Hello! I'm in a fanfiction/fandom class this semester, and our final project is a research project. I'm doing a sort of demographic overview of the audio drama fandom/community, and if anyone would be willing to take a couple minutes to fill this survey out, that would be greatly appreciated! It's totally anonymous and every question is optional. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or anything like that! Thanks! :D
(Please only fill this out if you're an enjoyer of at least one audio drama. Reblogs are appreciated!)
Hey! I'm doing a research project for a class on the demographics of the audio drama fandom/community with an emphasis on gender identity an
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Just wanna say seekers is awesome! It’s had a huge impact on me, I love it so much, even if I didn’t comment too often!
this lil loop is realllly old at this point, but I found it buried in my pile of work-no-longer-in-progress AMVs! Thought it was time it saw the light of day, however briefly haha.
AHHH!!! Thank you for letting me know you enjoyed the story so much! And a double thank you for this absolutely lovely animation! 🥺😭 I love the shapes and the colors and the little movements of Nia's tail and Tobias' fire...it feels so warm and peaceful. 🩵🧡
First of all, woah. I made this survey expecting to get like 20 responses, maybe 50 max but. No. I got 753. 753 people took five or ten minutes of their time to fill out this survey. It’s an absolutely mind boggling number. (And an excellent sample size! Though by no means representative but that’s how it goes with a survey like this.)
My main conclusion? Y’all hunger for the graphs.
And also just… This community is really really lovely. There aren’t many places online where you can get 753 responses to an anonymous survey and have the meanest response be “it might’ve been good to word this one question differently.”
So, thank you. Thank you for your time, your thoughts, and your awesomeness.
I shall give you graphs and data and analysis. *nod*
If you aren’t inclined to read over 5,000 words of. Whatever the hell this is. Let me know and I will make a video going over things and post that on YouTube. (I was originally just going to do that, but I got busy once classes started (go figure) so I won't do it unless someone asks. Feel free to ask though, I would have fun, I just don't want to add something else to my plate if no one's interested.)
If you’re not interested in the vaguely academic rambling, you can scroll down until you see graphs! The link to the list of people's favorite shows and favorite fun facts is way close to the bottom, in the section of text right above "the end."
Okay so a couple notes first.
The main point I’d like to talk about is that I didn’t address race/ethnicity/language in this on purpose. Part of that is because I’m as white as it’s possible to be, but mostly it’s because the audio drama community is international, and concepts of race/ethnicity (and language but to a lesser extent) are going to vary quite a lot from place to place and person to person, so it would just be complicated to come up with a question that would be globally applicable and actually reasonable to sort through. This is a topic that absolutely should be addressed, and really needs more space given to it. But honestly, I’m far from the best person to do that and it would’ve taken way more time than I had to really do it justice. (If I’d known this survey would’ve taken off like it did I probably would’ve tried to figure out a way to get some questions in this vein into it, just because a sample size of 753 is really incredible and there’s no way I’ll be able to replicate that any time soon.)
It probably would’ve been fine if I’d just thrown something together but I’ve taken too many anthropology classes to not overthink it. :p
If you’re interested in language data though, the Podcast Book Club is doing a similar survey for AuFiCon and they did ask a question about language! The data for that should be available around the time of the con! (January 30th to February 1st, ooooo you should join our Discord and tune into the con. This is our website: https://podcast-bookclub.com/, it's got all the information for the things.)
I was also originally going to do some actual statistics with this stuff. But. I didn’t have the best questions for doing so? So I guess it makes things easier for me? I wish that at the very least I had included questions about how people feel about representation for their sexual orientation/romantic orientation/gender identity in mediums other than audio drama so that I could compare those responses. But yeah, this will mostly just be graphs and me talking about them.
I also did collect information about how much people feel respected in the fandom with regards to various facets of their queer identity, but I didn’t go into that here. If anyone wants those graphs, just let me know. I didn’t want to go through and look at the identities that were most likely to say that they feel disrespected because I was already doing that for the representation question and this is very long even without that, and overall this ended up focusing on representation more than anything else. I think more questions about fandom environment would have been beneficial in order to better explore the fandom environment.
Because this was a school project, I wrote a paper for it (not a very good one, I’ve never written a paper like this before and I was provided with very little direction even after asking but whatever it’s fineeeee) so I’ll plug some parts of that into this just so I don’t have to rewrite everything. I’ll try to mitigate weird tonal shifts but you have been warned.
So… Let us begin. (Most stuff in parenthesis throughout this are just my random thoughts/reactions and discussions of things from a more personal perspective, so feel free to just skip over those if so inclined.)
“I love audio dramas because I don’t get people like me in any other media”: Queer identity and other demographics of the audio fiction fandom
Independently produced audio dramas are known for both having queer characters and attracting queer fans, however previous research in this area has focused primarily on individual shows (mostly WTNV and TMA), despite the considerable sense of community among fans of the medium as a whole. The purpose of this survey was to collect basic demographic information on audio drama fans with an emphasis on queer identity, queer representation, and how that identity informs their relationship with shows in the medium. This survey confirmed that the vast majority of audio drama fans are queer, and most feel well represented in shows with regards to their sexual and romantic orientations, but somewhat less so with regards to their gender identity. I’m going to go through the survey question by question and address potential reasons for the results looking like they do, drawing from previous scholarship, my experiences, interviews I’ve conducted for other projects, and the written responses of survey respondents.
Also YES there are academic articles about this stuff, mostly focused on individual shows as I mentioned, but I’ll provide a list of some of the articles I looked at down at the bottom. I took out any citations I had in this because the information I pulled from them was largely just emphasizing that the space and the shows are queer. (The one on TMA and queerness and the gothic genre was a delightful read. It pointed out that the Magnus institute was founded in 1818 which is the same year Frankenstein was published which I loooove. Anyways. That’ll be at the bottom.)
Quick background summary for anyone not in the know, this space is largely queer due to the influence of Welcome to Night Vale, which established that precedent of queer rep being the norm. The medium being super accessible to new creatives and not being under the oversight of big companies and stuff also has really encouraged this. (If you have any interest in listening to me and some actual podcast creators jabber about this, I made a video essay a year and a half ish ago where I kinda do an overview of the medium and delve into the gayness. I swear I have better hair and a better lav mic now. https://youtu.be/MR_98bqFrlw?si=6lmC-8cRKRwdgFf_)
While this connection between queer media and queer fandoms is well known and explored both in fandom spaces and fandom studies/academic ones, the actual identities of fans are often overlooked. Most of the research on the indie audio drama space has been done on individual shows, not on fans of the medium more generally. Due to most shows being very small, none of them individually have very large fandoms beyond shows like Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives, and even those are quite small relative to any mainstream fandom. Perhaps because of this, fans of smaller shows have tended to conglomerate in fan spaces focused generally on audio drama. And fans often have a hand in shaping the material that they are fans of, which is especially true in a medium where there is such a low barrier of entry to creating an original story. (I made a beautiful chart illustrating what I mean here and why it’s relevant, I’ll get into it towards the end. Keep an eye out for the hand drawn circle.)
Method
I went about collecting this information by creating an online anonymous survey asking a variety of questions with an emphasis on queer identity and queer representation in audio drama. All questions were optional, but there was a very high response rate for all of the multiple choice questions. (For most of them, only 1-10 people didn’t leave any response.)
I posted the survey in various locations, including in the Podcast Book Club Discord server, and several show creators in that server reblogged the Tumblr post I made, kicking off it getting fairly widely circulated.
TIME FOR INDIVIDUAL QUESTIONS AND THE DATA
How old are you?
This question was answered by 752/753 respondents.
The audio drama fandom is overwhelmingly an online community, with most fan interactions and culture building taking place in spaces such as Tumblr and Discord. These spaces are also dominated by young adults, so it does make sense that the age demographics of those spaces would be reflected here. (I can’t wait to see how/if this shifts over the next few decades.)
This question was answered by 749/753 respondents.
(This question was meant to get a basic geographic sense of where people live in case many people were uncomfortable sharing what country they live in, but the question about country did end up with a pretty high response rate. I had several people point out that it’s generally best to list Central America as separate from North America (I (American) was taught that North America consisted of Central America as well as the US and Canada growing up which is why I grouped it like that), and that’s a totally fair point, but then I’d have to list cultural regions for the rest of the world as well instead of just six “continents.” But the country question has lots of responses so not breaking this one down more turned out okay! Will be keeping that in mind for the future though, larger cultural regions would be more useful than continents while still being less specific than countries. O7) (Continents are also just totally made up, they aren’t based on culture with the exception of Europe, and I also had someone mention that some people consider Eurasia more accurate so. Yeah. Depends on your purposes.)
North America: 431 (57.5%)
South America: 7 (0.9%)
Africa: 4 (0.5%)
Europe: 243 (32.4%)
Asia: 21 (2.8%)
Oceania: 43 (5.7%)
What country do you live in?
719/753 responded to this question, the following countries having the most respondents:
United States: 376 (52.3%)
United Kingdom: 101 (14%)
For those who specified, here’s the breakdown of where in the UK they’re from (it wouldn’t let me specify in the program I used to make the maps):
England: 44 (6.1%)
Wales: 8 (1.1%)
Scotland: 10 (1.4%)
Germany: 44 (6.1%)
Canada: 42 (5.8%)
Australia: 38 (5.3%)
The most popular shows in this space are in English (though this is 100% biased by, y’know, language), and production for many of them is based in the US or UK, and so for the fandom of these shows to be primarily comprised of people from those two counties and other countries with high numbers of English speakers is far from surprising.
There is audio drama being produced in other languages of course, and I have talked to fans who first came across audio drama in languages other than English, especially fans from Latin America. A few online spaces with an emphasis on the medium rather than individual shows have been making an effort to highlight shows in languages other than English, but of course English shows still dominate the English-speaking fan space. (This little internet space where this survey was spread is generally inhabited by fans of indie productions.)
(Also there’s a whole conversation to be had about the popularity of audio drama as a medium in different countries, but that’s neither here nor there.) (Like for example, audio drama just really isn’t in the public consciousness in the US anymore, but in the UK it’s remained around due to shows continually made by the BBC and things like that. I really want to look more into this at some point.)
This map shows the distribution of all responses without being adjusted for outliers (link to interactive map):
The following map is adjusted to account for outliers to better visually show the variation between countries with between 1 and 44 respondents (link to interactive map):
(You guys do not want to know how long I took trying to make these fucking choropleth maps.)
To every US person who put “unfortunately” in their response to this question… Yeah. I feel you. (And I extend a hand of fellowship to every UK person who said the same.)
Which of the following describe your sexual orientation?
This was a multiple choice question where respondents could select more than one option. (That is why the percentages add up to more than 100%.) 752/753 people submitted a response to this question.
In the written responses, many fans noted how representation of asexual characters is fairly common, with one fan saying “I find audio dramas to be more representative of asexuality than many other story mediums,” which is very likely a contributing factor to the high proportion of asexual respondents. (As an ace person… Yeah. It’s not what originally drew me to the medium but it’s a huge part of why I’ve hung around.)
I feel well represented in terms of my sexuality in audio drama.
(Answers were on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree. Yes, the 1-5 scale was an. Inefficient way to do this, sorryyyy.)
752/753 people responded to this question.
Many asexual respondents mentioned that asexual characters are much more common in audio drama than in many other spaces, however many were just as quick to point out that fandom tends to ignore characters’ sex aversion and fic with ace characters having sex is really common. One fan puts it the following way: “The phrase 'asexual people can have sex too!' is very prevalent, even often used with regards to characters who canonically do not enjoy sex.” This discussion in the comments was overwhelmingly centered around Jonathan Sims headarchivistofthemagnusinstitutelondon, and it’s the primary place I’ve seen it personally, but due to this phenomenon’s prevalence in other mediums I’d guess. It’s far from uncommon.
(Personal opinions time… No one should be stopped from writing stuff if they want to. But the discussion around works like that shouldn’t be in justifying the actions of the characters (with phrases like “ace people can have sex too”), but more just. Having fun playing with existing characters and changing things about the story. You can acknowledge that canonically, Jon wouldn’t have sex with anyone, and still go write whatever you want. But when you’re justifying it, that serves to sort of erase some of the precious little sex averse ace rep that we have. Largely I think it’s just a cultural thing and there isn’t really a great way to make change in that regard except having more rep and changing the way we talk about ace characters and asexuality.)
Many respondents did also note that overall, queer representation is better in the audio drama space than in most other media.
Percentage of each identity who answered with a 1 or a 2
This shows what groups feel least represented and to what degree. The higher the percentage, the more people said that they don’t feel well represented in audio drama. (The lower, the fewer.)
(Sorry that these graphs look different from all the other ones. I made them later, and I couldn’t figure out how to get them to look the same. I’m very sad about the single color.)
Many of the respondents who selected “other” also selected other identities, and the answers people submitted were very varied. I’m guessing that the reason that category is so high is a combination of that getting caught in the numbers when people also selected other identities from the list, as well as many of the ones being listed being less common, and by virtue of that, having poorer representation. (This is my same reasoning for the two other sections below this.)
All of these (except the other category) are at 12% or lower, which is super cool! Generally, representation when it comes to sexual orientation seems to be perceived as being really solid. (I say perceived because individual perception of representation is going to hinge totally on what shows you listen to.)
Which of the following describe your romantic orientation?
(Sorry for throwing so many of you guys off with this one. I’m aroace so it felt important to me but I know that it’s not generally an expected question. Just trying to do my duty and push the aroace agenda I guess. :p)
This was another multiple choice question where respondents could select more than one option. 747/753 respondents answered this question.
I feel well represented in terms of my romantic orientation in audio drama (Answers were on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree.)
744/753 people responded.
Many people who identify as aromantic said that they feel like, despite relatively strong asexual representation in the medium, strong aromantic representation is still lacking, though there does tend to be a much stronger emphasis on platonic relationships than in more traditional media.
However, the interplay between the identities of fans, characters, and the ways characters are presented in fan works is still complex and shifting. One fan noted, echoing the sentiments expressed by many other respondents, “I feel represented in audio drama way more than any other medium, but the vast majority of podcasts still don't have any aspec characters.” (Aspec is a shortening of asexual/aromantic spectrum.)
It needs… Less romance! (This was supposed to be a “it needs more cow bell” reference but that doesn’t work great over text.)
One third of aromantic people said that they don’t feel well represented, which is, honestly, a lot. Just generally, more people were unsatisfied with romantic rep than sexuality, so these percentages are higher. Besides the aro crew, all percentages are under 18%, which while not bad, could be better I think! But once again, this is totally dependent on the shows that individuals listen to. (Though as a general trend it looks like there is primarily a desire for more a-spec rep and more lesbian rep.)
Which of the following describe your gender identity?
This was another multiple choice question where respondents could select more than one option. 751/753 people answered this question.
Several respondents noted that many creators in the space are trans and/or nonbinary, which isn’t something that is seen in many mainstream media production spheres, which feeds into the loop of queer content and queer fans. (See my gay watercycle loop below.)
I feel well represented in terms of my gender identity in audio drama. (Answers were on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree.)
744/753 people responded.
Many trans/nonbinary respondents noted that while there is greater representation in this medium than others, binary trans characters are still the most common, and so there is still a lot of room for growth.
One respondent said, “I love that the audiodrama space tends to have more non-cis characters who are complex and compelling than traditional media, also that they tend to be in lead/main roles. AND that non-cis voice actors are front and center.”
These percentages are much higher than for the previous two sections. I feel comfortable saying that there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of representation of varied gender identities. From what I’ve seen though, the space is definitely heading in that direction. (I will note that many people’s favorite show was TMA, and while it’s great (and my favorite), it is. Lacking in the gender department. I do think that its prevalence in the space may be dragging this up just a bit, but even Rusty Quill is doing much better in this regard in TMAGP, so this is another question I’d love to check back on in a few years as the space continues evolving.) (I’m not saying we are good to just sit back and keep doing what we’re doing; continuing to strive for better representation is always something that we can work towards.)
I am not sure why the percentage for “male” is so high though. I’m guessing it’s at least partly the overlap between cisgender males and the “trans masc” category though?
Comparison between perceived representation of sexual orientation, romantic orientation, and gender identity
These graphs are the same as the “I feel well represented-” questions I showed above, but I added an additional bar in each of them with the same value so that the scale would be consistent (the pink one on the right, just ignore it, it has no meaning). I’m just putting them all together here to better visually compare the differences between how people feel about representation in the three different areas.
I’ve already mentioned this, but this shows that generally, people feel best represented with regards to their sexuality, and least so with regards to their gender identity.
I am working on an audio drama.
I did a very bad job wording the options for this one, sorry. Most of the “other” responses were people who have a bit more nuance to the “no, but I’d like to” (such as, they are currently developing a plot for a show on their own) and/or have worked on shows in some capacity in the past and are no longer doing so. Which I personally consider working on a show.
752/753 respondents answered.
Roughly 18.8% of respondents (this is including the “other” category) indicated that they are working on a show in some capacity currently or have in the past, which is nearly one in five people. With such a high number of fans being creators in the space (and even more wanting to start creating in the space), it is very common for people to make media that they want to see. Be that media with better queer rep, disability rep, or simply with more women in it, audio drama is open to anyone with a microphone and a story to tell.
Yes, at least one episode out: 53 (7%)
Yes, but we don’t have an episode out: 44 (5.9%)
No, but I’d like to: 300 (39.9%)
No, and I don’t want to: 311 (41.2%)
Other: 44 (5.9%)
I made a thing to illustrate one of the things I’m trying to get at. This is my gay water cycle audio drama loop.
(Image description: A circle like the water cycle, but its steps are gay content, which leads to gay fans, which leads to gay creators, which leads back to gay content. Sorry for my shitty handwriting, I am not used to writing on an iPad.)
I dunno, I think that’s pretty self descriptive. I’m not getting a grade on this I can just chuck this in and not elaborate HAHAHA. (Though please ask questions if you have any, I’m more than happy to clarify.)
Generative AI Usage(Answers were on a scale from 1-5, with 1 being “it should never be used” and 5 being “it’s a fantastic tool that should be utilized.”)
All 753 respondents answered this question.
(For context, I added this question in because my professor for the class the project was originally for suggested that I use AI to come up with and edit questions. To be fair, she has had students in the past who have had issues with people getting after them for having confusing questions, but. My dude. 1. I can ask real people I know if things make sense. And then I have a response to my survey! Yay! 2. I’ve taken two college level stats classes. I’ve had multiple projects where I’ve designed surveys and stuff, this ain’t my first rodeo. (In other words: I have enough exposure I felt confident that I wouldn’t fuck it up too badly.))
Anyways, this is exactly what I was expecting. Fuck generative AI. O7
Well, if you need show recs, look no further! For this one, if people listed multiple shows, I just added them all to the list. This list has all the ones that at least five people said were their favorite, but if you’d like the list of all the responses, you can view those here! That document also has the list of all of the fun facts people submitted (thanks for humoring me, I am an avid fun facts enjoyer). I cannot vouch for their accuracy, but they sure are fun! :p
And as to people’s favorite shows…. There were 893 submissions (because many people listed multiple) across 145 different shows! (And two general categories as well.) I did. Count. All of these. By hand. So. I may have made a mistake but if I did there shouldn’t be anything too egregious.
Drumroll…
The Magnus Archives: 266 (29.8%)
Malevolent: 70 (7.8%)
The Silt Verses: 65 (7.3%)
Welcome to Night Vale: 39 (4.4%)
Wolf 359: 37 (4.1%)
The Magnus Protocol: 29 (3.2%)
The Penumbra Podcast (most people specified Juno Steel): 29 (3.2%)
Midnight Burger: 26 (2.9%)
Camp Here and There: 18 (2%)
Red Valley: 17 (1.9%)
Hello From the Hallowoods: 10 (1.1%)
Sherlock and Co: 10 (1.1%)
The Strange Case of the Starship Iris: 10 (1.1%)
Wooden Overcoats: 9 (1%)
Old Gods of Appalachia: 9 (1%)
WOE.BEGONE: 9 (1%)
The Amelia Project: 8 (0.9%)
Cabin Pressure: 8 (0.9%)
Monstrous Agonies: 7 (0.8%)
Camlann: 6 (0.7%)
Alice Isn’t Dead: 6 (0.7%)
The White Vault: 6 (0.7%)
The Kingmaker Histories: 5 (0.6%)
The Bright Sessions: 5 (0.6%)
The Holmwood Foundation: 5 (0.6%)
Re: Dracula: 5 (0.6%)
I am in Eskew: 5 (0.6%)
So if you need a new show to listen to, I’m assuming you haven’t listened to at least one of the ones on this list. :p (Also, to be clear, this isn’t representative of the quality of a show, or even the popularity. This survey was voluntary and not randomized at all, and so is innately skewed by where I got respondents from. And on top of that, these are just a bunch of people’s thoughts on what show they like the most based on whatever reasoning they deemed applicable. But it is fun data and great for recommendations!)
Just cause I can, my favorite fun facts are that the Persians thought that frogs were evil, and birds don’t have diaphragms (it’s why you have to hold a bird around their neck, cause if you constrict their chest movement they can’t breathe).
The end
If you read all of that… You rock. Thanks for bearing with me.
Genuinely, I love talking to people about stuff like this, so if you have thoughts or experiences you would like to share, please do! If you have any concerns about the data or the numbers look off anywhere, let me know and I’ll get that fixed as soon as I see someone say something. (I really haven’t spent much time with spreadsheets so I spent far more time going through this doing stuff by hand than I needed to, so there is likely a miscalculated percentage point somewhere.) I’m also more than happy to answer questions.
More generally, thank you to this awesome community and creative space. Thank you for making a place where queer stories can be told by queer people and enjoyed by queer fans. It’s not perfect by any means, but I do really think it’s special.
Once again, if you’re interested in a video of me talking about this instead of just reading a big chunk of text, let me know and I'll make one! Just don't want to if there isn't interest.
If you’re interested in an audio fiction convention (or just an awesome community built around audio drama), you can learn more about that and other projects run by the Podcast Book Club here: https://podcast-bookclub.com/ (I’m a mod with them which is part of why I’m trying to promote our stuff a bit, but it’s genuinely just a really lovely community and the stuff that the team works on have so much time and thought put into them and deserve all the support they can get. And they’re just genuinely awesome projects.)
Thanks again, and I hope to see you guys around!
Some academic articles (Noooooo it didn't preserve the hanging indent)
Bottomley, A. J. (2015). Podcasting, welcome to night vale, and the revival of Radio Drama. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 22(2), 179–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2015.1083370
Johnson, M. (2025). Tune out, Tune in: Cruising for queer utopian reprieve in welcome to night vale. Utopian Studies, 36(1), 80–98. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.36.1.0080
Juko, M. (2024). Narrating the (Queer) Gothic in the podcast the magnus archives. Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality, 204–225. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003375562-15
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I'm reading SoS for the first time (almost caught up!) and I'm so obsessed with it that I can't stop thinking about the characters literally every day. I don't know what you have planned for evolution at the end but I can't stop thinking about a hypothetical scenario where Tobias becomes a charmeleon before Nia evolves too so they just have this like 1 foot+ height difference for a while and how weird it would be but also how extra comfy and warm Nia would be if they curled up together ;;
Glad you're enjoying the story so much, anon!!! :D
And you're in luck...I'm a sucker for height differences, so I couldn't resist making a quick sketch of what this scenario might look like. You're right--Nia would be extra comfy and warm at night! :'] And she'd be super excited to talk to Tobias about evolution, too.
