#mod dare

4/13/2024 marked the two year anniversary of Podfeels’ first airing, and in August, we will celebrate the three year anniversary of its inception as a project. It feels so strange, looking back on it all. To me, it feels simultaneously like its always been in my life, and also like it just started yesterday.

I’ve spent nearly three years now spearheading this project, and we’ve expanded from a team of ten to a team of thirty in that time, and have put out roughly four hours of highly produced, full cast, full sound effect audio drama.

That may not sound like much, but for a team composed almost exclusively of first timers at its inception, and with two big hiatuses out of everyone’s control, I’m pretty damn proud.

With Season 1 ending back in January, us currently in the exact two month midpoint between anniversaries, and Season 2 being worked on behind the scenes, I thought now would be a good time to release a bit of a retrospective on our first season. Talk about the process, what went wrong, what went right, and also release our assets for the public.

I’m splitting this into three sections so you can skip around based on what you give a shit about. 

Looking 8ack

Reminiscence about how I got into godfeels through a series of insane coincidences that make my heart feel warm.

2. Adapt8ion

Discussing the process of adapting the work into our medium.

3. Portr8s, 8ackgrounds, and Sound8ites

A release of Season 1’s art and sound assets for your perusal outside of the videos, use as desktop wallpapers, or what have you. 

Looking 8ack

In March 2020, I got covid for the first time. My workplace had no protections for it yet, so I lost my job. And while bedridden with covid, subsisting off a diet of lukewarm broth, saltines, and nyquil, I set my youtube Watch Later (ok, thats a lie, it was my Likes, which i used ((still use)) as a watch later instead of using the actual watch later function, BUT-) playlist to shuffle. And in this fugue state, I stumbled on the video that would completely change the trajectory of my life.

“What I Learned Writing 50,000 Words of Homestuck Fanfiction”, by Sarah Zedig. I vaguely remembered her from some video about the McElroys and from Hbomberguy’s stream, and I had put off watching this because at the time of its release, I hadn’t yet finished Homestuck. So I shuffled it away for later, and it found its way back into my lap at the perfect time. Having now finished the comic, read the Epilogues, actively reading Homestuck ^2: Beyond Canon, and five months in to my first ever real creative outlet in my semi-abandoned video essay channel, I was interested to hear what this goat had to say.

In the video Sarah went into detail about a ton of wider context about the Homestuck Renaissance that I was fully unaware of, and made a very strong case for her own postcanon work, godfeels. Her passion bled through and I figured, sure, why not, I’ve got nothing better going on, I’ll read the story of Spiderjeggings’ No Good Very Bad Transition. Why not!

55,660 words later, crying alone in bed, I was now a girl. Reading the scene of June making her list of wants the morning after Terezi’s return, I said out loud to myself, hoarse as can be, “I can’t put it off any longer.” 

After reading to current I ended up joining the godfeels fanserver, and from getting settled in these circles I’ve met so many people I wouldn’t have otherwise, and come into myself in ways I can’t begin to fully quantify. I went from one relationship to fourteen to now a stable four, the other person in my head shook back loose after a decade of suppression by me (sorry again, Aegis), I’ve become more cultured, I’ve gained more friends, I’ve gained more hobbies, and most relevant of all… I’ve gained Podfeels.

Podfeels proper actually started in a really funny and impromptu way. In Sarah’s video she mentions wanting to start a podfic adaptation of it, but with that being two years past with no more word, a conversation about it cropped up in the server, and it was revealed that it had been canceled for various reasons. Everyone immediately understood why that had to happen. It was an insane amount of work, especially now that Godfeels was entering the territory of a space opera. But the demand was there among all of us, and after almost a dozen loops of us all going “drat, would be cool. I wish someone would take the helm on that!”, I just went ALRIGHT I GET IT and opened up casting. Podfeels was actually originally a joke name made by someone in the server before I even entered the conversation, but we used it for so long during development that by the time we came to release day it just felt wrong to call the project anything else. The name just stuck.

After a few hours of people daydreaming about it happening, and me encouraging other people to take the helm, I finally gave in and opened up casting. Now, it’s important to understand, I had never directed ANYTHING like this before in my life. I made a really terrible sketch in high school theater class and that’s about it. I’ve always been a bit of a natural leader but never anything with the kind of scale this would require, and it showed. I crowdfunded almost all ideas for what to do and how to handle it, and my best idea for how to do auditions was “just send in a few lines of you doing whatever character you want”. And my language was… insufferably fawning. I was hedging my bets at every opportunity. Every development in the project was “tentative”, I was the “director” until someone else took charge, etc. Looking back its actually kind of adorable? 

Look at that sweetheart. She’s so scared. She has no idea the beautiful changes she is in for.

The casting process was an unmitigated DISASTER. Nobody there knew how to audition, and I didn’t know how to wrangle. We were an unstructured gaggle of doofasses stumbling into each other. And due to the limited pool, I was stretched kind of thin on where to put people. Obviously I stand by all our decisions and love our cast, but because I was pulling entirely from the fanserver, options were very limited. I wanted to get everyone who wanted one into a role, but having to do the math of “this person is 40% good at Character A and 60% good at Character B, but this OTHER person is 80% good at Character B and the closest runner up for Character A is only 35% good” was agonizing.

We ended up deciding to make a few demos first, to test our chops as actors and mine as editor. We had four planned. But after we fully produced our first two demos and had recorded the third… I decided we should immediately start chronological production.

Why did I make this decision, you ask? Well. We had a few months until 4/13/2022. If we immediately all went overdrive, me especially, we had the chance to get our first episode out on the 13th 4/13 anniversary of Homestuck, and like HELL was I about to let us pass that up. 

This was the right call, I think, but it did bring us into a BUNCH of complications. First off, it meant we never really tested our violence and drama chops on the houseraid. Second, if I had waited, we would have been able to dodge our first big hiatus, where I put us on pause for a couple months while we waited to see if our Terezi wanted to leave after she floated the idea, which she ended up doing. If we had stayed in prepro, we would have skipped a huge hiatus and not replaced a key character between episode one and two. It also meant that we didn’t fully solidify an editing pipeline, and I was handling practically all editing until around episode 3. Additional prepro time would have helped us iron that out, as well, rather than me breaking myself on the first couple episodes before bringing in help out of desperation. This rush ALSO led to us having to release episode 1’s video around a week after the audio’s release, and with a fucked up background because I was crunching so hard I didn’t notice I’d accidentally completely butchered John’s bedroom somehow! I think I somehow content aware filled the wall? Fucked if I know why!

This is an abridged version because I want to get us to the meat of the matter today and I feel a lot of the longer story is best saved for a video I plan on making down the line, when we’ve reached 50 hours of runtime. For now, let’s move on.

Adapt8ion

A few folks have asked for indepth adaptation notes for what we change in an episode and why. As a general rule, we make changes with three primary motivations. First, adjusting text-based ideas to sound-based. Godfeels plays with its medium in countless compelling ways that, when shifted to a different medium, are either clunky or incomprehensible. So our first job is to translate those into sound. Second, turning narration into sound effects. We don’t need to discuss sounds in the scene, or a character’s tone, when we can just hear it all ourselves now. This then expands into further issues, however, as some things DO need to stay as narration. There’s a lot of pathos in the narration, and often there’s details that can’t be conveyed through audio alone. But by removing just the audio cues, we are left with very clunky phrasing that does our source material no justice. So we have to rephrase entire sections to give them the same resonance, meaning, and clarity while also getting rid of all the things that are now extraneous in our medium. The third main type of edit is bringing it more in line with what comes later. Godfeels has been running a long time and has become a very different beast from where it began. I love this about it, but some ideas have ended up with insufficient preparation, and some thematic resonances are easy to see looking back but may be partially unintentional. We can take advantage of hindsight and bring certain things more in line with the work’s modern philosophies, such as putting an additional focus on the citizens of Earth C, introducing X as its own entity, playing with Dirk more as a villain, and introducing the question of “what happens to the leftover Junes in a retcon?”, all during Episode 6. 

I’ll be releasing a few other posts soon with detailed adaptation notes for every episode in the coming days, but I’ll leave it here for now and bring us to our final section-

Portr8s, 8ackgrounds, and Sound8ites

While the idea for video versions was a relatively late addition to our process, I’m very proud of the work everyone has put into making them what they are. Our art team and video editor do wonders. First up, we’ve got the talkpogs.

The talkpogs were my own invention, but I can hardly claim they’re an original idea. I’m sure something almost identical has been done before. What directly inspired me, though, was the old Polygon podcasts, where they’d have the hosts faces made out of polygons, with one loose and separated, synced to that host’s audio track. It was the first time I’d seen something like that and I knew I wanted something similar to indicate who was talking. From there it all fell into place pretty easily. The outer ring and the waveform is the character’s text color, and the background is their name color. If those two are the same (as they usually are), I apply a slight darkening to the background just for differentiation. The sprites, though, were all the art team. Unfortunately we didn’t have a base early on, so different artists drew to different scales. 

For the art style I told the artists to try to strike a middleground between Homestuck classic and girlpillz’s style which had just been shown in GF3.1.8.E, where godfeels got its first spritework. Otherwise, designs were largely up to the artists but we had conversations about them as a project. Overall I’m very satisfied with the work everyone turned in.

Backgrounds were a more complicated beast, but paradoxically also have less to talk about. We started out with one background per episode, which was pretty doable, but with the season 1 finale, and our expanded art team, we opted to expand out into a background per setting. The first two are just Pesterquest backgrounds I edited by hand, but after that we started having custom art. That was largely due to restraints lifting as the team grew, but it also turned out pretty good thematically, as the first episode with custom art was Episode 3, where June’s egg cracks. We left official art behind as June left the officially plotted course. I think it’s resonant.

Now we come to our latest introduction. KEY ART. We started doing this in Episode 6 and it’s so sick. Don’t expect these inclusions to be TOO common, but… we have some cool things in store here, and I think you’ll all be really excited to see ‘em. For now, here’s our first and so far only public piece of key art, Dirk menacing June against the tree. The final piece of art of Season 1, and the final piece of art of Season 1’s retrospective. It only seems fair.

Which now brings us to my own inclusion: sound assets. I’m very proud of the work I’ve put in to giving each character and concept their own unique aural profile. From the magical girl burning radiation of Jade’s magic, to the shattering static of June’s retcon, to threading the needle of Hammer, Sword, Plastic Toy, Dice, And Doomsday Device in June’s vrillyhoo. 

That’s all for today. In the coming week or so I’ll put together a few more posts, going over each episode in more detail, from point by point script edit notes, to specific art discussions. I also plan to bring in a few people who have been around since day one to talk about our experience setting up the project.

But for now, look forward to seeing more from us soon. Both in the upcoming devposts, and in Season 2. We've been on a hiatus to get our preproduction pipeline settled, and because we wanted to get a few episodes prepped so we can try to maintain a monthly schedule. But we're getting to the end of this phase now, and will be announcing Episode 7's release date very soon.

With Episode 1, we thankfully had our writing work mostly done for us. Sarah had planned to make her own podfic of godfeels, after all, and she had drafted up a script for godfeels 1’s production to that end. As such we just went off her script with minimal changes. You can see her adaptational notes for her writing process on it here!

Her decision to change texts into calls was formative for how we went on to handle things, as well as making changes to tie it into later developments. We had a solid base to work with thanks to her.

That’s not to say we made NO changes to the writing. To emphasize the chaos going on with Rose and co, and to make it feel more like a phone call, we added dialogue in the background of the call to go along with the background sound. Dave and Karkat can be heard bickering with the crowd, and after Rose hands the phone off to Kanaya, we can hear her reciting evil dark magic (read: Karkalicious reversed), as well as accidentally lighting the fire that is mentioned at the end of the episode.

That’s all we had for writing, though. Most of our big choices as a team for Episode 1 was how to handle things in the art and sound departments.

The background was super simple. The entire section took place solely in John’s bedroom. All that took was a simple edit to the Pesterquest background. Some simple photoshop filters and dodging/burning, and I was done there. Easy as pie, not much worth talkin about.

We also had to figure out the sprites for John, Rose, Kanaya, Terezi, and Jade. The first godfeels art had just been released, so we had a good basis to go on. We opted to go for a midway point between Homestuck Classic and girlpillz’s Godfeels art style. From there we had to figure out the designs for these characters.

John was easy. Girlpillz June proportions, classic John design, but looking withered and unkempt. His hair is messier, his eyes are sunken in. This is the John we knew, having spent years rotting away alone in his house.

Rose and Kanaya didn’t require much consideration, either. Rose’s hair had some discussions, but ultimately it’s not hard to predict how the posh goth and the matronly seamstress will dress in their adult years, though that’s not to discredit the designs. The black vest over the purple dress shirt, and the Porrim-inspired dress for Kanaya, both look stellar.

Terezi was just as easy as John, but we did have some discussions about it. Terezi left the end of Homestuck and immediately went flying in space. She’s spent all these years withering but not starving. Did we draw her noticeably skinnier? Damaged? Ultimately, we opted to have her hair grown out and her cheeks gaunt, rather than actually make her break proportions in any way.

Jade, we opted to take in a direction similar to John. On the one hand, our reason for this was based on a mistake on our part. One of us cited a later section where Jade is shown to be falling apart and her house is described as being a huge mess, but that’s after she and June fell out in GF2, and seems to be because of that. So we did pull the trigger on her grossification early. Buuuut also she talks in GF1 about how everyone abandoned her too, so it works well enough. We have her in a basic t-shirt that says “Woof, Bark, Etc”, in the Live Laugh Love font, which I believe was inspired by a piece of fanart I can no longer find. We also gave her the same messy hair treatment we gave John. But she has to keep up appearances, so her eyes aren’t sunken in, but her dog instincts make her a messy eater so that with her depression-laziness, her shirt has some stains.

Sound was also pretty sparse, in terms of adaptational decisions to be made.  First is the creation of John’s ringtone. Its described in the text as “a bad cover of How Do I Live”, so I ran How Do I Live (Bunny in the Box Version) through a high pass filter and called it a day. Making Jade’s teleport was pretty fun, though. Combining the green fiery nature of Jade’s magic, with a bit of radiation crackle for Becquerel and green sun magic, and making it feel Magical Girl-y with the inclusion of the sparkles.

hello, dare again! just as a reminder for how these posts work, stagelights will be covering the notes as a whole, and if i ever have to pitch in it will be with purple text like this! with that said, lets get back into it!

and here we have it, the final one of season/act 1. i dont know if we ever settled on which its called. seasons internally, acts externally :) we never really cleared up that inconsistency but its not a huge deal so shrug emoji. this episode is some of our best work so far, and i think a lot of the changes help sell that even more.

a bit of a call forward to the next chapter where dirk says the same thing. we also used this in the trailer for the sahcon new years showcase.

this change was done to match the art drawn for the background more closely.

that first bit literally makes no sense in audio and there is no way to adapt it so we changed it. then some narration changes. then im pretty sure that last bit was a typo, so that was fixed lmao. yeah. half-hazard is a sarah-ism we nixed to make the actual word (as much as its a charming sarah-ism, i dont think it was intentionally included by choice by her, just put in by virtue of her writing it) and grub-naking was definitely a typo i think. as for the b's or 8's thing. yeah. that was hell to figure out and we eventually gave up on it after multiple attempts to find ANY way to make it work.

this line wasn’t actually changed, but there was a small addition of the characters in question screaming slash begging for their life or what have you as their name is said. spooky. :)

fairly big change, and i think the change from a photo to a video helps sell more in audio form the impact of junes violence here. its some good shit, and also fucking terrifying holy shit i shuddered while listening back to this for writing these notes. shout outs to the writing team for putting this here. abso-fuckin-lutely, the writing goes so hard. also a big shoutout to my friends who put up with my annoying and loose process to come in as cameo voices for the recording!

you know the drill by now.

there are a BUNCH of changes here. first of all we added a lot of new lines here for the ads, because i think that fits better in audio. all of these lines are voiced by guest actors, including sarah herself, which is pretty neat. then theres a new bit of dialogue here from jane. it being a pre-recorded message helps to sort of keep it ambiguous as to whether she’s alive or not, and helps to sell that this is a crisis the world is taking seriously. it also helps bring things in line with future bits of godfeels, as crockercorp has its hands in many pieces of this version of earth c. then janes voice starts to glitch out and we cut to the terezi call, which had a bunch of changes to reflect the whole “phone calls and not text” thing. 

some changes to help bring the fight scene into place more naturally

This entire fight scene does not show the script in the video version, so i had to manually create the screenshot for this for the sake of the comparison, but this screencap does not do this scene justice. this entire bit of narration was cut and replaced with some INCREDIBLE sound design, which i can’t really get into the sound design part because im not a sound designer. but its really fucking good. shout outs to dare for that.

so, a bit of background on this scene. originally our plan was to have an instrumental sludge metal cover of Sweet by Phemiec, the trickster!Jane song. it was gonna be a tense chase sequence like the original text, but dragged out into a cat and mouse between june and dirk with dirk playing with his food a bit and june having to face the reality of what she did while fearing for her life.

however, when it came time for this to be done, the musician i'd planned this with had something else in mind, intending on a Deftones style altmetal sound instead of the sludge metal previously discussed, and then also life events made her incapable of delivering within any reasonable timeframe anyway before we could settle on which route to go down. so that got scrapped, which is tragic because that plan, sludge or alt, would have been absolutely stunning, but also scrapping it allowed us to make it SO. MUCH. BETTER.

we had already settled on "Game over." as a title, a callback to the last time everyone Fucking Died, also formatted like Dirk's text instead of June's, to show his control over this episode. but following from that name, I realized... we could use the song. from [S] Game Over, CARNE VALE. which also adds more flavor to this ult-dirk depiction, i feel. using a Caliborn song over a Dirk scene reminds the listener that Ult-Dirk is, in fact, Caliborn. He's every instance of Dirk, which includes Lil Hal, which includes Arquisprite, which includes Lord English. So using a Caliborn song here actually resonates REALLY HARD, i think.

as for the sound design, thank you for the praise! im very proud of my work here, the vrillyhoo sounds, syncing the swings to the beat of the song, and using the uprising whistle in the song at one point as a sound effect for the vrillyhoo flying through the air after june gets disarmed. the scene and song gave me a lot of material to work with :3

there were actually a ton of suggestions for flourite octet effects from all of our writers (and a few friends of mine who weren't on the team lol), and i cant find them all, but these were the final ones we narrowed down to before chosing

last bit of the original episode had a bunch of cuts for pacing. pacing, yes, but also to keep us tied to our current june. the original writing had it cut to the scene before june showed up, and had her appear. but in order to maintain the inertia from the last scene and to keep our camera focused on our protagonist, we had us just land in the scene at the same time as her. the audio here is literally ripped verbatim from episode 5, and in the scriptlog for this episode it says “episode 5” during this part, which i think is very fun.

there is also a post credits scene involving dirk, with a bit of completely original writing.

i don’t know if theres much to say about this that the text itself doesn’t already make clear. “this is where i get off” is apparently a half life reference though, but i haven’t played half life so idfk. dirk would be the type of nerd to do a reference like this in these circumstances though.

i had a lot of plans for this scene, and felt VERY strongly about it. originally this scene was vetoed by some performers until i recorded it myself as a proof of concept and we discussed was to get them on board. my original draft had gore sfx after he swung his blade (because i love gore sfx), but i think its far stronger to cut off before impact. as for why we're having A Dirkicide, when thats often seen as a bit insensitive these days, is actually to humanize dirk. dirk, in later godfeels updates, comes back as far less of a villain. in early godfeels, he's all intimidating villain all the time, all the way until his death. i wanted to let him share his piece. the text here is some original, some taken from his death in the Meat timeline, and some taken from his death in the Game Over timeline. These callbacks are also included intentionally to make him a bit more sympathetic. While his plan is to spark the epilogues, and he is a monster for his actions there, he IS ultimately motivated by an urge to keep his friends alive. this timeline isn't just a dud for his plans, isn't just a failure of his foresight, but also a repeat of dirk's lowest moment in the comic, when he lets the glitchtide take him after learning all his friends are dead. a moment he remembers and likely still grieves. and now he's having to grieve it all again. this wasn't included to be insensitive to dirk, it was included to make you remember 'wait, shit. yeah. oof. he IS kinda right on all counts about june as of this moment'.

and for a bit of behind the scenes? i've designed two sounds for deaths, Heroic and Just. and this one? it was Heroic. he died in the process of opposing someone who just killed all her friends. i may not agree with that distinction overall, but i think its a fair choice for skaia to make and i included that little meta aspect to once again humanize him a bit more.

also yes i had him quote gman, not just because he's a dweeb, but also to show his position as a Controller Who's Lost Control.

_____

thank you for coming around to see the adaptational notes for podfeels act 1! thank you again to stagelights for putting all of this together (i never would have found the time to do the bit by bit markdowns like they did), and also thank you to everyone on the team for contributing to this passion project i think we're all very very proud of.

hello, dare again! just as a reminder for how these posts work, stagelights will be covering the notes as a whole, and if i ever have to pitch in it will be with purple text like this! with that said, lets get back into it!

this episode was sort of the first one we ever did, as the original demo for the project way back when (i think it was like 3 years ago now? how time flies) (yeah... its so crazy to look back on) was this episode. we did however make a few new adaptational changes, as well as re-recorded everything, as basically all of us have grown as actors since then. so before we get into the episode proper, we have an adaptational addition already!

at the beginning of each episode, we hear jess (as Narration and then june) saying the quote from the description of godfeels on ao3

these fuckers.

but since june has come out, we can’t just use the godfeels 2.1 one, and the godfeels 2.2 doesn’t necessarily fit. so we (actually i got sarah to do it!) wrote our own specifically for this episode. “My name is June Eg8ert, and now I know I’m human… but will my friends see it the same way?”

ok time for the actual episode

some fairly minor changes. i’m pretty sure the ellipses were meant to be there to help with direction for the actors but we kept them in in the scriptlog because i think they help add to the vibe of roses skepticism

this change was added to help sort of bring this in line with the epilogues. giving off the vibes she’s experiencing the symptoms she talks about in there. this part of the story takes place several months before the epilogues would have happened, so obviously it’s not as severe but its still present. 

line cut for pacing. id say less PACING and more just... sometimes narration things like this, her snapping her head, can be more cleanly conveyed in audio by just having it be incorporated into the performance. the narration described terse body language, so we nix that and deliver a terse performance!

more cut narration. at this point its kind of just routine lol

not necessarily a change but a very fun thing where junes voice and vriskas voice are layered for this line. this was actually also done with the call during the previous episode but i forgot to mention it.

more narration cuts. honestly though i have listened to this episode more than i’ve read the original version so i honestly didn’t even parse the “honestly rose” bit as a change until literally just now lmao. it flows so well that i genuinely thought it was there in the original

self explanatory. im running out of things to say.

the narration is replaced by door slam and party horn sound effects. champagne was specifically mentioned in the notes in the original google doc to be pronounced “sham-pag-in” which is probably a reference to a thing i dont get. YOU HAVENT WATCHED FUTURAMA!?!?!?

lotta cut narration. u kno the deal by now

another not-a-change but a line that gains a completely new context when combined with the actor swap. she quite literally does sound different. i think thats fun. according to sarah, that line was written back in the day with direct plans on it being in reference to her her, having played both john and june, taking a different performance when playing june. its just also taken on an even more stark meaning with having them be different actors, which i think is goddamn beautiful

just more instances of turning narration into stage directions and sound and emoticons into words and vocalizations

_____

hello! dare again, and i know that last time i said we'd be releasing these gradually in "the coming days", but, well, life happens. specifically, life happened to where i was unable to write these notes at all. as such, i passed the duty on to another dedicated member of the team. im gonna let them take over from here, and god Damn she was so much more thorough than i wouldve been, but whenever theres a place where my input is needed, ill pipe in with purple text like this! now to get to the real shit:

hey it's luna stagelights here for some adaptational notes for podfeels. i'm only really here to talk about script differences, i can't exactly speak for art and sound design because i wasn't involved in that part of the process. ill pitch in with sound design when necessary, but art was mostly covered in the general S1 post we had the first time.

anyway letsa go

so episode 2 is interesting from an adaptational standpoint because it was the first episode we had to do basically entirely on our own. for episode 1 we had sarah’s changes already, and the decisions she made from there served as as a sort of guideline for what we’re doing from now on, although as time went on we found our own sort of groove for this sort of thing, and we’re not super tied down to the way sarah did it as much i think.

on the topic of the actual changes though: chapter 1 of godfeels 2 part 1 begins with a flashback to pages 5283-5288 of homestuck, with John and Jade watching Con Air, with John declaring that “this movie fucking sucks!”. the episode begins a bit before that, with some noise from the movie itself, specifically audio synced to the footage on screen in the original comic. this change isn't really that major in the long run though, mostly just adding detail to help sell the scene better.

left is the original, right is what got put in the episode. there are a few inconsistencies between what i show here and the scriptlog shown in the episode , but i re-edited the doc to match what you hear in the actual episode.

lot of narration cut and replaced with sound. this is going to be EXTREMELY commonplace as we go forward. 

ok so this line wasn’t actually changed but I do distinctly remember there being some discussion about this, as john says “w8ke up” like “waitk up” here, which i thought felt awkward, however we came to the agreement that john is the kind of dork ass nerd who would say typing quirks like this aloud. but this does actually bring up an issue we’ll see a lot later on, and that is “how the fuck do you vocalize typing quirks”, especially with the inordinate number of gags that rely on presence of a typing quirk. the answer we’ve come to seems to be “on a case by case basis”, but usually characters don’t talk as if their typing quirks are a factor unless theres a good reason.

more lines changed from “texted” to “called” to reflect the change done from texts to calls as it’s an audio format, in line with sarah’s adaptations in episode 1.

“delete that message” was replaced with “forget i said that”, because it’s a call and that wouldn’t make sense.

another minor adaptational hurdle was dealing with emoticons in text. it’s another case by case thing, sometimes it can be just a little sound, sometimes if theres an emoticon at the end of a line we can just remove it and factor it into the delivery of the line, but with lines like this we just simply added terezi doing a little laugh to convey a similar emotion to the emoticon.

the “whoops shit” was added along with a sound of rose snoring, evoking the effect of being too loud on the phone while a friend is asleep, to reflect that it’s a call

the >:x is represented by terezi making a little ‘zzzp’ sound.

this is another answer to the emoticon problem, sometimes you just add a line there instead. 

text does a fun thing with color here, but we couldn’t do anything about that. I think there was discussion about having the va’s for the character who’s colors are represented in the text saying the line, but there was no way to get that to sound even remotely good so we just left the line as is. sometimes when adapting shit things like this will just have to be cut.

oh now THIS is a fun bit.

dare mentioned the talkpogs in the adaptation notes for episode 1, i can’t exactly go too into that part myself because it’s not my wheelhouse, but there is an INCREDIBLY fun bit in the youtube version of this, where terezi does her trademark scribbles on her own talkpog, just for the bit. in the audio-only versions, this bit is missing, and the scribble sound effect as she scribbles on her talkpog are also absent, because they’re a part of a joke that’s simply not there. the bit is still *kind of* there in the audio only version because in both versions terezi clears her throat. its also the first place where the talkpog coloration rules are demonstrated! in our talkpogs, the inner circle is their name color, and the outer ring is their text color. so when she draws on the hey dweebkid this you face, her outer ring shifts to john's text color!

another minor change, just having it be a more natural end to the phone call by adding some words.

after the call we added a new bit of dialogue here, as a way to more naturally transition between chapters, as this episode covers 2 chapters of the original fic. as time goes on and chapters get longer though, covering multiple chapters in a single episode becomes less feasible, often leaning towards us having some later chapters being planned to be multiple episodes.

the rest of the episode is basically entirely made up of narration, and there were actually no adaptational changes made in the narration! 

but there is one last moment. the text originally ends with a section break and then a text of vriska saying “there you are”, and for this episode we simulated that paragraph break by leaving in a bit of silence as if we’re going to cut to credits, before having vriska show up. in the video version, we also had that texton top of 7 dots, reminiscent of vriska’s spidery left eye (or the pokemon registeel, if you’re like me and for some reason that was where your mind wandered to first)

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hello, dare again! just as a reminder for how these posts work, stagelights will be covering the notes as a whole, and if i ever have to pitch in it will be with purple text like this! with that said, lets get back into it!

just as a side note i love the pun in this episodes title. 10/10 no notes. yeah riley is a hero. anyway i want to say that i dont think i really appreciated this episode enough before now. but like i think it really serves as both a nice bit of respite after the intensity of the previous episode, and as sort of the calm before the storm that is next episode, which i think is desperately needed. 

these first couple of changes were made because roxy’s typos dont work as well when said out loud normally. we changed it to make her sound more like how someone would actually slur their words here. (also, not an adaptational change, but “librarby” is a fucking undertale reference, sarah you sneaky bitch)

narration cuts, and a bit where we changed it because we needed to kind of make the whole “june talks with 8’s” thing a bit more clear, because thats kind of a big deal.

more “call and not text” shit you know the drill. also june fucking said “cripe a doodle dandy” despite everything june is still a massive dork ass nerd.

narration cuts. moving along

this change is actually kind of significant i think, because this is completely new material and not just stuff changed or removed for the sake of replacing narration. junes feeling bad about herself and shit. so, i actually had us add this because i felt it was necessary to get some details of june moping and feeling lonely, yearning for that kind of t4t romance, in order to butter her up for terezi's arrival later on. however, i kind of regret these inclusions now, to an extent. they add a lot to the pacing of the episode, giving her a moment of melancholy at the fire. however! i forgot that she already had a "moping at how cute roxy and callie are" moment. after she wakes up from the trickster rampage retcon, in what will be our episode 7. so i did just decide we needed something, forgetting it would come later. lol.

some more roxy re-slurring, and also re-ordering of stuff for pacing.

elevatorstuck plays here, but otherwise this is fairly minor. disagree! we used the fact she mentions not wanting to narrate it in the original, and me not wanting to put sound to it in our adaptation, to justify turning this into a cutaway gag. elevatorstuck plays, yes, but the scene sound also fully cuts out at the same time. its an auditory version of a TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES - PLEASE WAIT sign. im proud of this segment and i will NOT allow it to be passed by as "elevatorstuck plays here"!

couple more narration cuts. and that’s it for this episode. fairly simple.

to add to this ending description a bit, i want to gush about what we did with the ending here because im damn proud of it. so, this ending here isnt just ending cuts. we moved the lollipop reveal to be the second to last line, to really get across that its kind of horrific that its here. calliope's trickster sucker is, in and of itself, the scary cliffhanger. and further to that end, whereas the original fic ends that chapter on just that line, i wanted to really hammer it home. so once calliope says that line, the scream from the start of Red Sucker blares out, which then leads into "wherever the breeze takes this", a track from the first godfeels fan album by ash taylor and dj terezi, which was written to be about the aftermath of the rampage. whereas the original text ends on the sucker as a cliffhanger but potential gag, of calliope going "now normally im not so crass but do you want some Hard Drugs?", in our case, with retrospect and a fandom-cultural awareness of what is to come, we took the opportunity to tonally acknowledge where this is actually about to head, and i think it turned out beautifully

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hello, dare again! just as a reminder for how these posts work, stagelights will be covering the notes as a whole, and if i ever have to pitch in it will be with purple text like this! with that said, lets get back into it!

this episode had a good chunk of rewrites just because there's a ton of visual gags that simply do not scan in audio format. there was a good chunk of back and forth on a bunch of lines.

this bit of dialogue had a minor change, as the ‘question mark’ line kind of felt weird in audio. i think it probably could have still worked, but we decided to replace it to make it a call forward to a line later in the text, where vriska says the “prompting for a response” thing instead. for some reason the text in the video version was changed to a winky face instead of a normal smiley? i dont know who made that change or why but its so minor i dont even really care lol. it was made into a wink because we felt it fit the tone better! the original smile was kind of oblique, just ignoring june's question. but with the scene in general, and especially with our rewrites and our vriska's performance, a taunting wink felt far more fitting than the flat smile.

more emoji replacement. fairly simple

another text gag changed because it didnt work in audio. also the question marks were changed to exclamation marks in the text because i thought it fit the delivery of the actual line slightly better. 

theres nothing new to say about this that hasn’t already been said a bunch. moving on.

this line was a major sticking point. it’s a visual gag that we can’t just cut, because this gag is directly related to why june picks the name that she does. so we had to do *something*. we had a bunch of different rewrites on this.

we ended up going with the second one of these, as you can tell

there was also some deliberation on how long the actual “very long june” should be when said out loud. i thought the initial take we had was way too short, and i was mostly thinking back to the voxus dubs take of this specific line, but if we just took that delivery and slapped it here it would have felt *too* long because the context behind the lines is completely different. i think we ended having it be about 6 seconds long, which was perfect.

the immediate next line was also a bit of a bitch.

these were some of the rewrites suggested.

ended up going with the second one, which surprisingly isn’t *that* different from how it was in the original text. this is because ultimately we decided that our edits were all... overegging the pudding a bit. we ended up going with one close to the original in writing, but specifically directing our vriska to perform it as if she was lying through her teeth. lying about xenobabble she doesnt know (either because she's vriska and hiding a mistake like vriska does, or because she's Not Quite Vriska and making up exomemories on the fly to justify herself, who is to say) and brushing it off, with a couple added lines to show she's forcing it to be dropped through force of will and rudeness. god i love that spiderbitch.

this line was changed to be a call forward to this bit in a later chapter, which i didn’t even notice until listening back to some of the early drafts of episode 7 (coming soon™)

this was actually to try and solidify a bit of consistency between John and June. we've sprinkled some quotes from each other into the other's dialogue to make them seem a bit more like each other. (i use John and June like this for godfeels reasons to be clear, because June isn't quite John, and John isn't quite Dare, so there's no good way of going about it so I just use John. personal taste.)

some emoticons removed

some fairly minor narration changes for pacing

bunch of emoji replacements

this part is pretty fun. vriskas voice becomes jades and johns matching the text color, which fits whats being said in the narration. stuff like this is a huge part of why i love working on podfeels.

nother emoticon replacement

this is a very minor text change, literally because john’s va said the line slightly differently and i edited the script to match whats being said

 this bit of narration was cut for pacing

replacing the description of “bawl so hard it feels like dying” with audio of john crying, with dialogue of vriska being comforting. not just comforting, but Encouraging. in the "You got this", she is in a sense instilling june with her confidence. shit may go to hell, but we'll make it work. YOU'LL make it work.

minor change, theres a text sound effect here

there was a small change in the narration to reflect an addition in sound design of tossing the phone, and the smaller text is a fun little gag

none of the text here was changed, but this is such an important moment in the story, and the decision to cast john and june separately really helps sell the same switch from second to first person, replacing the swap in text color with a swap in actor. i believe this decision was partly to sell this moment and partly as future proof for later parts of godfeels. i remember sarah saying once that she had planned for june to be played by the same actor throughout in her initial plans for podfeels, but i personally like the way we did it a lot. also, a nice coincidence in our casting is that, junes voice sounds like a perfect in between of john and vriska’s voice.

this seems like a fairly big change, but its not…really? the script formatting makes it look way more complicated than it is. mostly this is just adding dialogue for the characters approach, similar to how its described in narration in the original text.

this isn’t necessarily a change but the final “fuck” is slightly cut off as the song jumps into the credits theme. which i think is very funny. also if and when we get to godfeels 3.2, when they do the same bit again but with dare instead of june, i REALLY hope we can do this exact same cutoff gag again. but that’s getting way ahead of ourselves. :)

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