky,” 2022

[lokomoqo]

„wish you were here” by pink floyd but with jon and tim

the vision came to me suddenly so i had to quickly draw it out 🚬

[magnuspanoptes]

funniest thing they did in S5 was building up an insane amount of anticipation for 38 episodes straight about elias WATCHING them the whole time from his evil panopticon tower. he's PREPARED for any revenge ideas jon might test out on him. from inside his evil panopticon tower. and then they got to the evil panopticon tower and elias was like this side quest jon had to worry about for like five minutes.

[monstrantia]

“Ah, Jon, care to join us ?”

I know Elias is watching them get closer and >;(

[magnuspanoptes]

hey i saw ur post abt the locked tomb and i gotta say that out of the three books so far i find Gideon the least compelling and i TOO do not really vibe with gideons narrative style while also being the least interesting, but the series in and of itself is magnificent and i agree that like the vibes between tma (specifically god/john gaius and the themes revolving him) are very similar and the books are so so so so so so good. if you can muddle through gideon (which really starts picking up only towards the middle id say) it is so so so so worth it bc the next two books are fucking show stopping in terms of gothic literature and god i cry

hey. ok firstly, terribly sorry about ignoring this one, i wasn't online for most of december and since i have notifications turned off for this blog, i don't get to see new asks on mobile. there's no need to apologise for spam notes, i don't mind at all! and yes thank you, you're the third person to pitch tlt to me here, my second attempt at reading gideon the ninth this year did not go well (read one chapter got annoyed by the fanfic register even though i'm told it's intentional and then forgot) but i will genuinely for real make an attempt this time

[sleepnos]

i dont think i ever posted this here ????? so here is my jon piece i did for uni last year :]

[jurassicpeanut]

Don’t you want to be consumed by what loves you?

[aropride]

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

[chernozemm]

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.

[girlfleeshouse]

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

[magnuspanoptes]

elias fancast

[magnuspanoptes]

blonde elias fancast

[magnuspanoptes]

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

[magnuspanoptes]

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