i find it so interesting how people act like “critically examining a piece of media” is the opposite of “enjoying that piece of media.” rip to you but i actually find it really enjoyable and compelling to dissect and think through the art i engage with
every time i travel i think of jon going to america. packing light because he has nothing he really wants to take with him other than comfortable socks and a decent jacket. living out of a carry-on bag. feeling disconnected and hungry in a way he cannot quite understand. navigating airports and bus stops on his own but propped up by a keen, sudden awareness of the world around him which feels sharp and new and which he isn’t quite used to relying on and cannot competently deploy or navigate. feeling the prickling needling awareness of being targeted and hunted down and stalked but not yet being tapped in enough to his becoming to do anything about it. feeding the lonely and the hunt as he ineffectually resists beholding’s pull. waiting for elias to call. hating himself for waiting. staring at his phone wishing it would ping. suspecting but not quite knowing that elias can feel his desperation for contact. suspecting and being almost certain that he likes it.
i find most fandom interpretations of jon’s asexuality really intolerable not because i don’t think he’s asexual or that i don’t think he was written in the show as convincingly uninterested in and disconnected from sex (not hard to do in a show that generally does not concern itself with the personal sex lives of its characters explicitly on-page) but because the idea of jon taking time to introspectively analyze the minutia of his (lack of) sexuality on tumblr and its linked fansite wikias for long enough to pick his favorite 2010s pride flag designed by a fourteen year old fandom discourse blogger is like. let’s pick a nice word. it is silly.
hissing growling fandom flanderization of elias bouchard is killing me again. no he would not wear onceler green. he would not wear eye jewelry. he would not wear jewelry at all. he’s not a gag in an eternal string of marriages and divorces with peter lukas
he looks like a normal man. *that’s the point.* he’s a very normal person who just happens to have the same colour eyes as all his predecessors. he likes doing spreadsheets on wednesdays. genuinely likes them. the mundane is exciting, because it means he’s alive!
he’s not… vibrant. he’s very purposefully understated and likes being that.
every time someone tries to do found family and/or quirky roadtrip shit w trev, julia, and gerry i swear my head spins 720° …they are keeping his tormented soul locked in a magic book that will not let him die and keeps him in an anguished state of undeath for eternity. they use this approximation-of-a-gerry to give them tips on how to kill and eat monsters and keep him rolling around the bottom of a backpack otherwise. you could not possibly objectify a person more. they have literally reduced him to an actual object. a literal artefact. they carry him around for convenience sake and ignore him as he begs them to die. it was evil of gertrude to bind him in the first place but it is calloused, cruel, and inhumane for trev and julia to keep him in the state they found him in. come on now.
The thing about jmart that gets me is that Jon has been treated so horribly by everyone around him (with a couple exceptions) in season four, is constantly told that he’s a horrible monster for eating people’s fears despite being forced into the whole thing and Martin, the person who is supposed to love and care for him… treats him exactly the same. Calls all avatars evil and horrible to Mr “i am an avatar grappling with my humanity”’s face without even a scrap of nuance and we are still meant to believe that they are a sweet couple and ohhhhh how tragiccccc that they have to stab each other. Like. At least when Basira or Melanie did something they weren’t Jon’s romantic partner.
I know omg like Martin just acts like everyone else does and for some reason he doesn’t get any shit for it when he does it? it’s all kinnies not wanting to think critically about the character that they’ve been using as their like self-insert i swear 🥀🥀
Do yall fw jonelias as “Flirt” by Alphonse Mucha. This idea has been bouncing around in my head since May and today it finally hit the corner perfectly DVD logo style
Does this look good. Most importantly does Elias look good cause I’m pretty confident in drawing my Jons but Elias is a first for me and I haven’t figured him out yet
The thing about jmart that gets me is that Jon has been treated so horribly by everyone around him (with a couple exceptions) in season four, is constantly told that he’s a horrible monster for eating people’s fears despite being forced into the whole thing and Martin, the person who is supposed to love and care for him… treats him exactly the same. Calls all avatars evil and horrible to Mr “i am an avatar grappling with my humanity”’s face without even a scrap of nuance and we are still meant to believe that they are a sweet couple and ohhhhh how tragiccccc that they have to stab each other. Like. At least when Basira or Melanie did something they weren’t Jon’s romantic partner.
I know omg like Martin just acts like everyone else does and for some reason he doesn’t get any shit for it when he does it? it’s all kinnies not wanting to think critically about the character that they’ve been using as their like self-insert i swear 🥀🥀
check tags ig. This is so real guys for real this time really!!!!!!!!!
what are you actually talking about im so lost why is moby dick there
Does this even count as “hate” per the tags when this is just, straight up truth?
The cast of the Magnus Archives gets mischaracterized a LOT but Martin really does seem to be the absolute worst case of the bunch. He gives off “the author had an Idea about what they wanted, but the character they wrote didn’t actually Fit the Idea, but ahead we now go!” vibes to the extreme.
Martin is a ball of neurosis and anxiety, but he’s also a sarcastic and snippy prick. He is self-destructive but even moreso is he a Petty Motherfucker. His entire segment of dialogue with Peter and Elias where he sits down and calls them all complete morons who fucked up their entire manipulation game came because, despite originally going along with it because it was “an easy way to get killed”, he seriously couldn’t help himself. He just had to have his moment.
He simultaneously hates Avatars but also uses Jon like an attack dog throughout the final season. Martin is a character of contradictions and extremes. But, he’s always characterized as “Big huggable fluff man” and “the BF who brings his anxious partner tea” - if at any point the narrative recognized “We have created an asshole” and actually worked from that, I’d actually like Martin as a character because he might actually get utilized in a way that works. But, as it is, the last season really just gives me “Abusive boyfriend complains for several episodes while Jon basically suffers the entire time” while really, really wanting you to believe it’s cute and romantic?
I really love that Jonah knows he’s “evil” (using this term loosely but I’m sure you know what I mean). He is under no false impression that what he’s doing is good in some twisted way which is common among villains. No he is being selfish and is going to cause untold suffering, he has reflected on this and accepted that it’s what he still wants to do despite that. He’s fully accepting over his own position in the moral hierarchy.
There’s something so tasty about a villain who can look at their own actions without rose tinted glasses and see the wrong they’ve done and still do it anyway.
something about jonalias being a “slut.” something about how so much of the fandom goes “teehee he has a regency harem” and ships him w all his many friends and past victims. “hahaha he’s such a whore.” when there’s no indication in the podcast that he’s even sexually active at all - even with peter, who arguably is the most likely candidate for it with their whole author-supported ‘bitter exes’ dynamic
and something abt how often jon is portrayed as this shivering wet chihuahua of a man. a perfect victim who everyone sympathizes with, when in canon they don’t and the situation is too nuanced for his victimhood to be obvious and he gets blamed. and in so much fanfiction he’s the poor asexual uwu bean who gets groomed and preyed on and treated like he’s so passive while jonah magnus is a predator.
and like. jonah absolutely is a predator, even if not sexually. jon is a victim. and there is room in the text for all of these reads to be valid. but like… <takes a long, abiding, frustrated drag from a cigarette> idk man. i just get sick of fanon sometimes.
people love to criticise the actions of someone under an extreme amount of stress as irrationally, irredeemably monstrous, and then you’ll actually look at what they’re talking about and see that not only is their behaviour entirely understandable given the circumstances, but they’re actually demonstrating incredible restraint and will to endure beyond what you thought anyone was capable of
my controversial opinion that it’s unfair to expect anyone to be their best self when they’re suffering has led me to engage in debates i wouldn’t approach with a gun. to my head.
Ok I did it. I present to you, jonelias as “Flirt” by Alphonse Mucha
The quality looks super crunchy but I don’t have it in me to care anymore. This thing took me 15 hours so if you see any mistakes just unfocus your eyes cause there’s no way I’m fixing them. Og under the cut
As you can see my version is cropped but that’s because no one gives a damn about the biscuits. And I bet no one will care about the background either but I still spent several grueling hours drawing it anyway so that one’s on me
honestly I see where you're coming from with jmart. Not as much with the character development- I personally feel like the characters were developed pretty smoothly. I think RQ was sort of intentionally starting martin with that "kinnie bait" nervous guy thing. Most characters like that tend to be liked by other characters, but Jon hates him through a good chunk of S1 (likely because he has said personality traits.) I think the TMA fandom grossly mischaracterizes him- (which to be completely fair was spurred on by RQ by not fully commiting to Martin's development.)
It's sort of like a Romeo and Juliet thing. People act like it's some hot take to say that their relationship wasn't great when obviously it wasn't great, it ended in a double suicide (and in jmart's case, a murder-suicide.) I personally am a huge fan of abusive characters, especially mutually abusive as jmart sort of is. I think martin certainly has a lot of potential as a concept but RQ fumbled the ball in S5. I'd say they do certainly have a shot at fixing it in TMP, but that could be wishful thinking. Honestly as someone with NPD who loves to project cluster B's onto characters I like, jmart is a PRIME example of an NPD/BPD relationship. Martin does swing wildly back and forth on a lot of things and feelings and honestly I think part of that was intentional- I don't think he's actually meant to have a solid idea about what he wants in S5. which is pretty uncommon to see in almost any narrative- characters are "supposed" to have clear motivations, and when they don't it comes off as shitty development.
i do think that yeah sometimes martin could lend himself towards being an interesting character, and i do really like your kinda interpretation of him, but for me like things are too wishy-washy with his motivations and ideas that it’s like who the hell even is this guy 🥀 i think that rq are good writers even with all their like controversies and all that which is why ughhh i just love the statements, but also like they’re so clearly most comfortable with horror writing that any idea of a healthy, non-abusive jmart just feels forced from the fandom because it’s just not like that at all, but also it feels a little forced from the writers to pander to these fans imo but that’s less relevant. sorry im rambling here im not really sure what i was trying to say
Every once in a while my interest in tma starts to fade and I’m like oh my god finally I’m free. And then it comes back two weeks later stronger than ever before and I’m back at the starting point again. Release me
The idea that certain tma characters are “the good guys” and other are “problematic” is laughable. All these people are doing awful shit to one another whether they actually meant to do it or not.
Obviously it’s not all comparable I get that Jonah ending the world for his gain isn’t exactly on the same level as Daisy being a violent power-abusing cop or Melanie lashing out and stabbing people but no character in tma is inherently pure and selfless and they all make mistakes and hurt other people. Your judgement of the podcast depends almost entirely on who you declared your beloved blorbo. You are confusing your personal feelings and opinions for morality
ALT
