it is still. Unbelievable. to me. that they made jonmartin canon in like full sincerity. that this was a good thing somehow that the narrative rewarded. getting to 158 - 160 felt in many ways like rounding a corner and getting hit in the face with a cast iron pan. i successfully predicted the main gist of the watcher’s crown some time around the end of s3 and i was totally BLINDSIDED by canon jmart. hit with a 2x4 fr.
yes and no! in the s3 Q&A they talked about martin’s crush on jon being planned from day 1, which i totally believe. i think it was super obvious from the start that martin had an unrequited crush. i actually think it’s a well written unrequited crush from someone with really low self worth and a prominent authority figure in their life.
then in the s4 q&a they say that the watcher’s crown has been planned from the beginning, which i also think is really obvious. like it was clearly well executed and clearly building from day 1.
and then they talk about the overall plan for martin’s arc which i don’t believe lmao. i think there def was a plan for his arc but i don’t think the plan was what ended up happening in canon.
idk this sounds like flimsy and uncertain to me. like if i had been writing web!martin up until now and i was currently scrambling to rewrite s5 to not be web!martin, this is what i would say.
and then they mention that jon’s ace-ness was something that they had head canoned from the start but that they didn’t think it would come into play (i’ve talked to you about why this isn’t important lmao but moving on)
and then after that they talk about whether or not jonmartin is romantic. and from what i can tell here they’re hedging SUPER HARD for people with aro headcanons?????
and then there’s the famous “magpod will never have kissing because it’s an audio nightmare” conversation
but this is like. this conversation is so baffling to me. they’re both like well i mean you know i can’t like. like i can’t tell you- i mean. it’s like. well. death of the author and such. so. it’s like. i mean-
like this is an incredibly simply yes or no question. i have no idea why this was how they answered it.
Yeaaah watchers crown definitely was set up well! In general I think almost everything was foreshadowed and set up quite specifically which is what makes the suddenness of JM stand out so much. And their answers here…I think the part where they say they tried to make JM feelings more explicit in 159 but it rang hollow is EXTREMELY telling like guys lmao. Say less…. We know.
Also “We wrote it as a romance” no offense but yall suck at writing romance jesus christ
To me, this seemed like 1. Martin’s crush on Jon was implied from the beginning and throughout S1-S2 (though, it was subtle, blink and you’ll miss it, herein you can also argue Death of the Author, I guess). It does get confirmed by Elias when he looks inside Martin’s head at the end of S3 and asks him why would he waste energy on someone who treats him so badly (paraphrasing bc I haven’t listened in a while). and 2). It wasn’t supposed to turn explicitly into Jmart but it was kind of sprung on by how positively fans reacted to it after the S3 finale? And that’s how we got the S4 romance plot shoe-horned in.
To be fair, Jon does become nicer to Martin in S3 after he comes back from his hidey-hole, but from acting friendly to outright being in love with someone is a huge gap. No offense to jmart shippers, but these people are not well-suited to each other. What do they even have in common? What attracts them to one another? What do they even know about each other?
Ultimately, there are discrepancies on both sides, IMO, bc Martin is someone Jon absolutely despises in earlier seasons. He definitely starts off as a prickly character with a lot of room to grow, someone that is very difficult to get close to, but he has none of this attitude towards Sasha, Tim or Elias. Martin just somehow ticks his buttons so much that he doesn’t even seem to respect him. ? He gets a lot better later on, granted, and in S4 you can argue he is in such a bad situation that Martin is kind of the only person available (well, not really, bc he’s busy with Peter) who doesn’t bite his head off just for existing, so NOW he is drawn to him. But it’s. Such a sad state of affairs to base a romance on.
Whereas Martin gets his own character growth after Elias calls him out for his crush and even admits in S4 he was kind of fooling himself and that they don’t even like each other in the Archives. So that looked a lot like self-awareness? Realizing that your crush is predicated on an illusion, but still doing the right thing, as is - he’s standing up for Jon in front of the others and he’s refusing Jon’s offer to run away with him. S4 Martin is kind of a refreshingly actualized character.
It’s the romance ending of S4 that feels kind of implanted. Jon has had little contact with Martin after waking up from his coma; I struggle to see how the Martin he seems to yearn for isn’t some fantasy he’s built in his head, whereas S4!Martin was mature enough to break through the illusions he had constructed about Jon as a romantic partner.
Like, I could buy this relationship as two people not necessarily suited to each other, but maybe finding each other in bad circumstances and making due. But that’s just it - they’re not each other’s soul mates, they’re settling for each other, because there’s no one else available. And that’s kind of realistic in and of itself, even if it’s depressing. That could have been the point of S5, but it wasn’t acknowledged as such. Instead, Martin really regressed from all his S4 growth and turned into his most annoying version, clinging to Jon no matter what, often trying to control and manipulate him.
So, to me, at least, it does seem like this relationship was written pretty chaotically and doesn’t really look like something that was planned from the very beginning. The narrative doesn’t decide what the dynamic between these two characters should be. Is it a great love story? Is it abusive? Is it just passing time? Are they sincere, are they fooling themselves?
