reading the transcripts of the magnus archives for fic reference as i often do and i feel like given everything else that happens i do not see stressed enough the fact that in season one, before half of the stuff that would justify it, jon was sleeping in the archives regularly enough to have a room for it. who does that??? what's wrong with him. this is an archiving job it is not the kind of job that requires this. when i'm in a poor work-life balance competition and my opponent is jonathan sims. what.
cant believe no ones talking abt the Cruiseship episode, where columbo not only has his raincoat off for most of the runtime, he Also has his top button undone and Also wears the worlds only brown hawaiian shirt
i like the idea of jon needing glasses at the start of the podcast but not at the end due to eye shenanigans, but i don't personally think of it being as simple as "the eye fixed his eyesight laser eye surgery style" because i think it's fun if it's weirder about it.
(under the cut, because this got long and sidetracked as my tma thoughts tend to, and it's been in my drafts too long for me to kid myself that i'll make it succinct <3)
when he first gains the ability to understand other languages, it appears to be somewhat situational to what the eye wants him to understand, in this case applying to the statement but not the invitation. perhaps if he tried in later seasons he could understand both, but the point is it's not instinctive for everything.
later with spoken language, he doesn't seem to realise (at least not in the moment) that it's being translated for him. he only fully seems to register the statement in 102 is french after he reads it, but he is able to see that it's french, so i think it's likely that he still heard chinese but the translation in his mind was natural enough that it didn't register.
so for the glasses headcanon, i think it's fun to apply the same logic. it's not changing his senses at the point of hearing, or in this case seeing, he just Understands what he's looking at. and maybe the fact that he can't technically see it doesn't register until it's pointed out. because, he knows what he's looking at, he can describe it even, but now he can also see that it's blurry and that he shouldn't know all off the details.
depending how bad his eyesight is, i could see this distinction being more or less relevant. if he needed them for reading it might be a lot easier to read things relating to statements. if he's badly shortsighted maybe it would end up letting him "See" things that aren't directly fears related for the sake of him making his way through the world lol.
as for why he'd stop wearing them if it didn't actually fix things, i mean. he was kidnapped 3 times around when he gained the language abilities, among many other incidents. i don't think it would have been a deliberate choice to stop wearing them, and there's enough going on that i don't think he'd get a new pair if things were working fine on some weird level.*
that's mainly for s3 though. with s4 i could be convinced there are cases where the eye actually lets him see, maybe even for the most part, if only for the idea of him waking up able to see better, which i feel could add to him doing way too fine horrors style after a coma. maybe in the same way that he Knows, it's often natural but sometimes takes effort, the mental equivalent of squinting to focus light.
with how it tries to guide him towards and away from certain things, it might not work in scenarios where jon is looking for stuff it doesn't want found, like eric's tape. even if it's mostly letting him see normally at this point, it's less of a permanent upgrade laser eye surgery style and moreso something that's still conditional. on the other hand, perhaps he can see people who have a statement to give very clearly.
by s5. well. i imagine the eye would love for him to see every detail of the world that he helped bring about. i think he can see more than most people can at that point. in the sense of both, literally everything, but perhaps also more detail in actual visuals if he looks for it.
which adds an extra layer of disorientation to upton house and the tunnels if he's getting this level of vision from the eye now as well. i doubt he even gets the base Understanding style of seeing when hidden from it. cut off from the thing that is very much part of you at this point and additionally the thing that lets you actually literally see.
i don't know if i'll ever incorporate this into anything, but it's real in my mind <3 will never be normal about the way the fears affect their avatars.
*under an asterisk because this is less about the actual eyesight part of the concept and was originally in the tags, but my specific headcanon leans towards him losing his glasses during the circus kidnapping.
my reasoning for the circus specifically rather than sometime else in the season:
it's around this time that the language ability developed, so i think it's when he'd get the ability even if he lost the glasses sooner or later.
there was a long time period where they may have just taken them away, even if he didn't lose them in the initial struggle, for ease of getting at his face for moisturising if nothing else.
plays into the way the stranger blocks out the eye in a very literal sense.
could be either a small blessing in the way the lights being out is possibly for the best in nikola's original scene, or on the other hand could add to the stranger's disorientation. maybe both!
i could be convinced that it happened with daisy, i can very much see them getting damaged with daisy and later lost with the circus. i just don't know if losing them at that point would add or detract from the fact that it's already the most powerless jon felt in the whole podcast, it doesn't ring as true thematically as the circus does. i could also see them being lost during the unknowing for the similar reasons as him seeing clearly after the coma, but that renders the s3 portion of the headcanon irrelevant so it's not as much my choice ghfjdk.
the statement by jonah in 160 that jon is "marked very deeply by the spiral" feels more and more real every time i try and write a story or meta about something relating to jon and Helen Is Now There Too. not complaining love her <3 insane about the entire character concept of the distortion honestly
got reminded of this question in part 2 of the season 2 q&a while talking about jon's complete lack of work-life balance. i'm sure this has been discussed but does anyone have any solid headcanons on what the "just a little bit weird" collection may have been before everything went completely wrong?
posting things my mother pointed out part 2: yeah honestly i see the similar vibes with these scenes too, close enough welcome back lynne hammond. congrats to her for actually getting paid for it this time
soon i will find out which is harder: finding a way to write 11 (12 but that's a secret between us) different jons from different seasons in the same room while making the story still possible to understand, or actually fixing the plot without the character who was actually present for all of the plot i am trying to fix, who additionally is somewhat omniscient.
i will find out the hard way and you will find out by which one gets a second chapter faster (first chapter is the easy part).
looking at the tma liveshow transcript for fic reference purposes and i'm just so normal about seeing the audience laughter transcribed, given episode 172 strung out. would be fun to find all the places where the phrase pause for laughter is directly applicable, but i think it's mainly the very end line that i'm abnormal about. the laughter about the tapes just feels so web narratively, given the dramatic irony of it which could easily read as schadenfreude even if that's not actually where the humour is coming from. adds another fun layer too i think, that what we don't get to hear through tapes we see through theatre, another avenue of the web.
