skygiants

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. ( a little more nattering on this under the cut )

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.

It seems like over the last year or so all the cool kids have been getting into actual play podcasts such as The Adventure Zone or Critical Role. I probably will listen to one or both of these things at some point in the future!

However, I am a very slow podcast listener, and right now I have instead been spending all my podcast time listening to a completely different actual play podcast called Friends at the Table. This is entirely the fault of nextian, who casually dropped me a remark about an orc archivist who accidentally screws over all his friends when seduced by the siren call of primary source materials. Now I'm perpetually out of the zeitgeist because I can't stop listening to FATT which means I can't listen to anything else! THANKS EMMA.

The orc archivist appears in the first season of Friends at the Table, which takes place in a more traditional fantasy setting, but there's a second season of that I haven't listened to yet so I'm not going to talk about that yet. Instead I'm going to talk about the second, stand-alone season, which I have finished. It's called Counter/Weight and it's a very long, frequently very good noir-themed audio anime about robots and capitalism and space revolution!

Counter/Weight is set in a backwater bit of the universe where two enormous, intermittently warring galactic superpowers converge. The People's Conglomerate of Orion, aka OriCon, is a fairly standard space capitalist semi-dystopia dominated by giant corporations; the Autonomous Diaspora is in theory a perfect democracy, and in practice dominated by powerful, symbolic AIs called Divines that are called things like Grace and Righteousness and Peace (also known as Order), and have symbiotic relationships with humans called Candidates. Also in the mix are the Apostolosians, a declining empire of Greco-Roman fish people who claim to be descended from the founders of Atlantis. Everyone has giant robots to pilot, including the fish people.

Our player characters/plucky protagonists are the Chime, a team of small-time mercenaries for hire, and include:

AuDy: short for Automated Dynamics; a car-parking robot that gained sentience in a development as mysterious to itself as to others, and subsequently quit their job as a valet in order to pilot a spaceship of their very own!
Mako Trig: a mouthy runaway from a deeply sinister school that trains psychic kids to hack into Divines!
Aria Joie: a former pop idol with a sparkly dancing robot and a fashion sense borrowed from Utena Tenjou; relatedly, READY and EAGER to become a revolutionary icon, except for the minor inconvenience that space Disney still holds the IP to her image and all her most popular songs!
Cassander Timaeus Berenice: an EXILED FISH PRINCE

And some of my personal favorite NPCs:

Orth Godlove: the Chime's occasional employer, a former ace robot pilot turned extremely stressed-out bureaucrat who essentially does not sleep over the five-ish years of series continuity; sovay-bait
Jaqui Green: a giant hitwoman with two metal arms whom Aria keeps attempting to flirt with rather than fighting, derailing several missions
Sokrates Nikon Artemisios: Cass' older sibling, ANOTHER exiled fish prince, who betrayed their people during the last war out of strong moral convictions and an optimistic vision of the future that was not particularly fulfilled
Ibex: candidate of the Divine Righteousness, one-scene wonder rapidly elevated to occasional series villain; a revolutionary or an amoral would-be tyrant depending on your point of view. Perfectly and reasonably willing to put galactic conquest temporarily on hold for the greater good when necessary!

(The actual series villain is Fordian labor efficiency.)

The first several episodes largely involve the cast members tripping over their own feet, getting beat up, and accidentally purchasing large quantities of robots they don't want, in the finest noir traditions. Every couple of episodes the DM gets together with a different group of players for a "faction" game, which is essentially a way to further develop the politics of the broader world of the story. Eventually the stuff that happens at the higher level begins to impact the players on the ground, and vice versa, all up and down the timeline; for me, this is when the story really starts coming together. There's something very neat about a kind of fiction where you get to watch the world get fleshed out in real time (or, if you're me and a slow podcast listener, substantially more than real time, but.)

Other Counter/Weight selling points:
- I am not sure I have yet properly conveyed the quantity and quality of interesting and weird artificial intelligences
- everyone's hilarious outfits are very lovingly described
- it's very funny tragedy, which is, alas, one of my favorite genres
- SO MUCH worldbuilding
- compelling character arcs developed around legitimately difficult choices and conflicts of ideals
- not one, but TWO major plot arcs set at SPACE PROMS
- cast members are not all white, not all straight, and not all cis, which definitely comes through in the storytelling
- what I mean to say is that it's very gay

Things that may not be selling points:
- kind of a slow start, especially for the faction game episodes
- Murder DM Austin Walker will probably murder at least one of your darlings
- the ending ... works very well in some ways and not so well in others
- honestly I'm still kind of mad that [spoiler] gets fired into the sun
- they keep trying very hard to make Apostolosian gender not just Gender As We Know It and it really doesn't happen, though I personally find the effort endearing
- I've gotten a lot of weird looks while walking around with near-invisible headphones in and giggling to myself