#i did the wtnv reference correctly right

[prestonmonterey]

breaking news: wild preston found shaking with. um. fear? excitement? idk general hyperness. in the woods lurkin like that creepy elephant man. if you see him. do not approach. he will bite and probably carries many, many unknown diseases. but do not fear. if you feed it one [obscure interest] it will love you and be your best friend forever. and. um. youll be stuck like that. sorry.

onto the weather.

[cue will wood]

[thedreadvampy]

there's nothing specifically BAD about white jon, it's just kind of... weird sometimes? for fans of color to see a character so universally portrayed as brown be portrayed white. it's more due to the universality of the headcanon than anything. we get comfortable thinking of him as "one of us," so to speak, so seeing him as white can be anywhere from mildly jarring to actively upsetting. it's obvs not actual whitewashing, but it sometimes evokes a similar emotional response, if that makes sense

First off, sorry if this is a bit addled, as I said me and Tumblr got in a bit of a fight so this is the third time I'm typing a response to this.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and it hadn't really occurred to me previously (because I am, as I have said, hWHITE). I feel like I don't know what to say here that doesn't sound more casual than I mean it - yes. I don't want to say "I get it" bc I probably don't have a full picture of how it feels to have people who look like you be so rarely shown as whole people in media, but it makes perfect SENSE how much of a gut punch that could be.

That's my whole response directly to this ask, is yeah, that makes sense and it's a shitty way to be made to feel. Little preface to this next bit - it's going to be self indulgent word salad and it's not as much a reflection on what you've said (which I wholeheartedly accept and I'm angry at myself for not thinking of tbh). so it's not aimed at you, it's sort of an into the ether continuation of the thoughts this started in me.

(And it's definitely meant as an explanation rather than a justification, it's not an 'I'm sorry you feel that way but I'm right' but I kind of wanna feel out for myself what it is that made me come on so strong and get so on one about a white Jon headcanon when I'm normally pretty quiet about fandom stuff.)

I kind of hate fanon? Not specifically TMA fanon, I've just always found it...irritating, I guess, that noncanonical appearances become very rapidly The Correct Thing and everything has to be done in reference to that (sometimes even when it runs directly counter to established canon). I think the obvious non-TMA example is Cecil and Carlos from WTNV - one of the big reasons I never engaged much with that fandom is that the Correct Cecil was drawn with white hair pale skin third eye skinny bod sweater vest etc etc, and if you drew a Black Cecil or a chubby Cecil or an Unknowable Eldritch Entity Cecil, then it was an AU, it was being viewed in RELATION to this Default Cecil who everyone was drawing without really knowing why except that that's What Cecil Looks Like, and when you came in having listened to the podcast and started engaging with fandom, (I felt) you were expected to drop however you had been visualising the character and start visualising this very specific look with no real reason?

And that's very much how I felt, correctly or incorrectly, coming into TMA fandom (or rather, as TMA fandom started spreading far enough that it came to me) - I started listening to TMA in probably like early 2017, because I had a lot of late studio nights and it was this thing Jonny was doing etc, and I doubt I saw a single piece of fanart until at least 2018/19. So it's a bit...I turned round and suddenly there's This Way Jon Looks, which doesn't at all relate to how I imagined him (and by the way possibly more significantly for me personally, This Way Martin Looks, which for reasons I can't exactly explain just sets me off, I HATE the ubiquity of Cute Little Shy Ginger Chubby Sweatervest Martin) and that's absolutely fine! It's a podcast! There is no right answer here! Except there seems to be a singular right answer. I don't think I've ever seen a Black Jon, an East Asian Jon, a Latino Jon, a South Asian Jon, a fat Jon, a bald Jon, whatever. (Also very few unhot Jons which. let this man be a nebbish weirdo) It's the homogeneity I find kind of alienating and at the same time I do get that that established image is functionally providing representation for a lot of people. It isn't that I don't think Jon should be brown (although I own that I've come a long way on that over the last few weeks and I did come in pretty stridently WHITE JON initially which was....hm. at best thoughtless.) but I do think I'm a bit...baffled, I guess? by the idea that there is one Correct Jon who should be treated, effectively, as canonical.