Thursday Recs

[soc_puppet]

Hello again, and this week I have an actual rec for you!

The Adventure Zone: Balance Campaign - podcast and graphic novels. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. The advantages of the podcast are that it's effectively complete; you can listen to or read transcripts of all of it, whereas the graphic novels are still being made. The advantage of the graphic novels is that they're somewhat more polished and make some corrections earlier than the podcast did.

"Okay, Socchan," you say, "but what's the representation here?"

Well, the show may have been made by four straight white dudes, but during the story, you eventually learn that one of them is playing a character who's a gay man. There's also a super surprise trans woman character who you get to formally meet in the seventh story arc. And then there's a sapphic romance in the third arc, and this is where it gets a little bit complicated and where podcast vs. graphic novels can make a big difference:

Click the triangle to view spoilers

When the dungeon master started the campaign, he was completely unaware of the "bury your gays" trope. And the main character who's gay was not "out" in the podcast until the story arc that followed. Feedback from fans and a greater understanding of queer representation lead to what is quite possibly the only example of un-bury your gays I have ever heard of. In the podcast, this happens in the last three episodes, a good four or five arcs later; in the graphic novels, it happens at the end of the volume where the characters are introduced. So to be clear: It happens in both versions of the story! It just happens a lot sooner in the graphic novels than in the podcast.

The podcast also takes a little longer to hit its stride than the graphic novels (again, more polish), but if you can make it through the first few episodes, things do start getting pretty good, and then really good.



Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

Comments

[soc_puppet]

Oh, cool! Now I've got a short list of examples instead of only one 😃 I mean, it sounds like the Disco one was in less than favorable circumstances (Griffin at least had the grace to own his mistake and apologize for it), but still much better than the alternative (gay/queer characters staying buried).