Aurora's Sundry Notes

Okay, folks, time for one of these again! Basically just books and podcasts, I haven't engaged with any other culture recently, other than the occasional music.

Books

Since the last, I finished the utterly delightful Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee, which I was reading at the time. I absolutely loved it, and the ending surprised me and was very different from what I was hoping for but utterly wonderful. Much recommended! After that I read Spellswept, a prequel novelette to the Harwood Spellbook series by Stephanie Burgis, a very delightful historical fantasy romance with a black female lead, and younger versions of some characters from Snowspelled that I read first. And now very recently I've been reading The Edge of Worlds, the fourth book in Martha Wells' Raksura series, which is epic fantasy about this really awesome shapeshifter race. (If I were to say they're kind of like human/reptilian person/dragon shapeshifters, with complicated social structures and matriarchy, you'd have something like the right idea.) It's been so brilliant, and I finished it today. I hadn't realised/remembered this book is actually the first of a duology so it basically leaves off at a very tense point! I might have to borrow the next book immediately.

The Raksura books have awesome and fascinating worldbuilding, with one of the most interesting fantasy races I've ever come across, they're written excellently, and very importantly they have fabulous characters! And I just need to give a special shoutout to Chime, I love Chime so much. I love all the central characters, but the smart snarky sensitive best friend (( slight spoiler - relationships, not plot )) is so much my thing. And I could basically read endlessly about Moon, Jade and Chime being awesome. This book also occasionally went into the point of view of characters other than Moon, to show things going on in places where he wasn't, that was also very cool after seeing the world only through his POV for three books.

Anyway, that's my fannish book gushing of the week! Probably.

I've also read and finished some space non-fiction books, and I'm currently reading Randall Munroe's How To: Absurd Scientific Answers to Common Real-World Problems, which is just as delightful as expected (this is the creator of the xkcd webcomic), and a hilarious way to learn some science.

I had to return Dread Nation by Justina Ireland to the library without finishing it, but I've placed a new hold on it, so I'll be able to finish it when I get it again, I hope. It's amazing, but it's also a touch more violent than I'm comfortable with, so I didn't manage to progress very fast... For lighter reading, I've started A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole. It's a romance novel with Black characters, and the leading lady is a scientist, which is brilliant. But I'm not great at reading het romance, and entitled dudes who need a good woman's love to learn to not be entitled is so not a favourite trope of mine, so I haven't been progressing lately. Maybe I just need to skip straight to the f/f novella later in the series.

I don't yet know what I'll read next if it isn't the fifth Raksura book. It's probably that. Unless someone else borrows it before I get around to it.

Podcasts

Quite a bit in this realm! I mentioned earlier that I finished the Juno Steel Season 2 stories in the Penumbra Podcast, and it was amazing. Juno Steel Season Two: a long, often arduous journey, but so, so worth it. I'm currently listening to The Battle at World's End, the Second Citadel finale, which is as many as six episodes, and I'm really enjoying it and wanting to squishhug many of the characters, especially that certain human-lizard-human trio.

With Wolf 359, I'm far enough in Season 4 to have entered the Shit-Hits-the-Fan phase, and am kind of scared to go on. The last episode I listened to was episode 55, and I both want to know what happens next and don't want to know, so I've been stuck here for a while. I'm so worried about so many characters.

So I've been listening to a lot of other stuff as well. I've talked about This Planet Needs a Name before, I think - it's a thoughtful, hopeful story about a small crew settling a new planet, meaning to prepare it for a larger group of humans who are in cryo-sleep until the planet is ready with them. It deals with some difficult topics like colonization and ethics of space settlement and ecology, as well as mental health and trauma, but it's also very sweet and lovely and hopeful. All the characters are queer in one way or another, it's very strong on found family, the characters are representative of many backgrounds and nationalities, the characters have been created in collaboration with their actors which is also so cool. It also has the loveliest, friendliest Discord server, which I recently joined, maintained by the creators. It currently has four full episodes out, plus a bunch of minisodes like the characters' job interviews, songs, stories, and even recipes. I've been listening to the new episodes as they aired pretty much since the show started, and I really love it. After listening to the recently released fourth episode, I started re-listening to the whole thing, and I've now re-listened up to the third episode.

I've recently found a whole lot of new shows I love. Directly via This Planet Needs a Name, because some of the same creators are involved, I found:
- Light Hearts, a super cute queer comedy show about a queer café/bar that has ghosts. It's very new and they've only got three full episodes out, but they're absolutely adorable episodes. The recent one even had a song! A totally adorable one, too.
- Hughes and Mincks, Ghost Detectives. A cute, silly comedy about two ghost detectives. The ghosts so far have been adorable.
- Also I've started on Seen and Not Heard, which is a podcast "about hearing loss and deaf gain" as it's described. It's only got a few short prologues out so far, and I haven't listened to all of them yet, but so far it's really good.

Shows I've found otherwise through recommendations:
- The Beacon, which I just binged in less than three weeks (it has two seasons and a bunch of minisodes). It's an urban fantasy podcast about college students who discover they've suddenly acquired magical powers, and try to navigate these powers and each other and, well, themselves. They've all got code names based on animals, and the main character, Bee, is an adorable queer ace anxious mess of a girl who tries to bring everyone together despite, and all the other characters are fabulous and adorable as well, and it's very queer.
- Phantomwise, which has just started and only has a few short episodes out, but I loooooove it. Basically when it was mentioned and I looked it up, I saw that it was based on Alice in Wonderland and the cast included Beth Crane (of We Fix Space Junk), and I didn't have to ask anything else, I went to look it up. It's got delightful dialogue and monologue and lots of alliteration, and it's basically about everything else except Alice's adventures (so far we've been hanging out with Alice's sister when Alice disappears, and Mary Ann a.k.a. Mock Alice who comes from Wonderland and ends up in Alice's place).
- Hit the Bricks, which was promoted in the outros of Phantomwise. The summary said "a musical radio play starring Michelle Agresti" and I basically didn't need to know anything else to check it out. Though also they're based on the Oz books. (Michelle Agresti appears in parts of Wolf 359 and, like several other members of the cast there, is one of the people I'd genuinely listen to recite a phone book.) It's really lovely and feel-good and the music is great, and though I'd probably get more out of it if it hadn't been almost 30 years since I read the Oz books, it's still really enjoyable.
- Solutions to Problems, a sci-fi comedy which is basically an advice radio show but in space, with aliens. One of the hosts is human and one is alien, and callers are from all over the galaxy, and it's hilarious and the host characters and their actors are so great. Really good if you need cheering up and enjoy sci-fi comedy.

One final note, We Fix Space Junk started it's Season Three recently, and it's been so much fun already! Definitely recommend checking out the new episodes.

I'm probably forgetting a few I've checked out recently, but it's so late I need to stop. (I got distracted playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp for a bit. Which has happened a lot, to be honest.)

Uh, I'll try to soon post content of other kinds, too!

Hey, let's have a recent culture & media round-up since I've actually got stuff to report for, and I feel like posting something! It's also very rainy here, which feels like the appropriate mood for some cultural posting. I think I'll start calling these recent culture round-ups rather than "culture consumed" which stuck to me from some fannish podcast but doesn't really work for me.

Books

Very promisingly, it seems that my reading block might be lifting! Since I last posted about books, I finished The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I also read two novellas: Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather, which is nuns in space and living spaceships and other cool space biology stuff, as well as an f/f subplot, and it was good; and Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis, which is the first of her alternate historical fantasy of an England where men are mages and women rule politics, because that whole thing with Boudicca and the Romans went rather differently than it did in our universe. It was really enjoyable, a sweet bit of feel-good escapism that still wasn't too fluffy or insubstantial. I really look forward to reading the rest of the series, and the third novella is going to be an f/f romance. This one was m/f romance, but for once it was an m/f pair I totally adored and enjoyed! Yay!

Currently I'm reading Yoon Ha Lee's Dragon Pearl, which is middle-grade space opera science fantasy and it's totally, totally awesome. I'm not even finding it as easy as before to read middle-grade or YA books, but here it all totally works for me, while I'm sure it also works for younger readers and damn would I have liked to have something like this to read when I was a kid. If someone's curious to try Yoon Ha Lee's work but is scared to dip into the Machineries of Empire series for whatever reason, this could be a good one to try!

I've also started reading Justina Ireland's Dread Nation, which is alternate history steampunk-ish historical-fantasy-horror with black girls being badass at killing zombies. I'm not great at reading about zombies without getting squeamish, so this is progressing more slowly than it deserves - the writing is great and the story super engaging. Anyway, this means I'm currently reading about two Very Bad Teenage Girls who it would be a horror to be in any way responsible for. I'm finding this very empowering.

Podcasts

In non-fiction podcasts, I continue to enjoy Exolore's exploration of fictional alien planets and the life that could develop on them. I have listened to other shows as well, but my mind's a bit of a sieve.

In fiction podcasts:
In The Penumbra Podcast, I finished Juno Steel and the Long Way Home (very exciting ending, and I cried a bit at a certain point, and I look forward to the next story but need to be in the right mindset for it) and I also listened to the Second Citadel Story The Spiral Sage, which was awesome. I in particular enjoyed Rilla's speech in the courtroom, hee. *squees a bit* Not saying more here because of spoilers - at some point I should do a proper spoiler-cut post just about the Penumbra. Anyway. This means I've only got two stories of each left before the end of S2 - it's actually in sight! Two Juno stories, each of them two episodes, and two Second Citadel stories, one of them two episodes and the other five (!) episodes, plus a one-episode special for the Second Citadel. Very exciting!

I've started listening to S4 of Wolf 359. Extremely exciting! I've listened the first three full episodes plus the minisode after the first episode. All very intense stuff. I was amused / surprised by Zach Valenti's intro to the season, though, because it turns out there's absolutely no difference between hyper-excited Eiffel and hyper-excited Zach Valenti, at least in how they speak. Heh.

I finished listening to the Far Meridian minisodes, and am now waiting for S3 with queer longing.

Other stuff

I've actually watched some things! I watched the recording of the Globe Theatre's A Midsummer Night's Dream that was available on YouTube for about a week after Midsummer. Then I also watched the National Theatre / Bridge Theatre version of the same. I of course had to watch both just before the time to watch them ran out because I'm like that. But anyway, I enjoyed them both, but found the NT/Bridge Theatre one particularly great, it really did something unique with the play and the characters, and I felt the changes they did worked, and made sense in the context of the production, which is more than you can say for many other reworked productions of classics, and they dealt really well with some aspects of the play that are... rather uncomfortable if you think about them. I was so excited by this experience I might actually get around to watching more of these theatre recordings online as they're available. We'll see! It would be nice. I used to be such a theatre nut, and it's been bothering me that I haven't been able to take advantage of all that's been offered online for free in the past months. Though I do wish I could afford to donate. Maybe later.

I'm wondering if I need to start including a section for gaming... Not that I've got a wide range of games I play, but this year I've started playing a few mobile phone games, mostly for distraction and comfort during stress and bad times. I've been playing too much Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp since I started it a couple of months ago, but it does make me feel good. Anyway, this week I learned about a game called June's Journey, where you play a 1920s lady who ends up having to investigate the suspicious deaths of her sister and brother-in-law. You alternate between solving mystery scenes by finding clues etc. and restoring and building up the fancy estate she's now in charge of. It's extremely pretty and atmospheric, the gameplay is really good and the balance between the different aspects works for me, and the main character looks very Miss Fisher-like, which makes me want to watch some Miss Fisher. I might do some of that next. I'm also mostly managing not to call her Juno instead of June, which I think is very good of me.

The world is being scary in lots of ways, and I'm not the right person or in the right state of mind to talk about it, I'm just going to talk about the recent culture I've consumed/enjoyed/whatever is the right word. Look, I'm actually managing this on a Reading Wednesday! I don't manage that often.

Books

I am reading, even if not as much as I used to, back in the old days. But since my last post like this, I've finished the Finnish space book I was reading, and I read the first book of K.J. Charles's A Charm of Magpies series, The Magpie Lord. I found it mostly a delightful gay historical fantasy romp with interesting characters and lots of sex in various English settings; though at times a touch too violent for my liking, and the relationship & sex dynamics in this one aren't the kind I often go for. But it was good and interesting, and a light enough read to manage with my quarantine brain in a reasonable amount of time, and I do want to continue reading the series.

I also finished a volume of translated Chinese poetry from more than a millennium ago, which I much loved, and which I've been reading for a long time.

I continue to read and enjoy The Priory of the Orange Tree; I'm nearly 90 % through it, so it shouldn't take terribly long, it's just the quarantine brain that makes it slow. I'm also rereading This is How You Lose the Time War, because I want to, and rereads of a favourite and hopeful and beautiful f/f book are probably one of the best things for quarantine brain and anxiety brain.

I'm planning to DNF and return to library a bunch of books that, let's face it, I don't want to read enough to actually finish them. I don't know why I've had weird guilt about not-finishing books lately, I'm usually pretty merciless at that - life is too short to waste on books you don't like. Seriously this is not a time to feel obligated to read anything that isn't working for me, regardless of how many prizes it won or how much I liked the author's previous book or how many months I've already had it from the library or even how I really should read more from non-English-speaking parts of the world. Also, a lot of these books were started/borrowed/placed on hold before the pandemic, and we all know that was about 72 years ago at least, so ugh, who cares. I've got books around I actually want to read.

(I do wish people from my country were slightly better at writing books I want to finish, though. Non-fiction still seems to go all right, though, and sometimes poetry works.)

Podcasts

I've somehow calmed down in my "only consume podcasts" frenzy of the early isolation days. But I finished my re-listen of The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, and aaah I love it so much, even more the second time around, and I have so many feelings and thoughts about the characters, and especially this time around I was hit by Massive McCabe Feels. And generally Agent Feels but especially McCabe feels. I want to write fanfic about this show. (Let me know if you're a native English speaker who'd like to beta such fanfic, if I get it written. Though I generally need to do a beta call for "hey who can help me with all these tiny fandoms I seem to have picked up".)

In other podcast-listening news, on the Penumbra Podcast I finished Juno Steel and the Monster's Reflection, which was not an easy story, but damn it was significant and damn it was good. I also cried my eyes out after finishing it because just so many feelings, how dare they, it was good.

I finished re-listening to Midnight Radio, and I've continued re-listening to S2 of The Far Meridian. It's got a few recent bonus minisodes released, but I figure I'll finish my re-listen first and then listen to them so it goes in sequence. Mind you, it's trying my patience a bit to keep seeing them on my podcast feed!

I've been trying to slowly check out some new shows, but it's really hard to focus on anything new, anything that isn't either continuing an existing favourite or re-listening to something I've already heard. I also might need to stop my subscriptions to short-story podcasts because I can't seem to listen to any of those. Except for Toasted Cake, it's apparently short enough (it's delightful SFF flash fiction, for those who don't know it).

Other

Hmm, I really shouldn't subscribe to streaming TV because I'm still making my way through Gentleman Jack though I really like it. I'm, uh, almost halfway through (for reference, it's 8 episodes long), but then it turned out I wasn't in the right mindset for working conditions of 19th century English coal mines. Hmm, I also managed to somewhat make use of all the free arts and entertainment online, by watching the first act of Swan Lake by English National Ballet, but then I failed to continue to the rest of the ballet before it went offline. Still, it was beautiful! Maybe I'll manage to catch some other ballet and actually watch all of it. It could be relaxing!

Some things are opening up in my country, so there exists a chance I might go to visit an actual physical museum at some point.

Okay, I've been meaning to manage these "culture consumed" posts for a while. Seriously, I'm probably just going to have to go back to trying to do a Reading Wednesday and then pick other days for doing other forms of culture because I apparently find it too much work to list them all at once. And then I delay for weeks and then it especially is too much work. But I just want to chatter about culture things so now I'm doing it.

Books

This is going to be fast, because I'm not managing to read much now. Pretty much ever since the whole global-pandemic-with-lockdowns-and-social-distancing thing started, my concentration has been really bad for reading. I don't know why. Normally reading is my way of escaping from bad stuff, of comforting myself when things are hard, but now I mostly can't. It's not like I can't focus on anything at all, either, but somehow reading isn't working, or only works for small amounts of time. When I try to read for a long time, or when I'm too anxious, I can't focus, or I just get so tense it's awful. I'm really envious of everyone who can keep reading through this because I miss that.

This is to say that since I last posted about books, the only books I've managed to finish are T. Kingfisher's The Raven and the Reindeer and a re-read of Martha Wells's second Murderbot novella, the latter because I figured rereads might work better. The evidence about that is inconclusive, because it's a 150-page novella, and I took at least a week to read it. Pretty sure that the first time around I read through it in a day, and I had high fever then. But I did generally enjoy it, in the small bits I managed to read it in. However, there was maybe a bit too much, uh, murdering going on for my current state of mind. Maybe the next reread should be a Becky Chambers or Red, White, and Royal Blue. But now I've started reading a Finnish YA fantasy novel by one of the only current Finnish authors that I love just as much as my favourite foreign ones (Siiri Enoranta). I really like it, and it's in my own language, so I'm hoping that makes it easier to read.

To go back to The Raven and the Reindeer for a bit, it's a feminist f/f retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and I enjoyed a lot. I mean, it's a feminist f/f retelling of The Snow Queen, so we're doing pretty well already, and it had awesome animals, like a proper smart-ass raven and reindeer some magical flying otters. But I got inordinately distracted by the fact that there were a lot of hints she was setting it in the Finnish culture, or a Finnish-based one - references to uniquely Finnish folklore and myths, especially - but wasn't aware that in Finnish, we don't have gendered third-person pronouns. Whether someone is "he" or "she" is not a conversation you can have in Finnish. (Of course you can otherwise have conversations about whether someone or something is male or female, but they wouldn't rise out of conversations that the he-or-she question would rise out of. Also, it seems weird, if we assume they're speaking/thinking in Finnish, that a raven would not like being called "it" because "it" is a totally proper pronoun to use of animals even if we think of them as intelligent and personable, for example with pets, and it wouldn't feel particularly demeaning/objectifying. In fact, in colloquial speech we use that pronoun for humans as well, because, huh, I don't know, we just do. I tend to always feel I'm being particularly official or excessively "proper" if I even use our word for he/she about a person in conversation. But I don't know if this was the case in the sort of time the story seems set in.)

Sorry, that's a long aside, and probably would literally only bother Finnish readers like me, but it just made me really confused about where I was supposed to locate this mentally, because every now and then it was telling me to locate it in my country, but then it also was clear Gerda was thinking in a language that doesn't match with the culture. Also Gerda isn't a Finnish name, but we do have plenty of Swedish names in use so that's not as much of a problem. As for Kay, though, that's not how we spell that name. But the names probably just come from the English renditions of the original tale.

Uh, I've been waiting to get that off my chest for a couple of weeks, thank you for reading this chapter and we'll move on now.

Podcasts

While I can't focus on books, you know what I can focus on? Podcasts! So many podcasts! In a time when I can't really meet anyone in person other than the occasional grocery store worker or a neighbour I pass by at the yard from a proper distance, it feels comforting to have some voices accompanying me, I guess. I've especially dived maybe even deeper into my podcast drama obsession, so I seriously need to trim this to just the main things. So I'll do those.

So, uh, maybe a month ago I started listening to Wolf 359. ( Rambling for a few paragraphs, mostly not spoilery but a bit. I've listened until the mid-season Three. )

So anyway, I've got a new fannish obsession there and it's... quite something.

Out of my pre-existing podcast obsessions, I've been slowly going through Season Two of The Penumbra Podcast, and it seems like I finally got through one really rough phase of the Juno Steel storyline (I'm sure there are still other rough things to come, but at least one arc arrived to a conclusion) and I was rewarded by a more hopeful, and truly excellent tale in Juno Steel and the Time Gone By. While there still was dark stuff in it, too, there also were some lovely things, and let's just say that I've now got a new f/f ship that I adore madly already. I might have to really write a separate entry about this, because I have lots of feelings and maybe even thinky thoughts. We'll see if I managed that!

And still with The Penumbra, today I listened to the Second Citadel story The Moonlit Hermit, both parts, because it was just so good and I couldn't stop. I love Rilla so damn much. I could honestly just listen to Rilla's research logs for ten hours, I wouldn't even need a plot, though I also enjoyed the plot and the character interactions immensely. But Rilla is brilliant.

You know, I'd rather love for all these scientist ladies from different podcasts to get together and solve some sort of a problem. I could just imagine Rilla, Violet Liu from The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, Dr. Eurys from Tides and Nora from The 12:37 getting together and being really amazing at sciencing at a problem. (Though Nora would probably be pretty unsettled since she doesn't do so great without her normal circumstances. But Rilla's good at dealing with Damien's anxiety, so she'd probably be help there, too.)

In terms of re-listening to old favorites, I've recently listened to S1 of We Fix Space Junk for the second time, and had even more fun than the first time. I've moved to re-listening to S2 of The Far Meridian, though I'm still in the early episodes - this part is a bit heavy listening, so it isn't the best time in the world for it, and I'm taking it slowly. And... I finally started re-listening to The Strange Case of the Starship Iris, and oh my goodness it's so good it's so good. I'm loving it even more this time around, maybe because now I already know everyone and I know what's generally going on and can just get more into it. I remember the first time I took a while to warm up to Arkady, but well, now I know how much I adore her, so I don't mind her being, oh, well, her general Arkady-ness. *waves* I've already listened to the first two episodes today, and I have a feeling I'll be going through it pretty fast this time around.

As I said, I've listened to plenty more podcasts, but I guess this covers the main things that I'm the most obsessed with.

TV Shows

Recently I got an HBO subscription for a bit - I'm still in the free trial period, but since I'm not a very fast watcher, it probably won't be enough. I'd been wanting to watch His Dark Materials and Gentleman Jack, and I've now watched the first episodes of both.

His Dark Materials is really excellently made and exciting and beautiful and seems to be superbly cast so far. But I remember the books pretty well, especially the first one because I read it many times while waiting for the sequels as a wee geeky girl-child, and well, now I'm watching it with this dreadful sense of foreboding because I know what's coming up, and it's especially bad with all the child characters because I know some bad things are coming and... I'm not sure if I can actually watch something like this at this time period. But at the same time it's so beautiful and well-made and it has beautiful music.

Gentleman Jack, though, is a delight, and doesn't give me the same difficult feelings. I have a feeling it won't take me long to watch it, the first episode was already so, so good. Of course there's complicated stuff that doesn't feel good, because history is history and the English class system is the English class system and yeah, that would be a whole essay. But it's more usual stuff that is easier to deal with than more epic danger. I'm going to have to write more about it when I've watched more of it. But it's really, really good.

And now I really have to stop and get on with other stuff before it's midnight in my time zone again.

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 )