You made a post/answered an ask about Jon's "fucked up and evil feedback loop" with his self-destructive behaviour, and I thought, wait isn't self-harm often compared to addictions? There's a whole dopamine release thing going on.
So I looked it up, there's a whole article written on it, which makes sense. Essentially, it says the neurobiology of self-harm is considered to be similar to addiction, wherein a dopamine increase is triggered by a compulsive behaviour that leads to "chronically decreased dopamine levels."
The Eye feeding off Jon when he does something self-destructive or gets hurt makes sense. And I mean, you've probably already though all this before, but I think that also looking at his self-destruction as indicative of his connection to the Eye being akin to an addiction is a neat way to look at it.
Like, it all really comes back to that. I really like how it's like, it's worst fears, essentially. Your addiction really is hurting other people and yourself, not making other people and yourself hurt.
I love this podcast and I have no words. Anyway I'm off to read like 8 articles on non-suicidal self-harm and ADHD now, lol.
(in reference to this post)
I think you are putting your finger on a few things the text is doing with relation to jon’s monstrous becoming. I don’t personally tend to view self harm through a lens of addiction, though I know some people who find that lens useful when it comes to interpreting their own experiences so I’m not saying it’s, like, Wrong or anything, and I also think the show deliberately parallels the repetitious, compulsive behavior of addiction with the repetitious, compulsive behavior of self-destructive PTSD symptoms.
jon chases after statements and knowledge again and again because it feels good when he gets them and it feels bad when he doesn’t, but all those supernatural experiences he’s absorbing and re-living are all about fear. like how he spends all of s3 getting chased and kidnapped and harmed and then feels like something’s off when he finally has some safe down time (mag 115), the repeated experiences of second-hand fear through statements creates a desire for more of that fear.
my thoughts on this currently are being very much influenced by a doctoral dissertation I’ve been chipping away at reading for the last few weeks, adam colman’s 2016 “addictive reading: nineteenth-century drug literature's possible worlds.” the main thrust of the paper is an examination of how addiction as a literary device influenced nineteenth century british writing, both in the portrayal of actual addicted characters / addictive substances and in the portrayal of what colman calls “aesthetic addiction” or “addiction-like” behaviors, behaviors which he defines as relating to a repetitive, compulsive, emotionally charged, exploratory pursuit of goals that may not even be achievable. think about how sherlock holmes uses cocaine when he’s not on a case, or how dr jekyll compares his relationship to his identity-changing potion to alcoholism, connecting both the investigative thrill of solving a mystery and the repetitive nature of the scientific method to addiction.
an obvious place for addiction-like forms to manifest is in serial mystery fiction, where characters (and the audience) keep coming back to the same subject over and over, spurred on by clues that only magnify the appetite for more. colman looks at this in the context of victorian serial novels, and I think it also applies to the magnus archives, especially given the ways that tma is in conversation with nineteenth century literature (riffing on the gothic, allusions to specific horror authors, references to keats and coleridge, criticism of imperial era enlightenment thought, etc.).
to borrow some of colman’s framework, I think jon’s trauma responses, as well as the curious nature of the beholding, are figured as addiction-like. he’s obsessed with gertrude’s murder to the point where he keeps coming back to it to try and reach further, even when it seems like his main fixations have already been answered, as though getting answers just makes him more desirous for more answers. he puts himself in harm’s way over and over to the point where he feels stagnant if he’s safe and will, on a whim, take life threatening risks that absolutely no one believes are necessary (mag 143). his curiosity and his tendency towards self-destruction keep him returning to pursue to the same points, which serves him well as a serial mystery protagonist, and they are also traits that are often in-text connected to addiction.
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