#i don't think benoit was weak for falling to the corruption

[equalseleventhirds]

#suddenly a tma blog#martin blackwood#hmmmmm#this is def more INTERESTING than fanon’s ‘woe is me won’t someone love me’ martin? and i think it’s the correct reading on season four and#but i’ve also long assumed fanon reads him as groveling before the shrine of anyone who’s tender with him be...cause of the timing of his#crush on jon. LIKE ‘you’re usually awful to me and also everyone but i think it’s a front and want to see more of your soft side’ is#a LITTLE more complicated than ‘you were nice to me once ergo 😍’? but it’s not NOT that either#and like this tendency and the. ‘i care but caring is exhausting’ thing? they go together ime!#like each half develops to try and protect you from the other#since putting >average effort into relationships#so that your ex still trusts you after you spoil his food on purpose#iiiiis what makes them so exhausting you spend months or years ghosting on everyone#(i’m not projecting why would you say that!)#also i don’t see ‘lonely by choice’ as more empowered than ‘waaaaa i’m so alone’ necessarily#like you know benoit macon the bug man who used to throw pity parties at work?#that guy sounds annoying as hell sure but i don’t think his fall for the corruption was *weaker* than#martin’s for the lonely if that makes sense (via @makeroomforthejolyghost)

imo fanon's take on martin's crush is... inaccurate at best. the first actual confirmation that he has feelings of jon is the end of season three. by that point they've been through a LOT together! this is not season one jon, who is a huge dick but let martin sleep in the archives; this is not even season two jon, who is slightly less of a dick to martin specifically but still paranoid and alarming. this is season three jon, who's had moments of softness and vulnerability in front of basically everyone by this point, and is about to risk his life to save the world. (i like to think martin's crush STARTED in s2 but didn't fully develop until s3, but i also like to think martin in s1 was actually very fighty with jon, so. bickering as communication.)

i also tend to think that martin's 'caring is exhausting' meter got like, mostly used up on his mum, bcos that was his whole life for years. which is not to say he didn't put a little effort into relationships, if he had relationships, but idk that it'd be like... so much more than average that it could be interpreted as the kind of fawning fandom likes to do. he certainly didn't do that with jon, once they were actually in a relationship, and jon was someone he did not have to exhaust himself around just pretending to not be bitchy. (my original 'his ex still calls him' was like, half a joke, half 'martin is just so fucking hot that even after a fairly average relationship and a shitty breakup his ex is like, Pining', bcos i am filled with hate at fandom's whole 'martin is just not attractive to ppl Until Jon Loves Him' thing, i will FIGHT)

i also didn't mean to imply that martin's choosing loneliness is necessarily more empowering than other ppl who do yearn and pine to be with other ppl, i'm sorry! i think that his purposeful withdrawing is tied up in his depression and some self-worth issues wrt 'i'm not caring enough', and that's not strong. that's a different kind of weakness, and he needs help to get out of it. but it is both more in-character and more complex than fandom's usual one-dimensional 'i am so ugly and undesirable woe is me until someone shows me i'm actually beautiful and i become desirable in someone else's eyes'

i don't think that feeling that way is a character flaw (and i think that most people have more complicated feelings behind saying stuff like that; i think benoit was also more complex than just that in tma), but i think that fandom reducing his complexity to that is pretty bad reading of canon and writing of fanfic. not necessarily disempowering, but... shitty.

and also their glorifying of that specific take when it comes to specifically a fat gay man is shitty. i think even martin longing for love could be done well (with attention paid to the actual reasons he's insecure), but the way that a huge chunk of the fandom tends to do this, making his worth and lovability dependent on outward appearance and on the acceptance of a romantic partner they tend to write as skinny, is a pretty bad pattern, especially for a character who has never once in canon expressed any insecurity regarding his own weight or appearance

look i just. 'martin cries himself to sleep at night bcos he doesn't think anyone will ever love him'? no. 'martin deliberately left his ex-bf's fridge open to spoil all of his food when they broke up, and still his ex sometimes calls him'? yes.