I wouldn’t mind jmart being unhealthy at all if their relationship hadn’t been so… ordinary.
Let me start off by saying that it isn’t an inherently bad thing to portray toxic relationships in media. Moreover, the toxic relationships do not necessarily need to be painted as wrong or punished by the narrative. More often than not, unhealthy bonds are far more appealing to the audience than healthy ones.
I would be more forgiving of jmart being toxic if it wasn’t so very boring. I said before that making Jon and Martin a couple was essentially putting two coworkers together and making them walk through the apocalypse. They don’t know each other outside of the Institute at all.
Everything Martin knows about Jon is that he likes the tape recorders, and for most of the time he believed Jon to be a good man. He developed a crush on the man presumably because his rudeness and callousness towards him reminded him of his mother, so it was familiar.
Jon didn’t even know that Martin made up his last name. All that he knows of the man he learned during his period of paranoia-induced interrogations and stalking. He could, of course, learn infinitely more about him now that he became an Avatar, but considering Martin’s repulsion to the Eye and the Fears in general, I doubt that would improve their relationship much. If anything, it would push them further apart.
Even the toxicity of their relationship is so basic. The fact that they are in a world ruled by ancient fear entities didn’t add any interesting twists to the nature of their bond.
Martin belittles Jon for his monstrous urges and abilities, only being tolerant of them if it benefits him. While the killing spree was not explicitly started by Martin, he was the one to urge Jon to continue despite the latter’s hesitation and shame. He ordered Jon to kill the avatars that he personally disliked (Simon, Oliver) but he suddenly wasn’t all that murder-positive when it came to the ones he did not know personally (Jude Perry). He made an attempt to apologize for it, but he took back his apology almost immediately.
Jon takes it all quietly and without complaint because he hates his new self as well. It’s not at all a new thing, not even for him - Basira and Melanie already hated him for being an avatar waaaay back in season 4.
An interesting bond requires a foundation. Jon and Martin do not have that. They did not have enough time to develop that. Almost immediately after they got together the Eyepocalypse started, and that is not a good environment for a blossoming relationship.
They both need eachother, they need closure, they need someone, anyone to latch onto. But they don’t even know eachother as people.
Even their mutual desire to sacrifice themself for the other feels selfish. They wouldn’t be able to survive on their own. Without the other, it’s likely that they would’ve succumbed to the Fears fully, and neither of them wanted that.
It’s easy to offer to die for the other. It’s infinitely harder to let go.
In the later seasons, everyone deciding not to help Jon and instead cutting him off was theoretically reasonable. After all, they didn’t owe him anything. He caused himself to become like this, nobody turned him into an avatar. Cutting him off was a good and healthy choice for them. Yet I can’t help but notice that it was also cruel, in a way.
Yes, it wasn’t their fault that Jon became an avatar, but it wasn’t his fault either. He was in a coma. He didn’t want to die. It was the most likely choice not only for him - everyone else would’ve chosen the same, had they been in his position. His fate was arranged by others ever since he picked up that book at eight years old. It wasn’t his fault.
He emerged from the coma forever changed. It turned him weak, gave him new needs that had to be met. I understand that for the archive crew, Jon extracting the statements from innocent bystanders was disgusting and cruel. But he needed that to live. He lost his humanity piece by piece, and his entire self shifted into something strange. And everyone hated that new, broken Jon. But it wasn’t his fault.
The sudden change of Jon’s mind and body followed by everyone’s hatred and resulting in his isolation reminds me of someone suddenly becoming very ill or disabled.
Jon’s avatarhood was like a sickness. It was gradually destroying him from inside out. And no one wanted to help him. They saw the death of a normal man and the birth of this new, twisted version, and deemed him lesser than them, not worthy of their time. The damage helping him would cause them outweighted the benefits of that help. They deemed him something disposable. “It should’ve been you. You should’ve died and not Tim.” Jon was forced to suffer for something entirely out of his control.
Not even his boyfriend tried to help him, beyond trying to get rid of the symptoms that inconvenienced him personally. It’s not like Jon was a healthy, normal man, traversing through the apocalypse with just the occasional desire to describe his awful surroundings. He was assaulted by the fear from the very moment the apocalypse began. It gradually built up, until it was too much for him to bear and he had to unceremoniously vomit the horrors he felt. He was holding back his needs, denying himself any relief just because it was inconveniencing for the people around him. Martin didn’t even try to offer him an alternative, he just said the statements upset him and he didn’t want to hear them. Jon was forced to neglect his needs just so his boyfriend didn’t have to be uncomfortable. Martin could’ve at least shown some compassion.
It’s like doctors trying to manage the bothersome and abnormal symptoms instead of getting to the root of the problem and helping the patient function as they are. You should strive to be normal, because it’s the standard. You should do everything in your power to fit in. Anything not meeting the norm is deemed as less worthy and undesirable.
It also fits with how the last few episodes played out. Jon’s a monstrous avatar, so he is no longer given the right to decide for himself. He didn’t have a say in the discussion that regarded his own life. Like a disabled person. “You either submit to us entirely and we give you the help you need, or you keep your autonomy and we deny you help, because if you’re so self-sufficient, that means you don’t need it anymore”. He could either keep quiet and let others decide his fate, or he could disregard them and make the choice for himself, risking the loss of the only people who still tolerated him. And guess which path he chose.
I’m still not over how Martin being jealous of Oliver is portrayed as a sexy and romantic thing.
Like I get wanting to kill the man who had a thing going on with your boyfriend. That could be seen as sexy. But ordering your boyfriend to kill that man? Just telling him to kill someone because YOU’RE jealous? Now that’s just weird.
It’s like those controlling boyfriends who forbid their girlfriend from having male friends because they’re jealous. Baby if this really was about your attaction to your boyfriend and not about you viewing him as your possession then you would’ve taken matters into your own hands and challenged that other man to a duel
With the Martin being human and Jon being an avatar arc there are no positive conclusions drawn from it. There is no “love makes you a better person”. It’s just Martin berating Jon for who he has become but also saying that he cares about him (?)
It’s not love that made Jon come back to his senses when he was getting too close to the powers. It was the occasional act of physical violence (slapping/shaking) and I doubt that those particular actions were prompted by love and adoration, rather than Martin’s momentary fear and disgust of fear-influenced Jon. What I’m saying is that any other person could’ve done that, had they been travelling with Jon. Love didn’t play a significant role. We witnessed that others despised Jon for being an avatar as well, and I think it’s safe to assume that they too would do everything in their power to stop Jon from feeding or hurting innconents - but that’s because they hated him and/or perceived avatarhood as violent and monstrous.
Martin’s supposed affection for Jon only resurfaces when Jon tries to go across with his own plan in the last episode, and that one singular act prompted by Martin’s love caused Jon to go with the Web’s plan last minute. The only thing love did for Jon was to strip him of any agency regarding his own life whatsoever. He had to throw away the only decision he could’ve made for himself to appease Martin. His love lost him. His love made him go against everything he believed in.
Love doesn’t fix you, it smashes you into pieces until there is nothing left for you to pick up. The Magnus Archives is not a tragic love story, it isn’t a love story at all. Among many other themes, it is a story about one’s loss of agency. But somehow the narrative completely overlooked that, and instead all that everyone picked up from it was “well they might’ve ended up somewhere else so maybe they’re fine!”. But that is not horror. There is no conclusion drawn it just ends vaguely and hopefully and not at all horror-esque despite it being a horror podcast.