Jonah In-Depth Analysis

Jonah Vasquez is easily one of the most hated, disliked, and uncared for survivors amongst the playerbase. In a recent leak, it was even revealed that the DbD team knows of Jonah’s generally poor regard among the fandom and has intentions to tackle his perception at a later date, though this was not a high priority. The reason Jonah is widely disliked by the community at large is because of his lore, from being a CIA agent, particularly when his counterpart killer was someone affected negatively by the CIA, being involved in an incident that accidentally and inadvertently caused the loss of innocent life, his lore widely regarded as not being on par with DbD’s better stories, and for his former voice actor being convicted of pedophilia. In this essay, I will analyze how Jonah and his story displays U.S. cultural assimilation and indoctrination by examining his cultural background, the actions he takes, and Entity involvement in his life.

First, I want to discuss the issue of his previous voice actor. As stated in the intro, Jonah had his voice lines replaced due to his first VA being convicted of pedophilia. It’s safe to say that this was simply the right thing to do. Jonah is no longer voiced by a pedophile, good, no one wants any character to be voiced by someone so problematic. Pedophilia is bad. While I don’t see why one should hold this against Jonah, people are allowed to like any character for any reason. I myself will dislike a character for even the most minute reasons. So if you don't want to like Jonah because of his old voice actor, go ahead, you're free to. I just ask that people don't hold this against Jonah fans. We weren’t fans of Jonah because of his voice actor, we were fans of Jonah because of his story and character and appearance. So, don't harass his fans for this please.

Moving on to Jonah himself, I want to begin with giving Jonah’s cultural background. I do want to clarify that my intentions aren’t to justify anything and say Jonah did no wrong, I aim to explain and analyze Jonah’s character and lore. This will be true for the majority of the essay, unless otherwise stated. Firstly, Jonah is a Latino American, likely Mexican American. Early in Jonah’s base lore, it's stated that, “His gift would have been overlooked had his family's history of poverty continued for another generation.” [1] In addition, given that “What started as a job picking fruit near Fresno, California, eventually led to [Jonah’s father] owning a small mangrove”[1], and a distinct lack of any mention of Spanish in the lore, it can be assumed that Jonah’s close ancestors came to the US under the late/post-WWII Bracero Program with Mexico, in which the US worked with the Mexican government in in the years 1942 - 1964 to help alleviate labor shortages in the agricultural and railroad industries. While it is entirely possible his family was in the US before the Bracero Program and isn't of Mexican descent, it changes little regarding Jonah’s story, I'm just working with this hypothesis. And while it is also possible they entered the US after this era, I don’t believe so, or at least they're not too far past this era, as Jonah and his parents seem well assimilated to US culture.

Cultural Assimilation can be defined as the process in which a minority group/culture comes to adopt some, if not all, of a dominant group/culture’s values, customs, beliefs, language, way of thinking, etc, and can involve indoctrination. For Mexican-Americans or other Latin Americans that came to the US, this would have included adopting a nuclear family household as opposed an extended family household, speaking only English, becoming Protestant, as opposed to Catholic, adopting certain values and ways of thinking, and taking up culturally relevant interests, such as baseball as opposed to soccer. (Football to those outside the US.) The ways in which assimilation manifests can be overt, covert, major, minor, occur rapidly, or across generations. As such, there is quite a fair bit of evidence of Jonah and his family being products of cultural assimilation. 

The infamous, idealized American Dream of coming to the US and pulling one’s self up by his bootstraps to get him and his family a better life through honest hard work and determination is one of the means by which people are taught how to assimilate into US society. Jonah’s dad embodied this isolating notion that rejects the more traditional extended family household. Jonah's father had “strived to better his family with every muscle he had. What started as a job picking fruit near Fresno, California, eventually led to him owning a small mangrove. It wasn't much, but it was enough to provide Jonah a stable childhood and education.”[1] This example of American culture ingraining itself early in Jonah’s lore sets up and plays into the idea of Jonah and his story being about U.S. indoctrination and its effects on a person. 

We don't know when exactly Jonah’s story takes place, but assuming that most survivors’ release date is an approximate date for when they were taken by The Entity, May 2024 for Jonah, and that Jonah looks to be in his 30s and uses a modern digital tablet, at minimum, Jonah was born in the 80s/early 90s. Assuming his parents were young adults, 18-21 when they had him, they would have been born late 60s/early 70s. A “fun” fact many of you may not know, if you were a Hispanic or Latino person born pre-1980, your birth certificate would have had your race/ethnicity as white. This was originally done by the white people, the dominant culture, in power in the U.S. to divide Mexicans/Latinos from other people of color so that they would not unite against them. While they were technically considered white in the eyes of the government, socially, they would’ve been treated as any other person of color in the era, though the extent to which they would have been treated like other PoC varied based on the area. This relates to how even proximity to whiteness, and thus the dominant white American culture, is valued, and further relates back to the American Dream in that obtaining upward social and economic mobility often translates to conforming to white American culture. Jonah’s father obtained that economic mobility upward for his family through honest, hard work, and social upward mobility goes hand in hand with conforming to what is socially and culturally acceptable in white America. 

Though more importantly, he wanted that socioeconomic advancement for his son, which is why Jonah pursued a higher education, got a prestigious job rather than remain a humble farmer, and why he was raised in a manner that conformed to the dominant white American standard. It's a manifestation of the The American Dream: the desire for growth, to climb higher, to not be content with less when you could have more through hard work and honesty in a “land of plenty,” to have better. The extent of this assimilation is seen in Jonah’s tome story, where it's said that he "doesn't even want to begin to imagine a life where his parents forget him or don't remember how proud they are that he's using everything they instilled within him to protect and serve their country and the free world.”[2] That desire to assimilate is why you’ll find Latin American people in the U.S. that don’t know Spanish. At some point in a family’s history, someone’s parents wanted their children to fit in and not be ridiculed or bullied. Personally, for my family, that started with my grandparents, minus the white one, born in the 50s, who weren’t taught Spanish by their parents, my great grandparents. They’re taught American values, and follow them, and pass them down to their children and so forth. You, we, are not immune to propaganda. This is part of what Jonah is meant to convey.

Moving on from Jonah’s cultural background, I am now going to analyze Jonah’s lore itself and address various aspects of it. First, and more simple to address, is that Jonah intentionally bombed civilians, which is false! After being moved from decoding the numbers station, he was moved to decoding “messages from bands of rebels. His work enabled the U.S. to target numerous rebel locations. Then the bombs dropped. It was discovered too late that the messages were decoys. Civilian casualties were staggering, the true numbers covered up by officials. Jonah blamed himself.”[1] It’s stated plain as day right there, his target was a rebel location, but the intercepted messages were decoys. Furthermore, these rebels weren’t likely even genuine rebels. In his tome lore, it says, “That very same feeling was there again as when buried rumours of the agency creating and funding rebels to destabilise regions and sell weapons to governments began to resurface.”[3] So, to paint the picture, as far as Jonah knew, these rebels were a legitimate threat to a foreign democratic government that he sought to help defend because he was raised with “American values”, such as defending freedom and democracy around the world, and protecting his country and what he was taught it stood for. So therefore, these rebels were actually very likely hired by the CIA/US to destabilize this democratic country, Kwatana, so they would buy weapons from the US. Therefore, it can be surmised that when the coded messages were intercepted by Jonah, this was a secret ploy by the CIA to create plausible deniability for an attack on civilians and force this foreign government's hand into buying US weapons, and possibly more. And this isn't so hard to believe considering the CIA’s real history. In all this, Jonah was just the messenger, the guy who decoded the message, he wasn’t even the one pressing the button to drop the bombs, and he believed that what he was fighting for was right because whether these rebels were hired by the CIA or genuine rebels, they were a threat to “the newly formed democracy of Kwantana.”[1] And regardless, he felt guilty over the loss of civilian life because of the role he played. When he took money from the rebels to give back to the affected families, he was taking money from the perpetrators, the CIA/US, and giving it back to the people he inadvertently harmed. In short, Jonah did not bomb civilians, he was the decoder to a message from the rebels that were, at first, unknowingly backed by the CIA, and he still felt an immense guilt over inadvertently bringing harm to civilians and sought to atone, at least somewhat, by taking money from these rebels and giving it to the affected families. In all of this, we can also see that, like his killer counterpart, The Artist, Jonah has a lack of agency in his life due to Black Vale/Entity meddling.

Next, I want to discuss how Jonah’s story mirrors his chapter’s killer counterpart by the both of them: being victims of the US military industrial complex, and having their lives steered by Black Vale/Entity intervention. Artist’s story being set during the U.S. backed dictator Pinochet’s reign in Chile is more easy to see with her story explicitly having her as an artist rebelling against her government. Pixelbush’s lore video on her goes into great detail about it, so I recommend watching it. Though, watching it won’t be necessary to understand the contents of this essay. It's well known that The Artist, Carmina Mora, has a distinct lack of agency in her story. However, I believe that is intentional. DbD’s world is bleak, only the sparsest number of atoms of hope here. With the advent of The Casting of Frank Stone, we learned that there are members of the Black Vale utilizing time-space travel to enter timelines and create branches in them to find/create offerings, survivors and killers, for The Entity to take. Augustine Lieber did this specifically to create The Champion, her idealized version of Frank Stone for The Entity’s trials, by manipulating him by being his therapist, and by injecting herself into the lives of the protagonist cast in their adult and teenage years. With Black Vale connections to the CIA known via Otto Stamper, who intentionally created The Dredge and whose influence created The Doctor, and IRL CIA connections to the dictatorship during Carmina’s time, it's very likely that Carmina was steered into becoming The Artist by Black Vale/CIA influence a la Frank Stone style. Her destiny was set the day she met the crows, birds not found in her home country, thus implying them to be agents of The Entity.  

As such, Jonah’s lore displays similar traits to Artist’s lore in that it's entirely possible he was moulded into becoming a survivor for The Entity, and thus also has a lack of agency in his life despite appearing as if he does, especially in comparison to his killer counterpart. On his 16th birthday, “he received an unaddressed card. There was nothing within but the following numbers: 8, 25, 19, 44, 1; -20.37, -69.85; 13, 2, 26, 11, 1 It was a puzzle. Perhaps a gift from his math teacher or a relative who knew of his penchant for solving brainteasers.”[1] He instantly recognized some of the numbers as coordinates which led to the Forsaken Boneyard in Chile, where he would be taken by The Entity years later. And later on in his life, upon joining the CIA as a codebreaker upon graduating, he found the numbers in his employee handbook. Later while working on a project deciphering signals stations which led to looking for hidden messages in horror podcasts. He potentially even listened to Sable’s radio show/podcast which was regarded as old in Orela’s lore, and Sable was also someone who knew of The Fog as Mikaela told her of it. In finding these hidden messages that seemed to involve what we, the readers, can assume is the Black Vale, Jonah once again found these numbers. Looking in a CIA database, he learned about the bodies found there that were devoured by crows, who we know to be Carmina’s murdered friends. After finally arriving there, he soon realized he had to change his way of thinking about the code to include other cultures to crack the code, he finally cracked it. By figuring out the numbers were a part of the Tanyrian calendar, a fictional calendar system likely made so that we the readers couldn't figure out any exact dates, he was able to translate them into the Gregorian calendar, the calendar system you likely know and use. “He wasn't prepared for the number it would reveal: his birthday. The world spiralled around him. With sweaty palms, he calculated the remaining numbers. It gave him another date: today. The code... it was about Jonah, at this location, at this moment. His hands shook. His heart pounded against his ribs. Was he part of a prophecy or had someone led him down this path? He didn't know. For once, numbers no longer made sense.”[1] This right here, in my eyes, is proof that Jonah’s life was steered to this moment, shaped as much as Carmina’s or Frank Stone’s lives were. These numbers appearing again and again in his life is analogous to how Lieber gave the TCoFS teens the camera when she implies she shouldn’t have to some extent by saying “Giving them the camera, I admit, was unfair, even for me.” Thus, Jonah’s numbers are likely a sign of Cult intervention in his life. However, the manipulation of his life is to a less overt degree. Where Frank Stone was a direct product of cult intervention via Augustine Lieber’s psychological manipulation, Carmina Mora was a product of the cult through being a victim of the CIA’s atrocities and US imperialism and the crows, Jonah was a product of US indoctrination, which the cult just so happened to take advantage of through the CIA. Less likely needed to be done to steer him to this pivotal moment.

All this to say, Jonah is more innocent than the fandom at large makes him out to be, and a character deserving of sympathy greater than what most give him. That being said, joining the CIA is pretty awful, but we have to remember that Jonah was acting within the framework of what he was taught to be right, while also having his life manipulated by The Entity/its cult. And even then, when genuine wrongdoing even so much as gives a hint of itself, he tries to seek the truth, and does his best to atone for his own wrongdoings. Hence why in his base lore he took money from the “rebels” and gave it to people affected by the bombing, and in his tome lore he, out of his curiosity and desire to do good and eradicate evil, he dug deeper into one of the names mentioned in the radio signals project, a teacher whose students disappeared after filming something, which happened to be an Overlap. It's also not entirely out of the realm of possibility that the “accidental” bombing set into motion by the CIA/cult/rebels was to not only steer Jonah’s life, but to also create an overlap, which are born in places where there was intense emotion and many deaths. It's possible this was at least one of the truths they didn't want Jonah to find. 

With a desire for truth, Jonah would have found it if left unimpeded. “He never admitted to them that he sometimes felt inadequate for spending most of his time behind a desk despite his superiors telling him he was the right hand of very critical operations. The only problem is he has no idea what the left hand is doing with his work. And often Jonah feels like he's only being presented with a half-truth. It's why he's here. It's why he's running his own investigation with his savings. His perfectly reasonable questions about the corporations he deciphered from the signals touched a nerve. A major nerve. It was a reaction even his chief officer hadn't seen before and he was officially ordered off the assignment. And so, being a good right hand, he officially moved on to a new assignment. Unofficially though… He had questions he needed answered.”[2] Jonah is a smart man, and a good man at heart, which is why he continued looking into the reason the radio signals project was terminated. He knew that higher ups were hiding something, and if they had to hide it from him, it probably wasn’t anything good. He had to know that what he was working for was truly something good and honest. He’s still operating under that same code of conduct he had been indoctrinated with: honesty, serving his country, protecting freedom and democracy around the world. Only now, he’s starting to doubt his government is acting with that same virtuous intent. As such, being a person with good intentions and someone who desires to be good, Jonah wouldn't give up and bend his knee to higher ups just because they said so. “The mere thought makes him want to quit and join his father on the farm. But he’s never quit a thing in his life, and he can’t help but see how perfectly positioned he is to weed the garden from within. Perhaps even kill a few snakes while he’s at it. Seems to him quitting would only allow the weeds to grow and the snakes to reign. He couldn’t allow that, and he certainly couldn’t turn his back on his country even if it meant living a double life. It’s what he was doing anyway.”[3] He intends to ultimately do good by staying in the CIA as that is what, in his eyes, gives him the best shot at digging up the truth, exposing it, and bring justice to any that dared to bring this strife and corruption to the world and his home.

All together, this paints the picture that while a product of US indoctrination and thus having a controversial past by working for the CIA, Jonah is a good at his heart man with virtuous intentions, driven by curiosity and a strong sense of justice. Whether or not his job as a CIA agent is reconcilable with his attempts at atonement and intent to bring justice to whatever is corrupt within the government is up to your discretion. For a long time, that answer was no to many due to a lack of understanding of his lore, for which I hope this essay has helped remedy. So while there’s been this general consensus against Jonah, this near unanimous and nigh omnipresent hatred for a character never extended to other characters who have similarly done or been a part of anything even remotely questionable. 

For starters, when given the choice between the lives of his people or giving The Knight knowledge of the Lapis Paradisus, Vittorio chose to let his people be tortured and killed. “When they returned to Italy, Tarhos locked Vittorio in a dungeon and began a campaign of torture in Portoscuro, promising to stop when he revealed the meaning behind the stone. Within weeks, Tarhos grew tired of torturing the townsfolk, and Vittorio was left to rot in the dungeon with no one to talk to but the rats.” [4] It’s certainly not an easy choice to make, his people or give a dangerous murderer unknown and potentially powerful knowledge, but I had never seen the fandom fault him for it, even though, canonically, he blames his own self for the suffering on his people. “He hears the people of Portoscuro as he heard them in his cell. I hardly remember that cell now. But I remember those screams. I was the cause of those screams.” [5] David King is well known to be prone to violence, even seeming to taken work for the cartel to beat up a police informant in his Day of the Dead outfit, yet, he’s never drawn the same magnitude of ire from the fandom for his violent nature. Dwight, despite largely just being seen as a unproblematic character, has his flaws that people seem to largely ignore. “Rose attempts to calm Lazar down, but he screams at her to mind her business. Dwight wants to help her... but... he's never made so much money doing so little before. He likes making money doing nothing. But... his hands are fidgeting and his palms are getting damp and clammy. Hearing Lazar verbally abuse Rose is difficult to bear. He imagines all kinds of scenarios where he leaps from his desk to help her. Nervousness fills his bladder, and he leaps from his chair and rushes to the bathroom.” [6] Inaction is an action. A less severe situation than the previously mentioned, but Dwight’s choice to chose his comfort over standing up for his co-worker is often ignored over his later revenge in attempting to drug his boss with a laxative, though the fact this leads to him and others losing their jobs is also ignored. And at the very least, Dwight displays growth this, putting aside his comfort over doing something more honorable. “A lawyer offers Dwight millions to settle with the company. He tells them he’ll settle if he gets a letter of apology for hiring and enabling a known abuser. They scoff at the request. They would rather give millions of dollars than apologize. Dwight turns down the offer”. [10] And then there’s Yun-Jin. “He was NO SPIN's only survivor. Everyone else was dead. Not to mention the eccentric murders that matched his tour dates. Death trails that seemed to converge... to him. If he caused... this, no artist would survive the scandal. Yun-Jin's career, no, her life would be over. All she had would be destroyed.” [7] Her tome lore further cements this with revealing other incidents that further made her suspect The Trickster’s murderous tendencies, such as “the gold rimmed headphones around the suspect's neck with two large “Xs”, one for each ear. It was the brand-new model of the Xerxes 1050x headphones, which few audiophiles knew about and even fewer could afford. She recognised the model right away because The Trickster favoured their equipment over other expensive models. He wore a similar pair on the plane to Miami.” [8] In a similar vein to Dwight, she chose her own comfort over tipping off authorities to a potential serial killer, even despite recognizing a victim’s screams in one of Tricksters songs too. While this fact was a topic of debate for a while in the fandom, it’s fallen off in favor of just keeping her a simple girlboss, even though unlike Dwight or Jonah, it’s not a question of right and wrong to her, its about not being able to live her lavish life anymore. Lastly, there’s the new Kwon Tae-Young, who uses generative AI. “He spent his nights eating cup noodles in the office, creating his killer app: a framework that would allow him to feed interviews, music videos, and biographical data from a real person into a \”personality matrix\” that would make a real-time, reactive model that accentuates positive traits and suppresses negative ones.” [9] While its too soon to see his impact on the fandom and how they will treat him, thus far, I’ve seen few reckoning that the new survivor is basically an AI techbro who doesn’t display any remorse or guilt over that.

I won’t claim that Jonah’s lore is perfect, though I do think he is a great character and has a good story that could be better. Personally, I think all his story needs is to show more of him finding out about the evil influence in the world, and doing more to sabotage it from within to cement his role as someone primed to topple corruption from within. His lore says he wants to do that, but we don't actually get to see him do that. Sure, he looks more into the radio signals stations, but it doesn’t really amount to anything aside from fleshing out his character a little more. And that’s good, but it needs more. He needs to be a solid threat to the Cult with its influence in the CIA so that he can really feel like someone whose actually just and with his heart truly in the right place trying to do the right thing. And in the current social climate, it should be as easier than ever for BHVR, a Canadian company to slightly shift Jonah’s story to be more explicitly anti-CIA under the guise of the made up Cult of The Entity influencing it. Though, this is a minor “change”/addition I’d like to see to his lore to make him a more agreeable/cohesive character while still maintaining his more nuanced character and story since his story already adds to the anti-CIA sentiment already present in Artist, Doctor, and Dredge’s lore. It just has to be amplified. 

So, I have to ask now, what makes Jonah different from the rest of these characters to where the fandom hates him so much, but lets other or similar flaws slide on these other characters? Is it because he’s a brown man, the only one of the aforementioned characters that isn’t pale? Not someone “conventionally attractive”? Is it because his lore hits too close to home for some, and it’s easier to villainize him than to recognize his indoctrination and conformity in yourself or someone close to you? Is the horror of that too much for you? Is it because of the poor first impression amongst the fandom? It’s likely at least a little bit of all of these. All the same, I leave these questions with you, and hope you've come out of this essay understanding Jonah better. I don’t think most will find his character as interesting as I do. His background is rather specific to an immigrant-American experience that I happen to know and understand based on my own personal experiences and family history as a Mexican-American. So for that, I find him to be an interesting character exploring topics I rarely see explored in media. As such, I hope that you can understand why someone could still like him and find him interesting, and I thank you for reading this essay that’s something very special to me.

SOURCES

1 - Base Lore (Jonah)

2 - Tome 12: Legacy of Deceit; Memory 204

3 - Tome 12: Legacy of Deceit; Memory 210

4 - Base Lore (Vittorio)

5 - Tome 14: Journey of the Lost; Memory 122

6 - Tome 3: A Story By Any Other Name; Memory 2115

7 - Base Lore (Yun-Jin)

8 - Tome 9: Chorus of Lies; Memory 446

9 - Base Lore (Tae-Young)

10 - Tome 18: The House of Arkham VIII; Arcus 732