Podfic: Dishonored
Is this more niche than my Kuroko no Basuke podfic? Probably not. But still pretty damn niche.
The Sea and Stars Are Yours, My Dear, But the Moon Would Not Cooperate by NeverwinterThistle (Dishonored, Corvo Attano/The Outsider) is probably the most pleased I have ever been with anything I've recorded. But let's start at the beginning. I had occasionally heard about Dishonored on twitter but never planned on getting the game myself because, well, anything that's not a JRPG is usually not something I'm good at. Stealth games in particular do not play to my strengths. But at some point someone (possibly from twitter?) recced this fic so highly and convincingly that I actually sat down and watched a play-through of Dishonored on youtube (which I thought was low-chaos but actually turned out to be high-chaos and WOW was I mad about that. Only ghosting play-throughs for this girl from now on).
Once I had lost a couple very enjoyable hours to watching all that, I went back to read the fic and absolutely loved every second of it. You probably don't even need to know the canon to enjoy this. It's all about an ageless, omniscient god-like being with limited understanding of human social interaction trying (and mostly failing) to woo a very bemused human. There's flower language (kinda) and picnics (kinda) and serenades and everything. It's hilarious, but also somehow keeps the eerie atmosphere of the source material, which I found incredibly impressive.
When I was rereading it last summer, I decided to ask for permission to record it, kinda on a whim because hey, 25k didn't sound too bad (sob), and the author was super nice and enthusiastic about it. I barely had to rerecord anything, aside from Jessamine's name, the pronunciation of which I forgot to look up until I was already more than half-way through. <.<'' Oh, and 'mischievous'. That's just a weird word. I probably had the most fun with The Outsider's voice, though in retrospect it might be a bit over the top. I had some trouble finding and keeping it at first, so I ended up watching all the Shrine cutscenes 10 million times and saying 'My dear Corvo' to myself over and over again. Fun times.
I spent a couple hours working on the cover art last year, only to completely switch out the background image in a matter of minutes this weekend. Somehow this photo just worked way better than the concept art of Dunwall Tower I had settled on. And the intro music is possibly the strangest thing about this entire project. It's the piano version of the kpop ending song of a kdrama adaptation of my favourite Shoujo manga, Skip Beat. And yet it somehow felt like the best fit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway. Like I said, I'm really pleased with how this podfic turned out. It's 03:30:09 long and you can download the .zip file here.
Enjoy! <3
P.S.: I finally started playing Dishonored myself recently, and it's going okay. But as it turns out I am surprisingly stubborn about going as low-chaos as possible. Which mostly means lots of saving and reloading. :P