jonathan sims, the shakespearean tragedy of a man that you are.
jonathan "paranoid" sims is paranoid in the same way that hamlet's a procrastinator and othello's jealous and macbeth's ambitious.
crucially, none of those characters possess even an ounce of the trait they're most commonly associated with. hamlet doesn't procrastinate, if anything everything falls apart the moment he acts without verifying the facts. and from then on, his problems stem from an impulsive tunnel vision driving him forward. othello isn't jealous, the correlation between othello and jealousy comes from iago's famous line of "beware jealousy, it is the green eyed monster." othello's fatal flaw is distrust and insecurity. macbeth doesn't have many personal ambitions, he's just very susceptible to peer pressure.
and jonathan archivist sims isn't paranoid. he wasn't paranoid for even a second of the podcast. if anything, he's naive for a large chunk of it. but since he works at Gaslighting Central, everyone around him is telling him that he's being paranoid when he worries about getting brutally murdered at the workplace; the thing that happened to his predecessor, all of her assistants, and the vast majority of his friends.
elias's "don't be so dramatic jon" and notSasha's "let's have no more of this paranoia" have become as defining for jon as iago's "green eyed monster" line became for othello.
listeners react to jonathan sims the very same way people tend to react to shakespeare's classic protagonists and I lose it ever time
