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
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