TMA Meta: Jon’s Ego and Martin’s Lack Thereof

Summary: This is my brain dump about Jon and Martin’s ideas on their own self-importance (i.e. Jon being self-centered and Martin having zero self esteem) and how they contribute to the plot/tragedy of The Magnus Archives, organized into a hopefully coherent essay. I didn’t come up with this all by myself; it was inspired by a meta I read over a year ago about Jon’s ego specifically, but unfortunately op has deactivated so I can no longer access the whole thing. Still, it was a very good post, and definitely made these ideas crystalize for me.

Be warned, this meta is about 2700 words, so it’s a hefty one. And yes, I do know this podcast ended almost 16 months ago, and yes, I do still care enough about it to write 2700 words. What can I say, it rewrote my brain chemistry.

Also I’m tagging @jonnywaistcoat, on the off-chance he sees this and has any interest in reading essays about something he wrote years ago. If you do read this, hi Jonny, love your work!

Now without further ado, the essay, underneath the read more :)

The Magnus Archives is primarily a horror podcast, but as I’m sure we all remember, it is also a deeply tragic story. I believe one of the signs of a great tragedy is a story in which the tragic outcome is technically avoidable, but is actually inevitable when you consider the personalities, ideologies, and behaviors of the characters that inhabit the story. This is true for The Magnus Archives in countless ways, but one that I think is largely overlooked is the egos of the various characters. More specifically, the respective egos of Jon and Martin are hugely influential in the story. Despite having practically opposite perspectives on their own self-importance, each of their egos feeds into the apocalypse and the tragic ending in their own ways.

Jonathan Sims is egotistical and self-centered. That might be a controversial take, and if it is, that would be understandable: he’s up to his eyeballs (pun kind of intended) in self-loathing and sacrificial tendencies. He burns himself out constantly trying to help other people. However, the reason he does that is because he’s self-centered. When I say self-centered, I don’t mean selfish, and I don’t mean vain. I mean the most basic definition of the word, which is that he centers himself in his view of the world. He is egotistical not in that he thinks himself better than other people, but in that he believes, maybe subconsciously, that he is more important and influential they are.

The biggest example of this behavior is the Unknowing. Elias/Jonah tells Jon the world is going to end, and that Jon specifically needs to stop it. Jon is told that he must use his powers to save the world, that he alone has what it takes to see through the Unknowing and destroy it. And Jon does not question this at all. He does recognize that he can’t do it alone, that he needs people to support him, but he never argues the fact that he is uniquely responsible for the safety of literally everyone alive. Now, it’s not an entirely unreasonable conclusion to draw, considering he does have supernatural abilities, he does work for a supernatural institution, and he was being told repeatedly that he was uniquely responsible. But it’s not an inevitable conclusion. He did not have to believe that narrative, exemplified by the fact that when put in a similar situation, Martin rejected the idea that he would be some kind of chosen one (which I’ll get to later). The most logical explanation for Jon wholeheartedly believing he was the only one who could stop the Unknowing is if he already believed himself to be special and unique in some way, even before he knew about it.

It’s not just the Unknowing, either. Jon has massive amounts of trust issues and is very unwilling to confide in others or ask for help. Some of those trust issues were supernaturally induced in season 2, but I believe they existed even before that. Even in season 1, Jon thinks he is alone in his problems, he’s alone in the work he has to do. That is an egotistical perspective. He does not recognize that maybe other people do understand, that they do want to help, that he doesn’t have to be alone in this world. I imagine much of this perspective comes from being an orphan who was bullied as a child; if you spend your whole childhood relatively isolated, it stands to reason that you’d believe yourself to be unique in a way the people around you are not, alone in your situation. It could also be some twisted form of survivor’s guilt from Mr. Spider, because someone died in Jon’s place. Therefore he must be important, otherwise that kid died for nothing. It’s impossible to say for sure what caused it, but what I can say for sure is that Jon has a pretty self-centered outlook on life.

The last bit of evidence in support of Jon being self-centered comes from seasons 4 and 5. This is when he is at his most self-sacrificial and his most guilty, and the reason for that is because of his ego. In season 4, he believes himself to be responsible for all the trauma and death that’s been going on in the archives during and after the Unknowing. In season 5, he blames himself almost exclusively for the apocalypse. And while I can understand to some extent why he believes those things – most of the other characters blame him for it too, for starters – when you look at the actual events, there’s really no reason for him to shoulder all the responsibility. Daisy says so in episode 136, and the rest of the (living) main characters say so in episode 199. With regard to the Unknowing, Jonah was the one who pushed them to stop it, and everyone involved agreed to the plan. After the Unknowing, he was in a literal coma, making it impossible for him to help with any of the Archive’s problems. The apocalypse was planned by the Web, embodiment of manipulation, plus all the characters contributed to the ritual succeeding in their own way. Jon’s conviction that somehow, he alone could have stopped things and so he alone should bear the burden of sacrifice to set things right is hugely egotistical, not to mention entirely false. He’s setting himself on a pedestal, holding himself to a higher standard than the people around him. It’s ironic and tragic, but it’s unavoidable given who Jon is and what he has been through.

So. If Jon is self-centered, where does that leave Martin? Well, he’s pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum. If I wanted to be mean about it, I could say Martin considers himself to be maybe one step above worthless. And that would probably be an exaggeration, but it’s true that Martin prioritizes and considers almost everyone else before himself, and does not consider himself influential or important in any capacity. There is of course his infamous line in 198, “I didn’t really think I was important enough to kill.” There’s also the fact that Peter’s attempt to convert him to the Lonely failed explicitly because Peter placed too much importance on Martin specifically, as is revealed in 158 inside the Panopticon.

The situation with Peter in season 4 is especially notable, because as I mentioned earlier, it directly parallel’s Jon’s position in season 3 with the Unknowing. Peter has told Martin that there is an existential threat to humanity, and that he, Martin, is the only person equipped to stop it. That’s almost exactly what Elias/Jonah told Jon about the Unknowing. Unlike Jon, though, Martin rejects this. He rejects the idea that he could be important enough to save the world by himself, that he could be a “chosen one” in any capacity, and in doing so destroys Peter’s plan. And he was right! Unlike Jon, who was wrong in season 3. There’s something to be said here about how The Magnus Archives simultaneously rejects and embraces the idea of fate: there are no true “saviors”, destined to save the world, but the characters still cannot avoid the final, tragic outcome of the story. But that’s a topic for another essay. The more relevant point to make here is that despite Martin being right, he made this choice because of his low self-esteem and his tendency to de-center himself. It is once again a moment of tragic irony, that the decision Martin makes because he believes himself to be unimportant turned out to be one of the most important decisions of the whole podcast. It’s what led to Jon’s final mark, putting the last nail in the coffin of the world.

(Author’s Note: It’s interesting that despite feeling personally insignificant in the grand scheme of things, Martin’s the one who says “I think our experience of the universe has value. Even if it disappears forever.” It’s sort of like, the “everyone matters and is important except for me” outlook on life that is depressingly common. That’s not super relevant to this essay, but it makes me emotional, so I’m including it.)

Those are the most explicit examples of Martin’s low self-worth, but they are not the only ones. He spends most of the first three seasons trying to help other people, whether that’s by making tea, being a sympathetic ear, trying to play mediator, or whatever else he’s doing. He is pathologically incapable of putting himself first until season 4 at the earliest. As Alex said in the season 4 Q&A, he sets himself on fire trying to keep other people warm, and unlike Jon’s self-sacrificial tendencies in later seasons, he’s not doing it out of a misguided guilt or feeling of responsibility. He just genuinely believes other people’s wellbeing is more important than his own. This almost certainly comes from his relationship with his mother, both due to her being abusive and because he had to become her primary caretaker at a young age. He was never given space to have needs or wants of his own, so as an adult he only knows how to cater to other people’s needs and wants. It takes several years of additional trauma for him to learn how to take care of himself first.

I want to make it very clear that I’m not trying to paint Martin as some sort of soft “uwu” character, which I know some people in the fandom try and do. For starters, he’s a total bitch (affectionate). But more importantly, he’s also a very proactive character. I mean, his first introduction is him bringing supernatural parasitic worms into his workplace to prove a point, and the reason he encountered those worms is because he illegally broke into an apartment building. He willingly (well, sort of willingly) throws himself into the action – but he does so for other people, typically to protect or take care of them. It isn’t until season 4, at the height of his loneliness and depression, that he stops caring for others, and even then he doesn’t replace that with caring about himself. He just stops caring about everything altogether. Season 5 is when he finally starts expressing his own needs, after his character arc is mostly completed.

Jon and Martin’s respective egos also bleed into the way they interact and align themselves with the entities. Jon is egotistical, and Jon is an avatar of the Eye. In order to properly inspire the right kind of fear, Jon has to insert himself into experiences that aren’t remotely about him. The primary example of this is the nightmares: before giving a statement, someone might have nightmares about the experience itself, and be frightened of whatever entity was involved. After giving a statement, however, Jon, the Archivist, is inserted into those nightmares, so that now instead of being afraid of the original experience, the statement giver is afraid of being watched during that experience. The Eye, and Jon by extension (however unwillingly), has taken someone’s trauma and made itself the focal point. The center, if you will.

On the other hand, Martin’s experience with the Lonely is largely an exercise in fading away. He can make himself go somewhere else when other people are around. He’s trying to be as peripheral as possible, avoiding everyone and making sure he is not an important feature in their lives. This is most intense in episode 170, where Martin loses all sense of self in the Lonely domain that he became a victim of and all memory of who he is. I don’t know if there’s an opposite to being self-centered, but “having no self at all” is probably a strong contender.

Also, Martin is not directly Web-aligned, but he is definitely good at manipulation, which I think also comes from his tendency to center other people. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of manipulators who are self-centered, but Martin’s specific brand of manipulation mostly involves telling people what they want to hear, playing into their expectations, using their own preconceptions against them, etc. His methods all require pretty good insight into other people, and they require Martin to step out of his own head and determine what other people will expect or think. He has to de-center himself in order to effectively predict, and thus effectively manipulate, other people. And once again, this is definitely a skill he learned growing up in abusive household. I imagine he had to tell his mother what she wanted to hear a lot, in an attempt avoid the worst of her cruelty. That’s straying into the realm of headcanon though, so take it with a grain of salt. I just harbor a lot of hate for Martin’s mom, and I simultaneously love making myself hurt thinking about them, so I mention their relationship whenever I can.

Anyways. My main point is that Jon and Martin’s egos shape much of the story, and both of them contribute to the apocalypse in their own way. It’d be impossible to list all the concrete examples of this, simply because every decision they make in the podcast leads in part to the apocalypse, and each one of these decisions is informed by their respective egos. Still, I’ll try to summarize the most important moments. First of all, had Jon not believed himself solely responsible for stopping the rituals, had he rejected Elias/Jonah’s assertion that he was some kind of hero, he likely would not have played along with Jonah’s game for so long, and the apocalypse would not have happened. On the other hand, if Martin had believed Peter telling him he could be a hero, he would have joined the Lonely and ended Jonah’s plan. Going back to Jon, if he hadn’t been so insistent on taking all the blame for the trauma and death and disaster that occurs, he probably wouldn’t have been so eager to sacrifice himself. He wouldn’t have jumped into the coffin, most likely, and though this is after the apocalypse, he wouldn’t have become the Pupil (which, btw, Jon becoming the Pupil was quite literally him making himself the center of the ruined world and thus a very self-centered action) and tried to doom himself and the world. And hell, if Martin had a bit more self-esteem he might not have fallen for Jon at all! Because let’s be honest, Jon was pretty shitty to Martin for almost two years. And obviously if they hadn’t fallen in love, the whole course of the show would have been radically different, so who knows what that outcome would have been. Their personal views on their own self-importance are thus massively influential.

Before I close, I want to say this is not me condemning either Jon or Martin. They are both a product of their circumstances; they both make good and bad decisions repeatedly. I especially want to make it clear, once again, that I’m not calling Jon selfish, and I’m not calling Martin a pushover. These are two extremely complex, well-written characters, and I tried my best to acknowledge that in this essay. Also, self-centered does not equal selfish, and low self-esteem does not equal a pushover. And though the extremity of their egos are personal flaws, no character is perfect and no character should be perfect, so really I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And now for a last bit of heartache: in the end, their love for each other is what allows them to overcome their ego or lack thereof. In general, Martin prioritizes himself and his desires more than ever before in season 5, not just because of Jon. But his final decision – voting to pass the Fears to other worlds in order to save their own – was primarily motivated by a selfish desire to save Jon, a desire to build a life with the man he loved without pursued by terror-monsters. And Jon made his final decision to step down from being the final hero (or villain, depending on your perspective), to set aside his guilt and sense of responsibility, to remove himself from the center of the world, because he couldn’t bear to watch Martin die, and he couldn’t bear to doom the world with Martin still in it. It’s poetry. Terrible, tragic, heartbreakingly romantic poetry.