TMA 168, "Roots"
May. 22nd, 2020 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitEpisode spoilers, reaction, and speculation under the cut.
In the spirit of (to paraphraserydra_wong) "that episode about being buried alive was so heartwarming," I'll say that this episode about death was reassuring and comforting. And I do say this in full awareness that at this point in the narrative, if Jonny is warming our hearts, it's so that eventually the knife will go in easier.
Yet I am comforted. On the character level, first of all. Grumpy!jealous!Martin is very normal, very human, very not-a-disguised-avatar. In a weird way, this makes me feel better about the state of Martin, and the state of Martin/Jon, than any amount of gentle patience and good communication. Real people can't be the Ideal Partner all the time. I also think it's probably good for Martin, emotionally, that he failed to be ideal, he failed to be perfectly understanding and secure and undemanding, and that Jon understood and reacted with love and a kind of tender, deeply affectionate amusement. (And Jon was also clearly a bit flattered, which helps.) Martin has a lot of history of trying to be, or at least pretending to be, what other people want/need of him all the time, and I don't want him to have to do that with Jon.
Having said that, obviously it's good that Jon didn't surrender to Martin's jealousy and, you know, kill a person(?) because of it. Boundaries are still important! And I'm also reassured, for whatever remains of Jon's humanity, that he's still capable of thinking of other people (?) as people, and not just as targets.
I do still find it disconcerting that Martin is so eager to have Jon smite everyone. Some of it, I think, is that Martin has simply opted out of the impossible ethical dilemma the avatars present. He's decided: Jon is a person, Martin's friends are all still people, all the victims are people, everything else is a monster. I don't think that's true, and I also don't think it's a logically consistent viewpoint (Martin likes Helen, after all, and hasn't asked Jon to smite her, though I also don't think he'd hesitate to kill her if he thought it necessary), but it makes a lot of emotional sense. In the face of literally world-shattering horror, Martin has probably had to withdraw from thinking about certain things. He's treating this world like a video game--or at least a certain kind of video game--where ethics are suspended and it's okay to kill whatever gets in your way. Now that I think about it, all of Martin's murder-cheerleading is mediated through fantasy and fiction. It's "Kill Bill." It's "smiting," which isn't a word anyone has used seriously for a long time, but which has a rich set of sword & sorcery connotations. Their whole journey is Martin-as-Sam and Jon-as-Frodo, assuming that the textual allusions aren't just Jonny being Jonny, but are Martin taking Lord of the Rings as the best model he can find for how to get through the apocalypse. I mean, can anyone really doubt that Martin read and/or saw LotR at a formative age and wildly over-identified with Sam?
For what it's worth, I think there's a meaningful ethical difference between Jon killing not!Sasha--which was never a person, only a manifestation of an inhuman force that feeds on fear, and which delighted in it--and Jon killing Oliver Banks. Oliver still has personhood, somehow, and also Oliver isn't malevolent in the same way as, say, Jude Perry (who also still has personhood). He and his patron feed on fear, it's true, and they've designed their domain to maximize it, but . . . well, death does await us all. Burning alive, however, or war or plague or oppression, are not inevitable in the same way, and so I feel like there's a greater level of culpability in their avatars and acolytes. Which may not be ethically coherent, but there it is.
Returning to what I find reassuring: death. Everyone and everything in this terrible new world will still die, and be released. It may take a long time, but it will happen. I am SO glad to know this is true. (Or at least, Oliver believes it to be true; I'm assuming that it's still impossible for statement-makers to lie to Jon.) It's perhaps an odd thing to take comfort in the idea of the death of all sentient beings, but if the alternative is eternal suffering, then I do. (Personal note: I'm an atheist, and while atheism doesn't offer much in the way of comfort in tribulation, I personally do find a lot of comfort in knowing that death is the end. It has its sad side--the people I love who have died are gone forever, and there won't be any reunion in heaven--but it also means there's no eternal suffering in hell. And, to be honest, I find it hard to imagine any kind of eternity that wouldn't eventually become hell.)
Assuming that Oliver's claim is true and that everything, including the Fears themselves, will eventually die: it changes the stakes. Will Jon and Martin feel the same obligation to save the world even at the cost of their own lives? Especially if, as is likely, they can't be 100% certain of the consequences of whatever "solution" they decide on. Ultimately, I think heroic self-sacrifice may be more appealing than living on whatever fragments of happiness they can build in a nightmare hellscape where everyone else is trapped in millennia of terror. But they've had so little time to just be together; the temptation to try to have something, anything for themselves is likely to be a strong one.
There's another disturbing possibility I've seen mentioned. If the house on Hill Top Road is indeed a portal to a parallel universe (or more than one), then the Fears might try to go there once they've started exhausting the supply of victims in this world. Or they might even try to go there just to get away from the domination of the Beholding. And in that case, Jon's responsibilities redouble.
*sigh* It's much nicer just to think about Martin being jealous and Jon being amused and loving and reassuring (but not to the point of murdering anyone!) and the two of them being, in a limited way and for a little while, happy.
In the spirit of (to paraphrase
rydra_wong) "that episode about being buried alive was so heartwarming," I'll say that this episode about death was reassuring and comforting. And I do say this in full awareness that at this point in the narrative, if Jonny is warming our hearts, it's so that eventually the knife will go in easier.Yet I am comforted. On the character level, first of all. Grumpy!jealous!Martin is very normal, very human, very not-a-disguised-avatar. In a weird way, this makes me feel better about the state of Martin, and the state of Martin/Jon, than any amount of gentle patience and good communication. Real people can't be the Ideal Partner all the time. I also think it's probably good for Martin, emotionally, that he failed to be ideal, he failed to be perfectly understanding and secure and undemanding, and that Jon understood and reacted with love and a kind of tender, deeply affectionate amusement. (And Jon was also clearly a bit flattered, which helps.) Martin has a lot of history of trying to be, or at least pretending to be, what other people want/need of him all the time, and I don't want him to have to do that with Jon.
Having said that, obviously it's good that Jon didn't surrender to Martin's jealousy and, you know, kill a person(?) because of it. Boundaries are still important! And I'm also reassured, for whatever remains of Jon's humanity, that he's still capable of thinking of other people (?) as people, and not just as targets.
I do still find it disconcerting that Martin is so eager to have Jon smite everyone. Some of it, I think, is that Martin has simply opted out of the impossible ethical dilemma the avatars present. He's decided: Jon is a person, Martin's friends are all still people, all the victims are people, everything else is a monster. I don't think that's true, and I also don't think it's a logically consistent viewpoint (Martin likes Helen, after all, and hasn't asked Jon to smite her, though I also don't think he'd hesitate to kill her if he thought it necessary), but it makes a lot of emotional sense. In the face of literally world-shattering horror, Martin has probably had to withdraw from thinking about certain things. He's treating this world like a video game--or at least a certain kind of video game--where ethics are suspended and it's okay to kill whatever gets in your way. Now that I think about it, all of Martin's murder-cheerleading is mediated through fantasy and fiction. It's "Kill Bill." It's "smiting," which isn't a word anyone has used seriously for a long time, but which has a rich set of sword & sorcery connotations. Their whole journey is Martin-as-Sam and Jon-as-Frodo, assuming that the textual allusions aren't just Jonny being Jonny, but are Martin taking Lord of the Rings as the best model he can find for how to get through the apocalypse. I mean, can anyone really doubt that Martin read and/or saw LotR at a formative age and wildly over-identified with Sam?
For what it's worth, I think there's a meaningful ethical difference between Jon killing not!Sasha--which was never a person, only a manifestation of an inhuman force that feeds on fear, and which delighted in it--and Jon killing Oliver Banks. Oliver still has personhood, somehow, and also Oliver isn't malevolent in the same way as, say, Jude Perry (who also still has personhood). He and his patron feed on fear, it's true, and they've designed their domain to maximize it, but . . . well, death does await us all. Burning alive, however, or war or plague or oppression, are not inevitable in the same way, and so I feel like there's a greater level of culpability in their avatars and acolytes. Which may not be ethically coherent, but there it is.
Returning to what I find reassuring: death. Everyone and everything in this terrible new world will still die, and be released. It may take a long time, but it will happen. I am SO glad to know this is true. (Or at least, Oliver believes it to be true; I'm assuming that it's still impossible for statement-makers to lie to Jon.) It's perhaps an odd thing to take comfort in the idea of the death of all sentient beings, but if the alternative is eternal suffering, then I do. (Personal note: I'm an atheist, and while atheism doesn't offer much in the way of comfort in tribulation, I personally do find a lot of comfort in knowing that death is the end. It has its sad side--the people I love who have died are gone forever, and there won't be any reunion in heaven--but it also means there's no eternal suffering in hell. And, to be honest, I find it hard to imagine any kind of eternity that wouldn't eventually become hell.)
Assuming that Oliver's claim is true and that everything, including the Fears themselves, will eventually die: it changes the stakes. Will Jon and Martin feel the same obligation to save the world even at the cost of their own lives? Especially if, as is likely, they can't be 100% certain of the consequences of whatever "solution" they decide on. Ultimately, I think heroic self-sacrifice may be more appealing than living on whatever fragments of happiness they can build in a nightmare hellscape where everyone else is trapped in millennia of terror. But they've had so little time to just be together; the temptation to try to have something, anything for themselves is likely to be a strong one.
There's another disturbing possibility I've seen mentioned. If the house on Hill Top Road is indeed a portal to a parallel universe (or more than one), then the Fears might try to go there once they've started exhausting the supply of victims in this world. Or they might even try to go there just to get away from the domination of the Beholding. And in that case, Jon's responsibilities redouble.
*sigh* It's much nicer just to think about Martin being jealous and Jon being amused and loving and reassuring (but not to the point of murdering anyone!) and the two of them being, in a limited way and for a little while, happy.
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Date: 2020-05-23 02:53 pm (UTC)