📂 martin blackwood!
One of my headcanons for Martin is that he has truly awful self-esteem/self-worth issues. I know that this isn’t exactly a new, scorching hot take, but I want to get into this because I have thoughts on it.
Warnings for self-worth/-esteem issues, and emotional child abuse (this is a look at Martin’s mom so. Comes with the territory).
We already know that Martin’s relationship with his mother has left him with some serious issues, namely feeling like he needs to take care of others, up to and including sacrificing himself for other characters he cares about. A lot of analyses and fics delve into this, but most of the ones that I’ve seen (because I do not have access to everything ever about Martin Blackwood, as much as I would like to) focus more on season 4, rather than something that has affected him for a long time beforehand.
Now, up until the season 3 finale, Martin is in denial about his mother hating him, believes her to be stubborn and being angry because of her illness. And that moment that Elias forces him to see and feel his mother’s hatred for him as if it were his own is extremely traumatizing. However, I also like to believe that everything that led up to this one moment was just as—if not more—traumatizing to Martin.
It is so painfully easy to imagine a younger Martin rambling about spiders before his mother irritably cuts him off, tells him to be quiet. For Martin’s takeaway from this encounter to not be “oh, she hates me,” but to end up being “she doesn’t care about this topic or she’s tired, so maybe if I try to talk later about something that she likes more it’ll go over better.”
I can imagine Martin trying to care for her, bringing her a meal, only to be rebuffed without any real explanation. He wouldn’t start thinking that she hates him. No, he must have brought the wrong kind of food, she’s not hungry, it’s a bad day for her.
I can imagine a thousand encounters like that, steadily growing more frequent and harsher as the years go by. And that only makes sense, doesn’t it? She’s getting sicker and older. It makes perfect sense.
What I’m getting at here is that Martin, for years, has loved his mother through thick and thin, and most of it has been very thick. And all he gets back is hurt and pain, but he doesn’t think that she doesn’t love him back, not really. Oh, I fully believe that the thought had crossed his mind, but love is such a complicated thing. You can love someone completely and wholly while still being the cause of unfathomable pain for that person. Martin knows this, has internalized it. His mother’s actions hurt him, yes, but she loves him. She’s doing the best that she can, given the circumstances.
So now we have Martin, someone who dearly loves his mother and believes that she loves him back, even though she’s hurting him. And here’s the thing with people who act cold and cruel: you start seeing kindness and affection in acts that are neither of those things.
So Martin’s mother may be difficult and rejects his help, but that’s just her being her, not because of Martin. So when she accepts his help, eats the meals he prepares, doesn’t get angry or talk down to him—that’s all her caring about him, isn’t it? That’s proof that she loves him, because he’s the exception to her hostility, not the cause of it. He takes care of her and she accepts his help and that’s what’s important here, not the rest of it.
This has Martin basing pretty much all of his self-worth in his ability to take care of others. And I mean all of it. Because that’s how he’s grown up, what his whole life has been like since his dad has left. He has no other way to seek validation, to affection, no love. So he has to project it into the times his mother isn’t actively being the absolute fucking worst. And the only time he’s around to see that is when he is taking care of her, because otherwise she doesn’t even want to acknowledge that he exists, let alone see him.
Please, try to imagine what that would do to you for a second. What it would be like having someone you love with all of your heart degrading before your eyes, and the only times that you even see them is when you’re taking care of them. All of your positive interactions with that person will then only ever happen when you’re taking care of them. And you tell yourself that’s enough because this person loves you, that it’s not fair of you to ask for more of them when they’re sick and can’t get better, after their spouse left them.
I don’t know about you, but that would fuck me up irrevocably. And I think it did that to Martin.
He’s been told for most of his life—every fucking day after his dad left—that he is only ever good for taking care of others, for what he can offer them. That people will only ever care about what he can give them, not about who he is. And I can’t imagine that wasn’t exacerbated by Elias’ sadistic reveal—she hated him, Martin. She wanted to be taken care of, but her problem was Martin.
So Martin has had all of this drilled into him for two decades, that taking care of someone is how you make them like you. And now he’s learned that those moments of projected-affection from his mother were despite him, not because of him. That his care-taking is the only reason she put up with him, a person that she hates.
Martin has been told time and time again that he’s only ever worth as much as his ability to take care of other people. That he has to constantly fight against who he is if he ever wants people to care about him in turn. That’s just how love works for him, how it’s always worked for him. If he can’t take care of someone, why the hell would they care about him back? This is what he’s good for, the only reason that anyone would like him.
Why would people want to invite him along to stuff? Why would someone want to do something nice for him back? That doesn’t fit in with what he knows, what he’s been taught. And so he expects to be left behind, to only ever be cared about in the vague sense that someone cares about other people in general.
This is why he’s so surprised when Jon offers the cot—why would he have done that? Martin has hardly done anything to help him and he is fully aware that Jon doesn’t like him. But he accepts, of course he does, because Prentiss is terrifying and it’s a genuinely good offer, and maybe also because it’s so nice and novel to be cared about back, if only for a moment. This is why he’s so ready to sacrifice himself for others, because his worth comes from helping, and if that means he gets fucked over in the end, well, at least it’s something.
Martin’s mother is the root of so many of his insecurities and his self-sacrificing nature. And why wouldn’t she be? She’s been beating him over the head with them since before Martin ever even heard of the Magnus Institute.
In summary: I think Martin’s issues with his mother run deep and have actively reinforced the idea that Martin himself is not worthy of love unless he is working himself down to the bone for it.
