skygiants | (no subject)

I had a lot of relatively mindless manual labor to do last week at work, so I ended up zipping through all extant episodes of The Strange Case of The Starship Iris and enjoyed it very much!

I have a pal who works on this podcast so it had been on my radar for a while, but all I really knew about it was "scripted fiction, ensemble I think, probably takes place on a spaceship called Iris?" As it happens, I was not even correct about this much! In the first episode, scientist Violet Liu is rescued from off the Starship Iris, which has just malfunctioned in the middle of a government sample-collecting mission in such a way as to cause the death of the rest of the crew, and the rest of the show takes place on the entirely different ship on which she unexpectedly finds herself.

The first thing that jumps into my mind as a comparative for Starship Iris is Becky Chambers' books ... which feels a bit oxymoronic in a way, because one of Chambers' main things is a gentle absence of plot and relatively low immediate stakes, while Starship Iris is not only very tightly plotted but starts off immediately with life-and-death stakes and only builds from there. But despite the high stakes it still feels to me like a very gentle show in a lot of ways -- there's a heavy emphasis on empathy and trust and communication, and the characters are all generally well-intentioned people attempting to do their best by each other and their own ethics in the various dangerous circumstances in which they find themselves. It's also very Emphatically representative; cast largely of color and/or queer, foregrounded queer relationships (an established human/alien relationship acts as a fairly explicit stand-in for the social marginalization of a queer relationship, while the challenges of the main lesbian romance are not structural and societal but internal and personal to the lesbians in question), carefully inclusive about portrayals of visible and invisible disability and structural inequality, etc. (My personal favorite character is the laid-back trans linguist who quit grad school to join a crew of smugglers because it felt like less of an ethical quagmire, but still craves feedback on his Ph.D. thesis on historical alien literary epics.)

The story is set a few years after a major interstellar war between humanity -- which resulted in the imposition of a heavily propagandized military regime -- and a much more powerful, moderately expansionist alien empire. One of my favorite things about the podcast is the format of the first season, which is structured as a series of government reports on the activities of Violet Liu and comrades, increasingly punctuated and annotated by the agents assigned to the case; as the season goes on, the cast become increasingly aware of their own audio surveillance, and the question of how the authorities are accessing the recordings becomes central to the plot, with absolutely no break in kayfabe until the closing credits of S1. I dug this SO MUCH and thought it was really cleverly done! I'm a little sad this conceit is not sustainable into the second season, which has a more traditional radio drama format, but they have made it up to me with the addition of frequent interjections from an in-universe pirate radio station and so I can forgive.

Anyway, now I have listened to all that there is so far, and am, shockingly, caught up on just about everything else I'm actively listening to, I'm potentially in the market for more podcasts?? So if you have recommendations, please let me know!

For the record, my other current podcast listening:

- Friends at the Table, aka 'the only thing I listened to for approximately four years while catching up on all their content,' but now

genarti are trying to listen to the current season together and use it as crafting motivation, which is part of the reason I have more time in my walking-to-and-from-work listening schedule these days
- A More Civilized Age, in which some of the FaTT people and some other people talk about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and I use it as an excuse to rewatch the episodes along with them and argue with them in my head
- Throwing Sheyd, the Jewish demonology podcast (currently on hiatus it seems?); I'm enjoying listening through their backlog very much but also can't listen to too many episodes in a row or it all starts blurring together

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From:

shadaras

Someday I'll circle back to Starship Iris! I have listened to the first couple episodes and liked it but listening to scripted shows takes too much mental effort.

I have no suggestions for podcasts because you're listening to all the ones that I'm actually keeping up with myself. xD this is not surprising.

(The only other thing I'm listening to right now is the Great Gundam Project, which I enjoy because I like listening to people tell me about a show I'll never watch but which is deeply influential on a genre I like. It's nice to listen to something where if I zone out for a while I'm not going to care about having Missed Things because I don't have that much context anyway [I skipped an entire episode once by accident at one point and didn't realise it xD;]. It's fun, and I enjoy it, and someday maybe I'll catch up with it instead of slowly listening through backlog whenever I am doing podcast-applicable chores.)

From:

skygiants

I didn't listen to scripted shows for a long time -- FatT was so much easier for me to absorb myself in completely -- but I think I'm starting to get the knack back! Podcast Listening: Advanced!

(That does sound like a pleasant experience! I expect if I listened to it I would find myself compelled to watch Gundam though and that seems perilous.)

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