April 2025

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.

When you think about it, Jon and Martin’s experiences with the Institute were roughly the same. The only difference is in their behaviour, and in how each of them handled themselves.

Oh Martin had to work alongside Peter Lukas and fulfill all his wishes and orders, even if they didn’t sit right with him? Jon had to do the exact same for Elias.

Martin worked his ass off to protect his coworkers from a big unknown evil, and isolated himself from everyone in the process? Jon went through the same with his Gertrude murder investogation.

Martin had no one left in the world to care for him, especially after his mother died? Jon was alone too - at a certain point everyone in the Archives resented him, he was an orphan without any living family members, and the only person he could turn to was an ex girlfriend who really didn’t like him all that much.

Jon and Martin even have similar self-esteem issues. They are both depressed.

But somehow Martin always ends up as the fandom’s poor mistreated boy, and all Jon ever gets to be is a wet blanket antichrist boyfriend whose only redeeming characteristic is his undying love and devotion for the former man.

Jon is not actually as much of an ignorant skeptic as the fandom likes to paint him. He is not completely clueless either.

He has knowledge of Leitner books and paranormal happenings, he’s simply not gulible the way I see it. He is just (coldly) considering all of the possibilities, and people are quick to write him off as an ignorant fool because of the mean tone of his voice. Putting that aside, I would say that he behaves quite logically, considering his situation.

The only time he’s pushing it is with the first spider oriented statement - it’s too personal, and so he wants to distance himself from it, because writing it off as normal would also mean his own experience was perfectly logical and nothing to be worried about.

People say he’s a stupid skeptic because they already know all those things to be real. Jon doesn’t. He is simply being reasonable. Even some of the statement givers admit that after their first encounter they tried to find a logical explanation for it, because you aren’t used to supernatural phenomena in your everyday life! By considering the most likely causes first Jon is doing the correct thing! He’s just mean about it!

Was it ever stated explicitly that Melanie is an avatar of the Slaughter? Because I think that the Desolation would’ve suited her very nicely.

She hurts everyone around her, damaging herself as well. It was not exactly out of a desire for violence and the need to kill. Her hostility was a result of her being… lost, in a sense. An animal, trapped and afraid, ready to gnaw its own leg off just for a moment of freedom. She was trapped by her own grief, unable to move past it.

Her anger consumed her, just as the flames consumed her unsuspecting father.

The anger was technically foreign; it came from the bullet lodged deep in her body. But as it ingrained itself deeper, she could no longer tell where the bullet’s anger ended, and she began. Maybe it had always been there, simmering quietly, waiting for an opportunity to set her ablaze.

Anger that burns you out, leaving just ash. An invisible force that burns you alive, destroys you from the inside, and yet it’s a source of warmth, of comfort, of familiarity.

Her trying to change for the better was like a phoenix rising from its ashes. A dangerous being, rendered by its own power into a fragile, helpless thing, with no feathers to make it feel that warmth again. What will you do now? Without that fire, that force which defined your very being?

People were so quick to say “oooh Jon hated Martin sooo much in s1! Haha what a stupid man, that’s your boyfriend! He has a crush on you!” But Jon was justified in his dislike.

He just got promoted to a job he frankly had no idea how to do. His predecessor left the place in a state worthy of despair, and he was trying hard to make sense of it. On top of that, he was unpleasantly reminded of his own paranormal encounter, from which he desperately wished to distance himself.

If I were trying so hard to do my job correctly, and i had a coworker who would straight up refuse to do his job sometimes because “it spooks him”, it would irritate me too. Jon was uncomfortable with the statements as well. He just didn’t show it.

He was incompetent, yeah, but it’s not like anyone was there to train him, plus him being unprepared benefitted Elias. He did his best. Martin just sat on his ass all day and made them tea sometimes

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.

Imagine a scenario in which Martin wasn’t the reason for Jon’s last mark, and instead Jon got so isolated that the Lonely consumed him all by itself.

He was already an outcast; it would take just a little nudge for him to succumb to the Lonely altogether.

Jon was so painfully alone in season 4. Forsaken. Everyone gave up on him.

What I’m saying is that if Barnabas Bennett could send a letter to Jonah from the Lonely then Jon could surely receive one.

I cannot for the life of me understand jmart roleswap au because then the plot just wouldn’t have happened.

The entire podcast happened because Jon was the person he was. Putting Martin in the Archivist’s position and Jon as his anchor instead would 1) cancel it all out and 2) need a rewrite of Martin’s entire character.

Jon I get, his current story has a whole lot of Lonely undertones, but Martin? I mean, Martin’s story is that he never received a proper education because he had to be there for his mother, and with the few episodes of him reading the statements it’s obvious he doesn’t have much knowledge in the way of research. He has a very black and white way of thinking: he doesn’t believe in police violence, because the police are supposed to protect the people! He despises Elias because he’s the big evil boss who hurt him! He wouldn’t stop for even a second to consider the motives of someone he already deemed as ’evil’ in his mind. Martin wouldn’t need to know. He would just leave it all alone.

His character is supposed to be that ’wet blanket nothing guy whom everyone underestimates and who’s actually more than capable of violence and manipulation’. I get that putting Martin as the big scary Archivist with Eye powers and Jon as his little Lonely boyfriend looks cool in fanart but it makes absolutely no sense plot wise.

Were Martin to be the Archivist, the entire story just wouldn’t have played out the way it did. Martin would read the statements out loud and chuck them into one of Gertrude’s boxes without looking. Elias would be SEETHING with rage

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 am doing a TMA relisten to refresh my memory of the podcast. So far I’ve gone through season 1, and I’ve come to a realization of sorts. At the very beginning at least, Martin was kind. Annoying at times, of course, but kind; in that plain, simple, sweet way. He didn’t start off bad.

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

The stab wound that Martin gave Jon in the last episode was deeper than his love for the man could ever be

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.

There’s this misconception that in s5 Martin was bloodthirsty and wanted to kill. No, he didn’t. He just wanted these people dead. He didn’t want to do the killing himself. He used Jon to kill for him, so that he wouldn’t have to feel guilty about it. And I’m sure that if he was the one with the power to kill, he wouldn’t have been as eager to abuse it. Because then he would have to take responsibility for his own actions for once.

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.