☼ ☼ ☼

when your ex is out grocery shopping so you get to have a snack and a cuddle with her cat in her comfortable recording studio chair (redraw of this) // happy jon sims and cats day 2024 @jonsimsandcats

Kept thinking about how weak and disorientated Jon gets when cut off from the Eye, which got me thinking about Martin having to help him as his state got worse.

Surprisingly, instead of getting angsty, I ended up with Jon being carried around like a ragdoll.

i fucking loved this line delivery, hes so done with everything

dancing :)

Headcanon that the eye feeds Jon information about the social queues his autism is missing but it doesn’t change how Jon acts because every time he just goes “What? That is stupid I don’t believe that’s what a neurotypical person would do” so he ignores it.

S2 - S5

this is his song did we all agree

MAG 111 - Family Business

The Blorbofication of Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London

[ID: TMA fanart of Jon and Gerry. Jon is drawn in a more cartoony style, sitting at a desk with a very distressed expression. Gerry stands on the table and bends down to speak with a pleased smile. He's standing a little on a large book open in front of Jon which has text taken from the transcript of Gerry's final thoughts. End ID]

[Caption transcript: MAG 111 - Family Business

doodle 111/200; days left - 2/110 16/128

The Blorbofication of Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London]

lil sketches i did while listening to tmagp. feels nice being back into this

feeling silly

I know Jon acknowledges this but it’s funny to me that A Guest for Mr. Spider is just genuinely the LEAST credible statement out of all 81 we’ve heard so far.

Like okay, Mr. Statement Giver, you were a very young child, and you just read a spooky children’s book, and your childhood bully stole it from you. And you’re oh-so convinced that the way your bully walked off was because the book’s monster was calling him and the house he went into belonged to the book’s monster and the monster got him the end.

No one else who can corroborate any events. No evidence whatsoever. A hearsay statement from childhood that sounds like a normal interaction played-up by the imagination of a scared kid frightened by his scary book.

The only evidence in Jon’s favor is the fact that the book was a Leitner. But that’s basically tautological. The only reason Jon was lending extra credibility to Leitner-book statements is BECAUSE of his encounter with A Guest for Mr. Spider.

The absolutel audacity of Mr. Jonathan Archivist Sims to show up with not just AN unverifiable statement, but the MOST unverifiable statement to date. Statement ends.

Jon Archivist voice, mockingly: "Statement ends... Well, while I do not doubt that Mr. Sims was sharing this story in earnest, it is nothing more than a childhood flight of fantasy.

"There are no verifiably supernatural details in this case. All Mr. Sims recounts of scary spider limbs opening the door are far more likely explained by the over-active imagination of a child who has just read a scary, scary book. And a scary book is, itself, not a supernatural matter.

"Mr. Sims cannot recall the name of the childhood bully who, supposedly, vanished in this encounter. And with no name, there is hardly a lead to follow up on. Mr. Sims' grandmother is dead and cannot be questioned. There were no eye-witnesses to the event, nor does Mr. Sims recall the street where the vanishing supposedly happened. The book cannot be recovered, nor even verified.

"To waste archival resources on this would be beneath even Martin, I've decided. There is nothing to follow up on here. End recording."

(via @annabelle--cane)

On my current "relisten of random Magnus Archives episodes" I got to the s2 episode where the supplemental is everyone throwing Jon a "Stop Stalking Us on Suspicion of Murder" intervention party.

And they manage to convince Jon is wasn't any of them because the cleaned-up CCTV footage exonerates them.

Except

Except

Jon... Buddy......

Jonathan "smartest man in the room" Sims: "Thank God. Everyone has a solid alibi. Including Elias who followed Gertrude down into the tunnels alone but don't worry he was just down there to find the blood and he wasn't down there killing her or anything. That would be lying."

This is wild because Jon leaps right to suspecting the tape has been doctored. “I mean, the CCTV is so corrupted that the police can’t just use it immediately, and then they happen to finish restoring it just when I start really digging into the murder!? And if it was an option, why not clean it up when she first disappeared!?” (Episode 65)

And Leitner even says the same thing in Episode 80, that Elias could have potentially interfered with the CCTV. “Simple mechanical eyes? In his place of power? You think he can’t control everything they see? Assuming such interference wouldn’t ruin them beyond recovery, of course.”

But neither of them just consider that maybe during the time Elias claimed to discover the body, he was actually committing the murder first.

Which always led me to think that Elias wasn’t down there for very long, before coming back up and calling the police. In Episode 65, Tim says “You’ve spent a month staring at that footage – double-checking every moment, timing every tea break, looking at me like I somehow staged it,” so we know Jon was very concerned about timing and would have presumably been suspicious if Elias was down there for a long time when he was supposedly just discovering the body. Jon—after a month of careful checking—came to the conclusion that none of the people shown on tape had enough time to commit the murder while they were in the Archives before they reappeared on tape, which renewed his conviction that the murderer had used the tunnels.

This is exactly the kind of addition I needed, from someone who remembers all the hyper-specific details I do not remember.

This leads me to the ONLY conclusion I can arrive at which makes sense to me, which is that Eliajonah--as an avatar of The Eye--is able to manipulate how much people pay attention to him. And every time Jon looks over at him he's just the picture of doey-eyed "who? me? wittle old me?"

Jon voice: "Supplemental. It's not adding up. I still suspect it could be Tim, if he manipulated the tapes. Or Sasha, if she manipulated time. Or Martin, because I hate him. Or even Elias, who went down into the tunnels at the exact day and time Gertude was murdered while saying 'I gotta kill Gertrude Robinson'--"

Elias:

Jon: "...Never mind it wasn't Elias. So about Martin if he's an identical twin--"

what happens when an interest crashes straight into my life whilst another, very intense interest is still ongoing? this, of course

(id in alt text)

no floating eyes version:

Jon in S4 hospital bed coma:

Elias at his bedside, sobbing: How could you do this to me? We are so understaffed

Hadestown au perchance

the Archivist’s crimson fate