I just finished listening to the entire podcast on YouTube and all the comments were hyping Martin and jmart in general up since the beginning but when I was actually listening to their dialogues and their interactions it was just so, alright?
Maybe I’m taking crazy but it feels weird to me that the main relationship in the story is built upon the fact that they were really the other’s only available option that is “morally correct,” rather than a deeper connection and attraction of not only on what the other represented in the past but also their developing attitudes and characteristic as the story progresses as their humanity gets ripped from them, in summary, they suck at adapting to their new situation which I find very frustrating but I guess is realistic, that it leaves Jon to be in such a distressing state and prolonged in accepting his new situation of no longer being fully human. If he just had a more supportive network of people with an actual brain that can think for a second to maybe not blame the guy who wasn’t even present when they joined the institute, so much of canon could have gone about a lot better.
One could argue that this lack of development stems from the fact that they’re in the middle of the apocalypse, and that we don’t hear the full nuance of their relationship because of how the podcast’s narrative is with the statements being the focal point, which is fair, but they’re a lot of apocalyptic settings type narratives with two male characters that aren’t even official, but have more of an engaging dynamic than jmart, take the pairing of joongdok from Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint for example, reading the actual novel it’s oblivious that none of the fandom ships will be canon but their interactions are such a hook and tragic that the readers are left longing for more of /them/, those two characters who as individuals are already compelling but when at each other’s side, no one can argue that they make a good team with or without the shipping lenses, and this is still clear even after arcs where they dont even see each other for YEARS, while jmart is glued at the hips for a lot of the later seasons and is still giving a passing grade.
For jmart, even after listening to the podcast, people long for the fanon version they made up because the actual content material leaves us with something so plain it could rival the UK’s entire cuisine.
If ONLY they didn’t forced this codependency with jmart and allow for Jon to explore in having different dynamics with the other characters more which relationships would actually stay relevant to the story and not have all of them follow the same mindset of blame Jon and ditching him, well, with Martin. It’s such a missed opportunity, Jonny Sims let me be the devil on your shoulder if you ever decide to write an alternate universe.
I would have loved if we got more of Jon and Elias/Jonah instead, for the main character and focal antagonist’s relationship to be sidelined as it was in the podcast drives me up the wall because these two are genuinely the only ones in that cast keeping me engaged with the story, build upon multitudes of parallels and a raw sense of understanding that you could taste and bite into whenever they interact and do their little mind games. See I don’t even want JonElias to be in a relationship with each other in canon, they just need to be in each other’s orbit, physically and mentally.
ok wow that’s a lot, sorry if some of this doesn’t makes sense I’m just writing down everything on my mind as quickly as possible. - 🪸
You said basically everything I've been posting about since starting this account so there's not much for me to add.
I'll just say - I will forever remain a jmart hater because not only was that underdeveloped relationship the focus of an entire season and the whole podcast's ending, it's also the main if not the only thing tma fans talk about. It could've been compelling and interesting but the execution was not it. These two barely talked before s5 and so having them suddenly become a couple in the beginning of the last season was hinged on the assumption that you already shipped them. Which I didn't. And then the emotional aspect of the ending was also hinged on the assumption that you cared about these two - as a unit - ending up somewhere else. And I did not care at all