jon sims:

“Stairway to Heaven,” 

Like correct me if I'm wrong bc I don't remember the sources for all of these but I believe the only people we have canonically/word of god confirmed or implied races for are Basira, Annabelle Cane, Jude Perry, the Haans, and maaaaaybe a few others who I believe were also avatars? Like please look at how screwy this line up is okay.

I know this is a show where most people are at least somewhat shitty, but it's a sliding scale, not everyone is fully off the deep end. Can't we get some people who screwed up and maybe did some bad things but ultimately are trying to do good? Some Georgies or Martins or Gerry Keays? And done thoughtfully so they don't run into messy implications like some of the characters above? Please?

Like come on if you're going to play the game of 'I'm not confirming characters' races bc this is a podcast' you cannot then only confirm that characters are non-white when they are a 9/10 on the scale of how evil are you even if the range for your show only dips as low as a 5!!!

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.

i made and developed an avatarsona in two days. that’s not me patting myself on the back, that’s a disclaimer cuz idk if its any good

BASICALLY they’re an avatar of the stranger who makes use of an old, used sketchbook they were gifted (its a leitner) to draw creepy, stylized portraits of people. then the subject’s reflection and any and all photos, videos, etc of that person are permanently altered and replaced with the messed up portrait version. 

one day they were like “im bored of my reflection i wanna get funky” and drew a self portrait with a rubberhose cartoon-like body and the lower half of their face all messed up (cuz why not) and not only did their reflection change but then their body did as well and boom fully realized avatar

they attract victims by moving from place to place and selling portraits on the street or just drawing people they see around town/on the internet.

but it does disregard the fact that tim joined up at the institute, like, right after danny’s death and was more than likely Not At All the friendly golden-retriever man that we meet in season 1 (after he’s been there long enough to get comfortable, as he says.) his top priority probably wasn’t making friends straight away, he was freshly traumatized and pretty angry and very focused on one thing. chances are he was a little closer to his season 3 temperament than anything, and had managed to build back up to his season 1 disposition over some time — during the time he knew jon in research. jon would have watched him bounce back from it that first time. he’d have gotten to see a few very honest sides of tim and it almost definitely strengthened their rapport.

so allow me to propose that tim DID zero in on jon right off the bat, and yes, because he was grumpy as hell, but it was more from the angle of, “alright, i don’t want to talk to fucking anyone but i do need some sort of ally here. this guy is a complete prick. if i stick close to him, people will surely go out of their way to avoid me while they avoid him. he surely will not expect me to actually try and befriend him, either, which is great. this man will serve as an all-purpose social buffer. this is a perfect plan. i have never been wrong in my life.”