🔥Elias?
I'm so sorry beloved my brain completely died yesterday. But >:) okay let's do this.
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I think I've talked before about how I don't think he makes sense as allegory for Capitalism before (like, at all), and I've got the post about how I don't think he's no/low empathy despite that being a pretty popular fandom device. So we're gonna go with this one: Elias has serious control over his emotions, his displays of sincere emotion, and if he did not what you to know something about him, you would not know it.
One of the most frequent things I see with fandom depictions of Elias have him as either flamboyantly, cartoonishly evil in a silly, almost clumsy sort of way. He is sprawling on his desk like it's a chaise lounge, he is getting tripped up by Archival Antics, he is falling all over himself trying to get Peter's credit card information--essentially making a public spectacle of his every movement in a way he literally never does. (That last bit about trying to secure Institute funding from Peter could be a whole dissertation its own and I think I've have another unpopular Elias opinion request so maybe we'll do it there).
The fandom also swings that pendulum all the way in the other direction and makes him this rabid, unstable, rage filled time bomb that explodes all over everyone at the slightest provocation, has him Joker monologuing and engaging in random acts of sporadic violence in a way that, again, he never does. Like the pipe murder scene is literally the only part of his character they internalized.
He's not an Avatar of the Spiral or the Slaughter, he's not tittering around in pastels twirling his mustache messing with people or looking for more brains to bash in, he's quiet and calculating and meticulous. He Watches, as he has for two centuries, acts opportunistically and deterministically to further his goals, and is a chess master to such a degree that few of the people he's manipulated ever even become fully aware that he's done so.
He's not a bumbling idiot who can't control himself, and to suggest so is to flatten and caricature a deeply nuanced and interesting guy.
