#johnmalcolm

Hey. I'm manning this thing one handed for a while. Think he broke my arm yesterday. I'm- not shocked, he's been getting antsy lately. I think it's cause of that new hiking trail we found right by our house.

I don't really know what to put on here, but we're heading to Aurora soon. We have to ditch this place because of- hhg- John's paranoia. I just hope this place'll be a firmer location. Don't need to explain why that's better for me, heh.

I think he thinks I'm-

Shit.

welcome to: samuel goes insane for over an hour typing about a fictional guy with a body count of 21 people!! staring me, samuel!! guest starring @miivrs

this will be broken down into multiple sections: section one is his fanon interpretations and my thoughts on them, section two is how much god damn queer coding he has, and section three is after thoughts and random trivia facts :3 warnings and such: i will be talking about heavy spoilers, child abuse, violence typical of the show, rape, my interpretations and opinions, and much more! be warned, be safe, be open minded. also i know like, ten things about christianity so there is a very good chance that i'm wrong if i try to go more in depth about things related to that.

SECTION ONE, FANON JOHN

something ive noticed is that in this fandom, some works usually just portray john as violent and sadistic and manipulative and basically a baby version of martin with all of his wrath channeled directly at malcolm (i think people forget the "i don't want to hurt you malcolm but my work is important" line). a lot of people overcorrect with his violent traits and make him almost comedically evil. he's violent, but his violence has a REASON. you can track that every single attempted or completed murder, barring his grandfather depending on your interpretation, slides neatly into one of these three reasons:

reason one: his mission was to be martin's accomplice and mentee, to learn from the man and use that knowledge to good use. (if you think john killed his grandfather when he was a child/before he met martin, he doesn't fit into this and i'll talk about this later. if you think it's after he met martin, it's this one. also this is the reason why he tries to kill malcolm, which i'll go more in depth on in a second)

reason two: his mission was to "clean up the streets", to help filthy sinners reach God through a "trial" of suffering and to save their souls by killing them (why he kills the 12 unnamed victims, beth morris, taquesha roberts, stephanie reyes, haley wyatt, ryan davis)

reason three: this kill was a requirement for one of his missions to be accomplished (why he kills ian turner and emily hayes, owen shannon, and attacks malcolm in the subway without killing him which, again, i will go into later)

why john tried to kill a ten year old malcolm is really complicated, and people don't give it the amount of nuance that i think it really deserves. i see a few interpretations say that he wanted to hurt malcolm so much because he was jealous of how much attention that martin gave to malcolm, attention that john thought he deserved more. which, when i look at actual canon, doesn't seem all that accurate. if we watch alone time and silent night (the times we see a younger john and malcolm interacting), he seems pretty grounded in talking to the kid. i'm sure jealousy was a motivation, factoring in how much john was probably excited for him and martin to be doing their thing alone without this kid in the way, but not the driving factor. i genuinely don't think john would've had such a big bone to pick with malcolm if the boy wasn't against murder.

the driving factor, to put it simply, was martin. it's very clear that martin groomed john into the perfect little accomplice. he took advantage of john, a vulnerable young adult processing being an adult and all of the trauma he had. i think it's clear that john is in religious psychosis. you don't think how he does if you aren't in religious psychosis. martin found john when he was young, easily impressionable, and fighting through some really tough things, and then fed into his delusions until john genuinely thought that god was talking to him. i interpret his feelings towards martin as romantic, but you could also view it as something else, i won't kill you with hammers or whatever, but we'll talk more about martin and john in section two. same with john and malcolm.

reason two starts after reason one gets abruptly cut off when martin decides to give up on the plan, to not kill malcolm, it was betrayal to john. john had put his everything into this plan, prepared himself for this so they would do it together and, in the words of mick, "what was supposed to be a bonding experience for martin and john became this tangled up mess that left everyone on different paths". so, after being thrown into a river (which pretty much everyone can agree martin did), john focused more on what he thought god wanted him to do now. take care of sinners and save them.(edited)

speaking of john's victims, did you know that gil gets his number wrong when he tells martin that they have 19 confirmed victims? the actual number he should be giving is 20 :) this number does not include john's first victim, his grandfather.

anyways, emily could fit into both reason two and three, but i just paired her with turner because she was a coincidental kill, a bogo deal if you will. why john kills turner and shannon is the simple fact of that they were snooping. here is where i'm going more in depth about the reason john attacks malcolm in the subway tunnel. john lured malcolm down there to kill him. it's very obvious, even if you don't hear john say the line "i thought i was gonna have to kill you..." BUT the whole reason why he doesn't is because he realizes that malcolm is worth more than a corpse, he could be a very good accomplice himself. malcolm choosing to say "because we're the same" and "i'm my father's son" was all john needed to hear to convince himself that malcolm was going to be his new and improved martin.

a lot of people see john trying to break malcolm into an accomplice as "john is trying to rebuild his dynamic with martin, but this time he has all of the power and the stand in for his younger self is malcolm" and while i do think john was trying to rebuild his dynamic with martin where he had all of the power, i don't think he's putting malcolm in the slot for his younger self. i think he's putting malcolm in the slot that martin was in. the informative, guiding accomplice, just without the control that martin had over john.

talking about a specific subsection of this fandom that i've noticed (because i read so much johnmalcolm) is how.. rapey they make john. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. I REALLY LIKE READING IT. but a lot of the time, it just feels like you should make a new killer if you want him to be so out of character, yknow? john is very detached from sexuality. i know martin has that line implying that john's a necrophiliac but put a pin in that cause im bringing it up later. anyways, john is very detached from premarital sex being a positive thing. no wonder he'd kill sex workers, that's their whole brand, but like... he's not going to be having sex with someone if he isn't married to someone, and he's especially not going to be raping anyone. john is not the pinacle of following christian morals, but i feel like he'd do that much at least. especially being raised by such strictly christian family members, he's not going to break from that. but i do really like reading it. i love whump. i love when john tortures malcolm, especially when he gets really touchy with it, but i also want to acknowledge canon characterization. know the rules before breaking them and all that.

OKAY ONTO THE NECROPHILIA ALLEGATIONS: i view this multiple ways.

martin's a dirty little liar,

martin is misremembering something or taking something john said out of context,

martin is telling the truth

and for one and two, they're really easily explained. 1 being martin is a dirty little bastard who likes lying about people he doesn't like. no shit. 2 is martin misremembering something or taking something said out of context. 20 years can do a lot of shit to a guy's memory, especially if they've been in a concrete box. but 3... it takes a little bit more effort.

john delves deeper into his connection with the dead because they can't abandon him like martin/his mom could. why would you keep the corpses to decompose in a junkyard if you didn't need them close for some reason or another. it's not like a huge amount of people go there but if it's operational, people can just waltz in (exactly like malcolm does in q&a) unless you had a connection to your victim/victims. it's not about physical attraction with john, definitely not. (even if he wasn't a christian and didn't think with hooh boy so much sexual guilt) it's about having a rock that won't leave him. coming from someone who has abandonment issues (which there's no way john doesn't have), i have a really bad problem where i have to know where everyone i care about is, and i think he has a similar thing but with his "rocks" (victims) so he keeps them close, not obviously there (because he's not stupid, he knows what he's doing is illegal) but somewhere where he knows exactly where they are in the piles of car rubble and junk.

SECTION TWO, QUEERCODING

the first thing i am going to bring up in this section is not serious at all and just makes me laugh but it's the line that malcolm has in Q&A where he says, "tevin, he's just like the killer we're after. a beta to my father's alpha." this is not queercoding. but it does make me think of the omegaverse. so.

okay, now onto the actual queercoding. i actually started making a google doc ages ago on this but i never finished it so this is the perfect time to break it out and use some of my points from that. i don't even have to list like, a ton of things for this section to make it pretty glaringly obvious what i'm talking about. there's SO MUCH. and it's not even so much in like, a funny way? but there's a lot. honestly a lot of these don't even need an explanation so i probably won't give one.

“you even smell like him.” john remembers enough about how martin smells to be able to pick apart the smell off of other people. he isn’t being literal when he says this i don’t think, but the fact that he says it at all means that after over 20 years, john still remembers how martin smells. also he’s literally sniffing malcolm like a candle. that's pretty gay.

“so you were his disposal man?” “no. scoff i was so much more than that.” the way he says no and the scoff is what is so damning about this one. he sounds so set off by the fact that malcolm is implying that he was less important to martin than he thinks that he was. because, at least in my interpretation, john really thinks that he and martin were close. maybe not equal, as i’m sure martin would’ve drilled into his head, but definitely close. to be faced with the idea that he was only a disposal man, a guy to get rid of martin’s mess, it makes him scoff and emphasize the so in his sentence. he was so much more than just martin’s disposal man which, as this whole section points out, IS PRETTY GAY.

"takes time to build trust. your father taught me that."

"you're-you're looking for a connection!" "oh, we've always had a connection." bonus points for the next line, "just like you had with my father. cause well, you needed him, didn't you?" thank you malcolm. you clocked his shit immediately.

"this is about you... and me." this is about YOU and ME and the SCAR YOU GAVE ME. UGFHGHHH

the quote doesn't matter for this next one, but let me just say something about john stabbing malcolm. as pointed out by mick (like many things), john's knife is an extension of himself. we see this time and time again with how he carresses himself with the knife (his neck, his jaw) and how he twirls it around in his hands and uses it as another hand basically. like that's an extention of him. ALSO. two episodes before john stabs malcolm, there is a very clear metaphor stated that stabbing = sexual penetration. it's established by gabrielle, beginning of pied-a-terre when malcolm has a dream about the girl in the box using one of his weapons to stab him. "were you aroused by this dream?" "there were some... erotic elements."

and then you actually look at what happens in the scene, and it's incredibly intimate. using mick's words from this post, "the way john pushes the knife to the hilt into malcolm. the way he grabs onto malcolm’s shoulder to keep him in place. the way he twists the knife inside him, which will cause permanent scarring inside and out. the way john smiles wide and makes eye contact, before pulling the knife out and letting malcolm fall and pass out." especially when you consider how close they are to each other, it's GAY there's more. there's so much more. but it's really the little things like facial expressions, the way mrj and tom choose to say their lines, how the sentences are structured and the body language they use. i implore you, watch the junkyard killer arc with this mindset, it makes it so much more interesting and cool.

SECTION THREE, TRIVIA

welcome to the end game! thank you for reading what is probably the most i've written down about john in one sitting. this took me three hours. yay. here's some trivia!

either coincidentally or on purpose, he ends up stabbing malcolm in the exact same place as malcolm stabbed him 20 years ago.

john was the first person to confirm the existence of sophie sanders.

michael sheen had to take time off of filming because his girlfriend gave birth, which is why martin was locked in solitary. i've seen people theorize that this is the reason john's arc was made longer. (people being @brightmalcolm if i remember correctly LOL).

michael raymond-james and tom payne have been in many shows together before and after starring in alone time together, but they've always been in different seasons, as seen in the walking dead with michael's role as dave in season 2 episode 8 and tom's role as jesus starring from season 6 episode 10 through season 9 episode 11.