![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
auroracloudThere'll be a Yuletide post soon, but first I've got to type out some thoughts on another story thing entirely. Because I've been so disorganized lately, I haven't got around to writing much here about how much I've fallen in love with podcast dramas in the past year and especially the past few months, when I've found some really amazing stuff. I've commented on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
podcastjoy about my discoveries semi-regularly, but nothing much here. In the latest friending meme I've acquired a few more friends/subscribers who are also into podcasts, so at least there are more than one or two people who may know what I'm going on about.
So anyway, I've been meaning to do sort of organized posts about them where I'd rec a few favourite podcasts per post and then do cut-tag posts where I talk spoilery thoughts about specific ones, but I should have realized that's just too coherent and sensible for me. I must brace myself to the fact that I'm just going to occasionally blurt out lots of verbal flailing whenever one of them gives me TOO MANY FEELS. And that's what you're getting now. I am going to start with a bit of a not-really-spoilery introduction before I dive into all the FLAILS OF FEELS. I should note that I'm only capable of doing this because I first did some crocheting, dancing, and chocolate-eating to get myself back together.
Weirdly enough I'm starting about my very latest obsession, rather than one of those I've been listening to for months. The Penumbra Podcast has been on my radar for a while, as it's quite popular and you keep hearing about it if you read about podcast dramas, but I hadn't got around to checking it out yet; recently, on this brilliant Tumblr blog called Podcasts described badly, this podcast got the description "Pick a genre. Now it's gay." Bad description or not, I've rarely encountered a more enticing description of anything. I mean, that's basically my entire philosophy nowadays. I should add that in this context (both for me and the podcast) you need to interpret the word gay as encompassing everything not straight or cis. A preferred version might be "Pick a genre. Now it's queer."
Anyway. Yes. The concept of the podcast is that The Penumbra is a hotel with guests from "everywhere and everywhen" and in various episodes you go into different rooms to get the stories of various people from different universes and genres, which is a handy way of getting several different stories under the same roof. The first season especially contains some stand-alones - I only listened to one of them, a delightful f/f Wild West type of story involving a schoolteacher, a bandit and a bunch of orphans (and one very useless fiancé). The rest of the stand-alones sounded too dark or scary or triggering for me. One of the great things about this show is how meticulous it is about content warnings. But it has two long-running story series. One of them, The Second Citadel, seems to be a somewhat Pratchett-ian Medieval-ish fantasy romp. It only had one two-part story plus short bonus in the first season, and that story was a bit all over the place, but it had a fabulous female knight called Sir Caroline, so I'll be glad to stick around for more adventures.
The other long-running series made up most of the first season and seems to continue to many many more episodes in the second and third seasons - the Juno Steel series. Basically, it's queer space noir set on a future Mars inhabited by humans, full of delightful tropes but super queer. The central character is Juno Steel, a queer space noir detective who is an utterly fabulous and exasperating disaster bisexual - or can I call him bisexual when he's also non-binary? (While Juno goes by he/him pronouns and by Mr Steel, he's occasionally is referred to as a lady, both by himself and at least one person who knows him well, and he's cool with having the name of a goddess; also according to some fanficcers' comments, the creators have confirmed him being nb.) Well, he is a disaster queer in any case. There's also this suave and attractive master thief, and you see where this is going, don't you?
And there are lots of fabulous female characters, and lots of same-sex couples among supporting/guest characters. Juno has an extremely bubbly and frothy secretary/assistant who seems really flighty until she needs to be super capable and rock the world and she does that. I love her. When she gets asked about her preferences in one story, as in men or women, the only coherent answer she manages to give is "I ain't choosy". And there are all sorts of people with fascinating stories, and sometimes emotionally pretty hard but also brilliant stuff, and you really should give it a try unless some of the content warnings get you. (It isn't super dark - I could deal with it and I'm really sensitive, though admittedly I had to take one story very carefully - but the genre brings a certain amount of violence with it, Juno is pretty gun-happy as your space noir detectives are, and there are some distressing goings-on in some stories. But as I said, they're careful with content warnings.)
Anyway, the rest of this is going to be me flailing about Juno Steel and Season 1 with spoilers, so don't read below the cut if you haven't listened to this but want to (or have started but aren't done with S1).
Okay, so I listened to the end of Season One today, to the end of Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place, and well, let us start with *takes a deep breath*
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
JUNO STEEL YOU DAMN IDIOT WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BREAK MY HEART AND MAKE ME CRY? WHY CAN'T YOU LET YOURSELF BE HAPPY, YOU FOOL? WHYYYYYYYY???
I can't take it, those two are so in love and they're SO DUMB and it's so frustrating!!!
And yeah, I know, if they wanted to do more seasons, Juno couldn't really run off to the stars at the end of S1, I GUESS. BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT HURT ANY LESS. Also it's not exactly surprising that Juno is someone who can't let himself be happy, and who'll rather hide himself behind cynicism and a wall of "I must do this" that can be seen from SPACE, than take a chance at being so emotionally vulnerable as to run off with someone he is desperately and stupidly in love with who also loves him desperately and stupidly. I mean I guess of course he'd do exactly this. IT STILL HURTS THOUGH. Did he have to do it so damn painfully, too? Guess he did because he's Juno, but grrraaaarghh.
Also, rationally I can see that a person who can't stay still in any one place and a person who's strongly rooted in one place are going to need more time to work something out, especially when they've both clearly got shitloads of trauma. STILL HURTS. Damn it, Peter, you couldn't have given him the option of "let's try to make this work long-distance and only decide later if one of us is going to completely upend his life"? Guess that's in character, too.
I mean clearly the creators are doing things right, AO3 has over a thousand fics for this podcast, and about 90 % of them are Juno/Peter, and if everything was sorted out between them by the end of S1, that would be too easy, both storytelling-wise and psychologically. STILL HURTS, THOUGH.
AAAAAAHHH.
So anyway, I loved S1 madly even though it was EVIL AND PAINFUL, and I want to read and write about a thousand fics where Rita fixes Juno a huge mug of hot chocolate with whiskey and makes him talk his heart out and gives him lots of crazy advice she's learned from movies and somehow fixes everything between Juno and Nureyev. And I'm sure I'll burn through S2 pretty soon as well, once my heart has healed a bit from this one. Whyyyy do I keep falling in love with these stories that insist on trampling on my poor little heart and breaking into a million tiny pieces.
I guess I'm not going to be listening to the final few episodes of The Bright Sessions in the next days, ha. Talk about another show that keeps trampling over my heart until it's ground to dust. But I'll talk about that one later.
Well, I'm glad that Juno and Peter got to snog and cuddle and spend the night and say they're in love and all that. Thank goodness there are stories that will do this for queer characters even if those characters are DESPERATELY STUPID ABOUT LOVE AND THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER.
And poor Juno and his eye, ow ow ow. The show does enjoy hurting him in all sorts of ways, doesn't it? But I love that the story didn't really make the loss of the eye the great tragedy, and there's no angst or worry about whether he's any less attractive to Nureyev because of it, because of course he's not, it's not even an issue. Far too many stories would be like "I'm not lovable because I'm not whole anymore", and however many issues Juno has, at least this one didn't become an issue here.
Also, I love all the tropey space adventure stuff in these stories. Ancient Martians and their artifacts! Superweapons! Mindreading pills! Super-fast trains appearing out of nowhere in the desert! Space underworld! Femmes fatales and hommes fatales! Weird aliases! Shady agencies! Tragic backstories galore! Etc. etc. etc.
New friends & subscribers, I'm not always this flaily and incoherent about everything. Just many things.
podcastjoy about my discoveries semi-regularly, but nothing much here. In the latest friending meme I've acquired a few more friends/subscribers who are also into podcasts, so at least there are more than one or two people who may know what I'm going on about.So anyway, I've been meaning to do sort of organized posts about them where I'd rec a few favourite podcasts per post and then do cut-tag posts where I talk spoilery thoughts about specific ones, but I should have realized that's just too coherent and sensible for me. I must brace myself to the fact that I'm just going to occasionally blurt out lots of verbal flailing whenever one of them gives me TOO MANY FEELS. And that's what you're getting now. I am going to start with a bit of a not-really-spoilery introduction before I dive into all the FLAILS OF FEELS. I should note that I'm only capable of doing this because I first did some crocheting, dancing, and chocolate-eating to get myself back together.
Weirdly enough I'm starting about my very latest obsession, rather than one of those I've been listening to for months. The Penumbra Podcast has been on my radar for a while, as it's quite popular and you keep hearing about it if you read about podcast dramas, but I hadn't got around to checking it out yet; recently, on this brilliant Tumblr blog called Podcasts described badly, this podcast got the description "Pick a genre. Now it's gay." Bad description or not, I've rarely encountered a more enticing description of anything. I mean, that's basically my entire philosophy nowadays. I should add that in this context (both for me and the podcast) you need to interpret the word gay as encompassing everything not straight or cis. A preferred version might be "Pick a genre. Now it's queer."
Anyway. Yes. The concept of the podcast is that The Penumbra is a hotel with guests from "everywhere and everywhen" and in various episodes you go into different rooms to get the stories of various people from different universes and genres, which is a handy way of getting several different stories under the same roof. The first season especially contains some stand-alones - I only listened to one of them, a delightful f/f Wild West type of story involving a schoolteacher, a bandit and a bunch of orphans (and one very useless fiancé). The rest of the stand-alones sounded too dark or scary or triggering for me. One of the great things about this show is how meticulous it is about content warnings. But it has two long-running story series. One of them, The Second Citadel, seems to be a somewhat Pratchett-ian Medieval-ish fantasy romp. It only had one two-part story plus short bonus in the first season, and that story was a bit all over the place, but it had a fabulous female knight called Sir Caroline, so I'll be glad to stick around for more adventures.
The other long-running series made up most of the first season and seems to continue to many many more episodes in the second and third seasons - the Juno Steel series. Basically, it's queer space noir set on a future Mars inhabited by humans, full of delightful tropes but super queer. The central character is Juno Steel, a queer space noir detective who is an utterly fabulous and exasperating disaster bisexual - or can I call him bisexual when he's also non-binary? (While Juno goes by he/him pronouns and by Mr Steel, he's occasionally is referred to as a lady, both by himself and at least one person who knows him well, and he's cool with having the name of a goddess; also according to some fanficcers' comments, the creators have confirmed him being nb.) Well, he is a disaster queer in any case. There's also this suave and attractive master thief, and you see where this is going, don't you?
And there are lots of fabulous female characters, and lots of same-sex couples among supporting/guest characters. Juno has an extremely bubbly and frothy secretary/assistant who seems really flighty until she needs to be super capable and rock the world and she does that. I love her. When she gets asked about her preferences in one story, as in men or women, the only coherent answer she manages to give is "I ain't choosy". And there are all sorts of people with fascinating stories, and sometimes emotionally pretty hard but also brilliant stuff, and you really should give it a try unless some of the content warnings get you. (It isn't super dark - I could deal with it and I'm really sensitive, though admittedly I had to take one story very carefully - but the genre brings a certain amount of violence with it, Juno is pretty gun-happy as your space noir detectives are, and there are some distressing goings-on in some stories. But as I said, they're careful with content warnings.)
Anyway, the rest of this is going to be me flailing about Juno Steel and Season 1 with spoilers, so don't read below the cut if you haven't listened to this but want to (or have started but aren't done with S1).
Okay, so I listened to the end of Season One today, to the end of Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place, and well, let us start with *takes a deep breath*
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
JUNO STEEL YOU DAMN IDIOT WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BREAK MY HEART AND MAKE ME CRY? WHY CAN'T YOU LET YOURSELF BE HAPPY, YOU FOOL? WHYYYYYYYY???
I can't take it, those two are so in love and they're SO DUMB and it's so frustrating!!!
And yeah, I know, if they wanted to do more seasons, Juno couldn't really run off to the stars at the end of S1, I GUESS. BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT HURT ANY LESS. Also it's not exactly surprising that Juno is someone who can't let himself be happy, and who'll rather hide himself behind cynicism and a wall of "I must do this" that can be seen from SPACE, than take a chance at being so emotionally vulnerable as to run off with someone he is desperately and stupidly in love with who also loves him desperately and stupidly. I mean I guess of course he'd do exactly this. IT STILL HURTS THOUGH. Did he have to do it so damn painfully, too? Guess he did because he's Juno, but grrraaaarghh.
Also, rationally I can see that a person who can't stay still in any one place and a person who's strongly rooted in one place are going to need more time to work something out, especially when they've both clearly got shitloads of trauma. STILL HURTS. Damn it, Peter, you couldn't have given him the option of "let's try to make this work long-distance and only decide later if one of us is going to completely upend his life"? Guess that's in character, too.
I mean clearly the creators are doing things right, AO3 has over a thousand fics for this podcast, and about 90 % of them are Juno/Peter, and if everything was sorted out between them by the end of S1, that would be too easy, both storytelling-wise and psychologically. STILL HURTS, THOUGH.
AAAAAAHHH.
So anyway, I loved S1 madly even though it was EVIL AND PAINFUL, and I want to read and write about a thousand fics where Rita fixes Juno a huge mug of hot chocolate with whiskey and makes him talk his heart out and gives him lots of crazy advice she's learned from movies and somehow fixes everything between Juno and Nureyev. And I'm sure I'll burn through S2 pretty soon as well, once my heart has healed a bit from this one. Whyyyy do I keep falling in love with these stories that insist on trampling on my poor little heart and breaking into a million tiny pieces.
I guess I'm not going to be listening to the final few episodes of The Bright Sessions in the next days, ha. Talk about another show that keeps trampling over my heart until it's ground to dust. But I'll talk about that one later.
Well, I'm glad that Juno and Peter got to snog and cuddle and spend the night and say they're in love and all that. Thank goodness there are stories that will do this for queer characters even if those characters are DESPERATELY STUPID ABOUT LOVE AND THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER.
And poor Juno and his eye, ow ow ow. The show does enjoy hurting him in all sorts of ways, doesn't it? But I love that the story didn't really make the loss of the eye the great tragedy, and there's no angst or worry about whether he's any less attractive to Nureyev because of it, because of course he's not, it's not even an issue. Far too many stories would be like "I'm not lovable because I'm not whole anymore", and however many issues Juno has, at least this one didn't become an issue here.
Also, I love all the tropey space adventure stuff in these stories. Ancient Martians and their artifacts! Superweapons! Mindreading pills! Super-fast trains appearing out of nowhere in the desert! Space underworld! Femmes fatales and hommes fatales! Weird aliases! Shady agencies! Tragic backstories galore! Etc. etc. etc.
New friends & subscribers, I'm not always this flaily and incoherent about everything. Just many things.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-27 09:36 pm (UTC)I understand that it's possible to listen to Penumbra that way, but based on the last show like that I heard of—Thrilling Adventure Hour, I think?—I really enjoyed the premise of one show but couldn't deal with hopping through all of it to find just that. Perhaps at some point I will, but... unlikely right now! :)