it meant me harm

First time listening to episode 159, I rewound and replayed this moment between Jon and Martin three times in a row before moving on. Wept so deeply, I barely paid attention to Peter's statement.

I've been overlooked in love many times. So when Martin vanished because Jon loved him too late, because he didn't fully believe Jon cared, it hit hard. I'm still aching that this episode ended beautifully as it did.

I have no explanation, I was just overly committed to this.

- WHY are you walking around in your underwear?!?

can i have a cigarette?

the blanket never did anything

she took him from me. made us a me. and she doesn’t get to die for that

there is a wasp’s nest in my attic

i got eaten by worms because of you!

look at the sky, martin. look at the sky.

i don’t want to just survive!

i am not a brave man, but i am, in certain circumstances, a very stubborn one.

i really loved you, you know?

ceaseless watcher,

the audience is only safe when the story isn’t about them

hello, jon.

absolute bangers people are not mentioning in the notes:

Hamid with all the people that he has lost (in order: Aziza, Bertie (i know he doesn't look much like him I'm sorry I haven't drawn him once let's pretend that that's how he looked like in college), Grizzop and Sasha. Hopefully it was worth the effort bc this was so long to make lol

open for better quality, and hope you like it!

the rusty quill discord mod team was made up entirely of volunteers, who were not paid and essentially just doing it as a passion project for the community. this became more and more difficult and unfeasible as the server grew in size, and at the time of the shutdown the server consisted of ~13k members. these mods had to deal with incredibly rude, entitled discord users far more often than they should have, because people were using them as their first point of contact for any grievance they had with the RQ shows or the community, and their efforts to moderate the server by asking these people to direct their complaints to the RQ complaints page or somewhere more personal were met with all sorts of accusations and personal attacks. not to mention that some of these rude users who made the discord unusable through “raids” or public shit-flinging were just people with personal vendettas against some of the mods for the kind of fic they wrote, or from other interactions outside of the official server–none of which had any place in a discord that was meant to be an officially protected space for RQ fans of all kinds. many of these people went on to spread rumors that the mods were bigoted or that RQ supported bigotry because they weren’t allowed to be rude and accusatory towards others in a public server, go figure.

the point is, the mods had to do a lot of heavy lifting while not being paid by the company. a while ago (i’m not a former mod, so i’m not 100% on the precise timeline), the head moderator, autumn (who was paid), was either let go or resigned for reasons unknown but which clearly struck the volunteer mods as unfair. this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. all of them but one (who stayed until the announced shutdown went into effect, and also resigned after that time) resigned en masse, at which point the server had to be shut down because there was simply no way for it to continue feasibly without a moderating team. as of today, one day later, there hasn’t been any outside statement from RQ about this affair, though a corporate statement released within the server’s announcements channel was poorly received due to its vague and unhelpful wording that made it sound like the mods were the ones being accused of something instead of the other way around. this has caused some people to wrongfully speculate that the server shutdown occurred because “the mods were racist” or because of the personal vendettas mentioned above, none of which are true. the issues raised were raised by the mods who had had enough shit to deal with from entitled fans without the company doing much to compensate them or protect them. 

Yes, RQ fucked this up in a big way. (I sent them a three page letter a year ago urging them to shut down the discord because of the way the mod team was being treated, so like, I am aware.) If you feel you need to cancel your patreon or whatever because of it, do what you gotta do.

But I swear to god, if you all weren’t so quick to make every desire a demand, to try and hold people with no power to account for things outside their control, to turn petty dislike into harassment campaigns, to believe every single thing that gives you an excuse to treat other people like shit (RQO is still up despite being frozen, btw, so you can start researching whether those rumors you continue to spread are actually true any time now), at least this could have been a garden-variety shitty unpaid job instead of the unpaid job from hell.

So if your first reaction to recent events is to try to use them as leverage for your preexisting annoyances with RQ or a “good” reason to whip up a mob to harass people in the company (before the full details of what happened are even made public!), sit the fuck down. You can ask for change and accountability without being a dick. The frothing hate campaigns have done absolutely nothing to date except really hurt those who had no ability to fix things anyway, and made this fandom a terrible place to exist, like, in general.

Martin: We haven’t seen any differences between where we are now and what we lived! if it’s another dimension, it’s indistinguishable from our past, so what’s the point in thinking of it differently?

Jon: The point is that if it’s not time travel, then we left behind another world rather than overwriting it, and furthermore-

Jon, standing and pacing: -and if it were time travel then we’d be in constant danger of paradoxes, something that clearly-

honestly this was written in a super lighthearted shitpost-y way but i really was conceptualizing it as an extension of their positions in the finale.

jon would be pretty against the idea of time travel just as a philosophical concept i think, because to him it would sound like an excuse to just pretend nothing ever happened. and also because if time is a Line you can move back and forth on, rather than just the way we conceptualize Stuff Happening, that opens up uncomfortable questions about “fate” and “what should have happened.”

I’m deeply leery of flippant attempts to brush off the moral consequences of a vampiric lifestyle with “Oh, I’ll just target bad people! UwU.” That wouldn’t be sustainable! People go to school to try and figure out who’s deserving of punishment and death on a moral, legal and philosophical level, and we all know how that fucking goes!  What, are you gonna start working your way down the twitter callout list? Kill customers who’re rude to you in the hopes that that was the extent of their whole fucking personality? What happens when eight vampires show up at the house of the same convicted sex offender? How many corrupt politicians can you kill before people notice a pattern? For that matter, do you, personally, actually pay enough attention to politicians to tell the genuinely corrupt and abhorrent from the faintly slimy, or the decent ones targeted by the media?

Broadly speaking I’m deeply leery of most media that tries to pawn off vampires and werewolves and the like as misunderstood outcasts while also having them have to eat people to sustain themselves- if X-Men aren’t an ideal metaphor for marginalized groups because they have an inherent potential to be a threat, monsters suck when the narrative shows us that they really are just going to keep killing people, again and again and again, and the best we can hope for is that all the people that they’re shown killing are set up in advance as unpleasant or evil, so it’s all fine. 

It’s a copout. If there’s anything resembling a society of these bastards- or even a small community of them, a la The Magnus Archives- then all those charming supporting characters have almost certainly done something to earn themselves the death penalty a hundred times over.

And that’s what I love about TMA- there’s no ethical way to do it, and most of the avatars don’t bother pretending that there is, or pretending that they care enough to go out of their way to find one. The handful that do either wind up repudiating their power with mixed success (Melanie, Daisy, Martin) or spending all their time working damage control (Jon) and mostly failing anyway. The vigilante monsters (Daisy, Trevor) are arguably the worst, in that they explicitly get the wrong people quite often and then just brush it off as the cost of doing business. Adelard Dekker is the only vigilante in the setting who manages to walk that line without falling off, in that he only ever targets avatars who are actively, patently engaged in killing sprees or mass murder (Throne of melted corpses, anyone?) and he, himself doesn’t have any powers.

I was introduced to horror very young. Specifically, by being forced to watch C.H.U.D. while at someone’s house when I was maybe 6 or 7. It was awful and I still have nightmares about it. I was also forced to watch Arachnophobia when I was about 10 or 11, which combined with some other stuff gave me, well, arachnophobia that I’m still contending with.

First: for the love of the gods, do not force kids to watch stuff that scares them! It can mess them up!!

My own first active forays into horror were Twilight Zone episodes and vampire stuff generally. Let me be clear: it was Anne Rice. I was into Anne Rice. And monster movies; I loved monster movies!! I loved the Addams Family and somehow as I got older “monster movies” seemed like a natural outgrowth of that.

And then a friend of mine offered me a Stephen King novel, and I couldn’t put it down.

Ever since then, horror’s actually been my go-to genre. I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago or even ten years ago. I like science fiction! (I like SF horror a lot.) I like comedy! (I love self-referential and “funny” horror.) I like cosmic horr–oh wait.

Point being, if there’s one movie I can watch per year it’s gonna be the best horror movie. If there’s one new book I want to read it’s horror. If there’s one podcast… well.

The thing is, I’ve never tried to write horror, not really. My original work has all been more fantasy or SF, not tangling with questions of fear and revulsion. My original work has also consistently flamed out and stalled.

And then TMA came along and hit a really good sweet spot for me. I love podcasts, I love queer people, I like a lot of English fiction, I love cosmic horror. And suddenly I’m writing more than I’ve written in a long time, coming up with AU after AU, pulling it apart and putting it back together again.

The thing that keeps happening? Over and over and over?

“I can make it sadder.” “I can make it worse.” “I can make it scarier.”

Not the fluff I usually try to write, but the villains and the pain and the terror. The things that repulse and disgust. The… well, the horror.

Which doesn’t mean I think I’m a good horror writer–I’ve never really tried to do it much! But it makes me think maybe that’s what I want to write, and just… haven’t been letting myself, for whatever reason.

Anyway this is a bit rambling but I will also add–if TMA was your first horror fiction experience… welcome! We have snacks! I promise it’s okay to cover your eyes when something scary is on the screen. TMA is good horror and it’s a great introduction to the genre!