I can also picture Martin trying hard to be nice, because that's what he does, and Jon, in a combination of his own personality plus new manager anxiety, feeling his boundaries crossed and hating it.
Yeah -- what I find very very easy to imagine is that the defence/coping mechanisms they've each built up collide in ways that Jon is going to react to like he's allergic.
Jon reacts to his childhood by deciding: well, people are going to find him weird and annoying anyway (and you can't rely on anyone for help or affection -- that's an eight-year-old who's sometimes being beaten up by an eighteen-year-old, without any adults in his life even noticing), but he's SMARTER than them, cope by being prickly and superior and high status.
(And he doubles down on it whenever he's scared.)
Whereas Martin goes for low-status, look I'm harmless, desperately seeking approval, please please let me please you. Which to Jon is going to read as the equivalent of wearing a sign saying HERE IS MY SOFT UNDERBELLY PLEASE KICK IT, because how could anyone do that, he must be STUPID and WEAK. And Martin's caretaking will feel intrusive and untrustworthy and threatening to Jon's sense of his own autonomy and competence, he doesn't need looking after, how dare.
(It is heartbreaking as well as hilarious in S2 that his train of thought is essentially "Martin is showing concern about my wellbeing and being nice to me -- SUSPICIOUS, he is probably PLOTTING AGAINST ME.")
And as we see in S1, Jon's very good at coming up with intellectual rationalizations for positions which he's adopted for irrational/emotional reasons, like his fake skepticism.
Once he's had that gut reaction of annoyance and suspicion, any small mistake on Martin's part can be taken as proof that Martin is useless and incompetent (and any competence on his part can be quietly ignored as barely adequate).
ETA: plus Jon's been dropped in at the deep end in a job which he's seriously unqualified for. Being able to go "Well, at least I'm not as useless as THAT GUY" is a coping mechanism.
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Yeah -- what I find very very easy to imagine is that the defence/coping mechanisms they've each built up collide in ways that Jon is going to react to like he's allergic.
Jon reacts to his childhood by deciding: well, people are going to find him weird and annoying anyway (and you can't rely on anyone for help or affection -- that's an eight-year-old who's sometimes being beaten up by an eighteen-year-old, without any adults in his life even noticing), but he's SMARTER than them, cope by being prickly and superior and high status.
(And he doubles down on it whenever he's scared.)
Whereas Martin goes for low-status, look I'm harmless, desperately seeking approval, please please let me please you. Which to Jon is going to read as the equivalent of wearing a sign saying HERE IS MY SOFT UNDERBELLY PLEASE KICK IT, because how could anyone do that, he must be STUPID and WEAK. And Martin's caretaking will feel intrusive and untrustworthy and threatening to Jon's sense of his own autonomy and competence, he doesn't need looking after, how dare.
(It is heartbreaking as well as hilarious in S2 that his train of thought is essentially "Martin is showing concern about my wellbeing and being nice to me -- SUSPICIOUS, he is probably PLOTTING AGAINST ME.")
And as we see in S1, Jon's very good at coming up with intellectual rationalizations for positions which he's adopted for irrational/emotional reasons, like his fake skepticism.
Once he's had that gut reaction of annoyance and suspicion, any small mistake on Martin's part can be taken as proof that Martin is useless and incompetent (and any competence on his part can be quietly ignored as barely adequate).
ETA: plus Jon's been dropped in at the deep end in a job which he's seriously unqualified for. Being able to go "Well, at least I'm not as useless as THAT GUY" is a coping mechanism.