Hi y’all,

Question for the Malevolent fans out there.

I started it recently and am not loving the storytelling style thus far. (Not a dig, it’s just a taste thing. I personally don’t find dnd-esque stories/dnd podcasts engaging and that’s what this feels like at the moment. I should also mention that I REALLY struggle with episodic storytelling so if it’s a similar storytelling style I want to get off the train before I sink a bunch of time in.)

I’m on part 8 right now and wondering: is there a dramatic spike in quality/shift in storytelling at some point that I should listen until?

I’m committed to at least the episodes with the black cover, as I want more answers than I currently have. So let me know!

Tldr: I’m suspecting Malevolent isn’t for me, does it get better, if so, when?

Still thinking about this

'only boring gays survived the AIDS crisis' on top of being just an insanely horrific and dismissive sentiment to have, is also weirdly acephobic? Like you can only make good art if you have a bunch of sex?

He’s just like me for real

“Rough couple of years”

UH HUH? Yeah? You wanna go into detail on that Celia?

hmmmmm hey celia? celia darling? what makes you pretty sure that the cases are real? why would you think that? do you have any evidence? any personal experiences, mayhaps? something to do with a carousel or a burning ghost or a cult in the tunnels under a specific institute, maybe? hmm?

A lot of the time when I see people talk about aromanticism they bring up the way a lot of us tend to think that romance is just exaggerated in fiction and are surprised that people feel that way in real life and not just in the movies and that's honestly kind of funny, imagine just going about your life and one day finding out that most people's high school years were actually like disney channel and you're the exception

HOLY SHIT this went over my head and I’VE USED THIS EXACT EXCUSE

I don’t mind either headcanon, obviously I never really read into this line since Martin dissembles a lot, but… yeah.

[Edit: WAIT WAIT WAIT this literally would parallel Jon’s narrative interactions with cigarettes as having made/being about to make a bad decision, and also with Martin being Deeply uncomfortable seeing the person he loves losing himself to the Eye. ]

ok. years have passed and we've had some distance, so i'm finally gonna take the leap of faith that tma fandom is finally ready to hear me on this. let's talk about tannins.

161 was the first tma episode i heard on early release, and i felt the bit where martin declines wine and cites tannins was pretty obvious in its implications. cool, got it, say no more.

imagine my surprise when i was one of maybe three people i saw read between the lines there, in a fandom famous for red stringing--a fandom that immediately caught the much less obvious thread of ignition sources in the same episode. i'll spell it out: alcohol is an issue for martin.

maybe it just felt obvious because addiction is a pet issue for me--as it is for jonny, who has said everything he writes is filtered through a lens of addiction. i don't know if that's due to his own experience or a loved one's, and i won't speculate; i also don't know if martin personally struggled with drinking or just avoids it for fear he would, but alcohol would fit what we know of his family. his dad walking out and his mum spiralling into bitter wallowing and verbal abuse? i'd bet one or both of them drank, yeah.

on a basic level martin tries to decline alcohol, and that alone should have raised eyebrows given what we know of martin and, again, a fandom that dissects everything. we already knew martin "K" blackwood lied about his personal life and his family in particular, especially pre-canon, which is when this flashback took place. i was shocked that everyone took his flimsy excuse at face value with no further questions.

and the excuse is flimsy. martin turns down wine by--nervously--exclaiming tannins are "a proven headache trigger!" which sounds like trivia from a magazine cover and not the words of someone who actually has headaches--and it hasn't come up before or since. jon, confused, points out that tea, a drink martin consumes to a degree that is memetic both in- and out-of-universe, also contains tannins, and martin squawks a panicked, "what?!"

if tannins are enough of a concern for martin that he knew they're in wine and so avoids it, why didn't he know they're in his drink of choice? why does he still drink tea at the time of canon, and why doesn't he struggle with constant headaches from consuming 'a proven headache trigger' day in and day out? why, indeed, would someone avoid wine and not tea?

when sasha insists martin drink he caves and agrees to 'just a drop'. i imagine him pouring it in a plant, which admittedly he could have done if tannins really were the issue. i will say that i, for one, would be less likely to falsely agree to something that makes me physically ill than to a private issue that i'd rather not be pressed on any further. this scene also establishes martin's birthday was an ice cream party instead of the more traditional visit to a pub.

also, this scene was in the first episode of the final season, as one of three flashbacks that could have been to any pre-canon event in the archives. prime narrative real estate. not really time one would waste on establishing the important character context that martin has... headaches. which never comes up before or after, even regarding the week he spent in spiral town. but you know what is pretty crucial character background...?

it felt like a no-brainer, and yet all i saw was h/c fluff about jon attending to martin's headaches. and i hate feeling bitter about disability representation. i want folks with chronic headaches to feel seen and have fluffy escapist fantasies. i don't want to be mad about people portraying a character with a disability. but, guys? you got the wrong disability. jonny sent a clear message, and it went over fandom's head.

One thing most people don't realize about Gazebos is how bloodthirsty they used to be until the 1930s or so. It used to be that in order to appease your average small town gazebo you had to feed it 4-5 marching bands a year, or roughly 2 dozen barbershop groups. Noaways? Throw it a steely dan cover act every 6 months, maybe a bridal party every few years if you're actively trying to court its favor, and you're pretty much in the clear. And the crazy thing is nobody knows why they calmed down, or that their appetite for flesh won't return to its 19th century heights one day. It's actually an increasingly popular theory among modern Gazebo researchers that we're at the tail end of a period of dormancy and it's only a matter of time until they start howling for blood again. And if/when that does happen there's the question of whether our modern zeeb-keepers are really ready for the task of booking enough sacrificial acts to meet that increased demand. Guild policy has gotten lax in the century since the heyday of Dark Pavillionism and a lot of local keepers refuse to even look at newer research that threatened to upsettheir status quo. Kind of scary to think about

Sometimes when I'm skim reading text I'll read bbg as bbeg and that's a fun double take

If you think about it dead goth is only one twist away from being a death god

my dead goth son and his friendly neighborhood personified concept of insanity

I know in my soul that Mr. Bonzo is a season 1 villain. His flame is bright, but it's bound to burn out fast. I could be wrong, but I don't think he's gonna make it much further than the s1 finale. At the very least he's going to lose his significance and what is irrelevance, if not death to fictional characters.

He's featured way too prominently so early on to be the main antagonist for the entire series, he's basically a popculture reference, he doesn't even seem to have much of a goal aside from voring people on behalf of the UK government. And most damning of all: he can't monologue.

Somewhere, somehow, my college design professor just woke up in a cold sweat. I didn’t make all the boxes in this 4x4 photo grid exactly the same size.

In fact, I just eyeballed it.

Happy International Asexuality Day!

so do we think mr bonzo passes the harkness test?

It's implied Mr Bonzo is at least over the age of 18 with the fact he is one of the OIARs "externals", and I believe you have to be at least 18 for that. Along with that, Mr Bonzo is based on Mr Blobby, and Mr Blobby (regretfully) has a wife and kids. We could probably infer Mr Bonzo has something similar (maybe a husband and kids?) So we can check that off.

However the other two are where I start getting...confused, for lack of a better term. For starters, its hard to say if Mr Bonzo is capable of communication. We know that all he says is "bonzo", like hes a pokemon or something. So that makes communicatoon difficult, but it doesn't mean its impossible.

The test itself makes note of this, saying that body language should only be attempted if all other forms of communication do not work. So, how could we MAKE saying Bonzo work? Bonzo twice if yes, bonzo twice if no? How do we know if thats gonna work?

And that leads us into my final point of confusion; IS MR. BONZO INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO CONSENT? We have no proof for either side of this debate. None, nada, ZILCH. We simply don't know enough about Mr Bonzo to say yes or no to that.

I want to bring this to peoples minds because. Well. Why NOT. It's funny? It's kinda important for the freaks in the fandom to keep it in mind, maybe? I dunno. I was taljing about the harkness test to my friend in relation to the ghouls from fallout and this just passed into my mind. I wanted to write a mini post about it because why the FUCK not.

Ngl, I think he only said it to make Alice stop worrying so much… but she knows him and called that out immediately.

“I think I’m done with Magnus stuff” Sam, my brother in christ, this is called the Magnus Protocol and we are at episode twelve. You may be done with magnus stuff, but magnus stuff is not done with you

This is what I mean when I say magpod excels at worldbuilding.

I am unwell

*slides a single tissue underneath the door*

It's okay, there there (not really, but maybe denial will help)

Thank you for the tissue! I’ve finished writing a comedy routine in this short period of *sniff* time and the tissue will be an excellent prop

*wipes eyes* the tears are part of the bit!

you know what would be awful, if gerry got to talk to jon while he's in a computer just like jon talked to gerry when he was in a book. something something sources of information something something they'll never be able to be friends