Been thinking lately about how much I love podcasts because, like.... they exist Completely outside of any corporation or network or whatever that exists soley to make money. They can be produced and published and grow in popularity, all without some bigger entity interfering with the original intent at all. Take The Magnus Archives, for example. The Magnus Archives is a podcast (distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under--) that literally started out being made in someone's apartment underneath a blanket, voiced by one guy and a bunch of his friends and family, and it was able to become insanely popular and end up being produced in an actual studio building all while staying under the direction of the same few people who conceptualized it originally. If TMA was a TV show, it would've had to be picked up by a network or something in order to be produced at all and feasibly garner any kind of traction and it would now be susceptible to the will of an entirely new set of people. This would allow for it to potentially be stripped of all of the representation that's in it as well as facing the possibility of being canceled prematurely, plus I'm sure it would've lost a lot of it's original intent and the depth of thought thats put into it because big networks and corporations care about appealing to the masses, which means that everything should adhere to a formula, apparently. (Not to mention that podcasts as a medium just allow for whole new ways of telling a story altogether.) It just enables so much more creative freedom. And!! The people who consume podcasts don't even have to pay for them (although, of course, supporting the creators is encouraged and vital to them actually being able to continue-- but you arent required to pay anything to listen). This means that they're accessible to anyone who has access to the internet and that the all of people involved are there because they care about the story itself. Like... they're just stories for the purpose of being stories and there's no red tape preventing them from being produced and no corporation telling them that they can't have that many LGBT characters or that they have to compromise their ideas for the sake of mass appeal or anything else. I just thinks it's really cool and it's a refreshing in a world where the media is so saturated with things produced by organzations like Disney: the literal definition of media controlled by corporate greed.
