skygiants | (no subject)

I have a podcast problem, which is that I need a steady podcast diet of fifty minutes a day for my walks to/from work, and my favorite kind of podcast is a (good!) media discussion podcast, but I can't listen to most media discussion podcasts even if they are good because I often will want to make sure I experience the media first and I simply don't have time. Anyway, here's some podcasts that I listened to this past year.

A More Civilized Age: As someone who only got really into Star Wars as an adult via the medium of watching The Clone Wars at the same time as I was involved in a tragic clone-centric Star Wars-themed RPG campaign, I am exactly the target audience for this Star Wars critical discussion/analysis podcast, which started with Clone Wars and has now moved onto Rebels with occasional detours to Andor, KOTOR, and the Thrawn trilogy. It is currently the reliable mainstay of my podcast diet and I'm very excited for them to eventually get to The Bad Batch, which appears to have become my favorite piece of Star Wars media after Rogue One and the approximately three Clone Wars arcs I really care about.

Re:Adapted: Usually I have a bit of a hard time with podcasts in which One Person Reads Out a Scripted Lecture (I prefer more freeform conversation) but I make an exception for things as directly relevant to my interests as this show, which traces the various ways that Phantom of the Opera has been readapted since the original Gaston Leroux novel came out and which pieces of each adaptation then got carried on, picked up, put down, pushed back against, etc. in subsequent adaptations after that. This is the kind of thing I find most interesting and I think Phantom is an incredible starting point. I think the Phantom season is complete at this point, but the creator has suggested that she might do subsequent seasons with other frequently adapted narratives and I hope that she does!

Jim Gordon Must Die: this is a podcast about the TV show Gotham, done by friends of mine who drop an update at complete random when the muse strikes them. As a result, every episode is always an exciting surprise! A rare and precious exception to my usual podcast problem, because I do not and will never want to see the TV show Gotham but I am curious about adaptations generally and so having all the most absurd parts of the show explained to me by my very funny friends is frankly an ideal way to experience it.

The Big Dig podcast: I wrote this up already, but in short, just a great piece of audio documentary storytelling about Our Beloved Local Nightmare Infrastructure Project. The producers have a follow-up coming about the lottery called Scratch and Win and I will be listening to it!

Shelved by Genre: This is a book discussion podcast ft. Austin Walker of Friends at the Table and A More Civilized Age plus some other guys who are new to me; I am not an archive completionist with this one and I'm not trying to read along with it, but

kate_nepveu alerted me to the vital and important fact that they were reading the Vanyel trilogy and it has been both funny and fascinating to listen to people who have never experienced Mercedes Lackey seriously analyze The Vanyel Experience as a standalone piece of media. (I've also listened to a couple of their Earthsea episodes, but only for the books I recently reread.)

Friends at the Table: Currently airing FatT has become a show that I listen to socially with

genarti rather than a show that I listen to solo on my walk from work, which is delightful but is also part of the reason that I have been looking for more podcasts to fill up the daily fifty minutes ... anyway, as has been the case from the beginning, I'm into FatT less because I think it is always one hundred percent satisfying storytelling and more because I am fascinated by the ways that the actual play format lets the listener see how cool ideas and personalities and impulse and chance come together to structure the narrative, and as such I find the show's successes and failures equally interesting. The most recent season, Palisade, I think, is an incredible object lesson and illustration in this; unfortunately it's also a terrible place to pick up the show as it's more of a sequel to all of their previous stuff than they've ever done before.

I am really fascinated by the way that the narrative and the dice and the play style have all fallen out such as to make Brnine kind of a uniquely compelling character in the history of the podcast (or at least, uniquely compelling to me). They're a character on their second season, meaning they've had more time to develop out a long arc than many of the single-season characters. They are a marine alien who is designed, from the get-go, to be awkward, low charimsa, and bad at communication, who is nevertheless in a leadership role as captain of a spaceship. They had an intense relationship with another player character in that first season who died tragically, and Ali-as-player made a deliberate choice to incorporate Brnine's grief about that character into the narrative drives on their character sheet but never ever talk about them onscreen, which provides a constant level of fascinating tension as the the GM constantly builds things into the world and the narrative that might encourage Brnine to open up about this central grief and depression while Ali ducks and weaves in order to avoid doing so. And then, in the middle of the plot, the dice and the mechanics line up to give this swagless fish an absurdly impressive, overwhelming victory in an interaction where Ali was clearly cheerfully prepared to let this be Brnine's final battle -- followed by an arc in which in-character Brnine has a deathwish and out-of-character Ali is fully ready to let them die because she's afraid that continuing Brnine's story too long after the spectacular thing that just happened could only be a narrative letdown, while the other players actively sabotage Ali's efforts to give Brnine a spectacular sendoff because they want Brnine to stick around. Forced to live by the narrative in every possible way! It's the kind of storytelling that can only happen in actual play, and that's made more effective and not less by the fact that you can see all the factors that went into it and the way that the players are trying to shape the narrative as they go and sometimes being shaped by events instead.

Conversely, this is notoriously a season with an endless finale, because the first system that they tried to use simply did not work in its mechanics and also because external circumstances caused various people to be depressed during the making of it, and they pushed on anyway. As the first round of finale goes on, you can hear the way that the players are attempting to push at or work around the mechanics to make a story that's satisfying for them and for the listener, and it is just audibly like shoving a boulder uphill, and they get all the way through it and are like right! Okay! Well, I guess the only way to fix this is to make another, post-finale finale! Which is very silly, but also, they were absolutely right, that was the way to do it, and I'm glad they left all of the difficult finale in and worked with it instead of just putting it aside and starting over from scratch, because this too is the work of storytelling and is the stuff I find interesting.

I am as always open to podcast recs! though as you may have gathered I'm quite picky about what specifically works for me and so I reserve all rights to ignore them.