girls when they’re forced to face incomprehensible truths

Get to know me: favorite characters ➔ Jonas Kahnwald (Dark, 2017-2020)

The role you play in all of this is much bigger than you think. But every decision for something is a decision against something else.

Being a Dark fan is thinking you've pretty much figured out all the fucked family connections, only to wake up in the middle of the night four year later with the sudden realization that Hannah's grandchildren married each other.

jonas's relationships with both his parents fuck me up but for completely different reasons. like ofc we have the Most Tragic Father-Son Dynamic Of All Time w him and mikkel/michael. both are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the other yet they need to knowingly be the catalyst of the other's suffering (michael committing suicide + jonas taking mikkel through the caves) even though they so desperately don't want to. forced to perpetuate the cycle by destroying each other because of how much they love each other.

then there's jonas and hannah. they clearly care about each other, but they can't really talk to each other. almost every scene they have together in s1 there's this emotional distance between them. hannah is extremely distraught over jonas's disappearance and she's relieved when he comes back as the stranger, but it doesn't last because it's not her jonas, the one she remembers. and she's not the hannah that jonas remembers either, even if she hasn't aged much since he last saw her. despite being mother and son they don't really know each other (just like what hannah tells jonas in the candle scene. "maybe you never know that, what a person is really like.") she abandons him after he gives up on her, and when she finally comes back for him in 1911, he's even more unrecognizable...

and both of these end with jonas killing them, in one way or another

Some pain is never forgotten. You will carry it for the rest of your life.

dark the netflix show and rusty lake/cube escape the games are the exact same thing

gritty northern european horror fantasy thrillers about fucked up little places, fate, religious symbolism, confusing af family trees, shady family-owned business, funny looking vintage sci fi machines, time travel and fucked up clans in fucked up little towns in the woods with goregous aesthetics ranging from victorian through 80s to modern, people dying, cave and old hotel, animals dying, a whole plethora of Torture Devices, experiments, a hard boiled detective that fucks around and *really* finds out, going to therapy but the therapist being just as fucked as you or straight up evil, cults and sacrifices, clocks, a Bad Vibes lake, a place called paradise, recurring symbolic geometry (the triquetra in dark and the cubes in rl) etc

nobody will ever convince me that these two don’t take place in the same universe (pun intended)

idk how much dark fandom talks about this or if the dark fandom even exists at this point, but I don't think we talk enough about how elisabeth literally raised her own mother-in-law.

i also think that noah's belief in paradise comes from what he was taught by his mother silja, which comes from what silja learned from elisabeth, and which comes at the same time from what noah shared with elisabeth.

oh i sure hope martha made jonas’ dirty ass shower before she let him fuck her

i just can’t stop thinking ab that scene between michael and jonas when claudia walks in. the way he has been sent back, thinking he’ll stop his father’s suicide, only to be the trigger for it. the way michael holds his head in his hands because that’s his son, offering the comfort hannah never really would. the look on jonas face that begs michael not to let him go with claudia. he is ready to sacrifice his life, his entire being, not really to end the cycle, but to end his own suffering. he doesn’t want to go with her. he doesn’t want his father or anyone else to die. he just wants it all to stop. he literally walks away crying bc there’s nothing else to do.

One of the things Dark was really good at was getting me to care about the characters’ relationships with each other, that I signed up for a weird time travel mysteries-of-the-universe kind of show and the plot part is magnificently charted out, but it’s really the icing on the cake, where the cake is the reason these people all care about each other, why Jonas does everything he does, why Martha makes the choices she does, why Claudia does the things she does, why each of them has the goals and wants they do, why the characters are bringing their baggage to each and every scene and each and every relationship. The flow chart of how every character is entangled with every other character, how the different timelines mean you have to keep meticulous care on who knows what when, because a character might know something in 1905 but they’re 33 years old, but they don’t know that same thing in 1986 when they’re 18 years old, because they experience their own life linearly, but the timeline of the world in crazy loop-de-loops, and that’s all really well done! But at the heart of it, it’s a story about people driven to do things because they want to save other people.  Every single character, whether they do something good or horrific, does so because they want to save the people they love.  Every single character is driven by people, they want to save the person they're in love with, they want to save their son, they want to save their daughter, they want to save their brother, they want to save their mother, they want to save people. Dark is about love and loss and what you do with those feelings, how they drive you, draped in a cool time travel show cloak.

I love stranger jonas, but he was kind of an idiot lol

literally all he had to do to save martha was tell her that staying in the bunker was the only way to be reunited with her jonas. instead of being cryptic as fuck and literally holding her at gun point

and not to mention he tells hannah that the jonas she knows will never return (which is a straight up lie and he knows it) and that she’s a horrible person and then he’s surprised when she takes the time machine and leaves lmaoooo

making jonas the cause of his dad's suicide is probably the most fucked up thing dark ever did

See you later, Romeo