#damn you Jonny Sims | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 1 year

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nhthcth is so damn good i can't even handle it. What really got me this most rescent update is how well you write Elias. He's threatening, terrifying even, but in a way that feels unique to you and much closer to canon than a lot of other fic I've seen him in. Can you talk about how you approach writing Mr. Eyeball Bastard Man?

Eliassssss oh I hate the bastard. So do y’all, based on the sheer number of death threats he gets every single chapter.

If I’m doing fanfiction, I’m usually playing off of a canon character who already has an established personality that I’m trying to at least get in the ballpark range of. So what I usually do is pick a few dominant core traits and then adapt them for the events of the narrative. Here’s what I focused on for Elias in nhthcth:

1. Total lack of empathy.

This was one of the biggest ones for making Elias such a huge threat in nhthcth and just making him so terrible. It’s also the trait that I think ties him the most to canon elias.

I see a lot of fanfictions where Elias is a lot more caring or attentive or just pulls more of his punches in comparison to his canonical self, and for me, it’s the biggest separation between canon elias and some depictions of him in fanon. This happens a good deal with fics that do involve Jon as a child—which, you know, is a playground nhthcth is kicking around sand in.

And I want to be so clear that I am not knocking or criticising those fanfictions. I have so much fun with them and they do a lot of good work. A lot of the time, the authors aim probably isn’t even to have their elias be like canon elias—it’s fanfiction. It is defined by taking creative liberties, and the way they execute their eliases are all extremely fun and enjoyable and interesting in their own unique way. The only thing I would say is that I really would not see canon elias making those same decisions—which is probably a statement that can be made about some of the decisions nhthcth elias makes, because I am not jonny sims and I, too, am taking creative license and engaging in fanfiction. Which is a very longwinded aside, but it’s important for me to say that I am not at all trying to insult these works of other authors who I deeply respect.

I also think it’s important to note that I feel Elias’s cruelty and lack of empathy takes child Jon fics and nhthcth specifically into darker waters than most want to be in. Like, fundamentally, Jon’s a kid. Due to the nature of Becoming, he is having his soul slowly eaten while he’s still alive to experience it. It’s very dark, heavy subject matter all circulating around a very young protagonist.

The thing is that I really like dissecting the practical implications of a narrative decision and embracing the ugly reality of it. Like, if it’s just a potential consequence that doesn’t have any real narrative merit and I can go with a happier alternative, I will go with the happier alternative but it sort of bugs me if I sort of like, shy away from the inherent implications of something. At the same time, I really dont want to fetishize bad things happening, particularly to young characters. Like sometimes, it just gets gratuitous, and I don’t like that either. I mostly try to edge around some of the worst of it by implying what happened rather than showing the actual scenes, but it’s a hard balance to strike, particularly when you tend towards angst in general and when a lot of the characters you’re writing about are children.

Like, nhthcth was both spurred from my interest in mr spider and how it could have gone different, but also in the fact that by the time canon Jon enters the narrative, most of the major actors in this supernatural underground are already gone. Gerry is dead, so is Dekker and Gertrude and Agnes Montague, so you have this sort of mental image of a golden age already passed. Most of the people who defined the landscape are already taken out of commission by the time Jon even approaches the edges of what’s happening, and I really wanted to write a Jon that participated in that period of time, which meant he had to get involved much earlier than he did and it spiralled from there, which left me stuck grappling with the practical implications of such a metaphysically horrifying experience as Becoming being visited upon a very young boy.

in a similar way, toy rosaries deals in an adult Matt Murdock and was really sourced in a desire to have Jack Murdock alive and kicking at the time daredevil is around, but you have to figure out how Matt’s still daredevil if jacks not dead, the clearest narrative divergence point is jacks death, Matt being kidnapped then was the clearest way to put him in sticks path, human trafficking was the only thing I thought the mob would practically do as retaliation that wasn’t killing Matt as a lesson to Jack, which sort of leaves me figuring out how to handle the practical realities of something as horrible as human trafficking and what’s likely to happen as a result.

Which is another long winded way of saying that deciding how far is far enough with cruelty, particularly when your child is a protagonist, is a difficult balancing act to strike and most writers probably don’t want to go quite so far as nhthcth does.

all of that being said, i just think canon elias would not nearly go to the sheer effort that he does in a lot of fics that i've seen. once again i have SO MUCH FUN watching him do it still and this is not to insult those fics, i love them too and think they're fantastic, they're just playing in the sandbox a different way than i am.

usually his care or effort is sourced in canon traits. The most common one i've personally seen is Elias doing it out of service to the Eye, who is Obsessed with Jon.

And this makes sense! The Eye has always, even in canon, shown a sort of increased attention to jon. Jon got a lot of stuff from the Eye that Elias never did in canon, even pre apocalypse. Post apocalypse, he was its Special Little Boy and the Eye was basically pspspspspspspsp'ing for its beloved archivist to shank elias in his little fear cocaine rave discoball so Jon could be the Most Specialist Boy In The Universe, despite the fact that Jon did this purely against his will and Elias has been its dedicated acolyte for literal centuries. The man is still getting his shit rocked by someone who isn't even on the police force anymore in his shitty little jail cell without any supernatural healing that we know of. Jon's over there having the worst fucking time of his life, been here for fucking twelve and a half minutes, and he's already curb stomping Peter Lukas in the depths of his own Entity and supernaturally healing from injuries and this is all happening with his active disapproval. Jon has a permanent google doc open on his laptop titled "resignation letter if i ever fucking gain the ability to quit without having to gouge out my own eyes or if local gayboy agrees to do self mutilation with me and run off to smooch in cottagecore bliss in which case i care less about the eye thing" and the Eye still thinks he's the most favoritist boy around. Elias is trying his best to bring his master into reality to realize its terrible purpose and the Eye is still making him schlep down to his old body with a very confused mailroom twink to manually gouge out his eyes in what must be a painful and messy process that's embarrassing for everyone. Like, elias probably doesn't have that much upper body strength. is it. is it hard to overpower the local stoner with a flat ass and poor observational skills. does he ever slip on the blood. does it ruin his clothes. does he. does he ever mess up with the, the eye thing. the removal thing. it's probably so gross. like the entire process is just extremely inelegant and probably embarrassing. Jon just fucking got here and didn’t even want to be here and the Eye is lavishing him with gifts and attention like he’s its favorite babygirl, and elias is looking on with resentment after clocking hundreds of years of dedicated service like “I could be babygirl” but he can’t he can’t be babygirl he will NEVER be babygirl

It's also canonically suggested through agnes montague that child avatars tend to be a lot closer to their entities and more powerful than people who become avatars as an adult. i have my own theories as to why this may be, but if you combine that with Jon's own unusually strong connection to the Eye, then it's safe to say that the Eye in these fics is going to be very much transfixed with baby jon.

But my own personal theories about the Entitles means that this would, in no way, require Elias to show even the barest amount of mercy towards jon.

This is a another MASSIVE DIVERGENCE that i won't really break down for the sake of like, the poor souls pinponging along this explanation with me, but I have a bit of a background in Classical tradition, including greek and roman philosophy. And I find the entities intensely fascinating, because how they're discussed metaphysically is really similar to how the classical tradition approaches metaphisics as well.

The thing is that, at their core, the Entities only are what they are, which is a very classical approach to metaphysics. The Eye is the horrible fear of being exposed, seen, known, by something cruel and uncaring, among other things. So Jon can compel truths from you with great ease, because that draws directly from the Eye's wheelhouse. But he couldn't compel you to lie. Moreover, I'd go so far as to say the Eye is metaphysically estopped from lying to him. Everything he Knows has to be true, because the Eye's very being is formed of this fear of horrible truths.

And I'd say that the Eye would never care about whether or not Jon is happy or treated well because that simply is not in the realm of what it is. The Eye is a thing that is metaphysically incapable of love in the way that you or I understand it. It is a direct product of the negative emotion of Fear, and as a result, something like concern or care for its most beloved avatar's wellbeing is something entirely alien to its very existence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it enjoys jon's own pain and suffering, because that is the only thing that it is capable of.

And this is something that I try to imply pretty directly in the most recent chapter of nhthcth. Jon straight up says that the Eye loved him for the pain he felt.

The Eye's entire existence, it's sole natural law purpose, is entirely directed towards fear, pain, suffering, and its consumption. If the Eye loves something, then that must be a very terrible thing, because it is only truly capable of causing pain.

And that's fascinating in the context of Avatars, because avatars are repeatedly shown to enjoy what they are. They're not really trapped in pain and suffering--they delight in it, actually. But I think the answer to why that is is most clearly seen in the act of Becoming.

Jane Prentiss is an excellent case study, because we have a statement from her in the moments before she fully Became. Even in the moments of her most devoted fervor, there's a deep, existential pain in her words. She doesn't like it. She came to the magnus institute not to gloat, but at a desperate final bid at being saved from the thing that was consuming her metaphysically in a way that caused such terrible pain that she could not put it into words.

And the thing is that I don't think it ever stopped hurting. I think that the Corruption just ate the part that remembered it was supposed to hurt. Her final form has some corroboration for this as well. She became a home for that which loved her, and that was a home riddled with holes. It must have hurt, having so many worms inside of her, burrowing and squirming and writhing. But she delighted in the pain, and I don't know if we can say that means it wasn't actually painful or that there has simply become something deeply perverse about her understanding of pain.

We see this in other avatars as well. Mike Crew, for all of his delight in the Vast, didn't actually seem to want to join it. he doesn't remember his own Becoming, and is deeply confused at his own jumbled recollections of being afraid because it's so incongruous with what he Became. But the outside statement discussing his Becoming corroborates that Mike Crew before he fell was desperate and afraid, and may not have truly wanted what he actually chosen. Once again, I don't think that Mike liked it, in truth. I think he just lost the bit of him that understood that it hurt.

Jon himself is an excellent case study as well. Season 2 is his most clear descent into what he becomes. That's where he starts developing his abilities most clearly, and, more important, that's where he begins to feed his god in earnest. he reads the statements, and the Eye feeds from him, but I think a far more definitive act that sent him towards his own becoming as the fact that he was stalking his coworkers that season. He was inciting in them a fear of paranoia and being watched that the Eye must have delighted in--and we see that he actually did cause this pain particularly in Tim's own deep-seated resentment towards Jon that is never truly resolved.

And I think that we never seen in canon the true depths of how profoundly Jon must have hurt Tim in the scope of Season 2. Tim is not only Jon's closest friend in the Archive--he's extremely strongly implied to be his closest friend in the Institute and possibly his closest friend at all at this point in time. Now, it's also shown that Sasha and Tim were likely closer to one another than Jon and Tim ultimately were, but it's still undeniable that the bond that Tim and Jon had must have been a very, very deep one in Season 1.

Tim is the only person that Jon actually asks to come with him to the Archives. He is shown to care deeply about Sasha--most notably in the sheer grief he felt about her death but also in his concern for her with Michael's first appearances--but it's unclear how much of that, if any, predated the Archives, and how much of that is just Jon's general care for people around him. Tim is the one that he actively wants to be with him in a job promotion he's later shown to be deeply insecure and fearful about, and while that may be just a general appreciation for his work ability, when he's in the Archives, Tim is the one that he repeatedly goes to for help with the most sensitive topics he has, such as Oliver Bank's initial statements. Jon in Season 1 is explicitly stated to be held deeply in the grasp of a very old fear of his, and most of his most prickly actions--namely, his blind insistence on tearing apart statements--is a desperate attempt to protect himself from a primordial fear that is likely of similar nature to the worst thing that ever happened to him. The fact that Jon, in the depths of a very deep and old fear, trusted Tim not to hurt him, suggests a relationship that had a very solid foundation prior to season 2. The fact that it is after tim nearly dies a horrible, painful death helping save someone who was likely one of his closest friends is the point where that friend decides he's completely untrustworthy begets a horribly violation that Tim has every right to feel betrayal for.

And I think that the sheer terror of being stalked itself must have been horribly painful for Tim as well. In the intervention, he has this line with a lot of tense anger where he says "He was watching my house." And I can't help but wonder how long it took Tim to figure that out.

He has his own trauma around the supernatural a la Danny that's been exacerbated by a very recent life or death spooky scenario. He starts to realize he's being stalked. He feels himself being watched. He likely doesn't realize it's Jon right away. All he knows that there's someone in his bushes, following him home, and he can feel eyes on him that hold nothing but malice. It must have hurt like nothing else when he realized Jon was the one who caused such horrible fear in him. All of that likely made an amazing meal for the Eye, and Jon was probably unknowingly feeding off of him the entire time. Jon stalking his coworkers was also a choice, and it sent him hurdling along the path of becoming the same way the statements did.

But what's especially interesting in this is that the one who explicitly suffers from the most paranoia in Season 2 isn't Tim.

It's Jon.

He spends almost all of Season 2 in a state of total paranoia. Tim, or what we see in canon of him, doesn’t seem to ever get close to the sheer existential panic Jon casually lives in the entirety of season 2. It's a mania, and one that causes him almost constant suffering. He's in total, constant, crippling fear, and while it's posited that the Not Them was part of what caused this, I think it'd be a mistake to say that the Eye wasn't getting a meal of its own. Out of all the entities, the Eye is most closely tied to paranoia, and it's suggested that the Not Them only affected him to such a degree because of his relationship with the Eye. Jon's own Becoming is yet another example of how even the avatars of the Entities are not exempt from their gods, and in fact seem to suffer from them more directly than even some of the victims.

So at the end of the day, you have a child in Elias's sole control who has absolutely no one to advocate for him. The only interest of Elias's that he serves is the Eye, and if anything, the Eye itself is interested in his pain and suffering. The only person in this situation who could possibly show jon an ounce of mercy in this environment is Elias himself, and canon Elias has never once exhibited anything that suggests he ever would.

Repeatedly, Elias in canon is shown to elect for cruel detached watching even when mercy is an option that would cost him little to nothing. Barnabas Bennet came to him for help, and Elias plainly states that he liked Barnabas, collected his bones sadly, and could have saved him but chose not to. More interestingly, he says so in a Statement, where he cannot lie, because such a thing is anathema to what the Eye is. His sorrow at Barnabas's death must be to some degree genuine, but he still elected for cruelty. He states that he did it to see what would happen, which means its at least in part directed towards feeding the eye, but it is important to note that this decision can't be laid entirely at the Eye's feet. Elias was still in the very early stages of his becoming and had likely not yet even attempted the Watcher's Crown. Not only that, but to blame this decision entirely on the Eye's hunger would directly ignore the thematic importance of choice in tma.

Daisy is implied to be one of the strongest, if not the strongest, avatar of the hunt around. She's actively starving herself, and she still fairly easily scares off Trevor and Julia, despite the fact that Trevor is an experienced, fully realized hunter who had gone through the process of dying and choosing his god, and Julia is in her prime and at least a third generation hunter. Daisy at the start is also very cruel in how she feeds her god, and she's shown to revel in it, much like Elias.

But she still abandoned a hunt for Basira. Even as far gone as she was when she went after Jon in the forest, she gave up a hunt at least in part because Basira asked her to. At the time Barnabas Bennet got stuck in the lonely, Elias was probably a common bitch who could probably barely even get a spooky heads up about the lunch specials, and he still decided to watch a friend's horrible, slow demise for basically no reason. "I wanted to see what happened" the fuck do you think is going to happen, elias. if you really wanted to know, you could have traded mordechai someone you didn't have homoerotic tension with to watch in the lonely and still gotten to save your probable ex-boy toy. Elias picked to be cruel, and the things you pick hold some of the greatest weight in tma.

Elias also exhibits this tendency towards Jon pretty plainly in canon, with the most notable instance being jon's attack from prentiss. Jon almost died entirely because Elias was watching and waiting as the worms were eating him, despite being able to stop it at any time with the emergency extinguisher. He claims that this was to ensure the marks on him were deep, and while this may be true in part, i think there's an implicit drive of perverse enjoyment in that. Jon, after all, was already marked by the corruption at this point. He was marked earlier in the day, when the worms first ate into his leg. Elias could have hit the fire extinguisher before the worms even got close to him at the end, and Jon still would have bore the corruption's mark. There's nothing in canon to suggest that the marks even need to be particularly deep--in fact, it's pretty clearly suggested that they only necessitate a fear of his life without any real intensity qualifier past that, because the Desolation's mark came from one handshake, the vast was a bad tea date, and he just had to look at the science project of the fuckin' glue-eater entity that is the dark. He was suffering, and Elias was feeding the god of callous observation of suffering. I think he did it at least partially because he was cruel, and he enjoyed it, and he was not going to try and make getting what he wanted--jon marked--any less painful than he could. He may have needed Jon marked for what he wanted, but he chose to make it crueler than it had to be. He liked it.

Lastly, canon pretty directly states that elias wouldn't really give two shits about the fact that jon was a kid. He ended a world full of children and damned them to what he thought was an eternity of pain and suffering without so much as a blink of hesitation.

The fact that Elias consistently elects for the crueler option is something that i think that is pretty fundamental to his characterization in nhthcth, and I think it's what makes him as terrifying a villain as he is. Particularly in chapter 23, elias is just callous towards Jon and his emotional devastation.

Chapter 23 was meant to sort of be a bridging point between Jon as a child and Jon as an adult. As a child, he’s almost completely overwhelmed by the Eye, and he doesn't really have a reason to have hope for any other existence. He doesn't really remember a life before this, and he knows that what's happened to him is so absolute that he can't go back to what he was before. He has multiple scenes where he's shown to not want to be what he is right now or stay where he is, but they're pretty directionless. He goes to the park; he comes back; he doesn't run because he can't think of anywhere to run to. He can't run from something living in his head, so he stagnates in this state where he wants to live any other life but can't think of another one to live.

But Jon as an adult, if anything, is more stuck than he was as a child. unlike before he ran away, he knows that the contract precludes any real chance of leaving. He's fully the Archivist, has been the Eye's avatar for much longer, and he knows enough about this world to know that even if he tried to leave, someone would come after him. If anything, he's got less reason to fight than ever.

But adult jon is marked by constant resistance--including seemingly meaningless resistance. Like, Jon has done absolutely everything he can to make sure that his captivity is not convenient for everyone else. Shit like having a deeply inappropriate out of office email, replying to HR messages with "hey i'm metaphysically bound to a monument of terror and cannot leave so i'm going to continue being a deeply unsettling and unwell man"--that doesn't do anything for him. Elias isn't going to let him go just because Jon's dedicated his life to making Elias seem like the world's shittiest adoptive parent who raised the world's least adjusted man. He's still got fight to him, and there's this lingering question of why when so much of his fight just doesn't serve any real goal of his and Elias will retaliate if he pushes too far.

And I think the reason why is because Jon in chapter 23 experiences a loss he's never going to forget or recover from, and while he may not be able to change that, he won't let Elias forget it either.

Jon in chapter 23 is effectively mourning the loss of his own personhood and his family. His grief is tangible, and it's strong enough to drive him for the rest of his life. And I think one of the cruelest things Elias does in the fic is trivialize his pain.

It's insult to injury to insult. Jon becomes physically ill on more than one occasion with how much distress he's in, and Elias calls him dramatic for it. Jon's having a total breakdown, and Elias is calling him selfish because this may require him to have to move around his schedule.

And all of that isn't needed for Elias's purposes, at the end of the day. Jon is trapped by the contract. He's feeding on statements, and he's got every indication that the Eye will continue making Jon Become. Even if this was driven by a pure cold, calculated design to end the world, he could do it without the endless verbal digs that just demean Jon. His cruelty, that's a choice. He picked to do it, and he didn't have to. it's not just that what happened to Jon was a necessary evil to make someone capable of wearing the watcher's crown; he's got moments where he could show mercy and still get what he wants, and he picks to be crueler.

at the end of the day, he is the one in almost absolute control over jon from a very young age, and he will not stay his own hand. Jon is a hurt, frightened, desperate child, and he does not care. He has no real affection for him past his own smug self-satisfaction at having created a child who could wear the watcher's crown. He has some incentive for Jon to be hurt, but even when he doesn't have incentive for that, he will affirmatively elect for the more painful option. I think canon elias would be making a lot of the same decisions, and that's one of the most horrible bits about Elias having a child as young as jon under his control. Some of his worst, most villainous lines and actions was a direct result of the fact that he could ease up on what he’s doing and every time he chooses to hurt Jon more.

2. Avoidance of responsibility.

Elias in canon is fascinating because some of his most memorable monologues center on him preaching on personal choice and responsibility, and yet the character who most often dodges his own complicity in what happened. The only time he actively accepts responsibility in what he's done is when he's gloating about it, most plainly seen when Daisy's got a fucking gun on him and Jon literally just crawled out of his own grave and would happily put Elias there in his stead, and Elias is taking his sweet fucking time telling everyone in a room full of people that want to kill him that he did every last thing because he wanted to and enjoyed it, and no one made him do a damn thing.

Any other time, however, he's repeatedly trying to flip the script and make it all about everyone else's personal responsibility. He's over here telling Jon that he chose and picked every last thing he did to become, and while that may be true, he neglects the important little detail that it'd be batshit fucking insane from the get out to assume that this normal job promotion to be what Jon seems to think is a librarian with more dust would incontrovertibly bind him to evil god. He made the choices, but he made them in a culture of ignorance that elias purposefully cultivated and literally killed to maintain, and if you're looking to attribute responsibility for this, then the responsibility is most plainly laid at Elias's feet.

Casting other people's righteous pain and indignation at what he did to them as something that's their fault is a favorite manipulation tactic for elias, but I think it becomes especially egregious in nhthcth, because he's using it against someone who is a child. Jon as a kid cannot parse through Elias's blame-giving in the same way Jon as an adult potentially could have--his brain is literally not developed enough. And while Jon as an adult at the very least assumed a little risk by taking a job at spooky central (not to mention the blame he has to bear for some of his more egregious activities, like stalking his coworkers, even if it is mitigated by the fact that he was in a state of extreme mental distress), Jon in nhthcth was a scared little boy afraid of being eaten who begged him for help. In response, Elias just fed jon to something else. He's doing the exact same things as he does in canon and using the exact same manipulation strategies, but it makes for an almost more horrifying action, because he's doing it against a little boy who bears absolutely no blame or responsibility in what happened to him, who was hurt on a much deeper level, and who just cannot defend himself against elias or his claims.

3. Arrogance.

Lastly, one of the most important aspects of elias as a character that I really tried to underscore in nhthcth is that he just is not as smart as he thinks he is.

Elias in canon has cast himself as this grand player in a game of cosmic proportions, which is hilarious, because he's actually the biggest clown in a community that literally has an entirely separate evil circus. there are literal clowns and he's outstripping them with ease.

Fundamentally, elias is a fucking schmuck.

He's a pawn from the start, and canon I feel is pretty clear about that. Most of his grandest successes in this game are either fed to him by the Web or him playing right into the hands of the Web's plans, which, of course, conclude with him being shanked by his own employee who probably hadn't even been with the company for like, that long. He only finds out about the Entities because the web arranges for it.

Even his final victory was honestly pretty hollow. I mean, the apocalypse happened, he took his place in the panopticon, but he was just a glorified disco ball huffing fear like paint fumes. Granted, he was in much better straits than everyone else, but I think there’s something innately human in the idea that we want more form life than the bare sensation of pleasure, which is what Elias’s life devolves into. He’s just in this weird fugue state mindlessly consuming fear which is just… pathetic, honestly.

It’s especially ironic in light of why he even incites the apocalypse. He does it, effectively, so no one else can do it to him. He starts trying to stop it from ever happening, decides instead it’s better to fuck over anyone else than be the one who gets fucked over. It’s also probably influenced in no small part by his deep fear of death.

The irony comes, of course, in the fact that he trapped himself and everyone else in a doomed world where death was guaranteed. While time didn’t exist in the apocalypse, so we can’t say if it was longer or shorter than his worldly life, he arguably could have survived longer if he just kept body hopping through trust fund twinks in a world where he could have kept getting his daily Starbucks and slutting around with whoever the new dumbest person in the Lukas family lineage was.

The fact that Elias always was a sacrificial lamb to the Web’s ultimate plot really just puts the final nail in just how outclassed he was in canon. He spent his entire existence trying to crown himself king of a ruined world, and when he finally got there, all he did was snort fear coke in the world’s carcass and then immediately get sacrificed because he was only ever just a placeholder for the Web's actual victory.

like in canon, Elias in nhthcth seems to think he occupies the role of a chess master navigating this grand scheme. however, like in canon, he's a fucking dumbass eating glue.

It's important to note that Elias's biggest victories are all the direct product of him skating through cheap advantages rather than any actual intelligence or skill. The real leverage that Elias has over Jon and everyone else is the contract. He is able to control a lot because none of them can physically get away or kill him. But the thing is that it's very easy to call yourself a chess master when you're a grown ass adult who signs up for the kiddie league.

Jon is fucking eight and knows jack shit about what's going on when he's trapped by Elias, and he has been skating off that victory ever since. Like, congrats, man, you barely squeaked out a success against someone who is in the third grade. Way to go, you special little man.

Part of his real downfall is that he's just not the player he thinks he is. He goes to his end having played his part in a performance that was never particularly creative to begin with. He hit everyone of his pre-written lines without missing a beat, and he died on cue, just as pathetic as he always was. He goes to his death as a patsy that lived just as long as he needed to.

I wanted to preserve that for nhthcth. I wanted his downfall to be linked to his own overestimation of his worth and his fatal flaws.

Elias throughout the fic is pretty insistent on making this show of someone who eternally has the upper hand, and who's already won, that i think is consistent with him from canon. But if you look at what's happening substantively, Elias so seriously overplays his hand on multiple occasions that he really lays the groundwork for his own downfall.

Elias spends chapter 23 treating Jon like his resistance is already at its end. he's extremely confident about it too--he puts it at a couple months before it's all over. Of course, we see the timeline in 2013, and we know that for all of his confidence, he is miserably wrong. Jon never forgets Gerry. He never stops hating Elias. He never stops fighting elias or what's happening to him. And I think that the way Elias approaches these facts is really indicative of the fact that he profoundly misunderstands jon as a person--almost entirely because he repeatedly discounts jon as a person. He treats jon like he's tangential to his own being, just person that unfortunately hasn't yet been stripped away from the Eye's vessel. And it's that arrogant dismissal that I think really sets him up for his own failure.

Not to take another divergence into another character, but Elias's main interactions in nhthcth take place with Jon, and I think to understand one you really need to understand another.

Jon was one of the harder characters to design for nhthcth, simply because his circumstances were so at odds with canon. It wouldn't make sense to have him start at the same characterization he had at season 1, simply because he knows so much more and his life experiences have been entirely different. At the same time, his characterization in later seasons were intensely the product of the events of canon, and they weren't a perfect match either. I ended up whittling him down to the base core of himself and sort of patchworking his different characteristics throughout the seasons back in.

And the thing is that i think at the most base, fundamental core of jon sims is that he will fight to the absolute end. he's just not guaranteed to be particularly good at it. And it's fascinating to me, because Jon's sheer drive towards resistance is something that seems to be dismissed time and time again by characters in canon, despite the fact that it really defines so much of who he is.

There's that Web statement, right? The Creature Feature one, about the movie production by Dexter Banks. The Statement details a Web Leitner that had been found by the director of a movie, about a spider that terrorized a small island town. The narrative lacked any real protagonist or hero, with each interlude ending with the slow, calm march of the character into the jaws of the spider. the closest thing that they get to a protagonist is a man on the island by chance, who serves as a connecting thread, wandering between and observing the islanders who all inevitably march into the spider's jaws. The actor playing this connecting thread on the film set was noted to seem to know more than everyone else, and who was the only one not excited, instead approaching this with more weariness and gravity. He would just spend his off hours smoking and reading, and when the time came and the Web claimed its victims in the actors, he led them all into the room without any resistance.

That episode seems to be a pretty clear analogy to Jon, right? You have the victims of the spider, paralleling statement givers, with the lone connecting thread wandering amongst them and watching their demise and the aftermath. But what's most interesting to me is this implication of going without resistance, because that's the place that Jon notably diverges.

Jon resisted pretty much every step of the way--he was just always outgunned, outmatched, and outclassed by people who had a lot more power and knowledge than him. But I think the fact that he constantly resisted was still important.

From the first episode, Jon has on display this instinct towards keeping himself contrary to the entities--he just never has the know-how to inform his resistance. he goes to ridiculous lengths to maintain his impression of skepticism, despite the fact that all three of his assistants call him out for how ludicrous it's getting, and yet he insists on maintaining it, because he thinks pretending not to know may help protect him from whatever's watching him. he just happened to be wrong.

he immediately tried to go after the not-them, but he again lacked the knowledge and skill to go up against it, but even when he was on the run, he was trying to leave tapes so people would remember his voice. When Michael was going to kill him, jon was trying to demand a way that he could get michael to spare his life--there just happened to not be any. He reaches the apocalypse, and he doesn't take up his role as the most important eye boy around--he tries to find the way to fix it. Even towards the very end, Jon tries to fight the Web's plans for him and to put it all to an end--it's just the web took his resistance into account and planned around it.

That, fundamentally, is where you can see the difference between the web and elias, and in particular elias in nhthcth.

Elias does not understand the game he's playing, and he is someone who is cruel for the sake of cruelty. Elias thinks that Jon himself is a non-issue, that Gerard Keay could never be a true problem for him, and that he solved the entire issue already. He thinks that he's already won, because he does not recognize or understand what drives Jon. Elias is someone who would burn the entire world to keep himself warm. He stopped trying to save the world and caved incredibly quickly into ending it himself as his only option. He picks his own survival at the end of the day, every time, and he thinks that by narrowing Jon's options down where he makes self-preservation contingent on what he wants, then Jon will go with whatever elias wants. He does not understand that people will make other choices, that they'll sacrifice themselves for others, that they'll resist even when it hurts them. The Web has always shown an understanding of how to manipulate people and account for these kinds of contradictory instincts, but Elias is not nearly on the same level as the Web, no matter what he thinks about himself.

And I really wanted these moments of overplaying his hand to be tied to his own other core flaws and failings. He's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and it's his instinct towards cruelty that he indulges to the detriment of his own plan.

So we look at Jon in chapter 23, right? He's the one Elias seemingly has in checkmate with the contract. Elias certainly seems to think he's won--he says as much, very smugly, to Jon's face.

Jon spends the entire chapter in resistance, but it's a very aimless, futile resistance that Elias fully assumes will burn out. Like, jon's attempts in chapter 23 are honestly sad to me, because all of his resistance just seems to be for the sake of doing something. he doesn't have any plan around breaking into elias's office or the files. He starts to make trouble for elias, and it's the start of jon's eventual reputation as a spoiled, distrubed troublemaker who gives elias hell, but from jon's perspective it just seems so desperately sad to me.

Like, Jon takes a few shots at jonah magnus and tries to embarrass elias publicly, but he does it with full awareness taht it won't save him, and it will only make it worse for him. he's lashing out for the sake of lashing out, and elias knows that all of jon's resistance is ultimately going to fail, at least in the short term. but he falsely assumes that Jon's eventually going to give up.

The thing is that Elias did not have to handle Jon's becoming in this way.

Fuck, he could have said, "I've decided the absolute funniest thing I could possibly do here is rent an apartment and make Gertrude raise you and gerard in it, you have to keep reading statements but you don't have to be near me to be an eye avatar." He could have treated Jon with kindness, indoctrinated him or brainwashed him or whatever, and made jon believe in the exact same cause as him. It probably would have turned out better than it did.

If he gave Jon more leash, treated him with more kindness, let him have happiness and safety and security with Gerard Keay, Jon maybe wouldn't have fought elias as violently as he did. maybe he would have taken his victories where he could get it and at least work with elias on occasion to protect the life elias has left for him. At the very least, he wouldn't have his head archivist sending out newsletter reminders to their entire donor rolodex about how elias is still a prick, same as the last newsletter. But instead, Elias elected for the worse option. He assumed he had a victory he didn't have, and he decided that gave him license to be callous and cruel. What could jon do in retaliation? He had no way out, and he would give up sooner rather than later, so he could indulge his crueler side without any fear of repercussion.

But we know that Jon grew up to be an angry, resentful man who fights him tooth and nail every step of the way. He never gave up, he never stopped fighting, and he never made it easy on elias. Elias as a character has always thought himself smarter than he really is, and elias in nhthcth assumes a lot of victories he doesn't have. And that's his own undoing.

#nhthcth #elias Bouchard #I exclusively answer these when I’m off my adhd meds you will get every divergence under the sun

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