#and I mean it people who are finding the song only through new animatics don't seem to share the negative sentiment only slight confusion

[bibiana112]

I don't think the bad response to vengeance saga is due to it being too video game anime coded I think Jorge had to falter somewhere in this project and this ended up being it, it's not a terrible big mistake either and is still awesome to see a guy in his position who's not exactly a first timer but that has used his storytelling media in a way that's all around innovative and experimental still have nearly flawless execution of every album so far

Ideally to me, Hermes would tell Odysseus to not open this bag too soon he'd make sure the audience knows in his song that aeolous put the storm in there again but that the other gods blessed it in some way too, a passing mention of them too wanting to get at poseidon that this is the will of the gods now for Odysseus to return home, in a way that wouldn't change anything about the intensity and emotional catharsis of 600 strike cause then in the last animatic of the stream you could only convey that visually

Absolutely no hate to the 3D animator that was called in but even if it was the most professional made flawless renders and animation I've ever seen it would still break immersion too much by staying in that general style in my opinion, and doing that alongside asking us to believe poseidon was taken down by a mortal on a jet pack with no molly or outside help beyond the wind yeeting him up was just asking too much of our suspension of disbelief to go alongside that level of immersion break

[cowboys-tshot]

A Beginner's Guide to Epic: The Musical - FINAL Version!

Are you new to Epic: The Musical and overwhelmed by 5 years worth of content to go through? Yeah, that's fair. Although Epic: The Musical is now complete, there are many things that new fans may be confused about or just completely unaware of. This is a helpful guide for the influx of new fans coming in, or just people that are still a bit confused about some parts!

*There will obviously be some spoilers in this! The Odyssey is thousands of years old, but Epic: The Musical is a retelling, meaning many things have been changed. I recommend listening to all the songs in Epic before reading this - or at least before reading the 2nd and 3rd sections - as this guide is intended to clear up misunderstandings/confusing moments and provide context (as well as some fun tidbits). But hey, you do you!

**All of the underlined words are links to whatever it is I'm referring to. I've done my best to include sources for everything or at least indicate where I got certain information I can't find a direct link. Although Jay is most active on TikTok, I've used YouTube links in case TikTok actually gets banned in the US (there was one video that I couldn't find elsewhere unfortunately).

This list will cover (1) General Information, (2) Music-Related Information, (3) Explaining Unclear/Vague Moments, and (4) Fun Facts. This post is long as hell, but so is the musical, so... sorry! Enjoy my endless yapping and let me know if I missed anything <3

General Information

This is some basic information about Epic: The Musical as a whole. This includes where to find new information and content, some context, BTS stuff, etc.

First of all, here's a quick rundown by the creator himself. There'll be some overlap in terms of what I cover here.

Here is a link to the official Spotify playlist for all of the albums/sagas in order.

Epic: The Musical is created by Jorge Rivera-Herrans, often referred to as "Jay" or "Mr. Jalapeño" by his fans. This is who writes the songs, makes the music, casts the characters, and voices Odysseus himself (and also Polyphemus)! He's a very silly, creative guy. :)

Epic: The Musical was originally produced under Blair Russell Productions, but Jay has never been paid the royalties from the songs released under them (and they have yet to give back control of the Epic social media accounts last I checked), so Epic is now produced under Jay's own company, Winion Entertainment LLC (source). The Troy Saga and The Cyclops Saga were re-released under this new company, which included new vocals, music, cover art, etc. It's preferred that you listen to these versions of the songs, and NOT the originals, because Jay only gets royalties from the current ones.

Jay is most active on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. All videos that he posts to these platforms are generally the same, so don't worry if you can't follow him on all of them. He talks about several Epic-related things, including release dates, BTS, animatics, details about the music/story, snippets of released and unreleased songs, and also plenty of funny videos. He is very active within the fanbase, and you're likely to find him (and other cast members) leaving comments on posts by fans!

Here are Jay's other links, including the Epic: The Musical Discord server. In my experience, the Discord server and TikTok are the best places to get information as quickly as possible. He also has a Patreon for early content!

Epic was just completed in December 2024. There is no stage adaptation, as Epic is still technically a concept album. There are many things in the works (video games, stage adaptations, etc.), but nothing has been completed and a lot of it is still up in the air.

Jay takes many creative liberties with The Odyssey for the sake of this retelling. He even made a video saying to NOT use Epic as a basis for your knowledge of The Odyssey. Many of the things that occur in Epic DO NOT occur in the original story, and many parts of the original story have been cut out. Here is a video where Jay explains the purpose of Epic as an adaption and goes over some key differences between the two stories.

Jay held live listen-throughs for new saga releases, where he'd start at the very beginning and naturally transition into the newest saga. I believe only three of these are still available on YouTube (The Wisdom Saga, The Vengeance Saga, and The Ithaca Saga). These are where you can find all of the official animatics, animations, and artwork, all of which provide insights into character design and events within the songs. The lyrics shown during the streams also detailed events happening in the story that may not be clear just from listening (though I will go over these later just in case). You can just watch the premiere party for The Ithaca Saga here, as it includes all previous sagas and their animatics.

Music-Related Information

I'm not musically adept at all, and this is post is already very long, so I'm not going to list every specific detail - just some common themes and examples of them.

If you're having trouble understanding the lyrics and/or the meanings behind the lyrics, Genius Lyrics has the entire album and is full of helpful notes about the context within the musical, as well as details about the music itself. A lot of lyrics get misheard, so even if you think you understand what's being sung, I'd recommend checking just in case lol.

Many characters have their own musical motif(s). There are also other motifs that are more general, like the "Danger is Nearby" motif.

Many important characters have their own instrument that plays an integral part in the songs they're in. You can typically tell which instrument accompanies each character by listening to what is most prominent in a song that focuses on that character. (examples, examples, examples)

If you hear a character's musical motif or associated instrument in a song they don't play an integral part in, that can mean a few things (listed below). With the more general motifs, they have their own separate meanings outside of the characters.

A character's motif or instrument can indicate that this character is present, even if they're not singing or even mentioned. (ex. Hermes in "Puppeteer," signifying that he's listening to Odysseus' speech, which is brought up at the beginning of "Wouldn't You Like")

That character is related to whatever event/conversation is occurring. (ex. the same musical motif in "Ruthlessness" and "Storm," signifying that Poseidon is the one that sent the intense storm)

The kind of instrument being played can indicate the emotion or tone of a scene. This is scene primarily with Odysseus, where the use of a nylon or acoustic guitar indicates that he is not being ruthless, while the electric guitar indicates his ruthlessness. (source)

When background vocals are accompanying a mortal, there is always a physical, in-universe source for those voices (ex. Odysseus's crew as background vocals in most of his songs in the earlier sagas). When background vocals are accompanying a god or other powerful being, there does not have to be a physical source for those voices—gods can basically summon a choir of voices at will (ex. "Ruthlessness"). (video explanation)

Explaining Unclear/Vague Moments

Some of the plot points, characters, and events in Epic can be confusing at first, especially without the visual element. Some things have been depicted in animatics, some said by Jay in videos/comments, others were detailed in the lyric videos during livestreams, and others are just commonly misheard or misunderstood events. I'm just going to explain everything regardless, and I will go in order of the songs to make it as coherent and cohesive as possible. I've tried not to compare Epic to The Odyssey too much, as Epic is a retelling, but The Odyssey provides a lot of context.

This list will have MAJOR SPOILERS, obviously.

Throughout Epic, several characters are named in the lyrics but never referred to as such within the musical. I won't list them all here for the sake of space, but they should all be listed on Genius Lyrics whenever they have singing roles.

Generally, the gods don't really work the same as they do in Greek mythology. They are closer to "immortal humans with superpowers" than actual gods.

As far as character design goes, most characters look physically similar to their respective actors, and their attire often takes more inspiration from anime and video games than Greek clothing (at least for the gods).

The deep voice at the end of "The Horse and The Infant" is Zeus, voiced by Luke Holt. Zeus shows Odysseus a vision of Astyanax, the infant son of Trojan Prince Hector, and tells him to kill the infant because the boy will grow up to avenge his father (who had been killed by the Greeks). After a lot of deliberation, Odysseus drops Astyanax from the walls of Troy at the very end of "Just a Man."

"Warrior of the Mind" is quite confusing without context. It begins with Athena's ability Quick-Thought, which lets her have telepathic conversations with someone within milliseconds by pulling their mind into another dimension. The rest of the song is a flashback to a younger Odysseus, when he first met Athena and took her as a mentor.

Polites dies at the end of "Survive." He is the voice weakly saying "Captain..." after being hit with Polyphemus's club, and he is killed after the cyclops hits him a second time. (I didn't realize this for a good while when I first started listening to Epic.)

The lil' guys in "Keep Your Friends Close" are called winions (which are also the Lotus Eaters in "Open Arms", and they appear again in "Dangerous"). Jay describes them as "little wind creatures that dance when they get excited and then float away uncontrollably." They don't actually exist in The Odyssey, but they're pretty cute!

At the end of "Ruthlessness," the line "remember me" is said/sung by Poseidon (Steven Rodriguez), not Odysseus - he's basically sending his voice through the ocean fog, since Odysseus is very, very far away from him at that point.

In "Done For," the yelling and roaring you're hearing in the background is essentially a Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh battle. Circe summons a chimera, and Odysseus summons a cyclops using the moly plant given to him by Hermes. There is an animatic by mircsy to serve as a visual aide, which I find very helpful!

In "There Are Other Ways," Circe is holding a knife and planning to stab Odysseus as she tries to seduce him. When he pulls away and rejects her, she quickly hides the knife.

In "The Underworld," shades (souls) are in a constant loop, repeating whatever they were thinking when they died (which we see with Polites and Anticlea, Odysseus's mother). Tiresias is an exception to this rule, seemingly because of him being such a powerful prophet. (confirmed in "The Underworld Saga" LIVE listen-through)

In "No Longer You," there's a LOT of foreshadowing (for obvious reasons). The line "I see your wife with a man who is haunting / a man with a trail of bodies" refers to Odysseus, not any of other suitors. I won't go into the rest of the foreshadowing in that song, as I think it's fairly clear and you can find other posts explaining all of that.

The sirens in "Suffering" and "Different Beast" are not the same as Greek sirens - they more so resemble our modern interpretation of them. Here is a video explaining their powers and how they work within Epic.

Scylla is a monster with six heads on serpent-like necks, with each one only eating a single man at a time. This is why Odysseus tells Eurylochus to light six torches. In the official animatic, Eurylochus is shown to hand off his torch to another crewmember during the chaos, only to realize too late that he has doomed his own brother in arms.

In "Mutiny," after Odysseus is stabbed (in his side, I believe), he is tied up and knocked out before the crew sails to the nearest island. Right before he says to get to the boat and row away, he manages to untie himself.

The statue of the sun god in "Mutiny" is depicting Helios, not Apollo. They are two separate gods, and I won't explain further because that's its own post. The cows are Helios's cattle.

Zeus completely destroys Odysseus's ship at the end of "Thunder Bringer", but Odysseus somehow washes up on the island of the goddess Calypso. She immediately falls in love with him and traps him there with her for seven years until Hermes, at the command of Zeus, informs her she must release him (though this confrontation isn't depicted in Epic, only mentioned). In The Odyssey, Odysseus sleeps with Calypso (unwillingly, mind you), but this part seems to have been cut out of Epic.

There is a seven-year time skip between "Thunder Bringer" and "Legendary." Telemachus is around 20 years old at this point. The suitors have only been in the palace for around 3 to 4 years.

In the "Legendary" animatic that depicts Telemachus growing up over time, a dog is shown walking alongside him. This is Argos, Odysseus's hunting dog, and it is the only time he's depicted in Epic. In The Odyssey, Odysseus sees Argos lying in a pile of manure outside his palace. He has been severely neglected over his owner's 20-year absence, unable to walk and covered in ticks. Upon hearing Odysseus's voice, Argos wags his tail, although he can't stand and go greet him. Odysseus, in disguise as a beggar, can't greet his dog and risk revealing himself, but he does cry a bit before he enters the palace. Argos then dies. (I cried while typing this)

The gods' powers in "God Games" are explained here. Athena is seemingly killed at the end of the song by Zeus. A lot happens in this song, so I'd recommend watching the animatics.

Charybdis is a monster opposite of Scylla in the same strait of water. She is a monster that remains beneath the waves, gulping up water three times a day to create intense whirlpools that kill anything and anyone that gets caught in its current. In Epic, Odysseus essentially maneuvers within the whirlpool by surfing on his raft until she inevitably has to spit the water back out.

In "Six Hundred Strike", Odysseus manages to reach the wind bag just before he drowns. He straps it to his back and opens it, using it like a jet pack and having a mid-air anime-style battle with Poseidon where he, powered by the souls of his dead crew, strikes Poseidon 600 times in quick succession (absolutely none of that was hyperbole). His eyes are now glowing red, and they will be this way until The Ithaca Saga (they're always red from now on, but they eventually stop glowing). They both land on a small rocky island, where Odysseus proceeds to pick up Poseidon's trident and repeatedly stab him until he stops the storm.

That wet sound in "Six Hundred Strike" is a trident being stabbed through Poseidon's throat, not kissing noises.

A lot of people (including myself for a while) get confused about the “shoot through 12 axe-heads cleanly” bit in "The Challenge". It's possible that the suitors were meant to shoot an arrow either through (1) the holes that the axe handles would go through or (2) a hole through the middle of the axe-heads - honestly I'm unsure at this point. If they were double-headed axes that were lodged in place in a straight line, the holes would align and could theoretically be shot through.

The part with the axe-heads honestly doesn't matter because Penelope knew the suitors wouldn't even get that far - Odysseus's bow was a particular type of bow, referred to in The Odyssey as palintonos (translating to "bent," I believe). It's mostly speculation because Homer wasn't super descriptive about it, but here is an article detailing the bow and how it would be used. Needless to say, not only would it have required immense strength to string and draw it, but the suitors likely wouldn't even know how to in the first place - which is exactly what is depicted in the animatic at the beginning of "Hold Them Down".

At the end of "Hold Them Down", Odysseus shoots an arrow into Antinous's throat and kills him. It's assumed that Odysseus has been in the palace the entire time (at least for the duration of this song), and none of the suitors noticed him stringing his bow without any trouble as they started getting increasingly rowdier.

At this point, you may be wondering why in the world no one just kicked the suitors out before it got to this point. For that, I ask you to research the Greek concept of xenia - there are many posts explaining this in relation to Epic as well. Basically, Greek hospitality rules prevented Penelope from simply kicking the suitors out. It was only once they threatened to kill Telemachus and sexually assault Penelope that Odysseus got the all-clear to deal with them himself without violating xenia.

There are 108 suitors in total, though only a fraction of them have singing lines and only a few are named in the lyrics. The first is Eurymachus ('Old king, our leader is dead...'), who in The Odyssey was second to Antinous and was very much an asshole. He is accurately depicted here as being a manipulative liar. The second is Amphinomus ('Damn, he's more cunning than I assumed...'), who is actually a fairly decent guy in The Odyssey. Odysseus warned him to stay away from the castle that day, but Athena urged him to stay and he was killed. Lastly, there is Melanthius (the one that encourages the capture of Telemachus) who is actually Odysseus's goatherd but was seemingly rewritten to be a suitor in Epic. In The Odyssey, he's a disloyal asshole that is so accommodating to the suitors that they let him hang out with them.

Odysseus first stabs Melanthius from behind, then beheads him right after he says 'this will be your fate'. This may seem pretty brutal (or ruthless, you could say), but I guarantee you it was far, far worse in The Odyssey! :)

At the end of one of the animatics for "I Can't Help But Wonder", when Athena says the line "very well," she turns her head to reveal that the right side of her face is scarred, and she appears to now be blind in that eye. The shape of the scar pretty much confirms that this is a result of what happened at the end of "God Games."

Penelope's request for Odysseus to move their wedding bed in "Would You Fall in Love With Me Again" is both a test and a way of circumventing Odysseus's identity crisis. It's first a test to confirm that this man is, in fact, her husband and not an imposter - only her husband would know that moving the bed is impossible because it's built into a literal tree. This request also serves to convince Odysseus that Penelope still sees him as her husband - only her husband would know that, therefore Odysseus must be her husband.

Fun Facts

Circe is voiced by Jay's girlfriend, Talya Sindel. They met when she was cast as Circe and began dating a bit later. They are horrifically cute together.

When Poseidon kills off most of Odysseus' crew in "Ruthlessness," he says that there are only 43 men left. But in "The Underworld," the souls of his crew say that 558 men died under his command. Considering Odysseus started off with 600 men ("Full Speed Ahead"), this math doesn't add up. This is because in The Odyssey, when Odysseus and his men party with Circe for a year, a man in his crew named Elpenor woke up drunk on Circe's roof and proceeded to walk off the roof and die from the fall. He actually has a cut song.

Jay messed up the amount of years in "There Are Other Ways" - it had only been 10 years, not 12. This mistake is referenced in "Different Beast" with the line "We've been away from home for / about 12 years or so."

All of Jay's family play characters in Epic - his mother plays Odysseus's mother (Anticlea), his father plays Hephaestus (because he helped Jay build his sound booth/recording studio), and his sister plays the Princess Winion in "Dangerous"!

If you see people commenting "rawr rawr rawr" or "🦖" on Jay's videos, they're referencing his April Fool's prank before the release of The Underworld Saga.

[minty-tea-soup]

Okay I'm adding my two cents here as well cause I tend to like fandom spaces/find them more interesting for stats and trends etc.

With podcasts there is a thing that happens often especially when you get into "smaller" podcasts. Aka ones that aren't Critical Role, TMA etc where the person listening to that podcast probably has listened to at least five other ones and has another ten on the list to listen to. The fandom lines especially on smaller podcasts get blurred and offer more cross overs. But it also means that people are jumping from one to another at a quick turnover rate. Instead of watching a show and then going: that was so cool, wish there was more or something like it I could listen to. People go: okay I finished podcast number 30 time for 31.

And also yes some podcasts only has like ten people listening to it. I have listened to podcasts where I cannot remember how I found them looked them up on Tumblr or Twitter and found that there is exactly five posts about them across both sites and three are from the creator. That doesn't have a large enough base to really make a whole lot. Though I will say that I'm part of a small community and run a m'craft server for them. There are these two people on it that I have made a full animatic for and other people have had fan art for. So it partly has to do with how important/unique the experience is to you more so then size for fan art.

Podcasts are great they get me through the day but when I consume so many of them, they don't that same special treatment. Instead they all get lumped together. Like how all the YA novels I read in middle school and highschool are just one big mass of plot in my brain. There are some I can remember clearly but most? I can tell you that it was a protagonist... with a mission. Saved world.

The other is when can people listen to a podcast. The answer is constantly. I listen at work for about 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I chew through podcasts like they are nothing. I have a LIST of songs I would love to make podcast animatics to for every single podcast I've listened to almost. But there are two things stopping me.

I don't want ever do the animatic until I'm caught up. Which sometimes with the podcasts that update weekly make me go: oh no that idea is now needing to include more and more.

I often never even get to the storyboarding because I finish that podcast that week and then move on to the next one. And even if I love the one I just finished it's like when you finish a good book and go to the next one. You are going to talk to a friend, you might reread your favorite chapter but if you got into and tried to make content and fan work for every single one might end up burning up.

I'm listening at work. I cannot start sketching ideas at work. And then I go home and I don't listen to the podcasts, or work on stuff for the podcasts (normally). For me podcasts are a work thing then to engage with at work. And I know for a lot of people podcasts are for specific tasks: driving, chores, drawing. Which means they don't get their own time that they take up, they are an additional not something that most set time to the side for.

Because they are in addition to an already planned task "making time" for podcasts never really becomes a priority, even if you want to listen to them more. I have a friend who has been trying to get through Wolf 359 for almost a full year now because he only listens to Podcast on long (2 hours or more) uninterrupted car rides. But currently lives somewhere where most of his drives are like 30 minutes tops and that is to work where he plays music. He loves TMA but while he will sketch silly fan things for other media he consumes I have never once seen him sketch a single thing for TMA. Because for him Podcasts aren't a media that is a primary time taker. It's a secondary.

The other thing is something that I noticed from being in DSMP fandom space. When new content drops there is a quick rush to get out that initial inspiration and then unless someone is working on a longer piece until the next bit of content drops? It will be generally quiet on the fanwork side, of course those people were going every single day/week so there was more art. But you could tell who streamed recently often due to fanworks.

Podcasts are similar. I can tell exactly which one of my podcasts just dropped a new episode from getting new art. A new flurry of updated fics etc.

On that note discords. Don't get me wrong being able to make and share art directly into a community is cool af. And desiring to share it somewhere where only fans will see it so you get a bit more privacy feeling can make it easier to share art. But some podcast discords I've been in it feels like they get twice the amount of art then any of the more publicly accessible social media for the same podcast.

The last actually partly has to do with my inability to actually visualize a person for the voices. The clearest character image I ever got in my head without fan art or cosplay forcing an image into my head was Doug Eiffel. People don't have a clear reference for their art and so now you need to make one. It's why fandom designs probably get so popular, makes it easier to draw someone if you don't have to also figure out how your brain interprets this random voice in your head. Sometimes I actively stop drawing or working on podcast fanworks the moment I get past barebones and have to actually add features. Because in my head these people are constantly shifting and don't have actual features at the same time.

This got more rambly and I don't think I actually touched on a single point I was trying to say in my brain. I just have bitched to my friends about how sparse podcast fandoms are sometimes and so brain went brrr and word vomited.

When I wake up and reread this will probably either clarify it or just delete. But current me is seeing this ideal real estate.

Where are all the Audio Fiction Fandoms?

To be clear, this isn't me complaining, and I know, there are plenty of fandoms for audio fiction podcasts and the like.

But I have always found it weird how few shows get the big, self-sustaining kinds of fandoms, the ones where there's always at least a little trickle of fanfic and fanart. So weird, in fact, that I've been thinking about it on and off for the last 5-6 years, and I have a few theories I'd like to share with y'all as to why, and to see if I can't get some feedback from the audio fiction fans on Tumblr.

Theory 1: Audience Size

The first theory is mostly about demographics - fundamentally, a fandom has to be large enough to sustain itself, and only a certain number of audience members are going to become the kind of fans who make fan works, so ultimately, an audio fiction show needs to get popular enough before fan works start appearing.

There's plenty of support for this theory, of course - Welcome to Night Vale, Wolf 359, The Adventure Zone and The Magnus Archives are titans in the fiction podcast space, and indeed they have big fandoms. But, with that said, there's plenty of other podcasts that are just as big that don't have fandoms, so this can't explain it all.

Theory 2: Audience Distance

This one is similar to the first, but subtly different. A few creators in the space I've talked to have noted that they'd never make fan works of their friend's shows - that feels weird, like deliberately treading on their friend's work. They don't have this feeling when playing in big fandoms, or fandoms where they don't know the creator. This implies to me that fans need a certain level of distance from creators in order to feel comfortable playing with that fictional space. While this is less the case now with the fall of Twitter, a lot of shows, for better or worse, used social media as the primary pillar of their marketing, as well as using Patreons with special access as part of their monetization strategies.

In short, it's never been easier to get close to the creators of your favourite shows, and for smaller shows, the most exuberant fans - the kinds who might make fan works - are also the kinds of fans who will take those opportunities to get closer to the creators. In short, there just might not enough social distance for fans to be comfortable creating works, not at least until the audience grows sufficiently that a creator simply cannot be that close with their entire audience.

This theory I'm not so sure about these days - this one is probably a lot more dependent on the generation of fandom you belong to. Older generations of fandom are more likely to have this queasiness around creator closeness, because they were creating in a time where fandom was a shadow realm, desperately hidden from The Powers That Be, and "No Copyright Infringement Intended" was carved into fan works as an eldritch attempt at legal protection.

Theory 3: Audience Age

To be clear - there are fans of all ages out there. But it is clear to me that fandom trends young, and part of that is just the time needed to participate in fan culture - creating and consuming takes a lot of time, time that tends gets scarcer and scarcer as you get older (there are obvious exceptions of course - stay-at-home mothers have consistently been a major force in fandoms!). It's possible that audio fiction fans just tend to trend older, and thus don't have the time available to create and consume fan works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how relevant this one is - Audio fiction is becoming more popular with younger audiences and slowly shedding the "old fuddy-duddyness" that surrounded it when I was first getting into the space. And, ya know, there are audio fiction fandoms out there, so obviously either the youth aspect of fandom isn't a thing, or it is, but audio fiction audiences are still trending young anyway.

Theory 4: We're getting what we need!

A lot of academic discourse often focuses on the idea that fandoms create for a reason - and that reason is often to focus on parts of a fiction that the original text, for whatever reason, doesn't. The most obvious form of this is the many, many, many examples of ships and erotic fanfiction. You, as a fan, watch a show, see something between two characters, and get frustrated that the show isn't giving you more of that, won't make what is clearly obvious to you, explicit. So, you consume and/or create fan works that help relieve that tension instead.

Or, in shows where the focus is primarily on plot advancement or action, you feel a desire to get to know the characters better - you see the stirrings of these characters, you want to know them better, but the show just isn't the type of show to give you that slow, character-heavy scene/episode that you know would give you exactly what you need, so, again, you go consume and/or create fan works to fix that.

It's very possible that a lot of audio fiction is already built to give these sorts of fan audiences what they want. There's already romantic relationships, characters are openly queer, the nature of the audio medium means that character-heavy scenes are something that the medium directs creators towards, so there's already a lot of character engagement. So, for many fandoms, there just isn't much need to create fan works - there's no tension between what the show is and what it could be.

Theory 5: We can make our own at home!

One interesting theory is that one reason that people make fandom is because, fundamentally, the creators understand that they're not going to be making a film, or a TV show, or a book. They have creative urges, and they're not in a situation in life where they're likely to overcome the enormous barriers to entry in mainstream media, so, in combination with the stuff in theory 3, they play in other people's worlds instead. They know that there's already an audience who will consume their work (they're part of that fan community, after all!), so they can get that validation of creation without needing to create their own TV show or film or book, etc.

Podcasts, however, are different. Now, it's not true to say that podcasts have low barriers to entry - to create a podcast, there's a lot of skills you either need to learn yourself, or find collaborators with those skills. But, those barriers to entry are much lower than visual media. At the very least, audio production is significantly cheaper and less complicated for an equivalent runtime.

Better, podcasts have absurdly low barriers to publication - There are no gatekeepers to satisfy, no distributors you have to convince. Once your thing is made, pretty much no one can stop you from distributing that work. You don't even really need to pay for a podcast host - there's a few free podcast hosts now. So, once you've done the work, pretty much nothing stops you from publishing said work.

So... If you're a creative fan, who loved a show but thinks you can do better? Well, you can! You don't need to play in other people's spaces, you can be inspired by the podcasts you listen to to create your own original work, in the same medium and genre.

What do y'all think? Which of these feel right, which of these feel obviously wrong? Are you part of a audio fiction fandom? What does your fandom feel like to you on the inside? As a audio fiction creator, it's kinda hard for me to get into the inside of fandom culture, so insider perspectives would be super neat for me, so please reblog this to anyone you feel might have an interesting perspective on the whole thing!