2018 podfic stats
I should be working but instead I'm writing up a breakdown of 2018's podfic, which is.... very me XD Well, I made WAY MORE podfic in 2018 than in 2017, though, as I said in last year's post, that masks the fact that I started working on Changes of Perspective, a >9 hour Rivers of London (Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale) podfic, in 2017, and only finished in 2018. In numbers, I produced 12 hours, 08 minutes and 34 seconds of finished podfic (well, no, I made more than that, but we're only looking at podfic that were not collaborations, gifts, exchanges, or auction-items, the reasoning being that this is actually a question of how I spend my fannish energies, and in all those instances I don't have as much control over my own output). That's triple what I produced last year, but less than half of the year before that, so *shrug emoji*
so there's this, which mostly shows that Changes of Perspective ate my life. I do love making long podfics :D what this doesn't show is that one of those dragon age inquisition podfics is from April, before I had any interest in actually playing DA:I, and the other is from December, after I had logged over 100 hours of playtime and fallen in love with everyone. But the latter would not have happened without the former :D Next up, categories!
well, I had made a resolution last year to podfic more femslash as compared to dudeslash, and I didn't /o\ in fact, I almost finished the year without posting any femslash at all, but happily was able to fix that. Buuuuuuuuuuuut my femslash amounted to 4.3% of my dudeslash, so I missed that resolution. I also missed the resolution where dudeslash wouldn't make up more than 50% of my total output. Ugh. I'll try again next year.
To reiterate how this section is done, because it's less obvious than the others: podfics are split up depending on the racial background of the main character, where main character is defined as "who is the story about/who gets the most screentime." This is done by the super-scientific "who do I remember this story being about" test.
Also, it's obviously very tricky to define the race and ethnicity of fictional characters, some of whom are never physically described (see: Juno, from the penumbra podcast), or who may exist in a setting to which real-life categories don't map easily (Dorian Pavus, you beautiful peacock). But these media do exist in our world, where we do have variously-defined concepts of race and ethnicity, so we're going with that.
Obviously there's a lot to be said about how American (and subsets thereof!) concepts of race and ethnicity are not universal, and that's very true, but this is ultimately to help me examine where I'm putting my fannish energies, and I am American, so I'm afraid that I'm going to go with my gut :/
So! My other resolution was to have podfics focusing on poc be more than 50% of my output, and I nailed that one! Obviously Changes of Perspective, which focuses on Peter Grant, whose father is White British and whose mother is Fula and originally from Sierra Leone. I also had a podfic about Erik Killmonger (The Wandering God, Erik/Heimdall) and another that was about both M'Baku and T'Challa (A Rare Bloom, M’Baku/T’challa). Finally, I had two that focused on Dorian Pavus, from the fantasy land of Thedas, about whose real-life equivalent race/ethnicity much digital ink has been spilt. The game creators* meant him to be Indian, and cast a British Indo-Fijian and Malaysian voice actor (Ramon Tikaram) to play him, so I’m comfy coming down on the side of “fantasy!southeast asian.”
So! A good amount of success on the podficcing-non-white-characters front, very little success on the podficcing-non-dudeslash front. Will try to keep one success going and make the other one happen, and I'm happy to say that I'm currently queued up for both, though I am a bit worried that the second of my big projects won't be done this year, which would put the non-dudeslash part in jeopardy. But, all I can do is try, so wish me luck!
* sources were lost when the bioware forums were taken down, but several are saved here:
https://medium.com/@amandahjean/stop-whitewashing-dorian-pavus-75c11974411e
http://dragonaging.tumblr.com/post/90568515838/knight-enchanter-dragonaging-im-sorry-guys
so there's this, which mostly shows that Changes of Perspective ate my life. I do love making long podfics :D what this doesn't show is that one of those dragon age inquisition podfics is from April, before I had any interest in actually playing DA:I, and the other is from December, after I had logged over 100 hours of playtime and fallen in love with everyone. But the latter would not have happened without the former :D Next up, categories!
well, I had made a resolution last year to podfic more femslash as compared to dudeslash, and I didn't /o\ in fact, I almost finished the year without posting any femslash at all, but happily was able to fix that. Buuuuuuuuuuuut my femslash amounted to 4.3% of my dudeslash, so I missed that resolution. I also missed the resolution where dudeslash wouldn't make up more than 50% of my total output. Ugh. I'll try again next year.
To reiterate how this section is done, because it's less obvious than the others: podfics are split up depending on the racial background of the main character, where main character is defined as "who is the story about/who gets the most screentime." This is done by the super-scientific "who do I remember this story being about" test.
Also, it's obviously very tricky to define the race and ethnicity of fictional characters, some of whom are never physically described (see: Juno, from the penumbra podcast), or who may exist in a setting to which real-life categories don't map easily (Dorian Pavus, you beautiful peacock). But these media do exist in our world, where we do have variously-defined concepts of race and ethnicity, so we're going with that.
Obviously there's a lot to be said about how American (and subsets thereof!) concepts of race and ethnicity are not universal, and that's very true, but this is ultimately to help me examine where I'm putting my fannish energies, and I am American, so I'm afraid that I'm going to go with my gut :/
So! My other resolution was to have podfics focusing on poc be more than 50% of my output, and I nailed that one! Obviously Changes of Perspective, which focuses on Peter Grant, whose father is White British and whose mother is Fula and originally from Sierra Leone. I also had a podfic about Erik Killmonger (The Wandering God, Erik/Heimdall) and another that was about both M'Baku and T'Challa (A Rare Bloom, M’Baku/T’challa). Finally, I had two that focused on Dorian Pavus, from the fantasy land of Thedas, about whose real-life equivalent race/ethnicity much digital ink has been spilt. The game creators* meant him to be Indian, and cast a British Indo-Fijian and Malaysian voice actor (Ramon Tikaram) to play him, so I’m comfy coming down on the side of “fantasy!southeast asian.”
So! A good amount of success on the podficcing-non-white-characters front, very little success on the podficcing-non-dudeslash front. Will try to keep one success going and make the other one happen, and I'm happy to say that I'm currently queued up for both, though I am a bit worried that the second of my big projects won't be done this year, which would put the non-dudeslash part in jeopardy. But, all I can do is try, so wish me luck!
* sources were lost when the bioware forums were taken down, but several are saved here:
https://medium.com/@amandahjean/stop-whitewashing-dorian-pavus-75c11974411e
http://dragonaging.tumblr.com/post/90568515838/knight-enchanter-dragonaging-im-sorry-guys