Recently i've being seing alot of antishiping proshiping discourse on tiktok against my will again, and with it i realised that i don't really hate Martin or Jmart, i just hate when their fanon versions are seen as canon. Like, i'm a big Elias/Jonah fan, and i often be saying shit like "He's so babygirl" "He did nothing wrong" etc, in a joking way, so it's hypocritical of me to criticise Martin fans for doing the same. But the problem is that TMA is one of those fandoms where the fans have divorced the characters so much from the original source that i'm not really sure if they're just babyfing Martin the same way i do Elias or if they legit think he's a "small bean" in the podcast. Idk if i worded this the best way
I get it. Martin's treated like a stereotypical sweetheart can-do-no-wrong cinnamon roll or just straight up like a self-insert, and jonmartin as a pairing are made to be a generic opposite aesthetics mlm ship #247 and I know this kind of thing happens with fandoms in general but jesus christ
I'm biased cause imo them being canon and the focus in both the last season and the whole podcast's ending was awful. But that aside, they had potential to be explored in fanworks (I mean it wasn't all that in the podcast itself but you could dig deeper if you fancied) but the vast majority of jmart works are just fix-its or some scottish cottage or slowburn office romance or flowershop aus. And that is so boring and generic and untrue to their characters. "What if we took a horror fiction podcast and removed all the creepy icky stuff and left only cute gays in love" that is nothing. You removed the main elements of the thing