Juno Steel and lots of FEELS, or, me going on about The Penumbra Podcast S1

There'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 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).


( The Penumbra Podcast: Juno Steel, S1 with SPOILERS and CAPS LOCK ABUSE )