The whole tragedy of jmart is that they would’ve never worked out, no matter what situation they ended up in.
In their current situation, Martin can’t bring himself to love Jon fully and honestly because he finds the “monstrous” part of Jon repulsive.
If Jon hadn’t become an Avatar, then the others wouldn’t have resented him and so he wouldn’t have turned to Martin in such a desperate attempt to maintain a connection with humanity.
If they hadn’t been working at the Magnus Institute, then they probably wouldn’t have looked in eachother’s direction twice, and they definitely wouldn’t have formed any meaningful bonds.
MAG 199 - Seeing It Through
The canon timeline is possibly the only scenario in which they ended up together, and they both know it. They are holding on by sheer willpower. Their relationship is a carefully balanced structure just one precise jab away from crashing down.
And I think there’s beauty to be found in that. How they both claw desperately at one another to remain stable.
jmart is codependence by circumstance to me, and I 100% agree fanon Martin is a huge mischaracterisation. That being said, I’m also with you on exploring the canon-accurate relationship there — what does it mean to be clinging on to each other as a last-ditch effort to keep a semblance of humanity?
Jon is with Martin because Martin keeps him grounded. Martin only likes the “human” part of Jon - the part he can easily wrap his mind around - and so belittling the “monster” part of the man is no problem to him. Without Martin, Jon would’ve succumbed to avatarhood wholly. With Martin “keeping him in check”, he’s only toeing the line and can be (harshly) pulled back a bit, if necessary.
Martin stays with Jon because it offers him protection. Without Jon, he would be likely to succumb to his own little Lonely domain (which we get a brief view of). It’s also stated that by staying with Jon, Martin is shielded from the physical aspect of the horrors - he’s still scared by them, but they cannot hurt him or wound him, and so he can walk freely through the Fearscape in the role of a viewer. It’s the best case scenario for him.
Also, by staying with Jon, who is by default more monstrous than him, Martin gets to reassure himself - by looking at Jon being very far gone, he feels more stable in his own slowly deteriorating humanity (he’s ashamed and afraid of the fact that he, too, has a domain, which makes him the perpetrator following the Fear-infested world logic - he cannot bear the thought of being just as harmful as the other avatars, who he deems terrible monsters that should be killed)
They don’t have many other reasons to stay together, because they simply hadn’t had the time to get to know eachother as people outside of their grotesque eyepocalypse hiking trip in which Jon is actively being consumed by an eldritch being.
In the half an episode we got of them pre-apocalypse, their relationship seems to have had only started blossoming. There is nothing more than the usual kind exchanges between two friendly people. It’s a nice beginning for something bigger, but it certainly isn’t love, not at that time.
After the apocalypse starts, there is suddenly a lot of weight put on their bond - they are quite literally the only ones left. They cannot afford to be casually lovey-dovey when their wellbeing and sanity are at stake.
Had each of them been on their own, I’m sure that witnessing the sufffering of countless people would have its effect on their mental health; it’s also very likely that they would’ve turned into avatars of their own. By staying together, they are also distracting eachother from the horror surrounding them.
Their days are spent walking through fear-filled landscapes, not to mention that each of them has to deal with their own problems - Jon has suddenly found himself in a position that makes him both very powerful and very fragile, and Martin is fighting off his desire to isolate himself and his fear of Avatar-Jon. Every time they say “I love you”, all I can hear is “please don’t leave me”.
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.
Martin didn’t start off as a bad person.
He was clumsy and shy, and bad at his job, but he was also caring and kind, in a very simple way. His acts of kindness were plain but sweet in their simplicity, and his demeanor seemed almost childish. I can see how that could make him endearing.
He was quite an uncomplicated character: all that we knew of him was that he’s clumsy, a bit squeamish, fond of insects and other small creatures, and that he wrote bad poetry. A perfect fit into the softie character archetype. You could find him cute, and develop an attachment to him - it was easy since he had no real flaws. But he didn’t have anything unique about him either.
That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Characters like him have potential to develop into someone interesting and complex. They have a lot of room to grow and change. But Martin’s biggest problem as a character is that he did not change.
The shift in his attitude in s4 was only temporary. He decided that isolating himself from everyone was the correct thing to do, so he did it. For a brief amount of time he became more quiet, started actively avoiding people, and began to work alone. But that was out of his own decision. Nothing in his point of view or values had to shift for him to take this course of action.
And that was a great moment to actually develop his character. That isolation, the decision to voluntatily sacrifice himself for others without even informing them of the situation - it could’ve made him stop and think. It could’ve made him take a moment to reflect on himself and his actions. It could’ve prompted him to realize that things weren’t so conveniently black-and-white as he had always believed them to be. That could’ve been the moment he altered his point of view. But it wasn’t.
You know what did happen? He got depressed. That’s it. He opened up to the audience about how much he’s scared of being forgotten, how much he cared about his mother and how she pushed him away, how out of place he felt everywhere he went. All of that makes the listener sympathize with him and feel bad for him, of course. But those are all issues he struggled with in the past as well. It’s nothing new.
And when he got out of the Lonely, when he more or less managed to pull himself together, he was exactly the same man as before. He might’ve seemed different to the listener, because only then did we learn about his self-esteem issues and his motivations. But his attitude did not change.
He remained the same, simple man we got to know him as. He still divided the world into “good” and “bad” categories, despite being shown on multiple occasions that the world doesn’t work like that. He’s in full-blown denial about being an avatar himself, because then he would have to either put himself next to the people he considers evil, or actually discard his childish point of view.
Because of that oversimplified way of reasoning, he ends up belittling and demeaning his boyfriend, even though he too went through something similar and ended up in a nearly identical position to Jon. Both of them have new needs connected to being an avatar, Jon’s are just more prominent. While Jon needed to extract fear and then speak it out loud, Martin felt the need to isolate himself. Because of that, he was also unknowingly isolating Jon, since he was the only person the man could talk to without being told nearly point-blank that he doesn’t deserve to live.
It’s like the writers were too afraid to properly develop him. After all, it was the sweet, plain Martin whom everyone fell in love with, and so even the slightest change to that beloved sweet cinnamon roll who can do no wrong would’ve caused riots! So they decided to half-heartedly entertain the previously discarded idea of Martin being Web-aligned. “Oh look, the guy whom everyone thought is an innocent pure-hearted sweetie is actually a great manipulator! Anabelle thinks he would be soooo good for her patron, she’s so smug about it!”
I think it was supposed to be him finally standing up for himself. “Look, your poor tormented sweetie is finally getting his revenge for all the mistreatment he had to endure! But he’s still fearful and insecure of course :) it’s your favourite guy beating up the people who were mean to him!” And he didn’t even do the beating himself, he just made Jon do it without much concern for the man’s feelings.
I understand that standing up for yourself is important, especially for shy and insecure people, but there’s a difference between defending your autonomy as a person and just being needlessly rude. I’m sorry, but I don’t think getting mad at your boyfriend for things he repeatedly told you were out of his control counts as “taking your own feelings into account for once”. Martin’s perspective doesn’t really extend past his own needs, and by season 5 it’s no longer cute. It’s just exhausting to listen to.
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.
