Oh PLEASE go off about Annabelle in canon, I was actually considering writing a season 5 where annabelle joins Jon and Martin to put a stop to the entities. Like, it’s so weird to assume that only Jon would be actively fighting back against his monsterhood and putting Annabelle in a position where she utilizes her patrons knowledge to fight against it? Like.... *chefs kiss* but I wanna know what you think about her treatment in canon

fjksdlf anon... oh anon. i have said so many things about annabelle, mostly after like 197 aired bcos i was SO mad. but. let me see if i can summarize.

so, firstly, yeah what you said!! i think more avatars should actively work against their patrons! and annabelle, as supposedly someone great at trickery and lies and manipulation? COULD DO THAT. like, tma p clearly sets up that you've gotta be rebelling to do good, but there's more than one way to rebel against a corrupt system! outright refusing to do things is one, but careful sabotage is another! annabelle could have been that. she was perfect! an unwilling avatar! forced into what she became! clever & tricksy! aware of the web's plans! come on.

secondly, like, she had all these parallels to jon. so many! so many parallels!! she was set up as a narrative foil for him! and did those parallels come into play when she finally confronted jon? did he have to see & understand her life as it was like his? did she reveal she'd been fighting battles like his as well? did she even have a villainous 'we're not so different you and i' moment?? no! she just delivered the web's message for it! damn!!

...it's also not necessarily bad treatment but i am just like. personally miffed abt how bad jonny is at writing effective manipulation. she got martin to go with her by telling him she had a solution? really?? and all her big buildup as someone terrifying & dangerous by jon, and... she's just a messenger. not even doing anything. rly took that 'make sure people either under or overestimate you' thing to heart huh.

and with the purely narrative issues out of the way. the thing abt her being a black woman. the thing abt her treatment as a black woman.

like, she was lied to when participating in a morally questionable medical experiment and wound up physically, mentally, and emotionally changed. she lost her place in society, her family, her education, because of that. and canon says 'yeah that's bad & scary' but does it truly address the specific horror of that happening to a black woman?

and then in her service to the web, she rly is reduced to like, its obedient servant. she is utterly controlled. her life is sacrificed to its whims. other avatars got some benefit from their avatarhood, but does annabelle? we never see it! and in the end she's still not exerting any will of her own, not even with her dreams of a spooky children's show. she exists to deliver a message to jon in order to serve the desires of her patron. she even mentions so casually that maybe she'll get to live or maybe she'll die, but as long as her patron's desires are fulfilled that's all that matters. like... jonny, this is what you choose to do with your one specifically-described black woman? without even acknowledging how specially horrific that is for her bcos of her identity?

add onto that that in the final confrontation she morphs into a huge, scary spider in order to... what? talk to jon? deliver a message to him?? in a situation where she does not need to fight, is not even TRYING to fight, is in fact calmly having a conversation, is it REALLY necessary to make her large & monstrous & physically intimidating? especially when a 'final form' reveal isn't something like... any other avatar has.

and then! in posts abt jon being written like a white man i touched on this, but the thing where he gets to decide if she lives or dies based on, lbr, how he's feeling? if he's mad enough abt her taking martin to kill her, or if he personally wants to stop killing enough to let her go? pls do not put your 'aracial' character (played by a white man) in that sort of position over your one black woman. come on.

and ultimately parts of this happened bcos jonny used race as an aesthetic in early seasons and did not consider the implications of some of what he was doing, did not realize the special horror for her (and for other poc!) in the stories he was telling. but by season five he'd had time to think, and to have some realizations, and he could have AT LEAST explored annabelle as a more complex character, instead of totally ignoring her complexities, her parallels to jon, and her agency so he could use her to wrap up his big scary web plan.