#askboxing

[mcwebby]

in my heart of hearts i know that juno steel wears exclusively sweatpants but i can also buy that hed wear fishnets and ripped jeans

SWEATPANTS A TURTLENECK AND A TRENCHCOAT DAPHNE???

[mcwebby]

ooh for the tma character ask - maybe draw either michael distortion or michael shelley please? i love your style so much :0

look at him! happy guy!

[mcwebby]

What’s your favorite TMA statement just in terms of the horror story aspect (not considering the fear lore/character backstory just the best scary story)

other than MAG 155: Cost of Living, MAG 65: Binary is my favorite episode of all time. it's horrifying. i think what sets it apart from the other episodes is the usage of modern technology. it is, essentially, a creepypasta, which have kinda always freaked me out unfortunately. what gets me is the verbiage used ("it feels like thinking through cheese wire" and "the angles cut me when i try to think" are so viscerally displeasing) and how otherwise simple the horror is. it's just a scary, gory video that followed the statement giver everywhere, with not much extra to know, but it really hit hard

[mcwebby]

what tma character should i draw askbox is opej

[mcwebby]

If you’re still encouraging answers to that poll.... Martin 100% is a lowkey fan favorite like quiet and sweet bass player, is nervous and polite in interviews.... an absolute menace otherwise. Hot martin rights.

anon... let me interest you in this band!martin i drew once upon a time

[mcwebby]

what r your thoughts on. fanon tim stoker. personally he makes my blood boil. this is not the man that i know and love

fanon tim stoker is a bitch i would fistfight at trivia night for telling me i’ve misspelled “circumstantial”. canon tim stoker is my husband.

i completely understand the cycle that takes place in fandoms regarding character analysis and depiction. if a character is too complex, the fandom has a tendency of watering them down, allowing them to be more easily understood for the purpose of making jokes, projecting onto them, or writing content for them. tim stoker has always been very concrete to me which is why i guess he’s been massacred so much

unfortunately, tim got the short end of the stick. he was shaping up to be a pretty formative character in canon, actually, until he kicked the bucket. and instead of being read as “funny until further notice, wildly intelligent and clever, frustrated and misunderstood, looking for a friend and an apology,” he was turned into this... strange hypersexual hot mess with a hater streak and a right hook for anyone who disagreed with him. i feel really bad about that because it showcases a lot of shortcomings about the fandom’s perception of him and other characters coded similarly to him.

[mcwebby]

thots abt agnes

i. love. agnes. montague. she's one of those characters that i wish were elaborated upon just a liiiittle bit more towards the end of the magnus archives and i would have liked to see some more specifics of her lore elaborated upon more. also gay gay homosexual gay she's probably one of the most subtextually lesbian characters i've ever encountered

[mcwebby]

okay but how things in fandom shook out with helen is infuriating sometimes like i enjoy michael as much as the next person but he was like. a minor character. helen was a major player throughout s4 and 5 and her relationship with jon is so interesting!!!! and over and over she gets pushed aside for michael or reduced to overenthusiastic 3rd wheel for jmart and like. it couldve been so good. what the fuck

oh for sure. the fandom treats helen in a very... unique manner. she's treated by many fans as either comic relief due to her playful nature, or a narrative obstacle that contributed nothing to the plot. which is very different from how much of the fandom sees other women in tma (namely the more aggressive ones, like melanie or basira or gertrude, even though i'd say that morally, helen is the worst of all of them).

the truth is, helen is brilliantly well written! she's manipulative, cunning, and intelligent. prior to s5, she effectively managed to humanize herself in the eyes of jon and then proceeded to manipulate him, earned the trust of martin, and nearly got away with some of her more dubious plans. she was in it for the long haul. even before that, though, she had a human existence, which is just as interesting as michael's. and i can't believe that she was boiled down to "little evil realtor lady in a miniskirt".

in my own opinion, michael is half the character that helen is, and i don't mean that in a cruel way -- he just never got the development that helen had and a lot of the interesting parts about him have been constructed by the fandom, who also has the tendency to romanticize him, and for that very reason i think he's more popular than helen. which makes sense! it's just infuriating!

tl;dr fanon michael is everything that helen is! helen is just a woman.