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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 11 months

Note

you might have been asked this question before but ive been curious for a while about what would have happened when gertrude was there when jon originally gave his statement? would anything change ?

Honestly she probably would have killed him.

Like, it feels mean to say? It would have been more out of mercy than anything.

If Jon had come to her with only a Leitner, she would have taken care of the Leitner and sent him home. She doesn't normally intervene on behalf of the Statement givers, but they also aren't usually eight, and it isn't unheard of for Gertrude to intervene for the random unlucky souls who cross her path. She intervened on behalf of Jack Barnabas, and she told the monster pig dude how to handle his problem. It's selective when she intervenes, but I think if it's just a little boy scared by a book, she would help.

The thing about Gertrude is that I don’t I think she is or ever has been heartless; I just think she’s brutally practical.

One of the most interesting tidbits about her is that she looked for Eric Delano for months after he went missing, but wasn’t close enough to know that he had quit ages before he actually died. She avenged Sarah’s death by seeking out someone she had never, ever let herself meet before that moment, but she did this right after sacrificing Michael without hesitation. She seemed genuinely fond of Gerry, but she still bound him to a book.

I think that, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be that she wouldn’t want to save Jon. It would just be that she would realize that she couldn’t.

If he had just arrived with a Guest for Mr. Spider, I think Jon would have walked away remembering her fondly as the brusk but ultimately nice old lady who had her assistant make him a cup of tea and taught him how to burn a Leitner. But he didn’t just come because of A Guest for Mr. Spider. He came because of Tommy Bradstaff.

Gertrude’s shown to be more wary of the Web than pretty much any other entity. She got tricked by them way back when she defeated her first ritual, and I don’t think she forgets. I also don’t think she would have thought it was ever a good idea to voluntarily set herself in a competition with the Mother of Puppets. Jon's eight and scared and she'd want to help him, but she also would have immediately recognized that saving him comes with a very high price tag and a very low chance of success.

I do think Gertrude would have at least tried to think of a way to save him. I just think she would have ultimately come to the conclusion that there wasn’t one.

And it’s just practicality, right? That’s the big difference between her and Jon in nhthcth. It doesn’t matter how badly she wishes she could help; she’ll accept when she can’t. But when she can, she usually racks up a very big win. Jon will wildly intervene without even considering his chances. Like, there's a reason why the Eye led him to Danny Stoker that night--it's not conscious the way humans are or the spiders are, but even pavlov's dogs learned association, and the Eye seems to be capable of that kind of low-level consciousness. When Jon finds Eric Delano's statement in canon, it's because he listened to the tapes the Eye didn't want him to hear. That implies the Eye is at least partially able to make connections based on its own impulses and desires.

Jon's its special little boy who has been resolutely fucking starving himself for almost two decades. He went and joined the eldritch version of AA with Daisy in an attempt not to feed the Eye other than when absolutely strictly necessary, and the Eye's never been happy with his starvation diet. But the one sure-fire way to get Jon to forget his sense and start ripping statements out of avatars is to shove some poor schmuck being eaten in his line of sight.

It’s pretty directly stated in nhthcth that danny isn’t the first victim of another entity he’s tried to snatch, even if he’s never gotten as involved with a pair of victims as the stoker brothers. And honestly—he almost didn’t get super involved with them either. Like, when he was trying to duck out after the initial fight at the theatre, long term involvement would have only made it worse for them. Most of the time, the absolute best chances come from "hope that they've forgotten you existed and won't come back for round two. if that fails maybe just hop continents and it will be too inconvenient for them to track you down again. buy guns." There's a pretty high mortality rate with people who hang around him, and he's not exactly expecting these random male model brothers to manage this world long-term.

If Jon’s hadn’t straight up passed out, he would have called Daisy to come pick him up and bitched to her about fucked up clowns being a problem now. He’d feel vaguely mad at himself when nikola skinned both Danny and Tim, because it’d be just another case of him trying to help and just increasing the body count, which is what happens most of the time.

I think Mike described him like someone who kept putting half dead birds in boxes and feeling disappointed when he opened the lid and saw they’d croaked. It's not unheard of for the people he helps to make it, but it's also not exactly often either. And that’s not even really to say he’s any less powerful or capable than gertrude was—honestly, between him and Daisy? They’re sort of a powerhouse duo. Like, people are afraid of hunters. At one point Dekker says that he was going up against something that would require a hunter to kill, and that while he knew a few, he would never actually risk consulting one. Amateur lobotomy it is. And Daisy is the sort of hunter that can kill other hunters. Jon’s this absolute muppet of a human being rolling up to soul-rending horror like “this is Daisy :) she is my best friend :)” and then they turn around and the Avatar of Fucking Them Up is standing there breathing too heavy and blatantly fucking insane. It’s like if kermit the frog kept bringing the fucking terminator to social events.

And Jon isn’t exactly a slouch either. Like, he’s keeping himself as weak as he can, and he’s still strolling into other entities' domains, feeding on them, and just... walking away again. These are people who are extremely used to being the human equivalent of a great white shark, more powerful and deadly than anyone else in any room they're in, but they've got this extremely distressed looking twink curb stomping them when he has reached the absolute breaking point of his Victorian Fatigue. this man keeps coming into their homes and one-shotting them after weakening himself to the point of being on death's door. jon on his own makes other avatars twitchy, but the Jon and Daisy Buddy Cop is honestly kind of one that the other avatars are somewhat actively afraid of.

Like, they'll dunk on Jon (where daisy can't see), because he's jon and he's ridiculous and pathetic at all times, but people are secretly pretty careful to toe the line of shit jon will put up with. Mike will be smarmy with Jon because he knows Jon will let him get away with it, but he also knows that if he fucks around too hard jon will put him through a psychic paper shredder and daisy will bury his corpse in the woods. It's not a secret that Daisy and Jon are strolling around feeding on and blatantly fucking murdering things like them, but none of these self-serving assholes have managed to handle a pretty active threat to their longevity. that's more because they can't than because they won't.

And still, Gertrude is pretty universally regarded as a force of nature, but Jon's still getting told that a seven percent success rate is a bit generous.

Gertrude is Gertrude Robinson, and she's the baddest bitch around, and that has a huge bit to do with her success rate. But it would be a mistake to say that the number of battles she picked didn't have something to do with why she's more successful. Like--Gertrude's going for quantity over sentiment. She'll save the world, but the individual people in it? Those aren't the fights she has ever prioritized, at the end of the day.

Almost all of the statements Jon in canon recorded were from her tenure, and Jon's follow ups usually concluded with "and then they horribly died." Gertrude was casually eating a fucking sandwich in her office and watching while Jane Prentiss decided that she couldn't be saved and went off to cram her forearm in a spooky wasp nest. She didn't help Jane. She didn't explain what was happening. She didn't try to intervene. She ate her sandwich, and she let Jane leave, and I think that at least in part she would have agreed with Jane's assessment. There wasn't any saving her, and that's a judgment that always precludes Gertrude's help.

Gertrude wins as often as she does because she picks her battles carefully. She delivers maximum damage to maximum effect, and she doesn't spin her wheels on things she knows are a waste of resources. She came right on the heels of an archivist who died because he burned through his resources and his luck, and her tenure has been marked by her being smart enough to be cautious.

I think Jon would have given her his statement. I think she would have been nice to him. I think she would have allowed herself to feel sorry for him, and sorry that he was so young, and sorry that it was too late.

I think that she would have considered what the web could have planned for him, and she would have considered how painful a fate was waiting for him if he met the End the Spider probably had planned for him. And I think she would have decided it would be crueler to let him meet it.

Gertrude in nhthcth specifically has always had a weird, twisted mercy when it came to Jon. She never manipulated him, is the thing. Elias made sure that what he did to Jon had long past the point of no return by the time Gertrude ever caught wind of his existence. As far as she was ever concerned, Jon was beyond saving from the day they met, which meant there was no point in trying. She was never going to offer him the mercy of trying to help him.

But she could have played him and she didn't. And I think that's about the most merciful action that Gertrude Robinson would have been capable of.

She knows about Agnes, okay? better than anyone. she's been bodily hauling the world as they know it through a decade of apocalypse attempts. She took one look at Jon and realized that elias had made him to wear the watcher's crown, but also that she couldn't kill him without completely alienating her resources to stop much sooner apocalypses.

But she sort of knew from the day they met that she may have to one day kill him, if only to stop him from wearing the crown. It wasn't set in stone, but it was a very significant possibility.

In chapter 24, Jon reached out to gertrude for absolutely any comfort possible, and she actually could have given it to him. She could have strung him along with false hope, or just given him a shoulder to cry on. Someone other than elias to love.

And she would have done that knowing that she was actively planning how to kill him when the time came. And she's definitely not above that kind of manipulation. Jon's extremely vulnerable when he comes to her, and he already thinks of her as a source of hope. Stringing him along and being his only source of comfort and support would give her an enormous advantage over him that she normally wouldn't ignore. But if he did die by her hands one day, as she knows he probably will, he'd finally go to his end after a very painful life being murdered by the only person that he thought loved him after he lost Gerry. Gertrude sort of uncharacteristically gave up that advantage to spare him from that final betrayal. She'd never sacrifice the world for him, she could have loved him like her own son and she would still kill him without hesitation, and she won't lie to herself about that fact either. It's a weird, twisted act of mercy to have it be turning the cold shoulder to a little boy begging for help, but in her mind, it was the most merciful option open to her.

And I kind of like the idea of Jonathan Sims in nhthcth always demanding the most painful acts of mercy of Gertrude that she's ever contemplated. Because the thing is, if she had been the one to take his Statement that day, she's almost definitely would have decided that Jon couldn't be saved. Not when the thing after him was the Web. And once she decides that, she has two options: let him meet the End waiting outside of those doors, or handle it herself.

And the thing is, her MO is to go for the former. It's not like she's mercy killing everyone who shows up and tells her of the fate worse than death that's most likely to befall them--hell, to take the risk of mercy killing is borderline out of character to her. If it were anyone else, she wouldn't have done it.

But Jon was eight. He was begging her for help that she couldn't give. And the Web has never been merciful. Either it was lying about wanting him for itself and he was going to be killed in the most slow, horrifying way possible, or it wasn't and he wasn't even going to get the mercy of death. Like, if a horrible, tragic fate is inevitable for him, Gertrude has to at least contemplate if there's an option that's more merciful than the rest.

Even giving him a less painful death is dangerous for Gertrude, but I think that's more of a price she'd be willing to contemplate. Like, killing another entity's victim is another way of snatching a meal from them. She had to at least entertain the risk that the Web would have some kind of retribution for it. But she would also entertain the fact that Jon's only sitting in the Archives because the Web let him get that far, that it wanted him to give its Statement to her, and ultimately decide that the risk is one she's willing to shoulder.

I think she would have made sure it didn't hurt. I think she would have made it quick, and made sure he didn't know it was happening. but I don't think she would have ever saved Jon the way he wanted to be saved.

If I’m being extremely generous (and self indulgent) and trying to come up with a world where she would go on a crusade to save him, and probably assuming some kind of off screen character arc that’s completely made her change her entire approach to life, I think she’d bring him to Agnes Montague.

If Jon could ever have a chance way back when he was eight, I think it would have been Agnes. Agnes is the direct opposite of the Web. She's the demigod messiah of the entity of Fucking Up All Your Life Plans. In canon, she's the one that Gertrude went to when she did need to go after the Web. If she had decided to try for him and needed to come up with an option to save him, she'd go to Agnes.

That being said, getting to that decision is just still really unlikely. For all of the above reasons and because of the difficulties Agnes poses. Even if they're in like, lesbian soul love, they've never met in person, and she doesn't really know if Agnes will help. It may attract the Lightless Flame's attention, and Jon may just end up burnt to death instead of filled with spiders. A lot of ways it could go wrong and give Jon a worse fate. It's the sort of Hail Mary play Gertrude never really did.

That line is in the summary because I thought it said everything about what the reader needed to know for Jon in nhthcth. (Also, I just thought it sounded nice.)

Jon in nhthcth is sort of defined by the fact that he has never gotten past who he was in the moment that James Wright locked him in Gertrude's office. It's one of the two cornerstones of everything he became.

The other cornerstone, of course, is Gerry.

Jon has spent his entire life trying to figure out a way that he could have been anything but what he is. It's been a decade and change, but he's never, ever been able to let go of what happened to him. And that feels at least a little off.

Maybe it's the idea that time heals all wounds, maybe it's the idea that Stockholm Syndrome should have kicked in eventually, maybe it's the evil god eating parts of his personality, maybe it's the idea that it's probably exhausting to eternally be struggling against a fate that you met when you were fucking eight. Even if he never becomes okay with what happened to him, he probably should have at least accepted it and moved on to some measure. Like, this has been his reality for almost his entire life. No matter how terrible it was, people usually adapt and acclimate to what happens to him.

One of the core traits of Jon in nhthcth was always supposed to be that Jon just didn't for some reason.

Like, Jon has not even passed the threshold of accepting what happened to him. It's all these years later, and he's desperately replaying what happened and trying to come up with the version that has him going home at the end. Even if you don't accept your current situation, you probably should have stopped trying to figure out what you could have done differently when you were eight, no matter how terrible what happened is.

At the end of the day, even with all he knows, Jon just has never understood why he couldn't have been saved.

He knows there's no Light Side at the end of the day. This isn't some big battle of Good Against Evil--it's just a series of Bad inconveniencing Other Bad because what Other Bad wants is not in the interest of what Bad wants. There's no ancient secret order battling the dark--there's just a lot of people stopping each other from ending the world because they want to be the ones to do it, and also like, Gertrude Robinson and her good-time buddy That One Random Priest. If you're looking for someone to save you in the TMA world, there just isn't really anyone.

And that's part of why Jon goes in after Danny Stoker. It's part of why he keeps undertaking the world's most half-assed rescue attempts. Trying to save Danny when his entire life has indicated that's impossible and probably going to make things worse is a deeply irrational thing to do. He probably should have learned when to walk away by now.

But a part of him is still eight, and a part of him has spent his entire life going over the worst thing that ever happened to him and trying to figure out the way to make it different.

It takes a specific sort of person to keep undertaking herculean efforts in a desperate, wild attempt to save people that he knows are as good as dead. And I think that sort of person once was someone who was as good as dead. He saves Danny Stoker because a part of him is still desperately trying to find the person who could have done the same for him.

In the end, he became the thing he once needed most in the world, which was a chance. I don't think he's realized that fact. And I don't know if he'd find it comforting if he did.

The other thing about that sentence is that it's completely and utterly pointless.

Like. It's been eighteen fucking years. At a certain point, you have to decide it doesn't matter anymore, and clinging to the question of whether someone could have saved you just doesn't help anything. But one of the other core traits of Jon in nhthcth was that he was someone who just simply did not care if what he was doing was practical or had any chances of succeeding.

He's designed to be so stubborn in it that it's almost ridiculous, and more than a little comical but it's honestly borderline sad to me. Here Jon is, making it his life's fucking mission to hold the title of World's Shittiest Employee. He is going to make his hostage situation inconvenient for everyone. He's not doing fucking paperwork; he's only here because elias kidnapped him. He can't get away, but he's going to be the absolute most unmanageable nightmare alive.

It does absolutely nothing to help him.

He doesn't think anyone in the Institute is ever going to help him. He doesn't think he's going to force Elias's hand into letting him go by racking up the most HR complaints in Institute history. It doesn't actually help him in any way to do the vast majority of what he does--it actively hurts him, actually. There's no one in the Institute who wants to help him, because they see him as a nuisance. When he causes Elias too much trouble, Elias punishes him for it. It'd be better from a consequentialist perspective to have settled into some kind of facade of normalcy, but he hasn't. Because playing along, going along with the facade as an Institute employee--he'd have to at least implicitly admit that what happened to him isn't relevant anymore. Sure, Elias kidnapped him and fed him to an ancient, primordial hunger from the dawn of civilization, but by god, he has his monthly staff meeting to get to, and that's too important to make a fuss about the first thing.

It's kind of sad, because while the Institute didn't know the entire picture, nineteen-year old Martin almost immediately said "wow, that blatantly unstable child sure does act like he's being severely abused." Elias had to feed him a story about an entirely different abuser to dodge the world's most needed CPS visit, and Martin still almost turned around and reported Elias literally the same afternoon. Yeah, Elias had a story for the institute to explain jon's Everything, but they really didn't have to buy it.

Like, willful ignorance absolutely played a role in it. Part of it was Elias was their boss and nobody wanted to be the one to accuse him of child abuse. It was easier to accept his lies at face value and not stick their neck out for him. Part of it was just that Jon's never been a very likable victim for them. He wasn't some tearful damsel they could swoop in and save--he smoked too much and was angry and loud about it. And once they made that initial decision to ignore their misgivings, the chances of anyone breaking that pattern got extremely low. No one wants to admit to themselves that they ignored a little kid in an extremely abusive household just because his abuser was their boss and they didn't like the kid all that much. Martin kind of hit Jon like a grenade when he first joined up and actually gave a shit if he was okay.

Of course, this all means that Jon's spent the past decade or so being told by everyone who could see him hurting that his upset at the soul-crushing pain he was in was inconvenient to them and it's rude of him to be so loud about it, could he do that somewhere else, because it really doesn't matter. and he's still there saying "it does matter. it matters to me."

Just--doing pointless things because if he doesn't then they stop mattering and they have to matter somehow defines so much of what he does.

When he was a little boy, Gerry told him that the clothes you wore were meant to be things that make you feel like you, that were who you were or wanted to be, and Jon decided that the parts of him that he loved were made up of other people. It's been fourteen years since he told him that, and out of all the people he's tried to make himself with, Daisy is the only one he still has in his life. He wears the secondhand clothes of people who he lost without anyone else caring to preserve a self that people are actively trying to kill. The fact that he feels more like him when he wears Gerry's coat only matters to the extent that he lets it. He makes pointless interventions on behalf of people he knows he probably can't save, because if he doesn't, then he fact that they needed help to begin with didn't matter. It only mattered whether they could have been saved; needing to be saved doesn't factor in.

I basically wanted him to be the opposite of Basira. Basira was the world's most polite hostage in Season 3. Martin had to actually ask her if she was aware she was in a hostage situation. Her entire thing was that there was no point in getting upset at something you couldn't change--you either got on as best you could or you found a way to change it anyway. That's the exact opposite to nhthcth Jon's approach to life--the Web even pokes fun at him for it in chapter 9. A spider's prey thrashes itself to death trying to get out of its web. Jon's just--flailing like a fly struggling against a web. Gertrude always conserved her resources and energy for where it would matter most, but he exhausts himself on things he knows wouldn't succeed. It doesn't make any practical sense, but there's something viscerally human about it still.

And the last thing that sentence tells you about Jon is that he is someone who has to believe in the lightning strike.

The thing is? Jon knows about pretty much everything this post discussed. No one really knew Gertrude, but if there was someone who did, it was him. He's been hanging around her since he was a little kid. It's been stated that she personally tried to teach him to some degree, though, and we've seen that she's stated to his face that she would not have tried to save him if she had been the one to take his statement. She never really represented a chance at things having gone differently to begin with.

But he still thinks of her specifically when he tries to find the version of himself that isn't this. Because even if she was never really a chance, she was still the biggest chance he had.

Jon was eight. He knew jack all when this started, and he was going up against the most dangerous entity there was. He was never going to come up with a place to go to that wasn't the Magnus Institute, and he was never going to outsmart the Web on his own. Gertrude Robinson was the only one who he ever had a snowball's chance of crossing paths with who wasn't like, actively evil.

There's basically nil chance of her having had some kind of midlife crisis right before he showed up and deciding that this is the one she must save and damn the consequences. There's an even smaller chance of her actually pulling it off and saving him from the Web. But that was the biggest chance he had, and he can't help but cling to it.

Sometimes, you have to beat the odds. Sometimes, lightning strikes.

If you believe in the idea of the multiverse, and that everything that can happen will happen, there is a Jon out there in some far-off universe who walked into the Magnus Institute and met Gertrude Robinson instead of James Wright. There is a Gertrude Robinson who, against all odds, decided that Jon was worth the costs of saving him, who fought tooth and nail to save him and won. It's a fairytale he tells himself, but the idea of someone kind enough to put him in a car so they could drive all about, go on adventures, and find places with rain was also a fairytale he once heard, and it still happened. Gerry was his lightning strike.

And that's really the crux of it. In order for Jon to have loved Gerry the way he did, he had to be someone who would bank everything on odds that were a lot smaller than being struck by lightning. Jon needs to be the type of person who will believe in chances that barely exist, because if he doesn't, he could have never made he decisions he had to make to stay by Gerry's side.

Gerry Keay was not Gertrude Robinson, and he definitely was not anywhere near her caliber when he was the little boy who tried to take Jon and run. They live in a world that tears into your soul, that Marks you in a way that cannot be removed and that never, ever lets you go. It's monsters eating other monsters, and they were both very small and very damned from the get-out. The chances of Jon Sims and Gerry Keay saving each other were always so much smaller than the chances of Gertrude Robinson saving him, and he knew it. If he couldn't believe that there was at least a chance that Gertrude would have saved him, then he couldn't believe that he and Gerry ever had a chance of finding their way home.

We still don't know where Gerry is in 2013, why he isn't there, but we know that Daisy saw him with Jon in 2011, kicking each other under the table for making ill-timed jokes to a monster who wanted to kill them. They first ran in 1999. That's twelve years of betting everything on odds south of a lightning strike. It takes specific kinds of people to do that. It takes people who will take the worst odds possible because they're the only ones they have.

There's no power of love or friendship or hope in that universe, but I think Jon and Gerry wanted to believe that they could love each other to the point of survival. They were looking at a world where, in the whole span of human history, love had not made a lick of difference to the things they faced, and they were asking to be the exception. Wondering if Gertrude Robinson would have saved him... it's hardly the most improbable thing Jon's ever let himself believe.

#nhthcth #tma #the magnus archives #jon sims #gertrude robinson #gerry keay #the continuing adventures of me answering asks after my adhd meds have worn off #babygirl i will answer questions no one even asked #me answering asks when unmedicated is just me reaching the end and realizing i went off on every tangent known to man #i will forge bold new paths into terrains no one ever fucking asked about #i already typed it it's too late now here have my info dump #i want you all to know that there's a half answered ask in my drafts and i found a way to have tangents about death note the iconic anime #and plato's republic the classic of greek philosophical thought #did the ask have absolutely anything to do with either of those things #no #i'm like this in real life too you could not plot a conversation with me on a map

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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 10 months

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Hi! I’ve sent you two asks already, sorry for bothering you. I just can’t stop thinking about nhthcth, but I was wondering, does Jon get paid? Was he getting paid as a child?

For some reason I got this idea in my head that if Jon didn’t get paid the contract wouldn’t work. Because like, contracts are usually an agreement that one person does one thing and gets another thing in return. Like the Magnus Institute’s contract is like “you work here and never leave and sell your soul to me and I’ll give you maybe more than minimum wage,” so if Jon didn’t get paid, the Institute wouldn’t be holding up their end of the contract, so Jon wouldn’t need to hold up his end and he could leave.

Although I don’t know how that would work when Jon’s a child, he wouldn’t have a bank account, (does he have one as an adult?) I assume it would just go to his legal guardian’s bank account, which I guess would be Elias, but did Elias ever fully adopt Jon? Like legally? Did Elias have to forge adoption papers and stuff or did he just kidnap a child and hoped he’d get away with it. (I suppose he did get away with it) does Jon even have an ID? How did he go to university when he doesn’t have any school history past third grade?

Anyway, sorry I started rambling, you of course don’t have to answer this (nor do you need my permission not to answer, so I’m not sure why I said that) this is just a funny little question I was thinking about. Also, sorry if you’ve answered this already or there’s something in the fic that would answer it and I didn’t notice. Thank you for the amazing story and answering my other asks.

So, you've actually hit the nail on the head on one of the very important rules for nhthcth as a universe, insofar as like, magic systems (for lack of a better word) goes. That being said, a lot of the specifics of this ask is something that I can't answer due to spoilers (like how he went to university, whether elias ever adopted him, whether he has an ID). Those will receive direct explanations in the course of the fic so I can't answer them here.

But as to like, the magic system itself, it's already been seen/addressed in the fic (in a lot of disparate bits and pieces), so I don't have a problem with a more detailed explanation below the cut.

so, most of this system has been in subtext and broken up amongst a lot of little moments in the fic itself. its there but figuring it out takes a lot of patchwork. I don't currently have a more explicit breakdown of the system in the narrative itself because having like, Jon explain it super explicitly feels a bit too much like those internal monologues of an anime fight scene where the characters are having these really in-depth breakdowns of what they're planning and what's happening while they're throwing each other through walls. I just like more subtle storytelling, personally? A lot of the time, it just becomes so painfully obvious that they're talking to the audience and it feels clunky and unnatural. So I scattered the foundation of this amongst a bunch of little moments throughout.

You're absolutely dead on about contracts needing to be "one person gets one thing and the other person gets the other." That is a hard and fast rule in nhthcth, and it has everything to do with what the Web is.

One of my favorite bits about TMA world building is that the fears as so metaphysical. Which makes for a very fun (again, for lack of a better word) magic system. I hate it when magic systems break their own rules or become too powerful and you can just supercharge on the Power Of Friendship to do basically anything if you Believe Enough. Personally, I think characters get to really shine and show their intelligence when you stick them with very narrow and firm rules and make them work inside that system without breaking it. TMA in particular does an amazing job with that.

The Fears are the platonic ideals of their own identities and they legitimately cannot resist what they are. The episode with the Web's theatre production best encapsulated this: The Web said something along the lines of "If only you could see the strings on me."

In that same episode, Jon almost got trapped in the Web domain watching endless plays, because the Eye could not resist what it is, and what it is is something that spectates pain endlessly. The Web couldn't resist trapping Jon in there, because that's what it is, despite the fact that it would have fucked its own endgame if it trapped the Archivist in its fucked up theatre production until the End claimed them all. They're incredibly powerful beings, but they're still, in a way, trapped by their own nature. Humans can change, adapt, be different, but the Entities can't be anything but what they are.

In nhthcth there's a line that i tend to use again and again to encapsulate this, and it's usually something along the lines of "These things only are what they are."

They're not versatile forces. They're not a flexible tool like most magic systems where you can use this abstract and malleable force to cast the Spell of Fire and the Spell of Healing and the Spell of Ketamine Ape. They can only do what their own existence allows them and they cannot resist their own nature. It's one of the reasons why Jon in nhthcth is so insistent that the Eye can't be used as a force for good--good is completely outside of its existence. If you know anything about Greek philosophy, I think Plato's idea of the forms is pretty analogous to what the Entities are and how they work.

Which is also why Jon's like, "Duh, of course it's the Web that's got us bound and not the Eye. That's what the Web does."

The Eye just isn't about binding and trapping. What Jonah can use it to do is completely limited to stuff that falls under the Eye's umbrella. He could have the most powerful connection to the Eye on the planet (he doesn't), but that doesn't mean he can supercharge on Eye God Juice and blast a hole through the wall with the power of his mind, right? That would make the entire magic system in TMA ridiculous. In the same way, he can't use the Eye to enforce contract terms. That's not what the Eye does.

That's the Web, through and through. So when you're considering the contract, you have to think in terms of what the Web is.

The thing about the Fears is that they're shown to be a little multifaceted in that multiple distinct fears fit beneath the same umbrella with them. Take the Eye. The fear of someone knowing your deepest, darkest secrets fits beneath it, right? And that's very much Jonah's area of expertise. He probably fed on Martin's terror about being discovered for forging his CV for years. He neutralized Daisy by finding out the secrets that hurt her and using them against you. He's the invasive, watching part of the eye that may know your secrets and want to use it against you.

but the Eye is also the fear of someone watching your pain, your suffering, and (for lack of a better term) getting off on it. Enjoying it. It's bleeding out in the street and, when help finally arrives, they just sit down next to you and watch eagerly as you die.

That is so much the Archivists role.

Sometimes, I think of how terrifying the Archivist would be if it wasn't Jon in the role. Don't get me wrong--he has his moments of terrifying power, and he definitely didn't get good reviews on yelp from statement givers. But, fundamentally, he does care.

But imagine you go to the Magnus Institute under the assumption that they may help. You sit there and you tell them the worst fucking thing that ever happened to you. It's like you're experiencing it a second time, in all the horrific detail. You're retraumatized all over again, and then the Statement ends and you're sitting there, tape recorder still running, and you realize the person you went to for help just... enjoyed every second of pain you went through. There's one episode in particular that I think pulled this feeling off so well--the one where the guy in Scotland who found Gertrude's circle opened with something along the lines of "I don't care about any of this. I just want to know if you'll save my son." Like, imagine the horrible, crushing horror of going to someone for help and the moment you realize that were never going to do anything. They just wanted to watch you die too.

It's also one of the reasons that I think that Jon, for all he thrived as the Archivist, kept so much of who he was because of the inaction part specifically. In Season 1, he makes these vague mentions to fights he's getting into with Elias. Elias keeps lecturing him about noninterference, how they're here to research and not interfere, and Jon has these moments were he's like "anyway I don't give a fuck there's fucking leitners out there and if i have my way there will be a hell of a lot less of them." He legitimately says at one point that he's going to get another lecture about Institute mission statements and watching without interference.

Jon made so many bad choices when he was Becoming, but the one he consistently made against Becoming was that, almost against his will, he wanted to save people. That's picking the opposite of what the Eye is, and I think that that's the part of him that he got to keep.

that was more of an aside and not so relevant to the question. i got on a tangent. but it's here now so it stays. i already typed it. Anywho.

Jonah can't do what Jon does. He can't compel answers out of people. He's a panopticon, and the fear he embodies is that someone may be watching you and catch you in the act. It's not the fear of someone forcing the information out of you. But Jon can't do with Jonah does either. He can't just hop through eyes and spy on people. That's not his relationship with the Eye or the part of it he embodies.

They both have a very metaphysical limitation to their own experience with the Eye, because the idea of the Eye itself is just a human classification. Maybe Jon's sky blue and Jonah's dark blue and the Eye's all the blues, but at the end of the day, we just made up the idea of "blue" to explain our own experience with colors. They don't get to wield the full spectrum of "colors" available under the Eye. They can both be attached to the Eye but they're completely limited to what it means to be sky blue versus dark blue.

So it's important to remember that when you consider the contract, because it's just an aspect of the Web. It's not every aspect of the Web.

The Web is the fear of being totally under control of another--think raymond fielding in Hill Top Road, Mr. Spider, forcing people to walk, that kind of thing--but it's not just that. It's also the fear of being manipulated. Of being outmaneuvered. And I think that fits much more metaphysically with what a contract is than being under total and absolute control.

A contract is just an agreement of rules that two parties have to abide by, right? And sometimes the contract is way more favorable to one party than the other, but we also recognize that there's limits to that. You named a very big one--"this for that." For contracts to be enforceable, there has to be this thing we call "consideration." I get this, you get that. If the contract read "I have to give you one million dollars and you don't have to do anything" that'd be a gratuitous promise and it wouldn't be an enforceable contract.

That being said, consideration doesn't have to be balanced. The contract doesn't have to be fair. I don't know a super huge amount of British law (though a lot of American law is derived from it) but in american contract law we have a standard that basically says there has to be a "mere peppercorn" of consideration. We're not going to see if the exchange is fair, just if there is an exchange. there's this huge body of law around what's allowed in contracts and how contracts should be interpreted because we recognize that, at a certain point, something isn't a contract anymore. It breaks the rules of exchange.

And I think that very much goes towards the real fear the Web would be working with when it comes to the contracts. Think of like, law dramas. People like law dramas because the characters show off how clever they are. They're working in some system of rules and then at the eleventh hour they pull out some kind of loophole or interpretation that saves the day, right? The fact that there are limits and rules to what the characters can do is exactly what makes it so exciting when they figure out how to flip them in their favor. You need to have the chance to succeed in the system, however small, or it all just kind of becomes meaningless. There's no point in manipulation or machinations if you instantly lose no matter what.

That's the exact fear the Web would be playing on with the contracts, in my mind. It's being at the mercy of someone who has to follow the same rules as you, but they're grossly skewed in the other person's favor and the other person is better at using them. It's being stuck in a game where both players have to follow the rules but you have no idea what the rules are, and the other player gets to know them and have them severely favor them.

But the entire fear just becomes kind of ridiculous if it's not limited. It kind of becomes like a game of make believe between little kids if you can just write something in the contract without limitation. Like saying "well, my power is at one million percent" "my power is at one BILLION percent" "my power is at FIVE TRILLION percent." Right? Like, if you're playing that game, the rules don't really mean anything. It's all just bullshit. It doesn't invoke the fear of someone manipulating the rules against you. If the contract terms don't enforce obligations against Jonah too, it just sort of leaves the realm of what fear this is, which breaks the rules of the magic system. Being totally at someone's mercy is just a different fear than having someone outmaneuvering you at rules you both are stuck with.

Which means that, for the contract to be what it is, Jonah has to be bound by it in some way. It has to follow some kind of rules that bind him too. It can be very unbalanced and favor him greatly, but it still needs to set some kind of obligation and limit on him or the entire thing becomes ridiculous.

That's why Jonah so aggressively tries to keep Jon from trying to learn the terms of the contract. If Jon knew the way Jonah was bound by the contract, he'd be able to use the rules against him. Jon's playing the same game as Jonah, but he never got to see the rulebook.

We know two ways from canon that you can use to escape the contract: (1) gouge out your own eyes and (2) the archivist dies and the assistants can leave. but we never see the terms of the contract itself, and the fact that option #2 popped up in season 5 when all we knew before that was option #1 means that maybe there are more ways to break the contract and maybe there aren't. Maybe it's just options 1 and 2, or maybe there's other ways to escape we never figured out. Why do options 1 & 2 work? Is it explicitly written out somewhere in the binding instrument? Is it some loophole that not even elias expected? All we know for certain is that ways out of the contract include but may not be limited to options 1 and 2.

So, yes, Jon gets paid. But is that a term of the contract? Was that the consideration that Jonah wrote down in the Web's binding contract, or is there something else? Jon doesn't know, so he can't use it against him.

Maybe Jonah does have to pay Jon under the contract. Or he's only paying Jon to keep up appearances. Like, yeah, maybe the metaphysically binding contract would allow him to chain people here without paying them, but payroll would still have massive questions about why the Institute Head's angry adoptive son has been the Institute's unpaid slave worker for the past decade.

One of Jonah's biggest strategies to keep Jon from escaping is to abide very strictly by what may or may not be the terms of the Web's contract. Jon can't deduce what the rules are if Jonah voluntarily plays by more rules than he has to.

Take Elias's promise to Tim, for example. Jon still doesn't even know how the Web contract is formed. It sure as hell isn't simply the contract that most employees see--there's no clause that says "and by the way you can never ever quit or leave or you will die xoxoxoxo." Are all the terms already written down somewhere he can't find? Could oral promises be binding? He has no idea, because Elias is never going to act in a way that lets him eliminate the possibility. He'll follow the letter of his promise, and maybe that's because he has to or he'll breach the contract, or maybe that's because he's choosing to keep his promise when he doesn't have to. Elias keeps the terms of the contract unclear by following more rules than he has to.

It's one of the reasons why he uses so much doublespeak. Elias says something like "I'll keep my word, and you'll have to do the same." That only tells us things we already knew--Tim would have to be bound by the contract and wouldn't be able to leave. He'll keep his word, but does Elias have to under the contract? If he broke his word, Jon would be able to conclusively tell that oral conditions are non-binding. He'd know that there's some kind of outside binding instrument that has the rules already set out, and Elias can't change them with an oral promise. But if Elias toes the letter of the oral condition no matter what, then it could be because he has to or it could be because he chose to.

There are rules that Elias has to abide by, but Jon is only pretty certain of a few: 1) He has to have Jon's signature before he moves people into his department. He can't give him assistants unless Jon signs off on it first. Jon only got that much because Elias tried so damn hard to get his signature for the transfer. If Elias could break that rule, there's a pretty good chance that he would have, but he didn't so it probably means he can't. It's a place the contract almost definitely binds him too. 2) the contract kills you if you spend too long away from the Institute, but Elias has a way of letting you stay away for longer. If Jon leaves without approval, then he gets sick within a few weeks. But he's made it months away from the Institute just because Elias approved the leave.

So is that because Elias is the one who triggers the contract killing you in the first place? Or does he have a way of stopping a power that will automatically go off.

If the contract reads, "In the case of unapproved absences, the Head of the Institute may file Form B45, the 'Kill My Errant Employees' Form, and the employee will suffer a heart attack within a period not to exceed fourteen (14) days," then they'd be able to pretty effectively escape just by finding a way to immobilize Elias permanently--chuck him in the Buried, he'll never die but he also won't be able to file a Kill My Errant Employee Form. But if the contract reads "In the case of unapproved absences, the employee will suffer a heart attack within a period not to exceed fourteen (14) days unless the Head of The Institute files Form U95, Approved Leave of Absences," then they need him alive and mobile to file a leave of absence form so Jon won't fucking die the next time he's kidnapped for a month. Or maybe a leave of absence form isn't necessary if Jon's only kept away because of a kidnapping. Maybe the contract reads "In the case of unapproved and voluntary absences" and being involuntarily missing isn't a breach at all. They don't know, because Elias is going to file the fucking leave of absence form whether or not he has to.

If they knew the exact rules and minute details of the contract terms, they could wriggle their way into an exception that makes their conditions more livable. Instead, they're just stuck with a very broad correlation between Elias's action and/or inaction and the contract not killing you when you leave for long periods on approved absences. Maybe they could just chuck him in the Buried and fuck off, but fuck if they know, and that's the sort of risk you really can't take unless you're certain.

A lot of Jon testing boundaries with Elias has been trying to figure out the boundaries of the contract. Remember in the martyrs chapter, where Martin is like "jon why do you have an employee email you're like sixteen???" it's because jon was already an employee, and employees are required to have an official email. He knew it and Elias knew it even if no one else did.

If Elias refused him an official institute email, Jon would know that the contract does not require him to provide all employees with Institute-standard resources as outlined in the employee manual. Maybe sections of the employee manual isn't binding, maybe the entire thing isn't binding. Jon knows breaking the Institute dress code probably isn't a part of the binding contract because of his Epic Fashion Moments (or, if it is, the penalty isn't death like leaving is), but does that apply to all parts of the employee manual? If he doesn't get an official email at the shiny age of sixteen when he's Not Supposed To Be Employed, then he knows another section of the employee manual just doesn't have teeth. But if Elias just gives him what any employee would be entitled to, then it could be because he had to or it could be because he chose to.

It's also the reason why getting people to quit was important to jon--yes, he was trying to get people free of the Institute, but if he pushed someone into quitting, he'd be able to test out some very valuable information about the contract. Can people quit if Elias allows it? Maybe the rule is that the Archives can't quit, but everyone else can if Elias allows it. Maybe everyone can quit if Elias lets them. Maybe no one can quit and they're all fucked. If Elias can let some people quit but never lets them quit, then Jon has no data points to work with when trying to figure out how people escape the contract.

Which is also why elias flipped his shit and burned the HR records the one time Jon managed to get his hands on them. Over the years, there have been people who unknowingly stumbled into one of the rules binding Elias, and he let them quit without protest. There's a very good chance that that's because he had to let them quit. If Jon could find the common denominator between people who quit successfully, then maybe he could figure out how to do the same, which is why Elias has spent so long making sure he gets as little information as possible to work with. Jon can't win the game if he never learns the rules.

It is important to note that Elias breaking the terms of the contract that bind him may not be "and now Jon can finally go home oh my fucking god." The penalties for breach of contract, that we know of, are death. Does Elias face the same penalties if he breaches? Does he face some kind of other penalty? We don't know yet, because Elias is guarding those terms like his fucking life depends on it.

#nhthcth #elias is guarding those terms like his fucking life depends on it because it does #the SECOND daisy figures out an exception that lets her kill him it's on sight #she's so so much more insane than she was in season 4 of canon in nhthcth #she did NOT get the sort of intervention an extended stay in the buried would bring and her stance on life is different than canon daisy's #but she has her little goblin man and she will go absolutely fucking insane if anyone looks at him #nhthcth was really my “i'm making contract law everyone's problem” fic #i will make my little interests and passions everyones problem #also never be sorry for coming to talk to me i love chatting about fics and its never a bother #if i don't reply to an ask know that it sits in my draft folders and haunts me and it will be finished one day #sometimes replies are same day sometimes they're gonna take a year i also dont like that this is how i am

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