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I just realized the show really contributed to the idea of being an avatar to mean just having a cool power by not having martin suffer the consequences of being one or be changed by it or even being hungry. he can just vanish. no don't worry he is a good person and a human <3 he doesn't need to feed on fear to vanish into the fog <3 don't you worry about it
the rules for everyone else is that you have to cause someone to suffer and fear, feed your god or it will feed on you. Jon is haunting people in their nightmares from the beginning, Daisy was straight up hunting people, Melanie was giving into the violence and anger (including threatening Jon). and Martin can just vanish for no reason
the logical answer is that he was feeding on Jon's loneliness. or not just Jon's, everyone in the Institute is lonely. except Martin faces no consequences for it, there is no intervention for it, no one performs a non-consensual surgery on him and he doesn't have to starve. during the safe-house period he doesn't seem to need to feed at all (and the argument with Jon doesn't even work here because he isn't supposed to be lonely any longer)
Martin doesn't get a hunger or an appetite for human suffering. but he gets to vanish whenever he wants, he has the benefits of the domain (not being tortured). and the closest thing to consequences he gets is that he is cut off from his emotions which falls flat when you remember he later chides Jon for not being good at expressing his own emotions/feelings
God I still wish theyd done something with the line implying Martin was literally cut off from his emotions early s5.
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I see it a conflict in writing Martin as his own character vs writing him as Jon's boyfriend. if he is Jon's anchor/humanity etc etc then you can't really focus on him having lost his own. it would be interesting for them to navigate that together, as a couple, with them both remembering the other as a human when they themselves don't remember (tho that does feel less impactful already solely because they didn't actually know each other when Jon was fully human but I digress). but this is not exactly the route they went with, choosing to give Martin the moral high ground in almost every situation. Jon is the monster. Martin is the human. but all that it does is ignores Martin's arc in s4. I feel like they wrote themselves in the corner by making it a little too similar to what Jon has. they want him to be The Human character (which let's be real, that's Basira) but also an avatar, giving him his own domain and all. and I don't think it works the way they wanted it to work
...you might've just put in words something that has been bothering me for a while
you got me thinking and it's kind of another piece of this ridiculous plot armour he has, like the fact he wasn't smitten when he hit Jon in Web theatre
