With MBMBaM…the conversation we had internally was like, we feel like we’re making this really dumb thing while really important stuff is happening, and we kinda felt bad about that. And then after we put that episode out, we got this flood of like, “thank you for being a distraction.” And we’re like, oh yeah, distraction’s important. We don’t have to deal with stuff to be helpful, sometimes you can just distract. And so that’s kind of always been our MO in general, just as people. If something’s going wrong and people are getting stressed out, we make jokes and we break tension…
We’ve never discussed this, but I think Justin and Griffin would agree, that you can set an example without explicitly saying, “this is a thing I’m combating” or “this is a stance I’m taking.” But rather, like, I’m going to choose to embrace this thing and talk about this thing and face this battle in a certain way, that I would hope you would understand what my position on things is. And so we talk a lot when we’re doing Amnesty especially, because it’s in our present world, in West Virginia…so for example, my character is a bisexual Puerto Rican woman. And it’s like, are we gonna make her…deal with shit? [laughs] And it’s like, noo. No, we’re not. Like, that’s not the world we wanna create and that’s not as interesting.
And when we were doing TAZ Dust…we ended up having—me and Justin and Griffin and Dad—a two-hour long conversation about, I’m gonna set up the Old West…but Dad wants to play a woman and I don’t want people to be, you know, misogynist to her, even though in the time period, they would have been. Dad wants to play an Asian woman and I’m not gonna have people use racial slurs, even though that’s what they would have done at the time. And we really went back and forth, like, are we being disingenuous by not acknowledging that this is the kind of circumstances that people would have had to deal with? But by doing that, would we be reminding people of these bad things that still happen in the world?
And so yeah, we put a lot of though to it and we try to find a balance between not trying to pretend like there aren’t issues and not trying to pretend like everything’s okay. But also knowing that people know that there are issues and so we don’t need to constantly remind people that there are issues. It’s a tough balance to find, but we try really hard.
– Travis McElroy at DragonCon
thought I’d transcribe the bit where he confirms Aubrey as Puerto Rican. this was a response to a question about the brothers’ decision to keep current events and politics mostly out of their podcasts.
bongdanceking 