[extraloved]

the unexpected joy of the worst summer of our lives by christine mi for vox

[triglyceride]

ulysses: i wonder if devils get nightmares of all of their victims as well

jon sims:

[wenttworth]

My favourite part of the S3 finale is how quickly Elias switches from torturing Martin with Jon to torturing him about his mother because like the only explanation is that Elias dipped into Jon's thoughts about Martin expecting to find 'hurrdurr Martin's so incompetent look he misfiled statement 19550623 as 19550624 what an idiot' but what he actually got was this weird mixture of affection and protectiveness and a 3 page plan for their first date which includes a whole list of potential flowers to give him and would he rather the theatre or the opera?? (Neither, Jon, but keep trying. Jon was mortified when Martin said he hated the theatre and his first thought was 'thank god for that coma')

[transmikecrew]

yall aren’t ready for my hot take

[ultimatepad]

“Stairway to Heaven,” 

Sasha Bikoff Design for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club

[transarchivist]

martin: screw this place, never liked theater anyway

jon, closeted theater kid: :(

[mod2amaryllis]

oh you think you're better than us poetry boy?????

[dontgofarfromme]

Mmm okay just because the handling of race in tma has been on my mind, I'm just gonna say it--it is....real bad.....that the majority of characters in tma who have confirmed races afaik are like. Wholeheartedly invested avatars and A Cop.

Like correct me if I'm wrong bc I don't remember the sources for all of these but I believe the only people we have canonically/word of god confirmed or implied races for are Basira, Annabelle Cane, Jude Perry, the Haans, and maaaaaybe a few others who I believe were also avatars? Like please look at how screwy this line up is okay.

I know this is a show where most people are at least somewhat shitty, but it's a sliding scale, not everyone is fully off the deep end. Can't we get some people who screwed up and maybe did some bad things but ultimately are trying to do good? Some Georgies or Martins or Gerry Keays? And done thoughtfully so they don't run into messy implications like some of the characters above? Please?

Like come on if you're going to play the game of 'I'm not confirming characters' races bc this is a podcast' you cannot then only confirm that characters are non-white when they are a 9/10 on the scale of how evil are you even if the range for your show only dips as low as a 5!!!

I want characters of colour in this show, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you can't ever have characters of colour who screw up or do bad things or even who are actually straight up evil! I want us to be allowed to exist in worlds which are built on grey-and-grey morality. However a show that is created/written by white guys and has its (very few) characters of colour concentrated heavily towards 'evil' has got a problem. The lack of explicitly written characters of colour shows idk laziness or fear or something on behalf of the creators, and these 'racially undefined' characters read as white whether they want them to or not. And the near-complete absence of sympathetic non-white characters combined with the fact that they're somehow just fine with writing people who do the most morally abhorrant or taboo things as characters of colour plays into really harmful ideas about people of colour and is an extremely bad look no matter how unintentional it was.

[mag134]

there are probably people who could say this better than me but if i may add some context to why i think this happened with tma specifically

first off i wanna establish that i’m a poc and that i completely agree with op. second off i don’t think that anything that i’m about to say is an excuse, just some context that i feel is worth mentioning in a post like this. 

when tma was first started, it is my understanding that they had a very small team, mostly comprised of alex and jonny’s friends. most of whom were white. because of this, most of the recurring characters introduced early on (jon, martin, melanie, tim) were voiced by white VAs. perhaps i give the rq team too much credit, but there is something iffy about having a white VA voice a canon character of color. whether they made this choice conscious of that or not, i do think it wouldn’t have been quite appropriate to confirm a character played by a white person as a poc, even if it’s only their voice. 

so who does that leave as candidates for being confirmed poc when you don’t have any poc to voice them? old statement givers, and avatars. 

let’s talk about the statement givers. they are not recurring characters. they, for the most part, don’t have voice actors. most of them die horribly. i don’t remember the majority of them. i do know that there were definitely some that had names that would have made them poc, which is nice on some level--i do think that there is a necessary place in fiction for poc who are just There and Part of the Story (like the podcast equivalent of having a diverse cast of extras in your movie. which really should be the bare minimum, but we know how low the bar is). but because of the nature of the statements it also wouldn’t super make sense for many of the statement givers’ races to be explicitly canon. should they have tried harder to make them explicitly canon? done some research on some culture things to sneak in? maybe. jonny definitely managed to include references to canonically gay and trans statement givers. idk. but honestly the statement givers are not the point here, so...

let’s talk about avatars. they’re recurring characters, and they have the unique trait of “appears in canon early on and recurs, but only ends up needing a voice actor come the later seasons.” as such, they can be confirmed poc when they’re first introduced, and by the time they speak in canon, rq is able to get an appropriate VA, like with annabelle cane. the thing with this category of character, though, is that in order to be important enough to recur and actually get to become a relevant canon character of color, they end up being pretty evil. furthermore, due to the format of the podcast, avatars are far more likely than any other character to be physically described. what reason would jon have to tell the tape martin or georgie’s race? a statement giver who had a supernatural encounter with an unknown person, however, would be far more likely to include as much detail as possible about the avatar involved, hence it is easier to confirm them as poc. 

so is any of this an excuse? no. but i do think it’s worth acknowledging. this is, by the way, why it’s so important to involve actual poc with the creation of media. i’m not necessarily saying it’s rq’s fault for not having more connections with poc...but maybe they should ask themselves why, exactly, they don’t.

p.s. as a chinese person i can say this, so: i am never forgiving jonny for the haans and you shouldn’t either. there is zero excuse. their association with the flesh, especially the way it manifests in mag 72 (takeaway), is CLEARLY playing into racist stereotypes specifically concerning chinese people (the idea of us eating dogs, etc). like. how no one caught on to “mystery meat takeaway ends up being human meat served up by a chinese cannibal” to be extremely blatantly racist is beyond me, but i guess white people be like that. “i didn’t want my last thoughts to be lowkey racist” well i didn’t want my podcast to be highkey racist either, jonny

[jasonsjrawings]

[fox-guardian]

the daisy behind her head is wack but otherwise im kinda proud of this

[fox-guardian]

at first this was just me wondering how my daisy would look in a pretty dress and then just became practice for drawing clothes and also her many scars whoops

[fox-guardian]

i made and developed an avatarsona in two days. that’s not me patting myself on the back, that’s a disclaimer cuz idk if its any good

BASICALLY they’re an avatar of the stranger who makes use of an old, used sketchbook they were gifted (its a leitner) to draw creepy, stylized portraits of people. then the subject’s reflection and any and all photos, videos, etc of that person are permanently altered and replaced with the messed up portrait version. 

one day they were like “im bored of my reflection i wanna get funky” and drew a self portrait with a rubberhose cartoon-like body and the lower half of their face all messed up (cuz why not) and not only did their reflection change but then their body did as well and boom fully realized avatar

they attract victims by moving from place to place and selling portraits on the street or just drawing people they see around town/on the internet.

((edit: i don’t usually “ask” for reblogs but this isn’t showing up in tags so it would be even more appreciated than usual))

[hotniatheron]

live footage of jonah magnus getting funding for his spooky bitch institute from yet another rich victorian heir like: 

[taireierre]

pov: you were rude to mike crew over a cup of tea and now he’s gonna wreck your shit

[shock]

i love how many different entities tried courting martin. eldritch monsters are fighting to give you epic powers and you’re like no thanks i think i’ll make my own. and they’re all like what do you mean make your own? and he’s like i’m coming up with a new entity now. i’m announcing I’m the avatar of the Messy Bitch. and like they don’t do shit about it LMAO. they’re just like “you’re really going to do this and not be awesome and powerful.” and he’s like “being able to vanish at will isn’t even close to the scope of power i feel when im at the grocery store and jon pissed me off earlier so i buy a tea he’s not that big a fan of and he has to drink the whole thing and pretend he loves it because he’s allergic to telling me what his preferences are because he’s emotionally repressed and I know what all his favorites are obviously but this stupid archivist needs to pay for eating the last muffin and i feed off it. bye.” and then he has jon come in and explode them LMFAO.

[gerrydelano]

i’m just as much a sucker as anybody for the idea that tim looked at jon right off the bat and research and went “yes. that one. that grumpy bastard will be the one i attach myself to and make a new best friend out of.” it’s very good.

but it does disregard the fact that tim joined up at the institute, like, right after danny’s death and was more than likely Not At All the friendly golden-retriever man that we meet in season 1 (after he’s been there long enough to get comfortable, as he says.) his top priority probably wasn’t making friends straight away, he was freshly traumatized and pretty angry and very focused on one thing. chances are he was a little closer to his season 3 temperament than anything, and had managed to build back up to his season 1 disposition over some time — during the time he knew jon in research. jon would have watched him bounce back from it that first time. he’d have gotten to see a few very honest sides of tim and it almost definitely strengthened their rapport.

so allow me to propose that tim DID zero in on jon right off the bat, and yes, because he was grumpy as hell, but it was more from the angle of, “alright, i don’t want to talk to fucking anyone but i do need some sort of ally here. this guy is a complete prick. if i stick close to him, people will surely go out of their way to avoid me while they avoid him. he surely will not expect me to actually try and befriend him, either, which is great. this man will serve as an all-purpose social buffer. this is a perfect plan. i have never been wrong in my life.”

and then he accidentally fell in love with him. nice going, idiot.

[femmedionysus]

JonTim early in research days

[lonelybeholding]

Thinking about Not!Sasha begging and pleading when Jon destroyed her and Jude was literally just like *nervous laugh* whoops I sure did burn your hand huh? That’s rough. I mean I still would have done it but wouldn’t it be neat if you didn’t kill me though? I really enjoy it here.