can we talk about this scene for a moment because like… ?? it’s so glossed over but martin genuinely just slapped him without really any hesitation or consideration of any other option here whatsoever - of which i believe there are many - and then literally just does not sound apologetic at all even when he’s apologising.
and then it isn’t mentioned again.
like guys i appreciate we’re in the apocalypse here, but am i genuinely meant to believe this is a relationship i should be in full support of? i just… don’t see why this was written in as a presumably positive portrayal of martin’s character.
and i get that it could be a genuinely important scene with some writing around how these high stakes or whatever cause people to become impulsive and unintentionally hurt people they love, but in that case, like… why isn’t it?
It’s just moved on from and they have some conversation about The Web with martin again getting annoyed at Jon for forces outside of his control and just not really caring about him in any way that makes the audience really see why they’d want these two to be together.
I may be biased in that point as i did, admittedly, skip the safehouse episode, which seems to be like the one where presumably they like gave all the fans a reason to root for them, so if I’m missing anything crucial from that episode then please tell me because I’m not sure I can bring myself to listen to it tbh.
(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.