#i. love this podcast.

[erstwhilesparrow]

A few years ago, I tried getting into friends at the Table, but got very confused and never finished. However, I noticed you have a tag for it, so i am assuming you listen, and i was wondering,,,,, while I don't have the spoons for another ttrpg podcast atm, I would *love* to hear your thoughts on it/what it's actually about in general, and so I figured I'd ask :3

you have no idea how excited this ask made me; i have indeed listened to friends at the table!! i like it so much!!

okay before i do my spiel, you have to listen to this. I Am Forcing You To. this is not really going to clarify what friends at the table is about, but it will give you a sense of how much Like That they are.

all right, everything else under the cut.

the flippant and easy answer is that fatt is about "critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interactions between good friends"! that's their tagline, and it's true, but it's also the answer anyone will give you if you ask about the podcast. the other answer is that, across (approximately) seven seasons of varying tones and genres, fatt has with surprising consistency managed to be about love stories without resolutions, communities coming together in apocalyptic times, and Extremely Cool Anime Bullshit.

i absolutely understand trying to get into it and getting lost -- it definitely took me multiple tries for it to click, and none of the helpful guides people offered actually worked for me? (a joke that was going around on tumblr a little bit ago: fatt fans will give suggestions on where to start listening the way new yorkers give directions.) the hosts of the podcast are A Pretty Specific Kind Of People! they are not trying to be marketable here! so it's. hard to sell and hard to explain. i don't know how to say, in an advertise-y way, "i had to trick myself into listening to more than two episodes by putting the podcast on in the background as white noise while i was playing minecraft." and also, "i got through like five multi-hour episodes before i started realizing that not only was i beginning to be able to differentiate voices, but that i might be invested in these characters." and also, "no actual-play in existence is doing it like friends at the table is. you will experience the sickest storytelling and worldbuilding of your life listening to this podcast. but you will first have to get used to every five minute fight or interaction taking twenty minutes because these people are long-winded and very thorough." i'm bad at elevator pitches!

but. but. i started with their fourth season, Twilight Mirage, and to this day i still call it the bearer of my heart. when i say i think it changed my life, i mean i really genuinely think the person i would have been not having listened to it would have been worse off, at least for that stretch of months where i was listening to it. the hosts are so careful and so thoughtful about their worldbuilding, and so interesting about it that after a certain point, i started going, "oh fuck, we're spending hours doing exclusively worldbuilding to set up for the upcoming story? hell yeah!" something that still pierces me to this day when i think about it gets mentioned almost off-handedly: the people from this sci-fi futuristic version of earth are named with possessives -- real canon examples include Morning's Observation, Declan's Corrective, Mother's Story -- because (in the hosts' words) it matters to them that they belong to something. what the FUCK! and it's like this all the time?? they just do this shit?? for free?? THERE'S A CHARACTER NAMED FOURTEEN FIFTEEN. there's not a lot of quotes i can give you out of context that convey what it's like to experience the whole thing, because they throw all these pieces onto the board and go through all of them and it's this huge chaotic jumble and then suddenly one thing connects to another to another to another and it resolves into the most gorgeous mosaic you've ever seen.

twilight mirage is their biggest and messiest season, they try to do a lot of different things with it, but i think the thing that most Got To Me is that it's a story about a utopia in decline? and it really is a utopia. the hosts are explicit about that, that they thought about what a utopia could actually look like, about what infrastructure it would need to work, about how there's no secret caveat or buried rot. this is something i said to a friend of mine shortly after listening: "they said, hey, what does a queer sci-fi utopia look like for us? and answered the question completely seriously. it takes a kind of thoughtfulness and fortitude that i think few possess to answer a question like that without flinching." it's like it flipped enough switches in me to make me go, "wait, you can DO that?" like. this was... the winter joining 2021 and 2022? i was having a bad time with [trying to imagine a future for myself that didn't make me miserable], and twilight mirage didn't, yknow, fix that, but it did suggest visions of the future that i could actually see myself in, and tell stories about things and in ways it had never even occurred to me you could do!

and they. keep doing that. every season. they've been doing that since 2012. there are space fish. there are ships shaped like bouquets of flowers. there is (and i quote) "a big-titty catgirl shrine maiden."

i know i've talked pretty abstractly here about the things i felt listening to this, and i haven't even brought up other seasons i've listened to, but i'm telling you. there's So Much. there is no way for me to meaningfully condense it for a question this general. friends at the table is so expansive and thoughtful and so so fucking good, and i will never have enough words to describe it to my own satisfaction.

(as a treat for after reading all that: another fun answer to "what's fatt's deal?" here.)

[weaselweaselweasel]

What do you mean Tim doesn’t stay alive and well and happy and silly and funny and alive forever WHAT DO YOU MEANNNNNNN

[aediondraws]

tmagp comic bc I'm not normal about them!!

ep 12

[saragrosie]

Sketching while streaming s5...

Jonathan Sims I will learn to draw you (this is my doing. I could draw him however I want and I choose to stick with an image of him in my brain that is difficult for me to draw. Masochism.)

Not s5 Mahtins below I enjoyed drawing cuz hes neat:

(Edit: I yassified Martin in the do not separate cuz I wanted his hair fluffier)

[ciao2-bambi]

Doodle of Jonathan Sims through Season 1-5!

Not the final version I think. But wanted to draw him throughout the season. Had a BLAST and EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER RIDE while listening. BUT I'M FINE.

Anyway, here's a wet cat of a man.

[merlins-art]

My guyss

[rainlovesrice]

tma season one/early season2 cast portrait! these are much older art plus only sasha and micheal haven’t gone through redesigns but!! i’m still very proud of how they turned out :))

tim isn’t finished cause i- forgot about this series but i have daisy, basira, melanie, gerry and helen also in the making!

[thatsfrickenace]

[m-kuprum]

random headcanon time:

gerry is always approached by street cats. no matter where or how.

[dyke-in-crisis]

I have noticed a pattern & I’m guilty of all of these

[nikkodikko]

"From beginning to end" a double page collage tribute to the horror podcast that forever changed my brain chemistry :]

[justanotherspeck]

well god forbid a woman does anything 🙄 (she is damaging the fabric of space and time)

[ladyjayde]

For the people who don't have Twitter

I think this is the best tweet I've seen in a long time 😭

[pigeons-with-jello]

No one talks about how michael shelley was angry. no one talks about how michael distortion was murderous. helen barely got that bad and she was the distortion during the apocalypse. michael was quiet with his anger but it ran free when he had the power to hurt people. he wanted to, somewhere deep down. that is before we get to the revenge aspect. he never grew out of his thirst for revenge towards the archives and the institute and gertrude more than anything, the one he trusted and loved like a parent who abandoned him, left him for bait. michael wanted someone dead for his pain, he wanted to hurt someone like he had been hurt.

[nicoriice]

girlies came back

[murderandcoffee]

are we dragging isaac newton into the horrors now? was the apple that fell on him full of teeth?