Fiction Frequency

Small Victories is so good. IT IS SO GOOD!!!! An absolutely beautiful, heartbreaking, glorious exploration of addiction, grief, and the ups and downs of recovery as a road, not a destination. I've just started Season 3 and I feel so lucky to come into this story as that season has been freshly released.

A recently recovered drug addict tries to start her new lease on life, too bad life has it out for her. This drama follows Marisol through the ups and downs of a year in her life.

Highly recommend this show. It's interpersonal and psychological, almost slice of life at times. Marisol is Black bisexual woman in her early twenties with a girlfriend she loves but also puts on a pedestal and struggles to be honest with. The exploration of the ups/downs/rock bottom is when you stop digging is really difficult to hear but also incredibly loving. There's a lot of understanding and gentleness for what drives people with addictive personalities, without making excuses for the hurt they cause. Just... yeah, loving.

sOther audio dramas made by black people and featuring majority black casts include Fan Wars by Shenee Howard, Sumeria by Mark Luckie, Vega by Ivuoma Okoro, Deadbeats Inc by Aisha Casey, Bronzeville and Harlem Queen - though I'm not sure about queer rep. Shows made by mixed crews with black queer characters include Unwell (Lily is a queer black woman), Forest 404, The Lavender Ladies podcast, Kalila Stormfire and Masala Jones (2/2 - but sorry, there's more)

Punishment Island is made in Uganda and stars a queer black woman. The Van is engineered by Rye Dorsey, who is a black person, and features a bunch of queer characters. When Angels Visit Armadillo is made by a mixed crew and features a black lesbian character. Ok, I think that's everything I know!! Radio Elusia also has a mixed crew and black director, but I don't know if it'll feature queer characters (3/3)

Thanks so much! This is a great bunch to look at. Fan Wars can confirm no queer rep but it’s a very fun story. If you’re Star Wars Fan and have spent time in fanspheres it’s really worth a listen.

@mistah-aluminum and @cactusjuicepod also suggested the list put out by the folks at Death By Dying which isn’t exclusively queer but has some really good ones and overlaps with @lesetoilesfous suggestions. Find that here.

@bi-blue suggested Caravan, which has a creator of colour as the lead writer/director/producer and a whole cast of indigenous, black, people of colour working on the project. I love Caravan it’s a really fun story. A queer Western meets Dante’s inferno.

In a reblog on the original post @chekhovs-harpoon​ had some really good suggestions too I’m gonna add here as well: 

Have you heard of the RedWing Audio Drama? I can best describe it as queer black batman. Main character is a queer black man, by day he’s an uber rich philantropist, by night he’s a masked superhero. This podcast is fun cuz it’s got all the wish fulfillment/power fantasy tropes that’s usually aimed at a white cishet able bodied men, but this one’s aimed at the more marginalized people, queer people of color especially.

I can also recommend the Fuck Humans Podcast. Which is about a post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy world where humans and monsters live, and any relations between them are forbidden by law. And the story is about how love overcomes hatred and prejudice (and also hot monster fucker porn with plot and  feelings. be aware that this is an erotica podcast so the sex scenes are very graphic and that’s the selling point)

I also really love The Glass Appeal. It’s the future but many people are dying from diseases we’ve already cured because of capitalism. So a rogue group of cyberneticists are going around trying to start the solarpunk revolution by teaching people how to take care of themselves. but they’ve been framed by the big companies for bioterrorism and our main character was sent to jail and it’s up to his husband to prove his innocence. Despite the harsh conditions, this show feels really hopeful and the married couple dynamic of the main characters is the sweetest thing

Those are the shows i’d recommend at the top my head, but i’ve got more i just can’t remember them rn cuz i’m subscribed to literally 300 shows at this point. my dms are always open for talking about and recommending podcasts!”

Twigs and Hearts is a surreal queer horror audio drama podcast with elements of mystery and found family. We are on our second season, and release episodes the 10th of each month, starting June 2026 with our finale coming out in March 2027. We are looking for both trailer swaps and full episode swaps!

Propaganda

Agatha Harkness (Agatha All Along/Wandavision/MCU)

"if you want a straight asnwer, ask a straight lady"

Michael Guerin (Roswell New Mexico)

Propaganda

Lestat de Lioncourt (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat)

He’s a blonde, French, nondiscriminating menace. He dropped his husband from 2 km in the air. He’s got so many mommy issues. He’s the worst. He’s just like me. I love him.

Derek (Disventure Camp)

Propaganda:

Ruth Fleming (Nerdy Prudes Must Die)

she’s a pervy bi high schooler played by a woman in her lates 30’s. That’s basically a big chunk of everyone on tumblr

Agent 4815 (Project: Daydream)

Cool, extremely competent agent at an agency that saves the world

She’s trans

She’s very strong

Also very clever, but surrounded by incredible geniuses, so she’s skim-reading thesis’s

She’s so pleased to have a friend!

She chokes on her drink when she finds out her coworker is a lesbian.

Propaganda:

Jim Jimenez (Our Flag Means Death)

"La vida es dolor."

Shuos Jedao (Machineries of Empire)

Propaganda

Hella Varal (Friends at the Table: Seasons of Hieron)

Woman with a big sword who ends the series with two wives (one of which she killed the week they met but hey that elevated her from a queen to a god)(the other is a thief who has stolen two kids and a dog).

Sister Carpenter (The Silt Verses)

Propaganda

Vickie Dunne (Stranger Things)

Just an underrated bi nurse who asks all the Real questions :)

Anne Bonny (The Ballad of Anne and Mary)

Bisexual pirate

People keep on confessing their love to her

Her singing voice is incredible

Both her and her girlfriend are currently in prison but she’s not going to let that stop her

She wants a happy ending

Keeley Jones (Ted Lasso)

Propaganda

Emily (Disventure Camp)

GOSSIP. Girl fucking loves to gossip and she can TALK. She's so fucking good at hosting disventure camp and bounced really well off of Trevor and Derek during s3 and s4.

Lup (The Adventure Zone: Bureau of Balance)

She’s a trans woman

She can set things on fire with magic

She’s so funny but also has a solid moral compass (enough to make up for her friends and family)

She finds a Tommy gun and instantly fires all the bullets into the air, shouting "count the shells”

Propaganda

Angela Montenegro (Bones)

She’s a talented artist and computer genius who uses those skills to discover victims’ identities and solve their murders.

The Joker (Lego Batman)

Lets do a poll to see what ow/jimmy ship name(s) turn out to be the most popular woooo

i think this is all the ship names that have been suggested

the new season has been out since mid-April and we are already halfway through it. i know the WTNV team has been posting about it on their social channels for months leading up to it. i dont think we are doing anything differently, promotion-wise, than we did with the first three seasons which seemed to find their audience much more quickly.

personally i find it rather frustating given the amount of work we put into this show, but im not really sure what to do about it. i know part of it is down to the fact that audiofiction is a far more competitive field than it used to be, and there's also so much noise and chaos in the world these days that its hard to find anything, and so many terrible problems that fiction feels less important.

First and foremost, the ways in which shows are shared online have fundamentally changed since the original run: the advent of short form video has been catastrophic for spreading this kind of information. Part of that is audience behavior but more of it (in my opinion) is that people are no longer curating their sources of information because the tiktok, reels, and shorts algorithms do it for them. I think this is why we've seen so much emphasis on moving to email lists again as a common piece of advice - there's just no way to guarantee that your own fans are even aware of what you're up to otherwise. This is a huge problem especially for Alice Isnt Dead because it's been a while since the initial story ended, and I have not personally heard anything about the new story outside of "it exists!" For me personally that's enough to check it out, but if that's what *I* know as an active fan of the project, I imagine many people know even less.

On a story level, I also think you're probably fighting an uphill battle because the initial run ended fairly definitely; because it's so hard to get that hook out into the world of what the show is even about, you're also fighting people's sense of satisfaction with the ending. Audiences who were avid fans when it was first active may not feel the urgency to come back without that essential intrigue, and they may not be getting exposed to the intrigue at all given how hard it is to spread across the siloed and atomised internet.

All of this combines to mean that the old strategies for promotion are 100% less effective! It's not just you! The solution isn't even as simple as "hire someone to make a bunch of short form videos for it" because from what we can tell shorts don't even consistently convert into full listeners. What works for commodity advertising doesn't seem to work as well for audio fiction. It's a nightmare out here.

In my experience, having made this show fully after the death of Twitter and in the midst of the current ecosystem, the things that have been most helpful are traditional trailer swaps for shows on networks and from individual programs that are close to the niche I'm in. Nothing else has come close to moving the needle to that degree because news just doesn't move like it used to.

Hello, apologies for the delay. And congratulations on leaving Spotify!

roughly in order of duration:

Paddleboat - existential experimental microfiction (12 episodes, ~25 mins)

Generation Crossing - scifi album that made me sob uncontrollably 😁 (~1h 40mins)

The Goblet Wire - extremely cool surreal microfiction (~2h)

Land's End: A Shepherd's Tale - vv cool short folk horror with scary sheep and gay people (5 episodes, ~2h)

The Tower - reflective & gorgeous & strange, 3 short seasons all of extremely manageable length & then a 2-part finale that ripped me apart <3 (~4 and a half hours altogether but you dont need to listen all at once)

Camlann - i actually feel like you might have heard this one before? if not i think it's up your alley. really cool mythological post-apocalypse fantasy w really gorgeously real-feeling characters (~4h 20mins)

SINKHOLE - cool weird fiction w/ unique framing device & world (2 seasons, ~5h altogether)

Conversations With Ghosts - pretty much what it sounds like lol. it's about 6 and a half hours altogether but the episodes are a v digestible length & i think knowing you like Remnants this might be a good pick for you thematically :)

for individual episodes i will also put forth The Cryptonaturalist, which in the past has been one of my go-to shows when i've been in a listening slump. episodes are about 20 mins and don't require you to follow an overarching plot it has a lovely overall feeling of wonder and weirdness and nature :) and also features a poetry interlude each episode. helps me get back in a podcast-friendly frame of mind

+ here they are in podcard form - not all the cards r fully complete atp but hopefully still useful to have a bit more of a visual format & trailers all on one page :D

There’s also Almelem, (2 hours 50 minutes long) about a group of con-artists and true believers creating their best story yet in first-century Palestine.