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kindkitSome thoughts below the cut on The Magnus Archives 173, "Night Night." Note: not cheerful. Perhaps not 100% coherent.
Further note: discussion of abuse.
So. I've had the words "Thank you for not hitting me this time" echoing around in my head ever since Wednesday morning. They have not done anything to improve my already fragile mood.
I'd felt a little niggling unease about those slaps. But I dismissed it, without much conscious thought, as me worrying too much. After all, in the movies people will slap someone to "bring then out of it" all the time. It's just a trope.
I forgot that this is Jonny (and Alex) and no trope is ever just a trope, and nothing goes unexamined.
What to us listeners, or many of us anyway, was a few harmless slaps in a good cause--I've seen people in the fandom joking about it--was, to Jon, the man he loves hitting him. It's very important, I think, that Jon-the-character and Jonny-the-writer don't use the word "slap," with its connotations of harmlessness. It's not slapping, it's hitting.
I need to go back and relisten, although so far I haven't been able to bear to. I need to hear how the hitting started, and how it developed, and at what point Martin learned that he didn't have to hit Jon to bring him out of a statement-compulsion, but kept doing it anyway.
The thing about Martin is, he's angry. He's never been allowed to be angry, not in his abusive childhood and not in his abusive job at the Magnus Institute, and I think he's got years of rage built up. And now the world has ended, everything is completely awful without mitigation, and Jon . . . Jon did it. It wasn't Jon's fault, but Jon did it. Everyone is suffering and Jon's doing nothing about it but record his impressions like a fucking tourist, apart from a little smiting that doesn't help the victims anyway.
Martin must be SO ANGRY. He loves Jon, but he is so angry. And he can't take a walk to cool down, or watch TV or read a book to distract himself, or have a night out with his friends, or work it out with a therapist. There is literally nothing in his world except Jon, and his love for Jon and his anger at Jon, and all the built up anger of his entire lifetime, and a planet's worth of people who are suffering unspeakably because of what Jon did.
It's not surprising that Martin has hit Jon.
It's awful and it's wrong, wrong, WRONG, and besides its innate moral wrongness, it ignores how much Jon is suffering. But it's not surprising.
I think of all the times Martin must have wanted to hit his mother when she responded to his care with cruelty, but he didn't. She was defenseless, except emotionally. He could have hurt her.
He can't hurt Jon, except emotionally. Jon is invulnerable, except emotionally. A slap isn't really hurting him, except emotionally.
I just keep wanting to cry.
In some ways, it feels as if S5 has had a very uneven emotional tone. Just a few episodes ago we had "I'm in love and I'm not going to forget it" and now it's "Thank you for not hitting me this time."
But that's what a relationship under unbearable stress is like. Adoration one minute, misery the next.
That's what abuse can be like, too.
I love Martin SO MUCH. This fucking HURTS. I don't think he's a dedicated, deliberate abuser who will never change. (Nor is Jon purely a victim--he's done his best to hurt Martin emotionally, sometimes.) But, you know, hitting your partner is abuse. It has to stop. Their whole dynamic, which has slid from gentle bickering to irritability to (mostly) verbal cruelty, has to change. And I don't know how it can, trapped as they are.
Things will change, of course. We're approaching mid-season and getting to the end of the Fears' domains. Probably the confrontation with Elias will come soon, and also somehow reconnecting with Basira and Georgie and Melanie. Maybe that will relieve enough of the stress between Jon and Martin that they can recover. But I wish we hadn't gotten to this point.
Please, Jonny Sims. Please. I'll take the tragic ending where love sacrifices itself to try to fix the world. Please don't give us the ending where love dies first.
Further note: discussion of abuse.
So. I've had the words "Thank you for not hitting me this time" echoing around in my head ever since Wednesday morning. They have not done anything to improve my already fragile mood.
I'd felt a little niggling unease about those slaps. But I dismissed it, without much conscious thought, as me worrying too much. After all, in the movies people will slap someone to "bring then out of it" all the time. It's just a trope.
I forgot that this is Jonny (and Alex) and no trope is ever just a trope, and nothing goes unexamined.
What to us listeners, or many of us anyway, was a few harmless slaps in a good cause--I've seen people in the fandom joking about it--was, to Jon, the man he loves hitting him. It's very important, I think, that Jon-the-character and Jonny-the-writer don't use the word "slap," with its connotations of harmlessness. It's not slapping, it's hitting.
I need to go back and relisten, although so far I haven't been able to bear to. I need to hear how the hitting started, and how it developed, and at what point Martin learned that he didn't have to hit Jon to bring him out of a statement-compulsion, but kept doing it anyway.
The thing about Martin is, he's angry. He's never been allowed to be angry, not in his abusive childhood and not in his abusive job at the Magnus Institute, and I think he's got years of rage built up. And now the world has ended, everything is completely awful without mitigation, and Jon . . . Jon did it. It wasn't Jon's fault, but Jon did it. Everyone is suffering and Jon's doing nothing about it but record his impressions like a fucking tourist, apart from a little smiting that doesn't help the victims anyway.
Martin must be SO ANGRY. He loves Jon, but he is so angry. And he can't take a walk to cool down, or watch TV or read a book to distract himself, or have a night out with his friends, or work it out with a therapist. There is literally nothing in his world except Jon, and his love for Jon and his anger at Jon, and all the built up anger of his entire lifetime, and a planet's worth of people who are suffering unspeakably because of what Jon did.
It's not surprising that Martin has hit Jon.
It's awful and it's wrong, wrong, WRONG, and besides its innate moral wrongness, it ignores how much Jon is suffering. But it's not surprising.
I think of all the times Martin must have wanted to hit his mother when she responded to his care with cruelty, but he didn't. She was defenseless, except emotionally. He could have hurt her.
He can't hurt Jon, except emotionally. Jon is invulnerable, except emotionally. A slap isn't really hurting him, except emotionally.
I just keep wanting to cry.
In some ways, it feels as if S5 has had a very uneven emotional tone. Just a few episodes ago we had "I'm in love and I'm not going to forget it" and now it's "Thank you for not hitting me this time."
But that's what a relationship under unbearable stress is like. Adoration one minute, misery the next.
That's what abuse can be like, too.
I love Martin SO MUCH. This fucking HURTS. I don't think he's a dedicated, deliberate abuser who will never change. (Nor is Jon purely a victim--he's done his best to hurt Martin emotionally, sometimes.) But, you know, hitting your partner is abuse. It has to stop. Their whole dynamic, which has slid from gentle bickering to irritability to (mostly) verbal cruelty, has to change. And I don't know how it can, trapped as they are.
Things will change, of course. We're approaching mid-season and getting to the end of the Fears' domains. Probably the confrontation with Elias will come soon, and also somehow reconnecting with Basira and Georgie and Melanie. Maybe that will relieve enough of the stress between Jon and Martin that they can recover. But I wish we hadn't gotten to this point.
Please, Jonny Sims. Please. I'll take the tragic ending where love sacrifices itself to try to fix the world. Please don't give us the ending where love dies first.
FWIW
Date: 2020-06-26 08:00 pm (UTC)I don't think he did ever learn that, though. In fact he learned pretty much the opposite.
There have definitely been points earlier in the season where he manages to pull Jon out of the early stages of a statement verbally.
But in 169, he tries talking and yelling at Jon for a significant amount of time while a) they're in a burning building, b) Martin is coughing and can't breathe, and c) Jude Perry (actively hostile and dangerous) is right there in front of them and Jon is unaware. It's clearly a last resort.
In 172, it seems like he slaps Jon quite quickly after we first hear his voice begin to break in (which raised my eyebrows a bit). But he's pretty scared (having been "exploring" and then realized it might not be his own idea) and he can hear that Jon is being looped back in to start reciting another act, and potentially staying there endlessly.
So I can buy him feeling that they're in danger and, well, he knows one thing that always works ...
I absolutely don't think he's done it when he didn't think it was necessary.
(And the only other time he's ever slapped Jon is 160, I believe, when Jon was unconscious -- and presumably looking a lot like he might be in a coma again -- and the apocalypse was happening outside. Which I tend to read as WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP YOU CAN'T BE DEAD DON'T BE DEAD.)
In 173 -- Jon is fairly "near the surface" when Martin stops him, having finished one statement and asked "Is that enough for you? Do you need to hear more?" before he begins the next one, so it doesn't surprise me that Martin can stop him verbally; doesn't mean he necessarily could have on the previous occasions (and 169 reads very much like he really did try everything else he could come up with).
But yeah, it's still hitting, and of course Jon isn't going to feel great about it (and presumably also feels extremely not great about the fact that he can't break out of a statement voluntarily, especially given 160). And yeah, that line gutted me too.
(ETA: as you may be able to infer from the fact that I already went back and checked transcripts for exactly what happened when and under what circumstances.)
Though to me Jon sounded more sarcastic/grumpy about it than anything else, and like it was (to him) a footnote to the way Martin's making impossible and conflicting demands of him.
I felt like their argument at the end of 173 was progress overall because it dragged things into the open, how much Martin desperately needs to believe that Jon can fix this and how very much Jon believes he can't fix anything, and the level of frustration and pain they're both in.
Re: FWIW
Date: 2020-06-26 08:18 pm (UTC)But I feel like the worst possibility currently on the table is that Martin reached for it as a solution a little too easily in 172, that he got too comfortable with it (and that that is potentially part of the way he's appointed himself as Jon's wrangler and carer and the resentment that's tangled up with that).
I don't think he's ever done it knowing it was unnecessary.
Re: FWIW
Date: 2020-06-27 01:06 am (UTC)Yeah, it's so bad for them both. In general, I'm in favor of Martin having a little caretaking, as a treat. He can bring Jon cups of tea and make sure he gets some sleep. (Or rather, he could, if the world hadn't ended.) But trying to be selfless 24/7 is just disastrous.
Re: FWIW
Date: 2020-06-28 08:27 am (UTC)But that's different from mentally appointing yourself someone's "carer" (in the sense that involves being responsible for and in charge of them).
It's obvious why it's so easy for Martin to fall into that role (he's spent a lifetime learning it, Jon genuinely needs support and assistance with some things, and they're both worried that Jon could slide further into inhumanity). But it's not good for either of them.
Re: FWIW
Date: 2020-06-27 01:01 am (UTC)I'm glad you did--it's good to have the facts, and I wasn't really feeling up to it myself. And I wasn't at all sure how many times the slapping had occurred--I don't always properly register what's happening in the soundscaping, because I'm not good at voices + background noise, so I'm usually concentrating pretty hard on what's being said.
It seems like it's not quite as common as I had feared.
I absolutely don't think he's done it when he didn't think it was necessary.
*nods* I don't think Martin would ever hurt Jon out of cold-blooded cruelty. But I do worry that his anger and frustration are making it seem more necessary than it really is. And I keep remembering the end of 172 with a certain chill. Martin's scared, yes. But what he says is, "I didn't want to wait"--it's his frustration coming out, too. It's like he's run out of patience with Jon. Back at the beginning, when he's ready to leave the cabin but Jon isn't yet, he says something like "I'm good at waiting." By which I think he meant he was used to waiting; it was one more thing he'd always had to put up with. But now, under so many other kinds of stress, it's another thing he can't bear and takes out on Jon (just like Jon takes his guilt and despair out on Martin, sometimes).
I really hope you're right that this most recent quarrel is some kind of breakthrough and will let them go back to talking honestly and openly with each other. But other quarrels have seemed that way, and then fall back into sniping that gets uglier with each iteration.
to me Jon sounded more sarcastic/grumpy about it than anything else
To me he sounded exhausted and desperately sad. But I'm exhausted and sad, so I'm not sure I trust my own judgment.
Right now I'm clinging very hard to my trust in the aversion Jonny has shown for "everything is despair and misery forever" endings. (He talks about it at some point during the Arkham stream, that he likes "punch Cthulhu" more than he likes "the universe is a terrible place, so despair and die." I'm heavily paraphrasing because I can't remember his exact words.) Which I guess is what Martin and Jon are struggling with right now--the temptation to despair. They really need to find something they can do, even if it's the proverbial 1 in a million chance (which, as we know from Terry Pratchett, always succeeds). They need to fight something besides each other.
Re: FWIW
Date: 2020-06-27 06:03 pm (UTC)Glad my "if in doubt, do close textual analysis" response was useful! *g*
I really hope you're right that this most recent quarrel is some kind of breakthrough and will let them go back to talking honestly and openly with each other.
I don't feel like it's a "now the air is cleared and everything is fine" (if nothing else, Martin is still holding onto the belief that when they get to the Archives they can Fix Everything, which I suspect Jon doesn't think is going to happen).
But at least it exposed the fundamental conflict between them (Martin's expectation and demand that Jon should know how to fix things, Jon having NO FUCKING IDEA how that would be possible and in fact believing it isn't), which is necessary for progress. Various folks have suggested that Martin choosing to listen to the statement seems like an important step -- even if listening to statements isn't actually useful for him, that maybe signals a shift towards maybe trying to listen and understand what's going on and what Jon is experiencing all the time.
And my current hunch is that we may be heading towards Martin making/having to make some significant choices in the nearish future.
What happens if Martin accepts that Jon can't/doesn't know how to fix this, and takes steps of his own?
I mean, this is a quite ominous possibility in various ways, given Martin's limited options. I'm definitely thinking they're going to be physically separated at some point this season (see that very specific Chekhov's gun that Martin can travel Helen's corridors and Jon can't) and am wondering if we may be approaching that point.
But it takes the story off in a different direction from this emotional stalemate.
To me he sounded exhausted and desperately sad.
About the whole thing, yeah. I was thinking about the delivery of "Thank you for not hitting me this time" in particular. To me it read like -- this is a comparatively small thing he can be snippy and bitter about, relative to the huge sadness and awfulness of Martin needing him to do something that's impossible.
Please, Jonny Sims. Please. I'll take the tragic ending where love sacrifices itself to try to fix the world. Please don't give us the ending where love dies first.
FWIW: I am not expecting the latter. I'm expecting more conflict, possibly physical separation during part of the season, then death (or worse!) of one, probably both. We are going to suffer.
But "The relationship turns toxic and it turns out they're just bad for each other": that I am not expecting. I don't think that's the story Jonny's telling here.
I may of course be horribly wrong, but that's where I'm at with it right now.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-27 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-27 06:32 pm (UTC)https://dathen.tumblr.com/post/621928949128282112/okay-gonna-try-to-put-into-words-why-tma-173-makes