My Three Favourite Genders Of Podcast Protag: Can Never Do Anything Wrong Ever™, Oh God They Do So

I saw a fanart by @alisaall_comic on instagram and couldn’t resist redrawing it with Merlin

man older generations just dont get how hard it is to get a job these days

youre trying to find entry levels jobs but they all require at least four years of knighthood or a lordship, the listings are only ever things like "stable cleaner, $7/hr" or "king of the realm, $120k annual, REQUIRED: sword from the lady of the lake"

ok you found a posting youre qualified for. now list list all of your conquests and all your chivalric values on your resume and then add your resume as a pdf and now also rewrite them in the boxes that auto populated and fix the formatting

and you cant tell older generations all of that because theyll just tell you about how they got their job by walking into a royal court and swearing fealty to the first king they saw and being granted a knighthood on the spot. literally if you try to do that these days the archers on the castle turrets will get you before the rattling of your armor is even within earshot

"just get a job with sir arthur"

gimme a break

the clanging of his armored ass cheeks brought down the walls of many a castle

Whenever arthur gets a new bethrothed

Merlin: Gaius she's evil

Gaius: you cant say that about every woman arthur tries to marry merlin, at this point you might as well marry him yourself if none of his suitors are to your standard

Merlin already making the plague rats sew together his wedding dress like cinderella: im prepared to make that sacrifice

I also love how audio fiction has always been a highly experimental medium, and likely always will be.

Financially, it has a low barrier for entry, a low point of diminishing returns, and a relatively small potential market. It's basically impervious to being taken over by giant studios - even the "big" networks like RQ would be considered indie in the film or game dev industries. With the exception of the BBC, they tend to dip their toes into audio fiction, figure out quickly that, although it's beloved by its fans, there isn't that kind of money in it, and proceed to leave us alone forever.

Then there's the fact that it propagates largely by word of mouth. Audio dramas owe everything to obsessive nerds forcing nearly everyone they know to listen to that podcast they just discovered.

So it's more about the thing being actually good, plus a decent amount of luck and persistence.

There's no optimally marketable success formula being relentlessly enforced by gatekeeping jellybean-counters because they don't exist here. So people make whatever they want. So it draws people to it who are looking for something different. And the cycle feeds itself, and the medium gets weirder (in a good way).

It may very well ALWAYS remain the wild west of storytelling.

So listeners tell your friends about that podcast!

And creators, make the weird thing! There are no rules! It can be an hour long or Breaker Whiskey short, or Re:Dracula all over the place length. It can be another tape recorder framing or another voicemail framing or basically just an audiobook. It can be any genre or blend of genres. This creative space gives us the opportunity to be our own target audience in a way rarely found elsewhere.

If you enjoy the thing you're making, odds are somone else out there will enjoy it too. I've already found this to be true, and my time as an audio fiction creator is still just beginning.

Peace and love on every planet, y'all!

Stollwerck’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Fritz Phil Schmidt (c.1898)

The Goose Girl, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Godfather Death