I saw a post that was a (TMA fanart, I guess) drawing of someone with fire for a head and the tags were ‘agnes montague I guess’ (via ashes-in-a-jar) and I started thinking about how we’ve made it so you can tell who it probably is.

It’s kind of like the Greeks making statues of the gods and how they would put motifs, like Athena would get a helmet and the aegis (Medusa shield), or Zeus would get a lightning bolt, so you could tell who they are. Because it was oral storytelling. Everyone had their own version of how the gods looked in their heads.

Obviously, it’s a little different with folktales/myths, but as TMA is an audio format, we know little about how the characters look. So Jon gets the eyes around him, Martin might get some fog, Agnes gets candles or fire, etc. You don’t have to rely on those clues as much for visual media since you can just…draw how they actually look. (Although most TMA fanart has homogenized, at least with Jon and Martin.) So I just think it’s really cool that artists made those motifs!