As a person of color, to me, Martin comes off as such a wannabe white savior character in both canon and ESPECIALLY fandom depiction that his whole character in general just gives me the ick whenever he shows up/mentioned. It’s especially apparent when it comes to j/mart.

It boggles my mind how the fandom hc’s Jon as a poc, usually SE Asian in most characterizations but only at an aesthetically surface level, when they get into his backstory they never or rarely bring up how his darker skin tone might have influenced his experiences with others, especially with how prevalent micro-aggression is in European countries. Then they turn around and depict Martin as the “reasonable” innocent but secretly badass one (I cringed writing this description of what they think of him) who only does what is "right", then there’s Jon who’s either this unreasonable brute that Martin needs to “civilized” or in this case, “humanized,” OR a completely dependent maiden in need of rescuing (from Mr. big bad Elias Bouchard, who will huff and puff and blow their ship away) fanon Jon falls under so many negative asian stereotypes that you would think they’re doing it on purpose.

Does this make sense or am I reading into it too much/projecting? Because I am SE Asian and Jon happens to be my favorite as well. 😭

omgggg that makes perfect sense and i think you’ve really put into words something that’s been bugging me for a while in this fandom. i think that the way it’s so clearly just like an aesthetic change and to make john like a complete visual contrast from martin really annoys me because like it just feels like such a weird way of using race as like a prop for the white character’s design without anything deeper. and also because people will go into the comments of any brown man w long hair on tiktok and be like “erm- jonathan sims ⁉️”

obviously not my place to try remove representation and that’s not what i wanna do at all, but it does confuse me when john is treated as if he’s actual se asian representation when like there’s nothing supported by the creators, the writer and actor are both white, and there’s no indicator of his race in canon at all 😭

but also like god bless anyone that projects their own race onto john (or any of the characters) and gives him a little more depth 🔥