Jonah Desperately Needs a lore rewrite!
Jonah Vasquez is one of the most hated survivors in the game and the main reason is the lore making him a war criminal. BHVR tried to say a political messages of the Chile Dictatorship but made the bad side the Survivor like how are we supposed to root for them if they killed multiple people then just brushed it off 😕
(Pixel Bush goes into great detail on what makes his story Problematic and why its arguable the worst lore for a survivor)
its to the point that people that main him get harassed on twitter and even in the game for the CHARACTER they play, and with the new tome coming out I'm worried that are gonna make it worse like his Base lore is bad as is, if they add more context and its worse Jonah as a survivor would be unsalvageable
instead of just shitting on his lore tho I have my version on what ill do
My Edit
(Note I'm not a good storyteller what sho ever so its gonna be flawed but might as well put it out there also I'm not gonna write the story but instead give my idea on how it should go)
my edit of his story would've been from the ground up changing his job and how he acts as a person
Generational Trauma
in Jonah's base lore it goes into his father working hard to provide stable life for him so the beginning Jonah’s story should be around generational trauma of feeling the pressure that parents put on their kids and how they grow up not feeling good enough for them, (Jonah's Father worked hard to supply Jonah with a good education so Jonah could feel like if he doesn't get good enough grades he’s a disappointment to them, When he gets a Job his Father doesn't like he starts to feel like he's being Judged by his family
Artist
- - Instead of Jonah working for the CIA he should be an Inspiring artist that works at the museum in Fresno, He wants to be a successful artist but needs to make name for himself spends nights commissions to gain more money and to put his work out there
- - Him being an artist will match the match the portrait of a murder Chapter theme
- - it could play into the generational trauma of not feeling good enough since artist aren't paid a lot, Jonah could feel like he wasted the chance his father gave him for a successful life for one of being broke living in a small cheap apartment in Fresno CA
- - This would cause a similarity in Jonah and The Artist with the Artist being successful and having paintings at the museum Jonah is working, while Jonah is the starving artist who works so hard with barely any pay off
- - Not all artist are successful even though they are talented, so that'll be a more realistic story about an artist in the modern age
Nightmares/Visions
-An idea I had was that Jonah would paint what's on his mind but as time goes on and he starts to nightmares of People in black Robes sacrificing people as he keeps having nightmares he decides to paint them he starts to paint them after each one the nightmare gets more and more detailed. Each painting is in different style (Expressionism, Abstract, Surrealism, Etc.) but the last one was photorealism of large spidery fangs surrounded by fog. He gets obsessed and it becoming the main thing on his mind, who are the people in the dark robes?, Why are they killing?, How does the Spider fangs relate?. He went to the library before work and got a book about The psychology of dreams, during his lunch break he reads for no luck on what he is looking for, walking back to his work station he recognized a building from one of the paintings, he looks at the name seeing, C. Mora going on his tablet he looks her up to see that she was from Chile, researching the city he finds an old cemetery, the exact one he had seen in his Nightmare
- - Him having Powers isn't too far out of reach saying Mikaela Reid, Yoichi Asakawa, and Haddie Kaur all had their own powers
- - Him having nightmares of Murders could be something along the lines of Last Night In Soho where as the nightmares get worse and worse they start to bleed into reality and he starts hallucinating people in dark robes following him
-Painter Walter Sickert Painted Multiple paintings of Jack the Ripper and his murders in so much detail that years after his death Patricia Cornwell wrote the book Portrait of a Killer about how she believes he was Jack The Ripper
(I'm not saying Jonah should be a killer but pointing out that people have painted crimes before)
Having Jonah Paints Crimes gives a different meaning to Portrait of a Murder while The Artist Paints murders of crows, Jonah would be more literal painting actual murders
His Disappearance
How I imagined Jonah being taken was he was in his apartment up late at night taking pills to stay awake, and he hears something in his apartment, he calls the police and hid in his bedroom. after hiding for what felt like hours The Spidery Fangs come out from the painting in his room and gets a hold of him. He screams for help as it pulls slowly him into the canvas. by the time the police arrive the place is a mess and Jonah was gone
One thing about DBD lore is they usually have the same ending, Someone gets surrounded by black fog then it says they are missing, or they die but their dead body wasn't found. Kate is the only one I could think of being different having the spider legs Grab her and pull her into the darkness
Comments
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i think we should rewrite him to do warcrimes in purpose in my opinion
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Can we rewrite him so that he orders chicken burgers from grubhub?
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DBD fanbase- "We want interesting morally grey characters"
BHVR- "Okay here's a character that inadvertently did war crimes"
DBD Fanbase- "No not like that!"
In all seriousness I think Jonah's lore is fine. Not every survivor has to be an angel or even a good guy. I hope they stick with what they did and instead make it about a person having a crisis of faith in thier mission and what they believe is right and living with the guilt of doing things as bad as what Jonah did.
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I have never seen a Jonah In my lobbies lol older male survivors are not super popular anyways but he is especially a flop
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Here late because with tome 12, we get more lore for Jonah. So far it seems pretty much in line with what his lore has already grazed upon. So nothing from the tome improves or distracts from his initial lore. Time to dump a bunch of thoughts:
Regarding Pixel Bush:
The Pixel Bush thing is bizarre to me. The primary argument that Pixel presents is that "Carmina was an activist against the regime that Jonah's employers propped up... And the story expects us to be okay with that". Which is not a sound argument due to how greatly unrelated Carmina's experiences are to Jonah's actions. Believing that the CIA is messed up for its actions during Pinochet's tyranny is a separate view from believing Jonah is personally bad. Jonah was never even remotely part of that beyond employer. That makes the CIA out to be Jonah's personality rather than employer. It seems like a misread where someone already has their opinion and then picks the text for any loose connection that supports their view, rather than looking at what the text says and using that to develop a claim. The Pinochet's tyranny reading fits for Carmina, but the application of that narrative to Jonah is forced solely because he works for the CIA. It's like Pixel had an opinion of Carmina first and then allowed that to bias their opinion on Jonah instead of focusing on what Jonah's lore actually says. Working for the CIA is not soind or valid enough evidence to apply that reading to Jonah's lore in the slightest. That they were released in the same chapter is not evidence enough in the slightest. Nor is Jonah being part of the CIA, as that is not an allusion or inference to Pinochet; Sometimes the curtains are just blue, and that's it. No hidden 40th clue or secret meaning. It's a claim that is as meritable to me as proof that Nea is the Entity.
Considering Jonah's lore in itself:
Jonah was part of a task force in Kwantana, which is a fictional land where the his story suggests the rebels as a threat to Kwantana's newly established democracy. He carelessly caused many civilian deaths when he was seeking to prevent civilian deaths. And while I have seen plenty of comments here, on Pixels video, Reddit, etc. That he is a murderer without remorse, his bio is very specific about his recognition of guilt. It goes so far as to lead him on a personal mission to provide financial relief for families of those he killed while dwindling the financial reserves of the rebels.
Of the issues I have with this, it's more that the story is biting off more than BHVR can chew. There is a great deal of extreme actions which consequences and accountability can not be properly explored. Part of that is due to Jonah being a murder of countless civilians due to not catching on to the codes being fakes from the rebels to get the CIA to inadvertantly do their work (because why else would the rebels give fake coordinates to highly populated areas than that? Also, they would have checked the coordinates first? So the whole team managed to mess up everything). And part of it is that taking accountability for his actions is difficult to show well when it's such an extreme act of destruction. Wartime is just not a topic that BHVR should have gone with because it requires more attention than what they can give. This is one aspect that I think worsens Jonah compared to the rest. We don't know about the skeletons in Dwight's closet, or Meg's, or Claudette's, etc. But we know of Jonah's, and those skeletons need more recognition than what they got.
As for Jonah outside of his skeletons, I think his personality, likes and dislikes, values, are all there. Just with a story that needs more attention than what it was given. Not because of Pinochet's relevance to Carmina's stoey, but because his own story in which citizen casualties in Kwantana mark a critical point. It was unnecessary to have Jonah take part (knowingly or otherwise) in war crimes as a way to get him taken by the Entity.
--- I think I got that all spell-checked right despite typing it out on mobile. Sorry if anything needs clarification due to format ---
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Jonah's story just comes up as imperialist white washing. The CIA is not good, even if they are employing the son of poor hispanic immigrants.
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I feel like jonah's story would have been better if he was shown to have a darker streak to him like yun jin. Mybe he didn't like the idea of bombing the ######### out of countrys, but if it's just part of the job, then to him, so be it. Or mybe make him more cold and pragmatic but not evil by any means, he's just doing what he thinks is needed to achive what he thinks is right. These two versions of jonah would have actully been pretty interesting like yun jin, both doing unjustifable actions, but not talking any sadistic joy out of them what so ever.
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