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tma 173
Some 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
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.
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https://dathen.tumblr.com/post/621928949128282112/okay-gonna-try-to-put-into-words-why-tma-173-makes