it’s not that i want malcolm to have been assaulted by martin as a kid, because i don’t! i think it’s more interesting they’re incestuous relationship doesn’t start until malcolm is much older, late teens, when he’s in a different position and still succumbing to his father’s machinations.
idk there’s just something...so humbert humbert about martin. malcolm as lolita, light of martin’s life, fire of his loins. the way he shapes and reshapes the narrative of their relationship, the way he frames what happened to malcolm as something almost natural and inevitable specifically because they are related.
like. incest is a corruption of the familial line, it’s a trauma experienced inherently by blood. and martin suggests to malcolm that they’re the same because malcolm is his son. idk idk!!! im not smart enough to unpack this but it makes me crazy.