I keep seeing posts that are like “season 1 Tim would be friends with this character” or “season 1 Tim would make archives team watch trashy movies with him” or “season 1 Tim would do this, or this, and season 1 Tim is so friendly and nice with everyone!”. And like. There is nothing wrong with headcanons. But I feel like it’s very demonstrative of the larger fandom problem of completely ignoring canon to favour a carefully crafted, wildly spread and completely incorrect fanon.
Because believe it or not, season 1 Tim is…. not like that. When I first listened to TMA, before I had any interactions with the fandom, I didn’t perceive him like this. Then I started interacting with the fandom, and I, too, saw this interpretation and said, “Oh! I’ll add that to my belief system!”. But I recently relistened to season 1, and realised how wrong that was.
Tim is “the hot one.” Sure. That’s canon, Basira said it in season 2. However, Tim is also an incredibly closed off and secretive person. And actually, canonically, he doesn’t have many friends at the Institute. Which makes even more sense than him being friendly with everyone. He arrived at the Institute traumatised by The Stranger of all things, making him very distrustful of everyone. Yes, he became friends with pre-season 1 Jonathan “don’t talk to me I’m busy” Sims, but Jon was also a traumatised person who was desperately looking for answers.
Sasha (who, by the way, I find is way too often ignored by the fandom) is the friendly one. Sasha became friends with Tim and Jon, Sasha tried her best to make Martin feel accepted in the Archives, Sasha is the nosy one who gets into everyone’s business. Not Tim.
i keep going back to that one ask you got its so funny. "youre chill with gertrude KILLING and DISMEMBERING and MANIPULATING people and jons surgery on melanie but you draw the line at MARTIN" fuck. FUCKKKK it's so funny. yes girl at least gertrude's wrongs were interesting and what she thought was the best option same for jon, what does martin do. he isn't a badass that orders explosives with institute funds.
literallyyyy like im sorry but martin isn’t a badass old woman who’s flaws are human sacrifice to do what she believes is saving the world he’s an awful blonde twink boyfriend who’s flaws are being boring as hell
i feel like a lot of the reason jon is portrayed as vaguely brown without being given any like links to actual culture or a direct ethnicity and therefore it just coming across as more of an aesthetic thing is just so that he can like he clearly protrayed as a direct opposite to martin (who’s always portrayed as like a [usually tall] fat blonde/ginger white guy compared to jon being a short skinny black-haired brown guy) and this trope is so incredibly prevalent in the fandom mainly due to how it peaked in quarantine in fandoms of largely white queers and typically teenagers and therefore still has that like visible effect on the fanon today. getting off topic but i just really hate how like rigid the ideas are in the fandom as well as the lack of any real thought into any designs that like fit the characters in a different way. sorry this was a tangent and kinda rambling
okay actually jm is boring because, unlike what they tell you in the posts, m*rtin is NOT a monsterf*cker/lover. he wants jon to be human unless he wants jon to clock an avatar he personally doesn’t like and has no patience for any weird thing that jon does even if that weird thing is for jon’s survival, he just REJECTS jon’s monster qualities until they suit his needs/wants. whereas the tma world is full of so many REAL monsterf*ckers/lovers/friends, because it DEMANDS a comfort within a certain monstrous morality (never an acceptance of bad as good but an understanding of what people, human or not, will do to survive)…….. m*rtin just comes off as a class-a boring-ass nag who can’t come out of his tiny boring office world to appreciate a glorious monster bf even when said glorious monster bf is BEGGING for acceptance. if you can’t appreciate the monstrous qualities of your monster bf then you don’t deserve him. thank you for coming to my tedtalk, this was the intro and it continues for another 4.8 hours and it has 93 powerpoint slides
let me start this off by saying i like tma :) it’s a fun show, and i think you can tell by my url and icon and recent reblogs that i’m in pretty deep 😰 but it’s not a perfect show, and i haven’t seen many people talk about the racial issues in the podcast, so i thought i’d take a crack at it. also i am indian so ✌️
jonathan sims / “jon of color” x white martin
i think everyone in the fandom draws jon as a person of color despite him having no confirmed race which is pretty cool. but given that it’s generally accepted that jon is Not white, certain interpretations of him can be a little… uncomfortable.
don’t describe jon feral or savage. just don’t. that word has some ugly connations, as white people have an ugly history as describing non-white cultures as primative and their people as, well, feral savages. i think this is mostly a joke, as feral became the Cool Tumblr Word to use but it hasn’t lost its implications.
along this vien, it’s a little uncomfortable for me to see jon’s monsterous characteristics exaggerated to the the point where he is a threat to (a usually white) martin. moc are often unfairly viewed as violent and abusive, particularly if they have white partners, and while i don’t think i’ve seen anyone push this that far, it’s still a choice with harmful implications. please don’t misinterpret this as me saying don’t call martin a monsterfucker or something, i just think it’s worth paying attention to how you have his abilities manifest. jon is not unnecessarily violent (at least as of writing this, post E166). he feels guilt when destroying something as evil as not-sasha and is constantly paranoid of how his actions can hurt those he cares about.
it’s also a little racist in my opinion to portray jon as a dirty, unclean person. to be clear, i’m not saying drawing him with unkempt hair or disheveled clothes is problematic, but saying that he doesn’t shower or groom himself ever is uncomfortable. people of color are unfairly viewed as dirty by white people for centuries, often as an excuse to justify imperialism as a way to cleanse them, so it’s obviously not great to perpetuate this. that being said, i can see that jon is certainly the type to lose himself in his work and i suppose he has dry skin according to nikola ordinov, so i suppose what i’m really saying is don’t push this idea too far. and it’s also very bizarre to have (again usually white) martin serve as some sort of caretaker to him. i’m once again being very clear so i am not intentionally misconstrued, this isn’t me saying martin shouldnt care or help him, obviously not, but the idea that jon cannot have good hygiene without (white) martin’s aid in some way is racist.
racism against asian people
tma is unusually particular about not confirming the races of most characters (my opinions of this choice r mixed btw) so when the race of someone is confirmed, it’s worth noting.
the haan family is “east asian” and likely “chinese” (mag130). there are two members of this family that are present in the statements: john haan and his nephew tom hann. they are both closely tied to the flesh and john hann is a cannibal. i hope why you can see why this is uncomfortable. rusty quill’s members are all white (except for one person) and as far as i can tell, the team working on tma specifically is all white. for a group of white people to tie two chinese characters as literal cannibals or otherwise weirdly into meat is disgusting. chinese people already have a multitude of racist stereotypes regarding what they eat (you’ve probably heard the “dog eating” stereotype) and this seems to be a manifestation of that
alright well that’s it then :’/ i’m not an “expert” on racism, i’m just basing this off my own personal experiences. feel free to ask for clarification or lmk if i forgot something. ❤️
(to start off my response, i am brown. i am writing this here now just so no one has to ask later)
one, holy shit, this post nails so many things on the head. thank you op for the breakdown.
two, though, allow me to slip a little bit more nuance in by dividing them into ‘fan behaviour’ and ‘podcast behaviour.’ for example, everything regarding the haan family is podcast behaviour, created by RQ, and has nothing to do with fans, but it’s something that should be considered when fans go on to make their own interpretations of characters without any confirmed race or skintone traits. i hope that makes sense.
i want to talk more about podcast behaviour– op, i hope you’re okay with me doing that here! specifically, i wanna talk about that last bit– about only the races of antagonists being confirmed, and maybe try and shine some light on why that is, and why it might be hard at this point for RQ to give us canon races of the protagonists.
it all comes down, i think, to the voice actors. the protagonists are primarily made up of RQ staff, with exceptions being jonny’s literal parents. and as neuroticarchivist pointed out, RQ staff is heavily white. this means that the VAs for most of the protagonists are white. and with the ongoing “debate” regarding casting poc for poc roles, it would be an act of extremely bad faith for Rusty Quill to take a character played by a white person and say “okay, this character is actually x (non-white) race. it would not fly. i personally would not want something like that to fly; voice actors of color have it hard enough as it is, and the magnus archives is a major player in today’s audio drama.
keeping that in mind, then, the best solution is to keep the depictions open to the audience, because the other option is to just say “all of these protagonists are white.” which also would not fly, considering the number of poc villains confirmed in tma. keeping interpretations open has the double advantage of avoiding that sort of situation and encouraging varied fan depictions so as not to tread on how people imagine the characters, because, after all, audio drama is not a visual medium, and i imagine part of the appeal for creators is that ability to get different responses from different people.
the one character exception here is basira. to my knowledge, basira’s VA is Black, and so basira could in theory be confirmed as Black. some reasons i could imagine for why they haven’t done this are:
consistency. if they confirm the race of one protagonist, there would definitely be a rush of people asking about the others. and because of their imagine as you like policy, which, as explained above, is honestly the best move right now, that would be difficult to navigate.
basira’s original last name and current name could imply that she is Arab or south asian (not necessarily, though, as i believe they’re also Islamic last names, and not all Muslims are from those regions) and afaik frank voss is not. so that sort of conflict would again bring up the question of who gets to be cast in what roles, making it better not to specify
the easiest characters for races to be confirmed for, then, is those characters that don’t have VAs when they’re introduced, because then VAs can be cast to them. the best example of this i can think of is annabelle cane, who has featured prominently over the seasons, but only just received a voice actor, chioma nwalioba.
and of the non-speaking characters, statement givers are nearly always referenced in first person, leaving only the figures they speak about to be described. a statement giver isn’t going to describe their family or friends by their race, most likely, so they’re out too. because of the conceit of tma, basically the only people who get described in statements are Avatars and other recurring spooky singles. and this group strongly skews towards antagonists.
obviously, though, it’s not 100%. adelard dekker and oliver banks, for example (both Black) avoid the antagonist camp. that being said, the number is low compared to the number of villains.
the best way to solve this problem would have been to cast diversely from the start and have gone from there; unfortunately it seems that RQ was a lot smaller when magnus started and working from their own limited talent pool. i certainly hope RQ decides to hire more poc going forward, but that’s outside the scope of this post.
and at the end of all of this i’d still like to say: fuck the treatment of the haan family that was hella gross RQ
This isn’t a call out for anyone, regarding anything specific, but I am painfully, wearily, disappointed. I started writing an essay about a few weeks ago, but the thing is I don’t think trying to be educational and objective properly conveyed the truth of the matter and that is that I, personally, am tired and angry and frustrated.
I’m not going to be talking about Rusty Quill here, or the issues with Jonny’s portrayal of race in tma. Fuck knows those arguments exist but that’s not what this is about right now. All I’m going to say is I never go into any form of media expecting race to be handled perfectly, and before listening I had adjusted my standards to account for the fact that the writer was a white englishman. Just like with any media I am constantly skeptical of race portrayals and do my best to be aware of it in my criticism. This is about the interpretations and portrayals made my the fandom.
The Magnus Archives has a majority white fanbase. That’s okay, such is the case with most fan communities I join. The team behind The Magnus Archives is mostly white. That’s okay, such is the case with a lot of popular media I consume. It doesn’t prevent the work or resulting fanworks from being fascinating and insightful, and I enjoy the content I get. I love the characters, and the intensive fan lore, and the fact that both the fanbase and the original creators seem so open to viewing main characters as people of color. So long as I remain critical of these portrayals, it’s a lot of fun! So long as I take note of when fans make their characters brown, so long as I don’t lose track of who in this podcast gets a confirmed ethnicity, so long as I remain constantly aware of how these characters of color are depicted by both the podcast and its resulting fanworks, the considerable diversity it great to see.
Hey white fans are you aware? I’m not asking if you care. I know you do. But do you think about it? How often? I’m not getting on my knees and begging you to consider that race is an attribute that should be considered in your fanworks and meta, but I am asking you, are you aware that treating all your characters as defalt-until-revisited doesn’t work if your default is white?
In just the past week alone I have seen multiple incredible, in depth analyses of Martin’s relationship with religion. It’s great, it really is fascinating and insightful. I just want to contrast it with the fact that, despite arguably having one of the most full backstories in the entire show next to Agnes and Gerry, I have never seen any part of Annabelle Cane’s history incorporated into any content about her. I understand the hesitation to approach such subject matter as a white fan, (though once again, given the ratio of white-to-nonwhite fans this argument always feels dangerously like avoidance) but there is never any hint of it.
Annabelle Cane according to the fandom is collected and agreeable and calculating. Where is the acknowledgement of her trauma, the way we see Agnes’ tragedy and Gerry’s anger? Annabelle’s character was about how the systemic issues of race follow and manipulate people through their lives. The true evil of her character is that she, too, is a puppet and yet somehow every portrayal I have seen makes her into the manipulator.
Do you notice the evils of the real world and historical tie-ins? I think one of my favorite fandom in jokes might be Jonny’s grudge against Edmond Halley. It’s my favorite because after looking into it, the joke is still hilarious.
As a warning, this is where I start getting angry. Because I cannot fathom ever hearing the name of an old dead Englishman and not demonstrating an instinctive fear response. Jonny made the comet man evil because some of his rival astronomers gave him a convenient nickname and that is objectively funny. Especially in contrast with the legitimate evil he invokes in other parts of his historical integration.
John Amherst is a unique character in that he is given no purpose, or reason, or drive. Even Rayner, for all his evils, is made vaguely exempt by his unyielding devotion that has consumed him entirely. No such thing with John Amherst. His first appearance is the hostile takeover of a neglected care facility for underprivileged populations and it gets worse. He’s so evil that it’s not Gertrude who kills him but Adelard Dekker, with his comparatively less gray morals. Gertrude has killed innocents. Adelard Dekker has no such ambiguity.
If you have never heard of The Tale of the Field Hospital, mag68 does a pretty decent job summing it up. It’s a collection of columns by Fredrick Treves detailing the medical horrors of WWI from the perspective of a doctor. It is an insight into who, exactly, was being used as fodder for this war. In case you couldn’t tell I could go on about this all for ages and if you ask me some other time I’ll tell you why I think the Corruption is the truest evil in the world of tma but for now what you need to know is that in the magpod version of this book, Amherst is explicitly tied to Jeffery Amherst, who used smallpox as biological warfare against Native Americans a century and a half prior, before he (John Amherst) uses himself to infect patients in a hospital he has occupied. And he does it with glee.
So why the fuck do I see John Amherst fanart on the regular? Not just obscure works, it’s not just some small corner of the fandom, this shit gets circulated! I cannot fathom not being immediately suspicious of dead white men but you don’t even have to do external research to understand that this is very real evil he is being tied to! It is explicitly stated in the work! I don’t understand how this could get entirely overlooked unless no one thinks about this shit!
I am begging you to fucking think! I understand that constantly trying to be aware of race is difficult and often distressing, but then in turn, please understand that that is just what it is like, being a person of color and consuming media! Sometimes race interpretations will be incorrect, and that can be harmful in its own right but the solution to that is not to erase and ignore the existence of race! Question for yourself! It should not be the job of fans of color to do the thinking for you, call each other out, stop virtue signaling and except that flaws exist so that you can further yourselves, holy fuck!
Also I really think that some people in this fandom must forget that there isn’t white-and-races. Like I said there’s this concept of a white default where you can either choose to develop the race of a character in your portrayal or depict them as you would a white character. I really don’t understand, are you not aware of your own racial identity? Are you so accustomed to seeing yourself that you don’t understand that your familiar attributes are not universal? Is race just an unspoken attribute to you, with no affect on identity?
When you see three different brown Jons cross your dash in a row, do you ever stop and wonder if he’s desi or if fans just don’t know they’re allowed to not use that color palette for him? There are pages and pages and pages of brown Jon Sims and I cannot tell you where it began.
I can tell you how it started for me. I’m a second generation Desi kid who talked too formal in my youth despite no particularly privileged upbringing because both my parents spoke in measured, formal accents as a result of English being their third language. I grew up with a sense of alienation from both my peers as someone “different” and from my family, which is vast and colorful and so unreachably far away. I was bullied as a kid and as a result am abrasive and angry and paranoid and often mistrustful of good intentions.
I listened all the way up to mag160 trying not to spoil anything for myself so I had no concept of the fandom’s brown Jon but every time we got knew information about his character he grew more and more achingly familiar to my most explicitly Desi self. When I got caught up and joined the fandom I was thrilled to see that familiarity represented. I was glad to have my experiences seen even without explicit canon confirmation of a brown character.
But as it turns out, I don’t think a whole lot of people seemed all that aware of why he was brown at all! If I saw “I’m angry and abrasive because I often feel targeted and out of place” and thought of myself, it seemed that a good chunk of the fandom saw “Jon is angry, abrasive, and looks like you.” It seemed like such a strange leap, when all of Jon’s fears are rooted in something in canon, to just strip his character of justification in nearly every fan depiction.
Someone told me once, “you’re not nice, but you’re a great listener because I never feel like you do things irrationally. So I can forget about the humanity of you, and I don’t feel as bad about being candid.” I say this because I want you to please keep in mind that the existence of brownness in your works doesn’t exclude you from forgetting brown people, if you forget that they are human.
Anyway, this has been meandering and tonally scattered, and ultimately I doubt this communicated much. But I feel marginally less angry than I did when I began. The smart thing to do here would be to delete this entirely and avoid the conflict, but hey. I can be unkind and also irrational, look at that.
sometimes i think about the tma fandom and get genuinely furious like y'all really let the predominant interpretation of these characters be “jon (a character overwhelmingly portrayed as a moc) is a feral dirty man who’s constantly messing up and needs to be straightened out by his female coworkers (who we’ve flattened out into two dimensional caricatures who are the Reasonable Onestm with no flaws of their own and also hi did we mention one of them is a literal cop who was complicit in excusing her partner’s police brutality? no? we’re just ignoring that cuz she’s canonically a woc so we have to flatten her into the one with the braincell? okay) and his boyfriend (who is overwhelmingly portrayed as white and who can do no wrong in the fandom’s eyes despite showing classic signs of emotional abuse in the final season AND whose trauma constantly gets treated as More Valid than jon’s, especially regarding their upbringings)”
and tbh canon did very little to dispel these interpretations either especially with that weird framing of the main moral dilemma in the final few episodes and that makes me furious too lmao
Warning for season 5 negativity ahead, particularly re: Jon and Martin’s relationship. Stop here if you don’t want to read about it!!
Okay to start, I have a lot of issues with the writing of Jon and Martin’s relationship in season 5. This isn’t because I expect a picture-perfect relationship or have any interest in villainizing any characters; there were just so many moments of “??? what the fuck why would you say that,” on top of major unresolved flaws that were never treated as flaws. For instance: Martin asking Jon if killing him would have helped anything in 167, Martin telling Jon–a burn scar victim–how gross he finds burn scars in 169, Martin barely blinking at Basira telling Jon she should have let Daisy kill him in 177, “God forbid the creepy ever stops” in 191, the running joke of how impatient he was when Jon needed to stop and make a statement when that need was a direct result of Jon’s trauma and a bodily change forced on him…
And then the entire smiting arc, which went absolutely nowhere, but involved Martin barreling past Jon’s discomfort with killing in 166, getting angry at him for refusing to kill someone for the sake of his own jealousy in 168, getting angry at him AGAIN for refusing to kill in 174…only to throw the absolutely baffling line of “I’ve been out there with you. I saw the kick you got out of making them scream for once. You weren’t supposed to enjoy it that much!” at Jon in TMA 194.
The bickering and impatience is so constant that I’ve seen fans insist that, well, there’s a lot of time we don’t hear, maybe they’re not bickering then? But I’m looking at it from a writing and storytelling perspective, and I put the blame on the writing more than on any particular character. In the behind-the-scenes, the creators talked about how writing those conversations was the easy part that they could just wing and not bother editing, so they could focus their energy on the soundscaping and tech side. A lot of what I listed above was explicitly meant to be comic relief without a thought to how uncomfortable it is in the context of a relationship. And as someone who’s listened to a lot of RQ content, it was a bit telling when I could straight-up recognize Alex’s sense of humor or even snippets of things he’d said about Jon in the past coming out of Martin’s mouth.
So back to 161 and 162!
I see a lot of people insist that the issues with Jon and Martin’s relationship in season 5 are “it’s because it’s a new relationship” or “it’s because both are so traumatized, what do you expect!” However, none of the stuff listed above are connected to being new or traumatized! Martin KNOWS Jon struggles with his humanity; even if Martin is traumatized, why would he call Jon creepy to his face? Since when does Martin prioritize his own boredom over Jon’s suffering? HOW can Martin just shrug off anyone saying they should have let Jon be murdered? How could ANYONE knowing the extreme of Jon’s self-hatred propose the “if you had died, would it make things better” hypothetical?
In contrast, 161-162 (along with the s5 trailer) hits a perfect balance of convincing, genuine care and love, while still having conflict directly connected to the strain and trauma of their situation and new relationship. We see Jon in a horrible low, and are allowed to feel his pain without it being played as funny or inconvenient. Martin is sympathetic but doesn’t know what to do with it. He makes jabs hinting at his impatience–“I’m good at waiting”–but doesn’t act as if Jon’s just being miserable on purpose to inconvenience him. There’s also more balance in the conflict: Jon snaps at Martin about how “not everyone can just cut themselves off from their feelings,” exposing old hurts about Martin’s distance in s4, but immediately apologizes. We see an imperfect couple being imperfect people, not wanting to hurt each other but sometimes stumbling into it. We also see the way they do hurt each other being framed as such, rather than treated as a joke. We even see the awkwardness of the new relationship with Jon’s fumbling knock knock joke.
It also just has SO many good moments between them. Jon’s fiercely protective “I won’t let it,” Martin’s eager preparations for their quest and Jon’s warm fondness over it, “It’s quiet, here, and I have you.” Those are all on the level of “let me know if you see any good cows,” to me, and mean twice as much given the darkness of the situation.
(I am also convinced that without the pandemic difficulties, the writing quality of 161 and 162 would have continued: they wouldn’t have had to “wing” Jon and Martin’s conversations, other characters could have been involved to suggest the “should we have killed Jon?” hypotheticals, etc.)
P.S. If I see anyone vaguing about “people demanding perfection from queer ships” or “you just don’t know how real relationships work” or “omg I can’t believe people are calling Martin abusive” I will pour glue in their shoes and glitter in their sock drawer.
swear there’s only like 2 micheals that play any important role in the podcast. and one of them is called mike. i suppose there’s more if you count distortion micheal as another micheal but like i feel like that’s still the same micheal. and mikaele salesa is not only pronounced differently but also always called by either his full name or his last name so i don’t really count him either. there just arent that many micheals guys what are we all complaining about. gerry’s dad is maybe mentioned twice.
