#i said in b4 but i'm sure someone has already written the hot Martin Evil take

[equalseleventhirds]

okay in b4 anyone goes ‘oh no martin is so weird and violent this episode he must be Evil’: NO.

firstly, as much as i love and adore oliver banks, he is also dangerous. he has killed people. he is, of all the non-eye-avatars, potentially the most dangerous to jon in particular (and btw oliver darling dear i know ur just serving ur god or w/e but i don’t think it’s jon who needs to hear ‘this ruined world will not last forever and immortality is bad and death will catch up with you’. i think that might be a message for sOMEONE ELSE coughjonahcough)

secondly, martin is still traumatized! he has good reason to be suspicious and ready to Smite even without the jealousy thing. and the jealousy thing... listen. it’s not weird or unusual for martin to be petty and passive-aggressive and jealous and bitchy. all of these things were part of martin’s personality even waaaay back in like, s1/s2 (recent events have just exacerbated that), and i have always been firmly in camp ‘good for him, he’s complex and flawed’ and also i myself a those things sometimes and lots of other ppl are too. u do not need to be sunshine and rainbows all the damn time to be a good person and worthy of love gdi. (also jon thinks the jealousy is cute so. sure he’s not gonna kill anyone over it but he still thinks it’s cute.)

aaaaand thirdly, jon is bad at boundaries. it’s already obvious that he’s bad at respecting boundaries (but getting better, and martin setting clear boundaries is helping), but jonathan ‘i’m sad’ sims cannot share his emotions and is very bad at defining his OWN boundaries, whether out loud to other people or even internally to himself. we’ve seen that before, often with that motherfucker jonah violating boundaries and jon not even seeing the problem, but in general jon is so set on blaming himself for everything that he doesn’t even realize that he can or should set boundaries.

(and i am absolutely not saying that’s jon’s fault. you see that difficulty in setting boundaries a lot, from people who were traumatized, from people who grew up in bad family situations and were forced into responsibility too young. jon says his grandmother resented him, he feels guilty that she even had to take care of him, he claims that he deserved to be bullied because he was an annoying child. this is not a child who is going to grow up knowing how to define and enforce his own boundaries. he can learn, but it takes time.)

in mag 168 we do hear jon start to try to define some kind of rules about smiting, about his own discomfort with it. before this it was all ‘i am a terrible monster and the smiting is just an exacerbation of that’ which is a. not a boundary and b. not HEALTHY, and martin rightly tells him no, that’s wrong, this does not make you evil. (’boo hoo i’m so alone and a monster’ anyone?)

this episode is the first time we hear jon express that he doesn’t want to kill people, not because it makes him a monster, but because he doesn’t think it’s necessary and doesn’t think oliver deserves to die. he didn’t say that about not-sasha, he didn’t say that about jonah, he didn’t say that when martin first brought up ‘kill bill’. it’s entirely possible that the thought didn’t occur to him; he may have been feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but was unable to put it into words. that seems totally in line with jonathan ‘not self aware at all’ archivist sims.

this is the first non-self-loathing reason he’s even sort of articulated, altho not very well, and while it took a while for martin to understand he did, in the end, get it and back off the idea of smiting.

do i think this is the end of that discussion, that jon has clearly defined a boundary and martin fully understands it and will not bring it up again? absolutely not! jon probably doesn’t even fully understand his own attempted boundary here! they’re probably going to have this conversation again! (fingers crossed that this comes to a head around DAISY bcos jon finally figuring out how to define a boundary and martin finally getting it is good but i would like daisy pls!) but also i don’t think this is some kind of big Martin Evil or Martin Possessed or even Martin Will See Jon As A Monster thing

tldr: martin is both petty and traumatized and that’s ok, jon is bad at setting boundaries and that is also ok, they are heading towards some kind of realization about this but i dont think this is some big underlying Entity Thing it’s just communication issues

(and i trust jonny to maybe make them work through communication issues, but not cause a horrible breakup between them because of it. they have so many outside things to worry about, and their relationship is the emotional core to the show; i think the apocalypse is big enough drama without adding in soap opera levels of relationship drama.)