#though less salty and more 'ah HA I can articulate my disagreement!'

[fakecrfan]

Well if I screenshot the take instead of arguing on the post--that’s better, right?

[Image ID: post that says “Thinking about jon sims in s4 of the magnus archives and how he went out of his comfort zone to trust people around him and show them he cared for them, only to receive death threats and be directly told he wasn’t liked by those same people. not to mention the isolation from martin which is it’s own thing to dissect. and, love her or hate her, it’s genuinely kind of devastating that the only person to show any real outward affection towards jon in season 4 was Daisy.]

This! This encapsulates a variety of fandom takes that are... well, honestly not horrible. But confusing to me??? And I think I can finally articulate why I find this stance on friendship and love is so fucking bizarre.

Jon did basically nothing to make friends with people until season 4, and in season 4... he still didn’t!

He spends 2.5 seasons pushing people away. One of his assistants is his friend and he stalks him for months until the guy snaps. The other assistant wants to be his friend and Jon shouts at him. Then, when Jon comes to the realization he needs allies, he is... gone most of the time. 

We get clips of Melanie and Basira going out for drinks with Martin and talking about casual things. Those are gestures of friendship, trying to get to know each other and do something nice for each other. When does Jon do that? The closest he gets in season 3 when he finally tries to check in with Martin for a hot second before flying off to America. We don’t see him ever ask Basira if she’s doing alright as a hostage, or how Melanie is feeling now that she’s found herself trapped in this place. We don’t see him bringing either of them coffee, or offering get takeout, what do you want? We don’t see him throwing a surprise birthday party for anyone else, the way his entire staff does for him.

Those are actions you have to take to get people to be your friends. And we generally don’t see him initiate any interaction with Melanie or Basira outside of “hey I need something from you guys.” Would you like a guy who only shows up when he needs you to do something? Yeah that’s what I thought.

He’s nice in season 4. But being passively nice isn’t enough to make people bond with you. He helps people in a big way a few times (which IMO is more important, but we’re talking about friendship here, not whether Jon is morally a good person) but friendship is more than just the occasional grand gesture. He still isn’t going out and doing the friendship things to win people over! He doesn’t understand that he has to! 

Daisy is the one who does that to everyone in season 4! Daisy! Fucking DAISY has Jon beat for prosocial behavior!

Posts like this frame love and why people get it this way: “Person is a good person inside and is sad” → “Person deserves love and friendship” → “Other people are SUPPOSED to give the love and friendship why are they not dispensing comfort from their emotional vending machines??? Unfair! Unfair and cruel!” 

But that is not how it works. People don’t grant love and friendship because you’re a good person inside in some sort of essential sense. People react to give you love and friendship when you do friendship things for/with them. It’s not that it’s earned as  1-1 transactional exchange, but it takes a person actually doing the things, not just Being Good Inside. 

So people get angry at Basira and Melanie for Not Being Good Friends. But why are they being held to this standard? Did they say they were Jon’s friends? Has Jon done anything ever to try and befriend them? Why is it their responsibility to initiate friendship and give comfort, and not Jon’s?