Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

"All Zen-Contented": Who is Marten Reed?

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AprilArcus:

--- Quote from: Gladstone on 19 Feb 2015, 09:18 ---April, I love that post on Marten's evolution as an LGBT ally, but I can never find it when I want to.  I suppose I should just bookmark it, but might I suggest you post it in its own discussion page?  That way, it won't get lost in the archives so easily, and we can discuss/add to it as the story progresses.

--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: ReindeerFlotilla on 21 Oct 2014, 14:43 ---Marten's transformation from zero to hero pretty much coincides with Tai joining the inner circle. If you watch the interaction, Tai is almost Marten's Obi-wan. She's nearly as chill as Dale.

--- End quote ---

Marten's exposure to Tai's relaxed attitudes toward social incest and gender identity has certainly coincided with the queering of his cultural baseline.

Before he meets her, he's already a good ally — he loves and accepts his dad and supports Pintsize through a sexuality crisis. But he's also defensive about his heterosexuality, has a somewhat faulty narrative about his dad's orientation, an unexamined gender-essentialist outlook on his mom's social circle, and a slightly prudish attitude toward his own sex life.

On two occasions, Dora tries to rile him with a trans joke. The first time (before he meets Tai), he takes the bait:


--- Quote ---Dora: So I guess this would be a bad time to tell you I used to be a man.
Marten: No, see, the way my life works is you'd wait until after we had sex to tell me that. You know, let me get the full afterglow going before you shatter my mind.

--- End quote ---

The second time (after having worked with Tai for most of a year), he is utterly unflappable:


--- Quote ---Dora: Maybe you realized you didn't love me. Or you wanted a girl with a penis.
Marten: Is that seriously something you worry about?

--- End quote ---

So I'm totally comfortable with the notion that it was through Tai's influence that Marten became the kind of person who would be able to listen to Claire's story without prying, process a drunken cuddle without outing her, and ultimately be the kind of person who could start a relationship with her and not even bring up the gender stuff until she did first. And it's also plausible that it was through exposure to Tai's own casually polyamorous fuck-knot that the idea of his close friend dating his ex came to feel normal to him — enough for him to feel real compersion.


--- Quote ---Compersion (n.) A feeling of joy when a loved one invests in and takes pleasure from another romantic or sexual relationship.

--- End quote ---

So while I'm comfortable asserting that Marten learned his cultural queerness from Tai, I don't know if I'm ready to say that's where he got his chill-ness from. It seems to me like whenever he talks to her about his relationship with Dora, she's either generically encouraging, or graphically jocular. And Tai is not precisely chill herself, at first. It seems to me that she slowly mellows out in parallel with Marten's reactive disillusionment at Dora's distemperate passion.

Gladstone:
Glad you posted this!  I was afraid my suggestion might've been lost in the shuffle on the other thread.  And I didn't mean to imply that the first half of your original post wasn't also worth preserving, but I suppose a Dora & Marten vs. Dora & Tai analysis might be worth a page on its own, especially if Jeph starts to explore the fallout of Faye's firing (alliteration!) on Dora, both in her role as boss and friend as well as her relationship with casual-pot-user Tai.  As if you're not busy enough already with the timeline thread...

jwhouk:
I didn't go through all your bookmarks, but I'd suggest that from what we learned right off the bat from Marten's mom, he may have had prolonged exposure to all manner of sexual identity while growing up. Yeah, it was a throwaway comment by his mom, but still.

EDIT: Yeah, you did have that down.

Gladstone:
One thing that doesn't get mentioned often enough is Marten's answer on Tai's sexuality survey.  I don't think that part of the timeline has been tackled yet and I'm not sure how long he and Tai have known each other at that point, so I'm not sure how well it fits into your analysis.  But, for me at least, 1024 serves as evidence that Marten isn't completely straight--that is, his sexuality is fluid enough that he's not completely opposed to dating someone who isn't a cisgender woman, and although he may have had reservations in the beginning of the comic, but he's certainly matured since then and learned more about himself and others.  So it never seemed strange to me that he could pursue Claire romantically without spending several days' worth of strips trying to rationalize to himself whether or not he's actually comfortable dating her.  He likes Claire, Claire likes him, they want to try a relationship together, and that was always good enough for me.

Edit, because I'm worried I may have said something wrong: When I say that Marten might not be "completely straight," I really just mean that he's not of the straight-and-narrow (as the kids might say) variety.  Plenty of straight people, especially straight men, when asked if they've ever been attracted to someone of their own gender, would answer with a resounding "NO!"; Marten didn't.  Furthermore, plenty of straight men out there wouldn't consider a trans woman to be a "real" woman and wouldn't consider dating them; Marten's actions since 2800 say otherwise.  As passive as he is, if he wasn't comfortable with Claire, he wouldn't have shown up for pancakes the next morning and asked her out.

I'm still worried that I've said something wrong, so someone should reassure me.  :psyduck:

Is it cold in here?:
I think it was SubaruStephen who said "Marten is straight but not narrow". Magnificent turn of phrase.

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