I am disappointed in white tma fans.
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.