#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

[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!