I just opened tumblr for a five minute break from The Paper (tm), and the first thing I saw was the ginormous Jon-supportive rant in the tags of that Magnus Archives post and I wanna thank you for putting that on my timeline <3
haha you’re very welcome!! what can I say I don’t think I’m even halfway through s5 yet and already I want to get up on my soapbox to defend Jon
because like. what do you mean he genuinely says “thank you for not hitting me this time.” like no we are not here acting like martin not being physically abusive this time when he’s already being icky about the whole statement thing is him doing you a favour. even if we wanted to say that avatars have a high pain threshold etc (which we haven’t even seen with Eye avatars, or at least with Jon, he just heals), it still doesn’t make it right.
there are some allowances for the intense amounts of trauma everyone has been going through and particularly how associations between the Eye and Jonah would extend to Jon with the whole feeling of being trapped and used and things like that. but Jon is visibly trying to cling onto whatever remains of his humanity and that is being used against him?? because it’s incredibly human to want revenge on the ones like Jude Perry that not only hurt you but also marked you in a way that made you become this, and then be torn about whether the smiting rule applies to all avatars. Oliver Banks didn’t hurt Jon, and while he technically did mark him, he still brought Jon back. Simon Fairchild wasn’t the one who Vast-marked Jon, that was Mike Crew. And all he really did to Martin was act on Peter’s behalf to tell him about the Extinction. But Jon isn’t allowed to show that humanity, and he isn’t allowed to be a ‘monster’ (record the overspills of a boiling pot of an entire earth of fear) either. Yet again, just like so many instances in his life, (dare I say ever since being Web marked at eight), he doesn’t have a choice. Perhaps the only choice he truly gets to make is right at the end.