i'm drawn now to the strange and new.

can’t get any damn work done cuz the office appliances keep flirting with each other !!!!

obsessed with these guys designed by @radladrobin

the ship has already been bombed twice during previous attempts at approaching gaza.

my only hope is that if we make enough noise this time, israel won't dare bomb it with such prominent international figures on board, from fear of making them martyrs and turning the rest of the world against them.

so talk about it, post about it, and expect, demand their mission to succeed and their safe return 🙏

IS he an expert manipulator? Yes. Does he have some serious skills in using people pleasing and framing and psychology to his advantage? ABSOLUTELY. He is gaslight, gatekeep, girlbossing his way through the first 3 seasons and we LOVE him for it.

On the other hand, though, I feel like we don't acknowledge enough as a fandom how isolating people pleasing can be in itself. I ranted about this in the tags of another Martin post, but basically, the person you create to be palatable to as many people as possible becomes a wall. A barrier between you and the outside world. Yes, everyone likes you, but that comes at the cost of no one knowing you in your entirety because you don't let them see the parts of you that are harder to swallow.

Martin effectively trapped himself in his own web of lies, suspended 30 feet away from his own life. He's dissociated from it all from the beginning, which is what made him the candidate Peter chose in the first place. He was always slated for The Lonely as much as he was The Web.

That leads me into my next point, which is that MARTIN PRE-LONELY WAS NOT ENTIRELY DISINGENUOUS. I see so many people implying that Martin straight-up wasn't anything like he said he was in the beginning. Common fandom reading comprehension L. He really does like people, and he really does want to be nice. It just also happens that you don't end up people pleasing to those lengths without it having developed as a defense mechanism!

Take the wall I introduced earlier. You surround yourself in this persona and swallow your teeth to protect yourself from other people. Realistically, it probably started with his mother, who is implied in Canon to not have been kind to him. There's a 3rd partner to Fight or Flight that doesn't get discussed very often, and it is "Fawn." This is the people-pleasing response that we see him exhibit. Ultimately, what he fears is rejection, and therefore, he fears being alone. He's nice and kind and polite and swallows his teeth in order to keep people around.

Post-Lonely Martin is the other extreme. He has no energy to please anyone anymore, and it doesn't serve him. He is tired and angry and constantly stressed. He doesn't bother hiding his teeth anymore, and he's prone to lashing out. Post-Lonely Martin is when he's surpassed his limit. Post-Lonely Martin is burnout.

As someone who relates to Martin Blackwood very much, I can tell you that the quiet moments where he's not deeply distressed either way is where we see the real Martin. He still loves and cares in private, and we see that over and over. The love is real. He just doesn't believe he deserves it in return, so he tries very hard to be someone who does. To "make up" for it.

+ some archimedes-centric thoughts and headcanons

Got fed up with constantly changing the way I draw them so I made myself a ref sheet for how I envisioned Jon and Martin. Will probably do other characters at some point. Also have a bunch of my HCs written but in case my writing is illegible I’ll write them out under the cut. Might even add some extra lol