(this is somewhat of a continuation of my last post, talking about mag172 - Strung Out, but it went off kinda unrelated and kinda long so I’ve split it here)

i get so many people asking me in my inbox why i don’t like Martin (with varying degrees of aggression) and I’ve never really been able to give a satisfying answer - it’s more that I’ve just never found anything truly likable about him, and then he started to become genuinely insufferable by s5 and i hadn’t had the predisposition towards him that most people do that let them glaze over and make excuses for him because they relate to him.

It would be a great answer for people, I’m sure, that I hate martin because I relate to him, but that genuinely could not be further from the truth - I don’t like him because I never had that ideal of him created through relating to him and projecting onto him, and therefore when he started to falter as a character, I started to genuinely dislike the way he acts.

While it is just a wide variety of things he does, for an actual answer the most concise singular reason I can give for why I don’t like him is because I don’t relisten to the podcast as a whole (I don’t like the main plot or many of the characters), and instead just relisten to the statements - 171, 172, and 175 are my favourites, and so they’re the ones I relisten if I want to listen to the podcast again.

These are also the episodes where Martin is particularly annoying, and, as I said 172 is the episode where he hits Jon.

Listening mainly to that episode, far more than most of the others in the podcast, and being bought out of that awesome Statement by hearing specifically the moment where he unapologetically hits Jon and then is particularly annoying, while already just not really liking him as a guy, is enough to get me to dislike him, and then the fans and the kinnies did more than enough to further the rest.