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# Transcript - The Big Final QnA (Part Two)

00:02 - Did you consider tackling racism within the setting?
03:02 - Do other gods have a Wither Mark equivalent?
05:20 - What went into getting each character's ending right
10:00 - How does HRT work in the world of the Silt Verses?
13:40 - B, what would Faulkner have done if his plans had actually worked?
16:30 - Why don't Val's lies work on herself?
20:00 - What was it like creating this final season?
24:10 - What is Mason's backstory?
25:50 - What aspect of the story did people latch onto more than you expected?
30:00 - What real-life landscapes inspired TSV?
31:45 - What was the focus behind All Lovers Part As Dust (the motel one)
35:50 - Did you have a map to keep the geography consistent?
38.45 - Which actors got the most physical?
48.00 - Did you know from the start that it'd end up with a dead body in the river?
49.10 - What was the fate of characters like Eddie, Gage and Charity?
51.50 - Are there any more stories planned in the TSV universe?
53.30 - What would each character's drag name be?
58.15 - B., what was your unexpectedly favourite thing about playing Faulkner?
59.10 - Jon, were you ever tempted to kill Carson horribly at the end?
1.02.28 - What was the catalyst behind writing Val?
1.06.05 - Any regrets?
1.09.45 - What would a meeting between Hayward and Faulkner have looked like?
1.12.02 - Méabh, how did it feel to record that finale scream?
1.15.21 - Any voicework plans next, actors?
1.21.25 - Do you have advice for aspiring audiodrama writers about balancing their time between creating, listening, and studying?
1.31.30 - Jimmie, did being Asian-American influence your performance?
1.32.07 - Jon, do you have any sound design tips?
1.41.46 - What songs would the cast assign to their characters?
1.47.46 - What are you going to do next?
1.49.15 - What are you most proud of?
2.05.23 - Will someone read the chapter-title poem one last time?

And we pick right back up where we left off, with the ambient jazz.

​

MÉABH:

Incredible! Okay.

melandrops asks, “Your story tackles a lot of systemic oppression and ways that flawed institutions impact minorities. Did you consider tackling racism in The Silt Verses? If so, how did you implement that? If not, what stopped you?”

JON:

I think it’s really nice to get a question that makes you stop and go, “wait, why did we do things that way?” and maybe to an extent come up short.

​

I think it’d be very fair to levy the charge at the Silt Verses that we’re trying to hold up this horrific and absurd funhouse mirror to our current reality, but there are a couple of topics that we probably shy away from, one of which is race.

Because the show is talking a great deal about the othering that goes on to justify the invisible cost of capitalism, about how we view certain people as expendable, acceptable victims to enable our own comfort, and in real life a huge part of that is actually about race and racism, whereas the show doesn’t really touch on that. It mostly deals with class, if it deals with these topics at all.

Race only really gets a hint of a mention right at the end, when it’s about nationality, essentially, where it's it's strongly indicated that typically in this setting at the end of a war you get a huge tranche of your defeated opponents’ citizens being delivered as sacrifices - so you no longer have to offer up your own population. This is a setting that has genocide built into its bones.

So why not include it more explicitly? I think organically, when we began telling the story and casting for the story, we were just imagining the Peninsula as our key setting, as this very generic western country, and then midway through that season introducing a second nation, the Linger Straits, but the joke being that actually these two nations are almost exactly the same. They have been rendered near-identical by multinational corporate interests, they may feel very strongly that they're completely different, but there's almost nothing dividing them, whether it's language or culture or even cuisine.

That was as far as we wanted to go with the worldbuilding; and to do the work necessary to effectively portray and tackle racism within the setting you would need to delineate nations and ethnicities and demographics to a much wider and more detailed extent than we were prepared to go, so I think it's fair to say that that's a gloss and that's an absence when it comes to the Silt Verses as a complete piece of satire.

MÉABH

Question from Luke! “Do any of the other commercial gods have powerful city-leveling markings and sigils or is the Wither Mark a unique case?”

JON:

Luke, this is just one of those…I think worldbuilding issues that happens when the potential chaos levels of everything that is in the setting are off the charts.

​

You know, of course it makes sense that that the Trawler-man is not the only god out there with this city-leveling power at its disposal, but obviously if you start to introduce that into a linear story that - "actually, oh, the Saint Electric also has something like this, and this god or that god also has something like this," the stakes get higher to the point of absurdity and we really start to delve into the question of how on earth has the setting not just been nuked to oblivion by now.

So…I think the conceit is - very much for the purposes of the story that we're telling - that the Wither Mark is something uniquely horrific and powerful. But I think rationally we know that that probably can't really be the case.

We might imagine, if we want to, that there is some kind of anti-prayer security that is in place generally speaking to prevent something like this happening. We do…we do pitch that a couple of times in the show, but generally it is, for comedic purposes, completely useless, like when Shrue is being attacked by the Love Saints and they put on a soothing motivational tape.

MÉABH

But I - I think that's something that's so easy to assume within the world of the show itself. Because we were talking about how the lack of exposition actually adds so much to it! You really feel like you're dropped into this culture and it’s like “this is it! Hang on”, so I think it works really well. I think the show is, like, you just, “this is a very fleshed-out world; we can't tell you everything that's going on because a lot of stuff is going on,” so I think it works extremely well.

Okie-doke, right! spiderhoney - fantastic name - asks,

“The finale was absolutely incredible. I cried multiple times. What went into making sure each character's end felt right, or intentionally not right?

JON:

This is such a lovely question, especially the bit about “intentionally not right.” I think for me when I got to the end, there was a lot of thought and a lot of pain…but also on one level it was quite simple. Because we’d done a quite a lot of thematic groundwork to almost establish these principles of what constitutes a good ending in the Silt Verses.

From very early on - this idea of “the only choice you have is what eats you” and so therefore this is a world where people don't get their just desserts. This is a world, we've established, filled with horrible injustice and powers that are far beyond us preying upon us and us feeling like we have to choose between them, but that a good ending might be…you get to end things on your own terms.

And so I think if you listen to the two-part finale, every character pretty explicitly talks at one point or another about how they want things to end, almost as if they're negotiating with the narrative itself. Carpenter talks about it, Faulkner talks about it, everyone has this bit of a dialogue or a monologue saying, “actually this is what I think I'd like to happen to me.” That gave…gives you so much freedom because it doesn't have to end with all the characters in the same room holding hands and running off into the sunset together.

People can die alone, but still die wonderfully and happily and I think with a huge amount of grace and dignity, as Hayward does.

So, yeah, there was a lot that went into each character's ending, but it felt like because we'd established that framework and those expectations, that we could take those characters to where they wanted to go, rather than where I was trying to steer them, if that makes sense.

MÉABH:

That's incredible! I, yeah, I think I completely agree with you - even the technically-not-right ending - or, you know, what is a right ending at the end of the day? - but even the deaths, you know…

Step one step to the side and reframe it and it could be overwhelmingly tragic, (but) as you said, all of them have some element of choice involved, some element of triumph, some element of hope, dignity, as you have said.

And I think that applies to almost every character in the show - which again is incredible for a show that is, you know, characterized as being pretty unrelentingly grim.

But to end it on those notes where it does end people's personal dignity and autonomy and all of those things kind of being grasped and acknowledged is quite the triumph! It's a fantastic ending, and I do think…I don't necessarily need this to go in the Q&A or anything like that, but I actually, I said this to Jon, I could not believe the overwhelming positivity.

That…that the response was incredible. When, I feel like, you put something out in the internet like that, usually there's a lot more people who are not happy, who are like, “I think this should happen.” I just felt everyone was kind of like,

(Weightily and with satisfaction)

“...yeah. Yeah. That's…that's how it went.”

B. NARR:

That’s what I saw too!

They're like,

(Emotionally exhausted voice)

“I cried for 5 hours! Thank you. Like, thank you.”

MÉABH

Like, it was, I just thought it was incredible-

JON:

I was - obviously, as ever, terrified right up to the end. Méabh, you know this, cos we we talked about it a lot - right up to the pretty much post- production I couldn't decide on Carpenter's ending.

Whether…you know, option one was that she just literally falls down, succumbs to her wounds, and drops into the river. Option two was she sits down by the river and then she just gets up and keeps going on. She endures. And option three was what we ended up going with, where we have this kind of Chekhov’s gunman who comes in and shoots her.

And I went back and forth and back and forth, cos, you know, it really…it felt like an important

cap to the episode, you know? Get it wrong and suddenly everyone who's died previously in the finale is just going to seem like a grim litany of authorial sadism.

In the end I came back to the ending we went with, because we are to our bones…we're an agnostic show! We're about the experience of agnosticism. It's about not knowing if there is truth, not knowing if there is finality.

Knowing that we do not know, and choosing to go on all the same.

MÉABH:

Yeah, absolutely, 100%. And on that note I did, also…I was keeping an eye out on people's responses to the ambiguity surrounding Carpenter's death and I - on God, I've seen equal amounts of people go, “she's dead!” “No, she's alive!” and also go, like, “it's ambiguous and that's fine.”

You know? Like it's, they just like…no one has landed on a particular ending, it's fantastic. I think it was wonderful.

Okie-do! All right!

​

Midori asks,

“I am overjoyed and fascinated by the fact that the Parish was able to provide testosterone to Faulkner. I am wondering if you had conceptualized how they get HRT / how transition looks in general for unlicensed faiths in the world of TSV.”

JON:

So to anyone who's forgotten, this is effectively a reference to the episode with Faulkner’s dad. There is a wonderful scene between Faulkner and his father, played by Steve Shell, where Faulkner acknowledges that actually the, that the Parish helped Faulkner to transition. Which is, you know, meant to be an explicit acknowledgement of Faulkner as a trans man.

I had a very clear idea of exactly what that meant in detail, but we really couldn't include it in the scene, because it is a…it is a very heavy and climactic emotion-filled scene and I really didn't feel like we could just stop it dead and go,

(Newcaster voice)

“Now, to explain exactly what that means and how that happened.”

​

So it's exposition that was, unfortunately, surplus to requirements. In my mind what had happened was very obvious. So Mason would be at the heart of it. Mason, as we know, met up with Carpenter and likely a few other orphans of the faith - however many years ago it was, 20 years ago - to start to reestablish the Parish of Tide and Flesh.

We know that a lot of the older generation had effectively been killed off in raids, that there would be a huge gaping hole, a lack of human resource, at the heart of what the Parish wanted to be. Mason then would need to start recruiting younger people, making fresh converts, and one very easy way to convert people to your cause is ensuring that you can provide them with what the system is failing to provide.

So in a setting where we have heavily indicated there is privatised healthcare and certainly privatised gender affirming care, ensuring that - whether through, yeah, raiding lorries or simply having a backdoor deal with local hospitals, which I'm sure would be very easy in this very corrupt - setting Mason actually has gathered a great deal of medicines and treatment that can be provided gratis to new converts.

But I wrote this and it was incredible to me - because it just…it hadn't occurred to me that we'd written the show like that! - that there were so many people who responded by going,

(Confused voice)

“Hang on a second, so what you're telling me is the Parish of Tide and Flesh just has like a big cauldron deep in the caves and maybe it's got crabs in it and it's fed with river water and they're stirring it around and and that's their version of magical testosterone?”

(Laughter)

MÉABH:

Boy soup!

B.:

(Cackling)

Boy soup!

​

JON:

Yeah, and you…and you know what? My very grounded, boring explanation doesn't have to be the answer. I'm really happy just to cede the ground to boy soup.

B.!

They're not mutually exclusive! Maybe someone tried some homemade stuff before they got Mason involved.

MÉABH:

That's so good. Stunning. Fantastic.

Okay, ManyJawedPossum asks, “B: What do you think Faulkner would have done if his plans had actually worked? If he succeeded in being High Prophet?”

B.:

He would have been miserable. Without question. He would have been miserable, he probably would have started this, like, schism group, because there's this licensed-faith version of the Trawler-man now! But he would have hated every second of it, no matter how well it went, because being a High Prophet means being lonely.

And that's never going to be fixed if he stays up on that pedestal, and that's not…that's not something he wants, but it is something he would have continued to do.

I mean, you're…feel free to speak on it, Jon or Méabh, but that's my thought, is that he would have absolutely been just in this terrible cycle.

JON:

I mean, technically Faulkner does succeed in becoming High Katabasian! He doesn’t necessarily have the longest reign, but he does actually achieve his goal-

B:

Correct!

MÉABH:

I think they've had kings that didn't last as long as that, so…

B.:

So you know what? Fair. He already did do it. He's…he done did it!

MÉABH:

So do you think he deliberately would have been stirring up shit? Because he was just like, “I need to distract myself from how isolated I am from absolutely everyone, by this pedestal that I made.”

B.:

Probably! He probably would have been doing some some Shakespearean nonsense on his own if it had not been handed to him.

JON:

I think the natural endgame for Faulkner in that story is that he would start to believe himself to be the Trawler-man or that he should supplant the Trawler-man, right?

​

It is the natural progression to go, “well, actually, I'm the one who's made all this progress; maybe it wasn't the Trawler-man at all. Maybe, maybe I'm the god here.”

B.:

Oh, shit! Yes, so brilliant. Oh my God.

MÉABH:

Dark potential for where that second mouth could be, also-

​

B. NARR:

Méabh!!!

MÉABH:

(Confused)

Well, it’s…so what they…you know when they…well it's like, you know, they say what a Colombian smile is?

It's like-

(Presumably gesturing)

Yeah, sorry, this…this is not a video. But I think a Colombian smile is, like - I could be dead wrong, but I thought it was when you slice someone's neck open. It's like I've heard-

B.:

(Also gesturing)

Pull the tongue. It's a Colombian necktie, maybe, or something like that, where you pull the tongue down through like a hole in a slice in the neck-

…we're doing a lot of gesticulating on this audio medium.

MÉABH:

There's a lot of, yes, there’s a lot of-

​

JON:

I think it was the way you said it, but…

I don't know about you, B., but that really sounded like you were making some kind of dirty joke about where the second mouth would be, Méabh.

Laughter and something indiscernable from B.

​

MÉABH:

Oh, get your brain out of your gutter! Come on now. Terrible.

Ahem. Well, now, that we've established that-

Em asks, “Why don't Val's lies work on herself?”

JON:

I found this such a fascinating question because, like…do any of our lies work on ourselves, really?

Is Em out there just lying to themselves and getting away with it? Who can do that? It’s incredible.

MÉABH:

God, wouldn't that be amazing.

JON:

No, I think almost as I said earlier with Faulkner, the gods in the Silt Verses setting - and Val certainly is at least representative of one of those gods, if not arguably divine herself - are insecure entities.

They may appear all powerful, they may be reality-warping, but they all of them depend on having an audience and they depend upon attention. So, so for Val to be able to break out of that paradigm without needing an audience simply wouldn't work for me thematically. I think it's very important that on some level she knows that this isn't really real; that she can't simply rewrite everything perfectly with a snap of her fingers, that there are some things that are beyond her. All of that is very important for her character arc but, you know, I'd also acknowledge…mechanically, we just don't want to go there.

If she can do whatever she wants offscreen, effectively, then the narrative ceases to have any meaning. So, yeah; mechanically it's out, thematically it's out as well.

MÉABH:

Okay, so…okay. So two things.

First thing is that - like, this is slightly light! We did mention earlier, we were talking about headcanons for characters, and I was kind of saying Val is written as such a a three-dimensional character that - you know, at the outset, if she did not have that that drop and that side of humanity, it would be very easy to kind of say, “oh, she's this weapon, how terrifying”, but because she exhibits that humanity it really branches out, like, “oh, well, what else does she do?”

So I was kind of saying, does Val ever say, “Actually, there’s still Nutella in the pot, it isn't gone”?

So I was wondering, is that the kind of lie that wouldn't work on her?

JON:

I think narratively it's more interesting if she keeps trying to do that but every day she's like,

(Uncertainly)

“...is there more? is there slightly more?”

Maybe, maybe she lies to herself that actually it is working, but it's not, you know?

MÉABH:

Yeah, interesting.

JON:

Maybe, maybe.

MÉABH:

Okay, so then here's my second question and - Jon, this doesn't have to go in the Q&A if you don't want to - but I just find it interesting that twice now you referenced characters who need audiences to, to exist, to feel secure in themselves. Like, is season 3 reflective of something that you're struggling with behind the scenes?

JON:

I love how you keep making these, like - you're not subtle, Méabh! - these challenges to my cowardice. This kind of reverse psychology. “This doesn't need to go in the Q&A, Jon!”

(Insistent)

It's going in the fucking Q&A!

​

Um, the entire show is to an extent about the act of storytelling, right? The stories we tell ourselves, trying to turn the chaos and meaninglessness of existence into something coherent, and season 3 definitely embodies that more than anything.

If there…if there's a bit that is really about the storyteller struggling with the audience I think it's in Faulkner's…one of Faulkner's final speeches. There's a bit where he - B., you just beautifully start screaming about baby birds rising to pluck out their mother's eyes. And that is the kind of condition of writing for an audience online, you know?

Love all of you guys so, so, so much, but the pressure that you find yourself under, the pressure that you put yourself under, is terrifying and immense. And so I was definitely channeling some of that yes for Val, but definitely for Faulkner at the end.

​

MÉABH

Incredible! Thank you very much.

All right, okay. Marina asks,

“To Jon and Muna: every episode this season hit like a freight train with how efficient and impactful they were. What was the process like for outlining this last third of the narrative?”

​

Editor's note: Muna had by this point gone to bed with the baby, we didn't just shut her out of the answer.

JON:

I love this question so much, because in…in an early Simpsons episode Mr Burns is running for office.

​

And he gives Lisa a fake card for her to read out - where it's an interview question - and it says, “Mr Burns, your campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?”

And this - Marina's question is so, so kind, it just reads like we planted it.

(Falsely flattered voice)

“Oh yeah, sure, every episode hit like a freight train, sure they did.”

Um, the process was hard as fuck, I'm not going to lie.

I think there is a reason why in these great adventure trilogies, number three is inevitably always a drop-off in quality. If you look at Lord of the Rings or the original Star Wars films, the three seasons kind of follow a comparable journey, where the first chapter is fairly straightforward: the heroes come together, they go on a journey, there's an antagonist. Season two, the journeys begin to diverge. Season three, the journeys, having diverged, need to somehow all come back together and wrap up satisfyingly…and it just gets harder and harder.

​

And I think you become very much aware that…when you have so many parallel storylines, and there's some really exciting stuff happening in one, there's always going to be one that is doing the hard mechanical graft of getting the characters to where they need to be.

And that just becomes so much more apparent when you're always having to check in with various characters! And in season 3 we're checking in with all these different characters at once, but we also need to get them to the right place on time.

So outlining this last third of the narrative, it was incredibly difficult, because you need to get Carpenter to the people of the Grace, to Paige and Hayward, you need there to be some kind of momentum from there, Faulkner needs to accomplish all of his goals…uh, to a certain extent…becoming this new leader of the faith. We had to do something with Shrue’s storyline, very much, we had to wrap up this big war we've introduced…

So much, so much stuff to do! And yet we've killed off so many characters at the end of season 2. You know, Faulkner has literally killed off anyone he could talk to at the Parish! So we need to introduce new characters that Faulkner hasn't killed, so he actually has someone to have scenes with.

So this season was…it was a real, real challenge to structure and outline. Introducing all these waves of new characters to ensure that actually we could still have a story for each plotline! Making sure that no one's storyline is moving too fast, also just trying to get in some standalone stories before the end.

I think if there's a, a real structural complaint to be made about season 3, it is that there is an obvious sag in the middle where Carpenter and Hayward set off on their journey to Glottage, and then we just have like three episodes where we go, “we're going to dick around with some stories; we're going to go to a power plant, Shrue is going to have the world's worst blue-sky thinking session, we're going to stop in at this motel…”

There's just…there's a little bit of self-indulgence, because it's our last chance before all the plotlines start hitting hard to explore the setting and tell some different stories.

​

So…yeah, the process was an absolute nightmare! Thank you for asking, Marina.

MÉABH:

Well…just to jump in really quickly, I did actually reference Shrue’s blue-sky thinking as some of my favorite scenes in the show! Because, because again it was that exploration of like the absurdest late-stage capitalism - “what are we doing here?” and I just thought it was done extremely well.

And I think the response to the motel episode was incredibly positive, so I'm not really sure your comment about the sagging stands up.

Okay. Fantastic. Next question, okay.

​

Jamie…Jamie Stewart who plays Mason! asks,

“I played Mason as a handler of spies, and later as a purely political type of cardinal. For him it's about power NOT the faith. What is his backstory? How did he get to that point?”

JON:

I adore that Jamie is to an extent asking for notes on the character a season after he dies-

MÉABH:

Consummate professional.

JON:

I know! Jamie, you're…you're awesome, absolutely love you.

Um…it's interesting, because I don't know if I see Mason as purely about power. His last action in season two is to put himself at great risk to try and ensure the future of the faith.

​

We see his boss in season 3, Roemont, who is clearly someone that could be pushed over by a strong wind - or, alternatively, Faulkner. He (Mason) could have had ultimate power if he wanted it.

In my mind, Mason…his main motivation is that there is a kind of…a real fulfillment that can come when you are surrounded by people who are idealists, committed to a particular goal. And you get to be the fixer. You get to be the pragmatist who makes things happen for these people.

And the…the fulfillment is both about seeing these people around you succeed, but also feeling that you're a little bit different from them. Maybe you don't have as strong a faith as they do because you are taking on the burden of being the guy who gets his hands dirty, the guy who makes things happen.

​

So it's…it's almost…it is the Cardinal Richilieu, as you say, Jamie, kind of character who has a faith in his own way, I think, but it's a tarnished faith that's really about how much he can achieve through any means necessary, if that makes sense.

MÉABH:

That's great, that's so interesting.

Okay! Penn asks, “Was there a specific character, moment or god that people latched onto harder than you thought they would?”

​

JON:

This is a great question because it is now, uh, Week 200 of Sibling Rane Saturday-

MÉABH:

That's literally what I was going to say!

B.:

Me too!

JON:

Sibling Rane, a relatively minor character who only appears in season three, now perhaps has

more fanart than Faulkner or Carpenter. And if projections continue, by the year 2026, all of Tumblr will be Sibling Rane-

​

MÉABH:

(A la Pacific Rim)

There’s going to be a new Sibling Rane fanart every two hours!

B.:

Not sure their servers can handle it!

MÉABH:

It's fantastic, oh, it's so good. Why do you think that is? Why, why do you think people have latched on, aside from the gorgeous voice acting and the…

JON:

Aside from HR Owen absolutely killing it!

(Shrugging)

Often fanworks and almost alternate universe fanworks and extra interpretation, it accumulates around the places where you've left a big obvious gap. Where the work has been done, people don't feel the need to touch it so much but it's more of that kind of slight…if not frustration then dissatisfaction with where things were left, and a desire to to delve more in.

And in this case I think with Sibling Rane…you know, Hero and I very much joked about this at the start. This is a character who is there just to represent the relationship of the Parish to Faulkner.

You know, to be at first “undying faith” and then gradually “real skepticism” and then a kind of desire to cover up Faulkner’s ongoing existential meltdown and try and pretend that he is the man that he ought to be.

​

And I think I had the idea…”well, okay, that's a little similar to Sister Thurrocks in season two. Is there something we can do here?” and there’s kind of…maybe a few hints that there's like some kind of unrequited attraction or something going on there.

But ultimately we don't have time to get into a doomed romance. It's season 3, we've got so much ground to cover! There’s a couple of hints-

MÉABH:

There’s a war going on!

JON:

Exactly! There's so much going on!

(So) there's like maybe a couple of lines that kind of infer something, or could be interpreted that way, and that's fine, that's done.

And that…I get the impression, is where folks have gone, “no, fuck you, Jon! There's going to be a doomed romance here! A doomed romance by any means necessary!” Um-

MÉABH:

Doomed romance, I say!

B.:

The people demand it!

JON:

That's my interpretation. What do you think, B.?

​

B.:

I agree, I think that's actually it. I think it's…Hero is incredibly charismatic and delightful, and I think it is this gap of, like, we get some of Sibling Rane’s backstory a little bit, and it is not obviously nearly as much as we get from our main cast - Paige and Hayward and Carpenter and Faulkner.

But they're so close to this plot, they're so close to all of this like climactic action and, like you said, the sort of the doomed romance thing that people just like eat up like catnip.

I think that's what happened, I think that people saw this, and they're like well, “this character! I want to fill out this character's backstory, there's like a lot of compelling shit here!”

Like you said, I think it…it comes in when there's gaps. A lot of the fanwork does. They're like, “well, what was Carpenter doing when she was a teenager? I need to know, I'm going to draw it right now, because you haven't given it to me, goddamn it, Jon.”

Like, I think that's where a lot of it comes from, and I say that with all the love. I love this. Sibling Rane Saturday is befuddling and delightful and I love it, cuz I wasn't expecting it to continue so rapidly and I love it.

I eat that shit up every Saturday, baby, I'm on that Tumblr. I'm all like. “ooh, look at that, oh, y'all are doing great!”

​

Editor's note: Rane-iacs, just to add - we love you and appreciate you and I should have remembered to say as much explicitly! Thank you so much for being there and producing so much awesome stuff.

MÉABH:

Wonderful! I love that. OK, fantastic.

​

Jack asks, “The landscapes in the Silt Verses are incredibly evocative. Were they inspired by any real places?”

JON:

Uh, beautiful question, Jack.

Umm…there is an extent to which it is literally just Louisiana imagined by a dickhead from the UK who's never been to Louisiana.

It's that kind of real, like, lowgrade Americana sludge of like,

(Voice of someone making up bullshit)

“OK, so, er, swamp. Motels. Diners. That's…that's it, right?” all merged together.

MÉABH:

Swamp! Motel! Diner!

JON:

The key elements of the Deep South.

MÉABH:

Monster trucks! But it’s really a monster!

JON:

(Perking up)

Yes!

But…more pertinently, I think, when I was young we used to go to the Norfolk Broads which is a wetland in the UK.

And often wetlands, where they have actual birdwatching hides - I'm sure folks who've done this will know - they often have these rickety but very beautiful walkways out through the reeds. And the reeds are surrounding you, when you're a child, on either side like a great labyrinth, and you just have this slightly rickety path that you follow out, further and further out, through the maze-

-until at the very end there is usually a dilapidated bird hide, a little bit of a Hansel and Gretel witch's cottage, you know? You go, you undo the latch, it's completely dark, and you have to open it all up, and it's always very mysterious, a little bit sinister, but that great sense of an adventure towards an abandoned place. And I think to a great extent that is what inspired the landscapes of the Silt Verses.

MÉABH

That is gorgeous! OK, fantastic. Right.

E. asks, “What was the process behind choosing to focus on characters unrelated to the plot in episode 36 all lovers part as dust (amazing episode btw)?”

​

JON:

I mean…it’s not the main reason, but one thing that comes to mind is, looking back at I Am In Eskew, David Ward really should have been bi. We hint a little bit in the early episodes about it, but it’s just not there in the text.

And, you know, it did feel compelling to almost have a bit of a do-over, with Dev, this character who is very David Ward-coded which is in an exaggerated way very me-coded, with the flat affect, the social anxiety and the general existential uncertainty…so it felt quite lovely to just return to an alternate-universe version of this character and give him a doomed MLM romance, where the promise of a functional happy relationship is in fact being dangled by a cosmic horror.

​

More than that though, something that was on my mind hugely as we went into the final stretch of the show was hope, and in particular how these very hopeful narratives - which can be revolutionary on a societal level or on a personal level - can be used against us and indeed how the reins can be held by monstrous corporate overlords that effectively use them to perpetuate their own existence.

With this episode we were heavily riffing off the existence of The Last Of Us - which I still haven't

seen - but equally I was thinking of Andor, and these very explicit revolutionary anti-imperialist anti-corporate overtones being produced by Disney. And Severance, a show which I felt a great

deal of kinship with, and which I enjoyed immensely, which has a real authentic anger at not just corporatism but the invisible suffering that we happily ignore when it benefits us - even though doing so is ultimately self-destructive to us, as well as to the people who are in immediate harm's way.

You know, I could not have agreed more with that show’s outlook and its genuine passion for the topic…but nevertheless this is being put out by Apple, a huge multinational which even as Severance was going out was being looked at by the courts for its ultimate complicity in the horrific treatment of workers in the DRC.

I was fascinated by the idea of trying to tell a story where we have both an authentic, genuine meaningful love story that is taking place within an environment that is feeding off that love story. An environment which is inauthentic and compassionless and hungry, and we almost have to make sense of…

...well, can the love story still matter under these conditions? And, you know, which ultimately do we choose to believe in?

Do we choose to believe in the hopeful narrative that is in front of us or do we take a look at the far darker thing that is lurking in the shadows behind that story? So I really, I loved doing it.

I also loved taking a moment to do some proper horror; I think inevitably with the show and these last two seasons, the further you get into the political thriller and the fantasy and the satire of it all, the plot drives naturally towards those elements and away from the horror.

There were fewer opportunities to really get into the nasty spooky stuff…so it just it felt like an absolute ball to get to do some of that with a fresh pair of protagonists en route to Glottage.

​

MÉABH:

Gorgeous! James from Indianapolis asks,

“TSV has such a VAST geography, both physically and politically, with two countries, all these territories, so much terrain etc. With so much ground to cover (literally), how do you manage that in the writing process? Was the physical terrain mapped out before pen was put to paper, or did it develop as needed as the story progressed? Is there a giant map that you referenced to keep things consistent?”

JON:

James from Indianapolis…I'm sorry, I'm going to use you here, because cos I do need to confess something dreadful.

When we first started writing the show - because you know, often I get these questions, “hey, is there a map of the Silt Verses? Oh, I'd love it if there's a map,” and sometimes I've kind of given it a little bit of grace and I've tried to sketch something out, and other times I've gone,

(Evasively)

“...uh, not really.”

And that is because in season one our characters are of course traveling upriver - Carpenter and Faulkner, they're going upriver on this pilgrimage towards Bellwethers.

Meanwhile, on the other side of this…English Channel, sort of, Paige is in the city of Nesh which is implied to be fairly close to the coast. She drives in a few hours over the bridge into the Peninsula and very quickly she finds herself on the banks of the White Gull river where she gets kidnapped by Carpenter and Faulkner.

And you go, “...okay, so they're driving upriver. Towards the coast.”

That isn't how rivers work!

MÉABH:

(Supportively)

Um, I don't know. I gave up geography so it's not an issue-

JON:

(Which is why) I am a little bit cagey about maps, in all honesty, because the geography on a fundamental level does not make sense. And so that is something I would aim to fix in any Silt Verses adaptations thereafter, but as it is right now, it is just a…yeah, a blot on my A-level Geography.

MÉABH

Well, honestly, I was about to say, it's really funny to me that you're saying that.

Jon, it's a world of weird gods and you, you made it, you know?

JON:

Well this is it exactly, Méabh! Like, we have now done two shows which take place in an inconsistent everchanging reality…and that is such a boon. Anytime that we make a mistake we can just go,

(Airily)

“Oh, no, that's…that's fine. A god did it, a god did it.”

MÉABH:

Right! There you go; this is the writing advice we’re all here for.

Amazing, okay. Brett asks,

“To any of the VAs, though particularly Meabh, B., Lucille, or Jimmy: Were there any scenes you found yourself being particularly physical? What was that like? Among all the VAs, who from the cast was the most physically involved whilst acting? “

I can take that one off the bat! I think I get quite physical when doing anything involving physicality in my scenes, because it just doesn't ring true to me (otherwise). So I usually am kind of…basically, if I'm getting punched in the stomach, that means I'm holding my two hands together, clasped together, and I'm hitting myself in the stomach like that!

(Exertion sound)

And that is how you know you get that punch and you get that burst of air, you know? It's not violent, I'm not hurting myself, but it it's good to get that cut-off in the sound that I think brings that element of force being applied.

And I do think that generally I would try and get physical because - even when it's things like running or something - it just helps to almost bob so you're getting the rhythm of the breathing right.

I think there was only one scene where I had to kind of throw in the towel and I think I was on a call with you, Jon - it's when Carpenter is digging the grave for the the body and also saying the prayer.

And I was trying to dig and say the prayer and it was kind of…I had to think about, “okay, and

now she shovels, and now she'd probably toss, and now she'd…” and at a certain point I kind of had to go, “Jon, I think this needs to be a monologue in the head!”

Cos it was getting very difficult to remember that I was holding a fake shovel and digging fake dirt and…also panting while I delivered the monologue.

​

But I do like to get quite physical! I think it lends a realism to the delivery of the lines. But funnily enough the one that stands out the most in my head when it comes to getting physical is the air guitar scene with Hayward and Carpenter.

Because truly, I was like…it's almost like “you can't”...what what do they say? They're like, “you can't sneeze and close your eyes.”

​

I was like, “I actually can't…do the noise, and not actually air guitar.” And it was like, “I know this is audio! I know no one can see me! But how will I play the right sounds if I'm not also air-guitaring?”

So I really had to…I actually had to do the air guitar, cos I was like…otherwise, I mean, what are we doing here? It's fake.

B. NARR:

Oh my God, that's amazing. That is…you're a consumate professional. That's fabulous.

​

I also feel the same way, though. I can't fake being physical. I have to do the movements, I have to…move like I just got hit or run, and actually…like, run, quote unquote - you can't see my air quotes, but I'm doing them - and get out of breath.

I think the most physical I ever got was drowning Sibling Rane. I was sweating in the booth! Oh Lordy Jesus, I was sweating, that was intense.

Just because there's a lot of, like…action lines of Sibling Rane coming up and going down and coming up and going down. So I was like, “I'm going to do it!”

And I think…also for little stuff. Like, if I'm talking on the phone I'll pick up my phone and put it between my shoulder and ear, because otherwise I feel it. I can't…I don't know, there's something about it that I can't do without doing that.

I can't cheat it. Like, I couldn't do air guitar without doing that (actual air guitar). That would be bananas! That would be bananas.

MÉABH:

Yeah, crazy! Yeah, no, as you say that I actually just remembered that when Carpenter has the bit of airplane in her side, I was…I was holding my side.

Cos I was like, “okay, this is the bit that hurts so I need to lean this way, and you know…”

Yeah, I…I don't know if It ultimately…I mean, I think it adds to the performance for me! Because it helps me go, “okay, this is the part that hurts. I'm leaning this way, my lungs are impacted or squished in this direction.” And definitely I think it helps overall.

And it is very fun to get physical! It is very fun to read a script where I'm doing something bonkers, and I have had many an enjoyable time almost passing out from the quick panting, when you're breathing like I'm like

(Hard breathing)

And then it's like,

(Exhausted)

Oh my God. Whoah.

B.:

“I need…I need five.” It's great. Like… “Can I sit? I’ve got to sit.”

MÉABH:

Yeah!

JIMMIE:

Well, I kind of already mentioned it! But the barfing scene in the tractor.

I literally had the pan - the cookie tray, basically, with moss on it - and I would put a bunch of water in my mouth and be like,

(Cartoon retching sound)

off out into it so it sounded like it was actually hitting dirt.

There are scenes when you're like running, and I was physically like moving my arms and everything like that.

​

The fight - the fight scenes! I'm used to doing a lot of efforts, you literally have to physically move your body like,

(Makes ‘HOOARGH’ noises)

when you're doing it, otherwise it doesn't sound quite as real.

​

SARAH:

Jon will know, from when I was able to have my camera on, that my old recording studio had a big pole in the middle of it right next to my head.

And while there is actually not a lot of physical work - except for one notable scene - that goes into Shrue, Shrue is very much a person who is constantly beset from all sides.

And so there was always a lot of placement in the space of people and effects. So I would be, like, looking from one side to the other, and unaware of where things were coming from…

…which means that I did multiple times just smack my head into a pole, playing Shrue. That absolutely, absolutely happened, and you'd hear like a little

(‘clonk’ noise)

and I'd be like…”We're going to have to take that one again.”

MARTA:

That's foley! That's actual foley work right there.

SARAH:

I have big headphones - the cans for my set are quite large - so it was always them rather than my head that was hitting it. So it probably didn't come across that much, but…

…yeah, you know, an addlepated little guy who doesn't know what's going on is very much within my casting bracket.

LUCILLE:

I don't think I've done anything similar for the Silt Verses, but I've definitely had roles where I’m like, “oh, I need to drown! I need to be drowning in this situation. OK, let me just bring a couple of bottles of water, and then just like low-key waterboard myself into the microphone and we'll be

fine.”

​

MARTA:

(Shocked)

Oh, wow, because I just had to record something - the writer really likes efforts and really likes physicalization of stuff, including drowning and fighting underwater! - but I don't know!

I'm going to do what I can do with my voice and…you can put effects on it, like, that's your job! I don't think I'll waterboard myself. But that's very impressive.

And I'm lucky, my character…no character I've ever played, I think, has ever had to throw up. Because I'm the sort of person that just thinking about it, or just trying to do the sound, will make me throw up. And we don't want that in the booth! So kudos to all of you because that sounds horrifying.

LUCILLE:

I like that that's what scares you! Instead of, like…every horrible, awful thing that happens in the show as a whole.

JON:

It’s funny with this stuff, because I think you can get a bit too deep into it. When Sibling Rane is being drowned by Faulkner, we did ask Hero if they’d mind doing some gargling and muffled screaming through a mouthful of water, and…it sounds absolutely nothing like someone having their entire head submerged, and there was no way we were going to do actual waterboarding, so we just left that out.

Likewise, I remember with the amazing Sarah Golding, who plays Acantha - right in their very first scene with Carpenter, they’ve just been punched in the nose. And Sarah, who is incredible, turned up with their nostrils plugged.

And you listen, and you go, “I love the commitment, I love what you’re doing as an actor, I love how involved you are to try and bring this to life, but because it’s audio…”

It’s a little like, you know, the filmmaking staple that “this actually doesn’t look like that when it’s onscreen, so you need to do something different.”

MÉABH

Yes, absolutely! And I've had that on like short films and stuff. Like, you get the actual thing and you're like, “...that actually doesn't look good onscreen. We're going to…we need to paint it gold or something. Yeah, we need to fake it up a bit actually because that looks better.” It's incredible.

Shauna asks, “I just discovered the show and marathon'd it all last weekend. I am Distraught and Delighted. It is amazing. Congratulations on making an epic show!

Did you know in the beginning, as they stood over a dead body together, that they would end the same way?”

(Laughing)

Oh, whoa! I was like,

(Carefree)

“La la la! What a nice thing to say.” And then,

(Shocked)

“Oh god!”

JON:

We've already covered the fact that this…this was always a bit of a shaggy dog story and we didn't have the endgame in mind when we started it. But this one has delighted me, because online, when people started listening to the ending, we did start to get these really wonderful reactions from people going,

(Profoundly)

“Wow so they started looking at a dead body in the river and then at the end, one of them was the dead body in the river! So, so thematic, so much meaning.”

And, you know, you go,

(Unconvincingly)

“Ahhh…yeah! Yeah, that was deliberate.”

No, no, you know, we didn't…we didn't intend to do it! It's a show about a river!

MÉABH

Statistics dictate-

JON:

Statistically speaking-

MÉABH:

That's so funny! Because it does begin with them, like, they're moving upriver, and I think it ends with them walking downriver. Was that…?

JON:

(Deeply unconvicing)

Uhhhh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

(Shrugging)

I mean…the river goes two ways, right? So…coin flip.

MÉABH:

(Mock-scandalised)

Jon!! Oh, you.

JON:

It's fine! We can be candid. It's the final Q&A.

MÉABH:

Yeah, you're like, it's fine, it's done.

(Taunting)

“What are you going to do? Take back the listens? You can't!” Amazing.

Mind Ur Ps & Qs asks,

“While a lot of characters die by the end of the series, a few are still unaccounted for. What ended up happening to some of the notable side characters like Charity, Gage, or Eddie, Faulkner's brother?”

JON:

I'd actually like to turn this one over, I think. Méabh, what do you think happened to Charity? B., what do you think happened to Eddie? I think it's only fair that you should get some say over canon.

​

Editor's note: I forgot about Gage. I'm sorry. I think they tried their best to go legitimate, took flute lessons and really struggled with formal music tutoring, then stabbed the teacher and went on the run again.

B. NARR:

Oh, shit.

(To MÉABH)

What do you think happened to Charity?

​

MÉABH:

(Thinking)

This is too much…this is too much power. This is too much power, this is too much responsibility.

Well, I mean…we do get our little snapshot of Charity, which I think was gorgeous! I loved that. I

thought it was a wonderful - again, sort of little look at like, other things are happening in this big world. And it was pulling out the focus a bit and kind of bringing us back to season one.

So, I mean, I…because I I love her, I think Charity's just doing what Charity does. She's running with the snare-dogs! Like, I mean, I can't think of anything better, particularly when…you know, I don't think she wanted anything else.

I think she had achieved Peak Actualization in that action. Love that for her.

B.:

I love this for her too! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

I think…I don't think Eddie's dead.

I think actually if this was a longrunning TV show, we would get maybe a like a a clip of him going to their dad's house and it's empty. And the rest of his family is dead and he doesn't know yet. And that's, like, where it ends for him narratively, and he has to just keep on living.

Cos I think that's the most “realistic” - quote unquote - thing. Like, that feels very in the spirit of the show. Yeah, he doesn't get, like, a super clean ending cos he's just a person like everyone else is.

MÉABH

I actually like those two characters side by side and how we have to…

…because again…it's that thing again that this is a wider world and these things are still ongoing. And the rest of them (the cast) that's not necessarily connected to the main narrative, but you have that nice contrast.

Charity is still continuing - she's obviously engaging in that that strange cultist activity - and then you've got Eddie on the flipside of the coin who's just trying to live his life. and these are things that are still going on! People are still just trying to live, trying to get on with things, but on two sides of the coin, but it's kind of disconnected from the overall narrative.

It's gorgeous! Again, just adds to what a rich world - what a rich world everything takes place in.

Cern asks, “will there be any other stories in the TSV-verse? is that something you ever think of, or maybe some time has to pass before thinking of that?”

JON:

I mean, we've actually had some talks about this, haven't we?

(Diplomatically)

And there's been some good pitches-

B.:

There's been bits!

​

MÉABH:

There's been fun pitches! There's been a lot of gags, a lot of bits.

JON:

There's been bits! OK.

I think the only sincere idea - which I did actually really like! - was from Jimmie, who pitched a

a followup that was almost an Iron Age version.

So go right back to the very origins of the setting, and look at actually these small isolated pre-medieval kingdoms discover, effectively, these immensely powerful weapons of mass destruction, and seeing how that would then reshape society for the infinitely worse.

​

Which I thought was a really fun idea! But as to “are we going to return to this?”…I, I honestly don't think so. I'm very happy with how we left it, it feels like the characters got to where they needed to go. Thematically it feels like we very much made our point…yeah.

If it's just a case of wanting to return to horrible monsters and anti- capitalist satire, we are definitely going to be going back to that well again and again - it's kind of kind of my thing! - so yeah.

Hopefully whatever we produce next will satisfy you, but it will be something different, I think

MÉABH:

Live Hayward asks,

(Dramatically)

“I understand if this is too personal but history denied will weep for answers. What would be each character's drag name?”

(Short pause)

Pam Cakes. Got it in there, done and dusted.

B.:

(Impressed)

Damn!

MÉABH:

(Triumphant)

Carpenter!

JON:

(Confused)

…pancakes?

MÉABH:

Pam Cakes.

B.:

That's Carpenter. Like, Pam Cakes, pancakes.

JON:

(Realising)

Oh, Pam Cakes!

B.:

Oh, my God-

MÉABH:

It wasn't really a deep thinker now-

B. NARR:

I like it!

​

MÉABH:

I have to say, I'm not…I’m not good at this game so I was very pleased I came up with Pam Cakes. B., did you do…can you think of any?

(As B. reacts)

Oh, B.’s got some!

​

B.:

I wrote down one because I had to think a lot. I only have one for Faulkner, because I didn't feel right, uh, drag-naming other people. But I wanted a nautical pun.

​

So it's Naughty spelled “nauti”, Buoy instead of boy. (Nauti Buoy)

MÉABH:

Yeah, yeah!

B.:

I thought it was funny!

MÉABH:

Now that's a thinker! That's what we would call a thinker.

B.:

Yeah, it's a thinker, it's a thinker I wanted something nautical themed. I don't think he's confident enough to do drag, personally! I don't think he has the genuine confidence needed.

MÉABH:

That's so funny, but you…well, here's the thing. I mean, well now, let's break it down a little bit - but not too much cos it's late.

I mean, everything is drag.

B.:

That’s true!

MÉABH:

And one could argue that, like, he's in drag as High Prophet. He's just playing the role, he's wearing them robes, but…you know.

B.:

That’s so true! So real.

​

LUCILLE:

I cannot think of Paige’s for the life of me! I know what my drag name would be, and so I might just…I might just say this would be Paige’s too.

​

Like, if I was going to do drag, my drag would be - this comes from a partner and I making Sesame Street jokes - so if I were going to be a drag queen, my name would be Cunt von Cunt.

Cos like, the Count in Sesame Street is Count Von Count, and so I’d be like, “oh, okay, I can do this!”

I mean like, if I were a drag queen, I definitely would be doing a lot of vampire shit. I love vampires! I'm like…I'm like basic that way. Twilight was huge for me when I was in middle school!

SARAH:

It would 100% be Abby Judicator.

​

LUCILLE:

(Snapping)

Oh that's good! Snaps to that. Yes.

MARTA:

I get to say that Val doesn't have a name, so we don't really know.

Like, the first thing I thought of is so inappropriate…but it's the only thing I could think of when I saw Val, knowing that it's an acronym for something else.

(Bracing herself)

And so what I came up with…oh, God…

…it's Voluptuous Ass Lover.

​

SARAH:

Yeah!

LUCILLE:

Yeah, that's good!

MARTA:

Bit of a mouthful, and I don't know if it's a name, really. But, you know, you can cut it down to Val and, yeah, no one will ever know what it stands for, really-

LUCILLE:

The Last Word would also honestly be a solid drag name if you really lean into, like, the domme of it all.

SARAH:

I mean, She Who Shall Not Be Named you could probably do quite a bit with.

MARTA:

True! I don't know, yeah. I'm terrible at naming, genuinely terrible at naming things. I'm not very good with puns and witty language jokes…I don't know.

I'm sure there's people out there that are just screaming at us right now with amazing options.

In which case, like, you know…share them online! @ me!

SARAH:

Yeah, throw it…throw it back to the crowd.

(To the audience)

If y'all want to do the Silt Verses Drag Revue, I'll come! Oh, yeah, I'll hold, like, I'll sit-

​

LUCILLE:

Yeah, same!

SARAH:

-be sat behind the table with like numbers and shit, hell yeah, let’s go!

LUCILLE:

Fuck, yeah. If you guys can come up with a good drag name for Paige I will…I will make it a point to become a drag queen and do at least one performance as Paige. That would be incredible.

Like, this…like, this is already my favorite show I've ever done, but that would just really fucking put the, put the cherry on top for me.

SARAH:

And have it be, like, noir-inspired!

LUCILLE:

Oh fuck, yeah, I love this! Glitter, but it's like red glitter. So it's like…is it glitter or is it sparkly blood? Who can say?

SARAH:

If we could do the Woundtree covered in glitter, I think that would be the pinnacle of my life.

LUCILLE:

(Considering)

I think…I think Hayward’s would be The Hays Code. Like, if Hayward were a drag queen, I think it would be the Hays Code.

JIMMIE:

(Without hesitation)

Hayward would be Haley Hightower. It would be a purple or long black wig. With sequins, not glitter. The dress would be sequins, because glitter gets everywhere.

(Very seriously)

No one wants craft herpes everywhere.

MÉABH

Hange asks, “To B. Narr - What was your favorite thing about performing as Faulkner that you perhaps did not expect to enjoy?”

B.:

I didn't expect his arc to be so emotional when I auditioned for him! I'm going to be honest, like, and that ended up being one of my favorite things.

I got to cry and be messy. I didn't expect to get to, like, be so emotional, and it was very cathartic. It was delicious! I didn't know what to expect when I auditioned for this cat - once again, first role!

​

Delightful, just…but I think it was the emotional depth and getting to like do that on screen was my favorite.

MÉABH:

I mean, he's an incredibly complex character. I think it's the…unpredictability of everything is incredible.

He's just repeatedly pulling things out of the bag that's like,

(Disbelieving and annoyed)

“What?? How did you get to that thought process? What was the arc that brought you there?” It's

incredible.

Okay. Amazing.

John asks, “Jon! How much restraint did it take not to give Press Secretary Carson an absolutely punishing end and instead having Val show her capacity for kindness after her devastation? Was it at least tempting to give Carson something more horrific to pay for his crimes?

JON:

Honestly, it never even occurred to me! For several reasons, one of which is…obviously you don't feel any great resentment or anger towards a good villain when you're writing them.

I certainly was not gritting my teeth going, “Ooh, I can't wait to see Carson get his comeuppance!” Rhys Lawton did an amazing job, but it also felt like we'd actually really hit on something with Carson that maybe we'd struggled with in the writing of the previous season's antagonists.

The real villain of Silt Verses is the setting, and that was very deliberate, but that often meant that when you're trying to find antagonists - often, you know, with Daggler and even to an extent with Mercer and Gage - you just end up with a bit of an absurd little one-trick creature that's out to cause harm.

Because there are…they need to be an articulation of the setting, but also in their own way a victim of the setting. And so it becomes almost…you have to make a point of them showing up, doing something mean, doing something mean again, just to try and get them to a point where they can be successfully knocked down.

Carson, it felt like actually for the first time we'd really found a way that - without needing to be the the end boss of capitalism - he could be a representative of the worst excesses and the shallowness of the setting we were trying to portray while also being an individual in his own right.

I've said this before online but the instruction we gave to Rhys was “Ted Lasso but evil”, which he just captured perfectly!

So I didn't feel any great impulse to kill him horribly, but more importantly that's the exact opposite of what we were going for with Val's journey.

Val’s story is someone who begins with unlimited power and then needs to rediscover her own humanity and capability for positive human values…and so if it just ends with her exploding Carson for 10 minutes, really, her arc becomes meaningless and she's learned nothing. So, yeah, it was never on my mind for a heartbeat.

​

MÉABH:

Incredible. And absolutely, Rhys Lawton, what an incredible turn as that character, and just the camaraderie, and sort of the friendly “we’re all in this together; let's just get along” that he just instantly brought the character, then just revealed himself to be more and more despicable as time went on, but yet with that completely disconnected way of, like, “well, I'm just doing my job and this is sort of what I do and what exactly did you expect of me?”

Incredible turn, incredible performance, and from Val as well. And to have two - it's, you know, this almost “unstoppable force meets an immovable object” - but then to have it end so calmly and kindly was an absolute turnaround.

​

And the response to it was incredible and justly so.

Right! Franz Seward asks,

“What was the catalyst behind writing VAL? She's one of my favorite characters in the entire series, because she's incredibly powerful and evil, but she's also painfully human at the same time. Was there anything in particular that inspired her creation?”

JON:

There was…her creation was very much inspired by, I think, narrative necessity.

That we did need there to be some kind of active antagonistic force moving through the narrative - you know, wrapping up this war which we'd alluded to that was happening but we hadn't actually come up with any characters who were directly involved in that!

So a character that could almost bridge these worlds of Glottage and this war, helping to very swiftly move through that storyline, without us having the necessity of trying to map out what an actual war would look like when there are no characters taking part that we care about.

​

So in some ways Val is the greatest deus ex machina, because she can change whatever the hell she wants to. We'd played in season one with the idea of rhetorical Gods as these very powerful banned Gods where you're literally using language to change the world around you. And I was aware that in season 2, because we'd moved to a bit more of an action-focused sound design some people were saying, you know, “I miss the narration.” And so coming up with a villain who narrates the action felt like a good get-out, where actually we don't have to rely so heavily on action sound design. Because she is going to tell you what she's going to do to you, and then we're going to hear it happen.

​

So I…it was interesting. I think lots of people still listen to season 3 and go, oh, you know, “There’s still, it's…it's still very action-focused,” And I think they don't realize just how much of the action is narrated; it's just narrated diagetically.

So there was a lot of, I think, narrative necessity, that we needed an antagonist to fill this role who could behave in a certain way. And then I think the the human elements that come out were very much,

“Now we've got this all-powerful figure, we need to do something interesting with her. She can't just stand around until the heroes join hands to defeat her at the end. We need to actually find a way of humanizing her, exploring her, maybe showing that all this power is ultimately quite existentially inadequate.”

MÉABH:

And it's incredible - for all her power, and the idea of her being a deus ex machina, I mean, she never actually…she doesn't come into contact with any of the main cast, you know?

She doesn't actually have that direct (contact), and it's not a case of the “We join forces and we go and…”

Like, her storyline is completely unpredictable from what you would assume as being presented as the Big Bad, what the ultimate end game is, it just takes a complete right turn, it's incredible.

JON:

Well, what I originally had on the table was the idea that she would be sent to the the Woundtree Camp to assassinate Paige and that she'd run into Carpenter or Hayward or Paige, one of these characters, and ultimately they would have a conversation that turns Val around.

And I just…I realized halfway through drafting the season, “this is hokey.”

You can't introduce a character out of the blue who is this threatening, this menacing, and then a good speech by the heroes just completely redeems them. And so it was much more effective to me to almost mirror what we had with Vaughn in season 1, where there's a disconnect.

These people will never know what they did for each other, but it happens all the same. That just felt like a much more interesting thing to explore.

​

MÉABH:

Fantastic.

Angel and Apollo ask, “What, if anything, do you regret/would you change about the plot of the show (other than Dick Faulkner, the rat bastard). Thank you for everything.”

JON:

I don't know if regrets is often the term, because I think particularly with season 1 and now
season 2...the longer ago the production took place, the more you're able to see them as tradeoffs of the moment rather than choices that you actively regret.

I guess one thing that does play on my mind with this season is...I do regret that we weren't able to
spend more time really taking the story of the the Woundtree camp to a stronger conclusion.

I think we faced a real challenge with that one, because I think what I had in mind for it was this real Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed-style articulation of a very small-scale society starting to find its feet in
very difficult circumstances, and the everyday challenges and compromises, and the difficulties of being part of that small society which is trying to do its best and always faced with the temptation of doing something worse and being better off for it.

So I had this very grand idea of what we could do with that - but the problem is ,you know, what you end up with with a small cast is just lots and lots of scenes with Paige and Elgin in a room saying, "Oh, well, now X problem's come up! How are we going to deal with X problem?"

And that's not...that doesn't make for compelling drama. And I was very concerned as I got deeper into
the writing of season 3 that we were Ent-ing with it. And by Ent-ing I mean...you know in The Two Towers you have this real problem where you have two very compelling storylines. You have Frodo,
Sam and Gollum, and then you have Aragorn and co having all their adventures in Rohan...

...and then every so often we cut back to the Ents, and the the audience members at a certain point start to go, "oh, God it's the fucking Ents again. You know, we were having such fun at Helm's Deep, now we're
checking in with the Ents and their slow-paced storyline."

And it's not that...it's not that Peter Jackson does anything wrong with Merry and Pippin's storyline, it's just the inevitable conclusion of the stories from the novels now being presented side by side
in a very fast-paced cinematic fashion. Inevitably when you go back to the storyline which is, in its nature, just a bunch of conversations about "well, what are we going to do next?" that eventually gets to a
conclusion...

...by contrast it feels impossibly slow and tedious and like it's testing our patience. And so a lot of the ideas that I had for the the conversations that could be taking place at the Grace just felt like they were
falling short when everyone else was having these these great adventures, and so it we ended up really kind of cullng those storylines and spending less time with them in favor of the adventures that Carpenter and Hayward were having, and Faulkner's various misdeeds within the Parish.

And I don't know what the solution would have been! Because in terms of the pacing between
the different storylines it felt like we spent a decent amount of time on all of them, and we couldn't have spent more time with the Woundtree folks before the end.

But, yeah. I don't have a solution in mind, but I am sorry that I feel like we didn't really make the most
of that storyline before the ending, and I felt like that had a bit of an impact on Paige's character arc to a certain extent but also on Elgin and Dan, who I really wanted to bring out more of them as the story went on and we didn't really get a chance to do that as much as I would have liked.

So that is, that's one regret!

MÉABH

Dani asks, “what would an interaction between Hayward and Faulkner have looked like? I think it's very amusing that they never met and I can't help but wonder how it would have gone down.”

B. NARR:

I don't think they'd like each other! I think Hayward's little shit radar would be pinging the moment Faulkner walked in a room.

And yeah, and Faulkner, I mean…depends on the season! Is he (Hayward) a part of the system, is he just another person to drown, or is he someone who's on a sinking ship the same as he (Faulkner) is?

Cos he never really interacts with the Woundtree either. So, like, what does that look like? That's…there's a lot of factors here!

MÉABH:

We're taking this very seriously. We're like,

(Nebbish voice)

“Now, what are the circumstances at play-”

B. NARR:

They do meet, though.

…Jon?

JON:

They did meet! I don't know if it's a particularly meaningful encounter. Faulkner does at least run into Hayward in Bellwethers, when he sics a giant hermit crab on Daggler and and bisects him. So it does happen.

MÉABH:

But also aren't they in the car? Aren't Carpenter and Faulkner in the car together when Hayward, like, knocks on the window in season one?

B.:

Oh, my God, yes!

JON:

Yes, yeah! These two have a rich history!

B.

Yeah, I was like, “I can't believe I didn't remember that!” That actually happened in canon.

MÉABH:

I was thinking, like…is that the context? Cos then Faulkner's immediately like,

(Teenager voice)

“oh, Carpenter, I did something bad.”

So I was like…is that the circumstances? Is it like, Faulkner has just done that terrible first murder.

(With emphasis)

First murder.

JON:

I think B’s first comment…your first comment, B., was absolutely bang on. Like, Hayward, for all his flaws as an investigator in season one, he does have a good little shit radar. Which I think would be pinging when he encounters Faulkner in any season.

MÉABH:

I think it would be very interesting, actually, for Hayward to not like someone. Because as we see

him develop, he's very personable! He kind of gets on with most people. So the idea that he would clock Faulkner and be like, “no, I don't like that one,” that's quite funny!

JIMMIE:

I think it would be a Pokemon battle.

8-bit music begins to unexpectedly play.

JIMMIE:

I legit think it would be like, Hayward and Faulkner would be like, “Go, crab monster!” “Go, giant tree! use this attack!” “Oh, it was super effective.”

​

MÉABH

Tybalt asks,

“To Meabh de Brun: How did it feel to do that finale scream?”

(Thinking)

That finale scream was…yes, very heavy to do, and I…but I was determined to do it right, to do it correctly and to give it the appropriate weight that it deserved, you know? You can't phone that one in.

So I actually recorded that scream in my parents’ house, in the middle of nowhere in rural Ireland, because I was like, “I want to make extra sure I can scream and scream and scream as much as I need to until we get this thing right.” So, yes, so I was in my parents’ empty house in the middle of nowhere, screaming and screaming and screaming.

And I usually give a couple of takes of most, you know, of…screams, well of lines and screams, of everything!

That one in particular, it was really interesting for me I guess to scream and then go, kind of, like,

“...does that feel appropriately heartbroken enough?”

You know? I…I was really taking it seriously. I was like, “this is the last - I don't know - big emotional display from this character of this season in response to the death of her brother.”

So I think the one Jon went with actually in the end, it's one when my voice is actually going a bit, because I've been screaming so much.

So that was the one I think that actually, ultimately got chosen and I think that was the right call because it's…it does sound broken, because my voice is breaking! And I think it's very reflective of what the character is going through at that moment.

But, yeah, no, it was…it was something I really took seriously. I was like, “I have got to get this scream right.”

So how did it feel to do that finale scream? Very deep, heavy, weighty. A lot of responsibility to make sure I pulled it off and I did right by this character that I have been performing for four years, and it has been one of the most rewarding and joyous experiences of my life.

It was the last thing I think I recorded, that scream was the final thing I recorded out of the series. So it was intense, and I'm glad it came off as well as I hope it did.

JON:

Méabh, I would also say that just - goping through your scream takes, and hearing the range between them, from the animalistic to the fractured to the weary, it genuinely sent shivers up my spine. And it was such a rich experience, getting to pick between all these different shades of meaning.

And, like, it's a scream! So it's loud and in some ways it's unsubtle, but it really really was each time. So yeah, really enjoyed it.

MÉABH

Oh, thank you! Yeah, that's…that's thank you very much, cos sometimes I do send them off and I'm like, “...this is seven takes of me screaming.”

But it...but it literally is exactly that. I'm like trying to sound more unhinged this time, I'm trying to sound more feral with anger or fury. This time I'm going to try and sound more tired and weary.

​

And it’s…very rewarding to know that it is coming across and it's not just me screaming in a microphone for seven takes that Jon then has to listen to and go, “...uh, this one

I think?”

So, wonderful. Thank you very much! I appreciate It.

​

Apollo asks, “Do you have any voicework plans after this? Where can we find you next?”

B., you want to hit that one up?

B. NARR:

Sure, yeah, I can! I'm…I mean, baby, you know it, I'm always trying to get in more stuff.

Right now I'm doing a bunch of stuff with Bloody Disgusting. If you didn't get enough of me dying in your horror podcasts…uh, boy, howdy. I do a lot of dying in those shows. All the shows that they, they're like, “hey, here's a guy, he's got to get ripped apart by zombies or whatever. Do you want to…you want to do that?”

And I'm like, “yes, yes!”

That's largely what…what I am doing currently and I'm always trying to get my grubby little hands over, all over these other podcasts. Other shows, other video james (sic). Just more cool stories!

Because this…this show set my bar very high for what a production can be, what a story can be. what a cast and crew can be.

And so I'm always like…you know, my bar is high and I want to have these experiences more, and I want to work with y'all more and I hope…I hope every single person that we've worked with in this show, our paths cross again in these industries, because it's just it's fabulous.

​

MÉABH:

It absolutely is, and I will say - because I do, I act for stage and screen as well - but I have to say, I mean the opportunities that are there in audiodrama are incredible!

Because, you know, again you just have these…just the character arcs and the scenes that you get to perform!

But, you know, to absolutely mirror B., the bar is now quite high.

(Smug voice)

“Cos I was in the Silt Verses.”

So, um…but absolutely, I love acting in audiodrama. I'm going to be in…the next season of Omen is coming out, which is going to be so much fun, going back to the world of fantasy pirates. And then as well, I will be in Chain of Being coming up. I also have some other projects coming up in the future that are much further down the line.

But yeah, always keeping the hand in because audiodrama…it's just so fun! It's a delight. I really love it.

​

Any actors that I'm working with, when they're saying, “What are you doing at the moment?” I'm kind of saying, “oh well, I'm in audiodrama! It's great? Have you tried it? It's so much fun, everyone's lovely, and you get to be in these alternate fantasy worlds. You get to, you know, just the scope and the imagination and the worlds to explore and the characters, it's just absolutely fantastic.” And again I don't think most people are aware of it in the wider world! Like, once you're into the podcast (scene) you know what exists out there, but every time I tell people, like, “you know they're fully doing these complete like fantasy, horror, dark fantasy fics? Anything, any single genre you want, it's out there and it's in audiodrama.”

So yeah, it's brilliant. I love it. Good.

​

SARAH:

I can jump on! I've got...season 3 of of Ethics Town is going to be coming out next year.

​

And then we've go the Shelterwood Chronicles is coming out.

Again, like I said, I am only in stories that I can't listen to. So just...trigger warning for ever hearing my voice, ever.

And then besides that I am doing interactive and immersive theater in London - I am part of Bridge Command, where you can come and fly a spaceship. Yeah!

​

JIMMIE:

I am constantly doing voiceover work. A lot of my stuff tends to be in the videogame genre, so I can't mention anything cos none of it's coming out yet, so I can't tell anyone!

​

But as soon as it comes out, I will.

​

MARTA:
Um, oh God. So to quote Jimmie in the chat, “cry in a corner”, for sure, followed by pestering - which I've already done! - Jon and Muna about what they're doing next, and please cast me. Please put me in it. Please, I'll do anything. I'm not desperate or anything, but like I think I offered to be an inanimate mute object at one point in an email.

​

I would very much like to be in whatever they do next. Because this was maybe one of my favorite things I've ever done ever, and the caliber of just…just the joy of of the writing and just everything about the show is amazing.

​

Uh, God - currently what am I doing? I am in a little show called Sherlock and Co, that some people might know about. It's a modern retelling of Sherlock Holmes, we are doing the entire canon. And it is - basically, the gimmick is that John Watson is a true crime podcaster who follows around Sherlock Holmes.

​

And we are doing everything that was ever published about these characters, which is a lot, and it's a weekly release, so wish us luck! Yeah, yeah, we just…we just hit the one-year mark.

​

And I play Mariana who is a sort of reimagining of Mrs Watson, absolutely a completely different character at this point, nothing to do with the original. But there's some fun winks to that.

​

I'm also in the Road Of Shadows which is releasing season 3 at the moment - a show that Jimmie was a part of as well! And you can also find me popping up in video games every once in a while! I'm trying to do more of that.

​

LUCILLE:

The main thing that I can think of - the only other show that I'm currently working on is one called Among The Stars and Bones. It's a sci-fi xenoarchaeology space horror type stuff.

​

Season 2 is either being released or has just had its final episode released. There's gonna be, I think, five seasons in total.

​

I only have a few lines in Season 1, I'm more present in Season 2. That's the only thing I'm currently working on - I'm not as in touch with things as I used to be a few years ago! Among the Stars and Bones is the main one. Apart from that, who knows.

​

MÉABH:

Frances asks,

“What advice would you give for aspiring audio drama writers, specifically in the context of balancing "writing more, practice more" and "reading/listening to great and influential works for sources of inspiration."

​

JON:

Your question is one that really speaks to me! Audiodrama is an interesting medium, because we are very small and scrappy but we're also very prone to carpetbagging. Twice a year someone will put out a press release saying,

(Grandly)

“We have invented the world's first cinematic audiodrama!” And they have some SFX and a celebrity but actually it's very much something that's been done before.

And so I think there is conscientiously an impulse to really fly the flag for doing your research, knowing your stuff, and making sure that if you're going to create in this space you actually really understand the work that's been done - the best quality stuff that's out there and the exciting imperfect interesting work that's being done right now.

The flipside to that is…the scale of human artistic endeavor has never been so great. The accessibility of creation has never been so broad. And these are wonderful things but it means that there is far too much for you to listen to and you'll never hit some kind of perfect threshold where, actually, you've imbibed enough now; you can consider yourself a fully informed writer who can go out and create. You're never going to hit that!

And audiodrama can be a very time-consuming medium both to create and to ingest. It's

not possible to spend all day, with your headphones on, working on your own material and working on (studying) someone else's.

​

At some point you need to go out there and, for your own well-being, have a life, and doing so is very important. So I think I would provide a note of of just…grace and caution.

Try not to worry too much about, “have I actually listened to enough? Have I found the right balance of researching and listening to what other people are doing before I begin my own stuff?” Because you'll never hit it.

I think the good thing is, audiodrama is timeconsuming but it's episodical. You by no means need to listen to all 350 episodes of Welcome to Nightvale to understand what it is doing well and what you can learn from it.

Be cut-throat. Pick out a few key episodes that people tend to recommend. Listen to them. Get a sense of, actually, what does the show do well or not so well and move on. Don't feel like you have to commit to some of these vast, vast series to get a full understanding of what they're doing well and what they're doing not so well.

I'd also make the case that we are a scavengers’ medium, and while audioplays do have a a long and rich 20th century history, we are coming late to the table.

And so often I think when you're trying to inform your own creativity, it is absolutely just as valuable to enjoy other media and to ingest other media as it is to listen to audiodrama. If you really want to get into action sound design, my first piece of advice would not be to listen to us or listen to We're Alive or another audiodrama that does lots of that kind of action.

​

I would say, “Go and scavenge.” “Go and watch The Good the Bad and the Ugly’s final scene, the climax in the graveyard with the standoff, and think about, “well okay, brilliant scene that relies very heavily on the visuals, the direction, and the music. How can you create that kind of wonderful rising tension when all you have to hand are a couple of voice actors, some footstep sound effects, and maybe some pistols cocking and gunshots?”

You know? What can you do with the limited resources and limited palette that audiodrama provides, with a scene like that?

So, yeah, my…my general thesis would be, “acknowledge completely the importance of doing your homework and understanding how people are playing within this space, but do not let it consume you and do not let it delay you from beginning your own work.”

MÉABH:

I think you're right, because I think that…you know, at a certain point reading or listening to great and influential works, it becomes its own barrier, you know?

You can almost get a little bit…because if you're not doing it for enjoyment, if you're just doing it

because you need to, you're supposed to, um…

Like Jon said, if it's more a case of “I just need to figure out how they did this so I can hopefully put that skill into my toolbox”, do that and be done with it. But if it's not for enjoyment, you know, at a certain point it's just going to start Weighing on you.

Sometimes you just have to close the door and you just have to go, “right, this is just…this is my story, and I'm going to do it how I’m going to do it.”

Because it can get quite overwhelming. As Jon said, there’s a lot of things available out there. The internet has made it so much more accessible for people to put things out there, there’s so much more in all kinds of media - a myriad of television shows, films, everything.

Sometimes you just have to close the door and say. “this is the story I want to tell and I'm going to sit down and do it.”

Which would be my second point; so you just have to sit down and do it. It's a horrible, horrible, horrible thing, and I used to…when I first started kind of writing, and I was reading all of this writing advice, and all of them were like, “you just have to sit down and do it.” And I was like, “well, that's not helpful.”

And now I'm like, “...oh, it…that's it.” No, it's not helpful; it's just the truth. You just have to sit down and do it.

So I think that - sometimes, you know, that research aspect which might fall under the category of reading and listening to your works - that can bog you down too, you know?

When you're like, “oh I just…I just have to read this thing and then I'll know how to”, or, “well, it's set in like the Civil War so I'm going to read this thing!” And, you know sometimes you have to throw all of that out as well and just start pressing buttons on your laptop. Which is horrible.

​

I think the last thing I would suggest - because again we were talking earlier about how you would adapt, say, the Silt Verses, which is an audio show, for a visual medium - it's actually a great thing to read scripts. Scripts are great. And when I started writing for screen I would have read a lot of scripts, because again the screen is a visual medium, and so I would have started writing for theater. Which, again is…much more, there's much more of a verbal thrust to theater.

​

Screen then is predominantly visual! There's actually so little…when I first started writing for screen a lot of the feedback I was getting was, “they don't need to be talking this much!” Like, you can convey things in a glance.

Which, again, I was like…mind blown! But then you come to audiodrama, again, you're saying,

“okay, there's actually a lot I can't do here, because it's audio based. What can I do? What are the strengths I can lean into here? And maybe how have other people written that to convey it?”

So I think that there are audiodrama scripts available online. Obviously there's a lot of shows who put their transcripts up - the Silt Verses transcripts are online - and it shows, again, it's kind of quick things.

​

Like how a montage was structured to convey a certain amount of information, things like that. How it was laid out in the page. And again it does get you in the mindset of writing for that. So similarly, if you're writing for screen and you read a lot of scripts for screen, you're already in a place where you're thinking predominantly in screen direction as opposed to dialogue. And then if you write for audiodrama and you read a lot of audiodrama scripts or transcripts, you're in a place where you are not going to be describing visuals because it's predominantly sound design and things like that. SFX is what you've been reading!

​

So putting yourself into that mindset can be very helpful as well, and it can…help you structure the story or get the story onto the page in the format that is going to best serve it and heighten the story you have.

B.:

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t have anything to add to that, really, that you guys didn't say, because that's exactly it: know the strengths of your medium, know its weaknesses, play to the strengths and figure out where you can push the boundaries of the weaknesses and use those to your advantage.

Instead of worrying about consuming everything ever made, just know the structure, know the shape and know how other people have played with that shape and molded it to their own needs, and be like, “okay, what can I do here?”

​

And don't worry about being like, the first person to ever do it like that. You certainly aren't and you're certainly not the last. Because we're all humans and we're all doing the same stuff, and you're going to do it your way and it's going to be unique in that way.

So don't…mostly, don't stress. Don't stress so much, bud. You're good, you are doing great, don't stress.

I know it's hypocritical, probably, coming from all of us.

​

But don't stress. We're not anxious people-

JON:

(Unconvincingly)

…whoah, whoah, what are you talking about? We’re not anxious people-

B.:

No!

MÉABH

Yeah, that caught me right under the ribs. I was about to say something and then it just kind of went…all the breath left my body.

I think the one last thing I was going to say was, because I know sitting down and actually pressing the buttons can be quite hard. I have had to restructure my thinking around that. Because, you know, your first thought might be, like, “I don't want to do that”, and now I kind of think, “okay, but…do you want to have done it?”

​

That's the place you want to get to, and if you can kind of restructure it to that and say, “okay, you know, six months from now, I want to have done this.” And it's much better to think of it like that! That is something you can grasp onto. But…listen, nobody likes writing. Nobody actually likes it. That's actually the secret. The secret is, nobody likes it.

It's bad, nobody likes it, nobody wants to do it. It's bad and terrible. I don't like writing; I like having written.

And that - once you can kind of get that on, you're like, “oh, okay, it's bad and terrible and no one enjoys it. Ah, okay,” it's kind of easier to get onboard.

JON WARE:

(Hans Moleman voice)

I like writing.

MÉABH:

(Scornfully)

Yeah, Jon, we can tell! We can tell!

(Also in a Hans Moleman voice)

“I was saying Boo-urns.”

Nausica asks,

“For Jimmie: did being Asian-American influence your portrayal of Hayward? In Season One, I kept hearing echoes of my Fiipino father and grandfather clinging to American Normalcy harder than white men around them.”

JIMMIE:

I wouldn't say it directly influenced (me), but…if it did it was completely unconsciously!

Because, you know, you're influenced by your family themselves, or the people around you, so there is my family in who I am and how I act.

​

MÉABH:

Leo asks,

“You said that your sound is one of the aspects of your work that you’re most proud of. Is there anything specific you’d like to recommend for someone jumping into the audio world? good programs and plugins, tips and tricks? Favorite parts to design, least favorites? Do you record foley, or is it strictly pulled from online libraries? It’s wonderful to see how your audio has changed over the course of the podcast, and I’m excited to hear the remaster of earlier episodes.”

​

JON:

…uh, yeah.

(To B. and MÉABH:)

You know, I'm going to answer this separately so that everyone doesn't have to hear me waffle on, because it is getting late.

So maybe, uh…if you wouldn't both mind making some kind of reactions telling me how clever I am, I can just edit those in at the end and it will sound like, you know, you were really impressed by whatever I said.

MÉABH:

(Instantly)

Oh, my God, Jon, that's incredible.

B. NARR:

Utterly brilliant.

MÉABH:

To be…but, like, I mean to be clear, we have already talked about this. The incredible sound design is astonishing. For as I understand it, you just sort of went, “I think I'm just going to do it! I think I'm just going to do it, nobody's doing it the way I want to do it; I'm just going to do it ,I'm just going to do it.”

B.:

Amazing.

MÉABH:

Like, what an incredible decision.

​

JON:

(Dismissively)

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's the confidence of the mediocre white man. Like, “I can do this. Sure I can do this.”

MÉABH:

It's a bit like Legally Blonde, when they're like, “did you think you just woke up one day and went, ‘I think I'm going to go to law school?’”

​

Jon went, “I think I'm going to design a cinematic special-effects audio soundscape for this fantasy world when I apparently have little to no experience doing it.

B.:

(Reese Witherspoon voice)

What, like it’s hard?

JON:

(To the audience)

Tip number one is…every object in a given location can sing, and any fragment of song, no matter how short, can contribute to to the listener's understanding of that location and the action within it. You don't have to use everything, but you should consider using everything.

If it's helpful, make a list: what objects are in the scene, what is the background noise of the scene, and what's going on outside the scene?

I now generally always begin from a position of maximalism and then gradually just pare back the elements as needed: so if it's an interior we might have an air conditioner or creaking walls and a TV playing. There might be curtains and books and a chair and the sound of rain on the roof. Cos it…if it's too much, again, we can always adjust those elements back, and actually we can always let the characters make those adjustments.

Because change and detail are our two best friends for conveying a scene. If we imagine that a character enters a room where the windows are open and we can hear some very loud rain and a thunderstorm happening outside…maybe that is going to drown out any dialogue! Maybe that is too much.

​

But then we can have the character cross the room to the window, stare out into the rain, and then slam the window shut, and then the scene begins proper. And that extra sequence gives us a much clearer idea of the size of the space, the character's position within the space, and the mood of the character than if the rain never existed.

So I think if you listen to seasons two and three you’ll probably start to pick up on…we start doing this trick quite often where a TV or a radio is playing, a character will enter and turn it off. Something will be happening that is conveying the location and a sense…of the scene that then we just have the character deal with in order to create a bit of relative quiet so the the action can begin.

​

Speaking of action, I think in the same vein…audiodrama works best when it's a medium of twitchy protagonists and breakable props. Naming no names, but I have listened to some very famous well-regarded audio dramas that will have a fight scene that is stock punch sounds layered on top of grunts, and just doing that in a row to a certain extent. But that starts to feel artificial around punch three!

So everything within the fight scene needs to sing. You can have a punch, a grunt, footsteps to the left, a TV shatters, footsteps to the right, crashes. Everything needs to be brought into the action to prevent artificial monotony from sinking in.

Likewise, twitchy protagonists! If a character needs to be reflecting in silence for a moment, that silence is going to start to feel like dead air or a mistake after about second three. So have them open a window, have them flick through a book, have them sit heavily in a chair. Make the environment the subject of their anxiety and restlessness., which is again something that we've done quite a lot of.

Tip number two, with that in mind - build up a library of spontaneous audio resources! One thing we did for our second two seasons when I took over sound design was, we asked our actors to give us a set of different generic noises - hard breathing, gasps, grunts - so that we could always evolve our directing beyond what we'd recorded.

If we needed to make adjustments or add another bit of action or spend a bit more time with the character silently in a scene, we could actually do that without requiring re-records.

For this season we also commissioned a bunch of extra adverts, so that we could again always have something playing in the background to help us give a sense of where we were and what was happening.

Tip number three, do use movement and panning to a reasonable extent. Back in season 2 we actually had a couple of listeners saying, “hey you're using too much panning and I only listen in a single earbud so I keep missing lines of dialogue.” We did then pare it back, but we still use it a lot.

This may seem like a really minor detail, but I'm making a point of it, because I have read - again, naming no names - audiodrama designers saying, “it's pointless to use panning because lots of people are listening without any kind of spatial capability at all…and even lots of the people who do simply don't notice.”

For me that's a little bit like saying, “hey, why bother with cinematography, cos people are just going to watch the movie on their phones and it's going to be compressed?”

But for me more importantly - when you stop in the editing process and you use panning, you are creating a tangible stage left and stage right in earbud left and earbud right. You are plotting out the geography of the scene and then you are as a result creating the marked distance between objects in your head .

And I think regardless of whether the end listener can tell, “oh, that person's coming in in my left earbud,” you are going to have an immensely clearer understanding of the scene, and everything intuitively will make a bit more sense than it would have.

​

Favourite programs! I like EW spaces which I use for ambience and room effects. I have UVI Workstation’s footsteps tool which I really enjoy. Izotope’s RX8 programs, and I use Sennheiser for 360° panning.

Favorite parts to design…I did get really addicted to someone rising from water, the transition from spooky muffled underwater splashing to sudden noisy surfacing. We did it once with Faulkner in the echo-angel caves in season 2 and it was so cool that I do it about a million times in season 3. You can count them, it keeps on happening, it really became a problem…but I'll never get tired of it.

​

So if you listen to more of our shows…please get ready to hear it again.

Least favorite parts of design? Crowds are really hard. We had a lot of crowd effects this season. Stock foley for crowds…either it’s an actual football stadium or Taylor Swift concert, or it's literally five tired voice actors in a room going,

(Bored)

“Yay. Yay. We haven't been given a script for this so I'm just going to keep going. Yay.”

​

There's actually very little room to create something organic sounding, unless you do a lot of layering which we had to do.

Also carpets and socks! Boots crunching on gravel usually sounds great and satisfying, but whether through live foley or footstep generation, a good soft footstep is a lot harder to capture effectively.

We had a whole thing with Faulkner and Carpenter's final big scene together; Faulkner has been drowning Rane in a pool, and he's kicked off his shoes, the audience knows that. So when Carpenter finds him, we ought to be hearing some wet barefoot footsteps upon the stone.

I rendered that for the scene; it sounded horrible and unconvincing! So I thought, “okay, let's imagine maybe he's put his shoes back on, so let's have some squelchy booted footsteps on the stone.” Also sounded horrible and unconvincing.

So for that scene I ended up just ignoring reality and logic, and you will hear that he has

some dry hard footsteps…even though logically he really shouldn't! No-one complained. I guess maybe he did stop to just towel himself off.

​

MÉABH:

That’s fantastic. I mean, I just…I was blown away with what you achieved. It's truly astonishing. It's incredible stuff. OK!

Shan, Mars, and Danika ask,

“I would love to know what songs or music would the cast assign to their characters?”

(Pause)

I…this is…I'm not good at these questions, I'm not good at these questions!

Because first of all, I don't really actually listen to that much music, which I appreciate a lot of people find annoying about me as a trait.

I kind of listen to…I hear individual songs, I put them on a playlist, and then that playlist just sort of grows over the course of the year, and then at the end of the year I start a new playlist and I never listen to those songs ever again.

No but so I don't have a very wide library of musical knowledge to draw on, but also I do feel that if you pick a song for a character it should probably sound like something that they would listen to themselves and I don't I don't think myself and Carpenter listen to the same kind of music. So I don't know.

That said, I did see at one point Jon said something about relistening to Fiona Apple over and over while writing a season and so, um…

(Straining)

…what's the, what's the song that she has? The, the clippers. The, the bolt cutters. Fetch The Bolt Cutters. So that's the one I'm going to pick.

B.:

Oh, that's good.

(Very politely and supportively)

I love this, I love this for you, that is a bonkers way to listen to music. No judgment, my friend, no judgment.

…that's just the wildest thing I've ever heard. This is a…this is a…

​

MÉABH:

IS this a safe space??

B:

This is a safe place and I love and respect you.

(Pause)

I have a whole-ass Faulkner playlist I've been curating since we started recording the show. I do that with every character I play pretty much for any period of time, because I just think it's fun!

I just think it's a fun little thing to do, and I pick it more like, “what would play in the TV show if we were to pan out and the episode was going to end? What would we play?” Like, that's how I've picked it.

Like, Jon has a playlist for, I believe, season 3, and Bringing Home The Rain by The Builders And The Butchers was on there and I was like, “that's on my playlist!”

MÉABH:

That's crazy! That’s…pretty wild.

B.:

I know. So I feel obligated to pick that one or one of a dozen Mountain Goats songs that ended up on there.

MÉABH:

Well, yeah, I will say I've seen people reference, um, Hand In Unlovable Hand (sic) for Faulkner and Carpenter. And I was like…”yeah, no, that's good.”

B.:

Yeah, that's really, fucking…No Children really works, damn. Heretic Pride fucking…there's a lot of things. The Mountain Goats are just kind of Silt Verses-y, cos it's very grim and weird.

But no, I think…I like making character playlists! It's fun-

(Supportively)

But I also…I understand not doing it, because it's…it's just a hobby-

MÉABH:

You, you're like,

(Discreetly)

“She's, she's odd. Let's not point it out, it's almost the end of the night.”

You're, you're like, “I understand it.” No, you don't.

B.:

I can…I can understand it in the way that I understand...maybe, like, a character-

MÉABH:

Me! And you accept me.

B.:

Yes. I understand and accept you from, like, an outside perspective in that way.

MÉABH:

That’s great. Amazing.

LUCILLE:

I think…when I think of Paige, and especially when I think of Paige and Hayward I think of Hozier. Especially the…God, what was it? The song that Hozier does where it's like, “lay my body down, I'll crawl home to her,” or whatever I think of Paige and Hayward when I think of that song.

​

Editor's note: After this QnA, Lucille sent through three Spotify playlists she'd curated: Hayward, Paige, and Here's How Paigeward Can Still Win. She has our undying love and respect.

JIMMIE:

I think Hayward's going to be right on the nose; he's ,you know, that noir detective! He's going to love that smoky jazz, he's also probably going to listen to rock or classic rock music.

But I think secretly…secretly I think Hayward also likes - cos he would be embarrassed otherwise - he's totally listening to the girly pop.

SARAH:

Uh, yeah, John Prine, Angel from Montgomery. It starts,

(Just beautifully fucking delivered off the cuff)

“I am an old woman named after my mother;

My old man is another child that's grown old.

If dreams were lightning and thunder were desire

This old house would have burned down a long time ago.”

And it's a song about somebody who's come to the end of their life looking back and wondering what they have done with their own humanity and knowing that they probably should have had more and wishing that they had. And that feels very Shrue.

MARTA:

I don't…I’m terrible, I'm the basest of the basic person with music. I listen to anything, really.

For Val, I mean obviously classical music because of the ballerina thing, if you dance ballet you have to enjoy and know classical music.

And for me, the thing I always envisioned as her own soundtrack was something like melancholic folk music, Russian lyrical songs, sea shanties, and - this is from my own background - Portuguese fado, which is notoriously melancholic and sad and depressing! A lot of yearning, a lot of wanting, a lot of waiting, that always felt like in her journey through the world, that’d be pretty cool.

We mentioned before, coming in like a Wrecking Ball! I don't know if I would assign it to her as a taste thing...but I feel like it's appropriate for who she is as a person in the show. Joni Mitchell has a few songs that I think would be really good for her.

Anything…like that Billie Eilish thing she does where she mumble-sings stuff also feels very…yeah, I don't have any specific songs, but that's kind of the vibe I always got from her!

​

MÉABH:

Linnea asks,

“Absolutely love this podcast! Now that it's over, do you have any idea of what you are going to do next?”

(Laughing)

It's very existential.

JON:

It is, yeah.

What…what am I going to do next? Um, we are new parents! So a certain amount is just going to be trying to survive. I…I hope Muna mentioned that at the start, because that would just really explain the delirium and nonsensicality of our answers, to a certain extent.

But yeah, being new parents is kind of a ruling factor in our lives right now, but in the meantime I am trying to piece together a bit of a remaster of season 1.

I am working on what will hopefully be a Silt Verses novelization. And then next…the next show which we've kind of teased already a little bit on Patreon, but hopefully if we manage to survive the next few months of childcare, we should be publicly talking a bit more about that around the start of 2025.

MÉABH:

Amazing. Incredible. A lot of accomplishments.

JON:

(Confused)

I mean, none…none yet. Except for the baby, the baby's an accomplishment.

MÉABH:

(Confused in turn)

But you just finished doing a massive show! And you’re about to-

JON:

(Dismissively)

One's in the past! One hasn't…one's the future, that doesn't count anymore. I've achieved nothing,

​

MÉABH:

(Drily)

Yes. I got you, man, OK.

​

Bats asks, “What are you most proud of?”
(Pause)

Probably the baby.

JON:

The baby’s pretty cool. Uhhh-

MÉABH

(Laughing)

Again, I'm sorry, I'm just laughing because I'm again like - this is quite existential, but I'm like, “In the show or in life?”

​

JON:

I think with the show, I…it's the, it's the end of this so I can be as sappy as I like.

I'm so fucking proud of all of you. Like, I think all of you actors, you have been with us now for several years. You know, on your evenings, your days off, your lunch breaks coming in and performing these often bizarre, extremely gruesome, extremely weird scenes and always bringing your all. Always bringing so much enthusiasm and joy, even when certainly I was lacking it.

It is…I am very proud to have just got to know you all as people, and so proud to have got to see you work for so long, and got to have to collaborate alongside you.

Second to that, I'm proud that we made it to the end! I think there is a reason that many serialized narratives - audiodramas included - either precipitously drop in quality or they just tail off completely. And the fact that we got to the end, we planted our flag in the ground.

People…people can still fight online about which season they think was best, but there's not some kind of consensus out there going,

(Referencing Prison Break for some reason)

“Yeah, you know it really dropped off after they escaped the first prison, and they just had to go to another prison and escape that one too.”

We didn't have that drop-off that so many of these great serialized narratives have had. So…I'm so proud and so grateful for that, for all of you, and I'm just proud to have got to the end.

MÉABH:

Incredible. Well, from my perspective, it has been…I am incredibly proud to have been a part of a show of such high caliber.

Incred… like, the artistic quality, the message to it, the themes, the performances, the depth, the characters. There's just so much rich juicy goodness in all of it, and it has been a privilege to be a part of but all…like to your point, I mean, not only did you finish but you finished so triumphantly! And it was like…the finale was, the response to the finale has been so fantastic.

And I was…I just wanted to touch again on, Jon, your opinion on True Detective. Which is, you were saying, was like one of the first sparks that went into the pot when you were talking about Silt Verses. But the idea that the show dropped the ball so spectacularly in the final instance when it had been building up this kind of, you know, mysterious, otherworldly message or presence or anything like that and…

Because I don't think I told you this, I did watch it! And I didn't actually (previously) understand the extent to which they dropped the ball!

I kind of thought that you were saying, “they have all of this cultic mystic stuff but in the end they say oh none of it's real, and it would have been a bit more interesting if it had been real.” So I was like, “embrace it for what it is,” that's fine.

And then they just sort of are like, “oh, that's not really relevant, we're just going to stop talking about this, never address it, not even explain really what was going on the whole time,” and I was like, “oh, now I understand. OK, the ending is actually quite the flop; they don't even touch on, they don't explain anything.” Which again - when they spent so much time building up that, you know, rich mystical element of it was a fascinating choice.

But for you to have not only sustained the narrative storytelling of the Silt Verses, to continuously introduce character after richly thought out character - all of whom contributed to the storyline, had fascinating interactions with one another, helped the characters grow and develop - the web of interactions contributing to the wider themes and messages of the story…

…to do all of that over the course of four years and three seasons and still stick the landing is an astonishing, astonishing achievement, particularly in the genre that you're writing. Which is quite…you know it's that…as we've argued, the characters all end in great places, actually, but it could have been very easy to have a quite depressing ending. But in the…in its way, it was, it was really beautiful.

And I think everyone's ending was satisfying - not necessarily happy, but satisfying - which I think is the most important thing overall. So I think it's an incredible accomplishment and well done and I'm so proud to have been a part of it.

B. NARR:

Same here, absolutely! This is the story that was told together. Getting to be a part of something so beautiful and profound and being trusted to help tell this story with all of these like these incredibly Rich characters - Méabh’s touched on it, everybody is super complex and getting handed that as an actor is just, like, a treat.

It’s…it’s fabulous and this story is really really amazing, and the landing was stuck every time you've done it. Every end of the seasons, the end of the show, every character arc, you landed it.

And it's beautifully told and it's really unique and and just gorgeous and so that…I'm, I'm on the same boat as Méabh, I am very proud to have been involved, to get to know all of you, because you're all amazing talented people.

Like, my God. I had no idea how awesome it would be when I found your…I'd listen to I Am In Eskew, I saw your little casting call on Twitter. I was like, “oh, what are they making now? Oh, go on then,” I was like, “This is really cool.”

I had no idea how fabulous it’d be. Like, the amount of fabulous people that I would meet because of this show! And you're all so just amazingly talented and getting to work with you,

just, like…that's super cool.

Getting to make this, getting to be a part of this. I would happily come in every evening of my life to get to tell a cool story like this. So I'm just proud to have been a part of it.

MÉABH:

Well I was…I was, actually I was…

(Suddenly realising something terrible)

Actually, like. Jon, please cut that middle part where I started rambling about True Detective.

Because it just, like…two brain cells hit off one another that I was all like, “you did it, not like True Detective, who did it bad. Also, I never told you I finished True Detective,” so I just…

B.:

(Supportively)

I thought it was compelling!

​

JON:

You probably don't remember, Méabh, but the first season Q&A began with me rambling incoherently about my hang-ups with True Detective. So this is actually beautiful and perfect. This is coming full circle.

B.:

You have to keep it in now!

MÉABH:

(Tiredly)

Ah. Incredible.

JIMMIE:

“What are you the most proud of?” Besides my family and being a dad…

​

…this show, the Silt Verses, means more to me as a performer than I thought anything ever could. And it's hard to explain when you finish a project like this - with how wonderful everyone, everyone was. So wonderful!

​

Getting to work with very, very talented people. They just get it, and they're all so talented.

I am so proud that I get to have been a part of it with everybody here. They're, they're absolutely phenomenal.

LUCILLE:

OK, I think that I'm most proud of the fact that Paige - I definitely, like, took her places that I didn't really take, I haven't taken other roles before. Just in terms of like…like emotional spectrum.

And I feel like I definitely connected with her on a lot…on a much deeper level than I have a lot of my other characters. Just because of…like, how amazing the whole fucking show and also her were written.

And then I guess I'm just proud of the Silt Verses as a whole…like, as a whole fucking show! Because it, like really, like…really fucking did amazing things. And I guess, like the…for me, in terms of takeaways or whatever from the show, my biggest takeaway that I got from the show as, like, an audience member, is actually something that I also talked about in therapy!

My therapist and I did the thing where we…where you talk to your younger self, and you kind of have a conversation and see what it is that they needed to know that you can tell them now.

​

And I know for my younger self, the whole thing that I needed was to know that there was a future that was worth working towards. That it didn't have to be what it was or, what it currently is. That it can be different. There can be something that is worthwhile to have, or to live through, but it has to…you have to actually work for it.

And that's like…one of the key things of the show, I think, is that it's possible for shit to be better. It's going to take a lot of fucking work, it's going to be hard, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it. And, like, that's…I don't know, I just feel really proud of that messaging, I guess.

SARAH:

I could not agree more strongly. I feel like what I am most proud of with the Silt Verses is twofold.

​

And first and foremost, exactly what Lucille just said, that I believe that it is a piece of art that has an incredibly relevant worldview and message, in that the horrors of our world are things that we have made; they are the gods that we have built to serve the purposes to which we have put them, and the only way that stops is if we make it (stop).

And it does not matter what choices we have made that have gotten us to this point; we can make better ones now. We can start making those decisions. Right now.

And it behooves each and every one of us to stop and examine the choices that we have made and the people that we have built ourselves to be, and whether or not those actually are the people that we want to be, the values that we want to support.

And that is an incredibly big ask. That is hard. But you know what? Living as a human being is hard; this is what we do.

And I feel so incredibly lucky to have been part of a piece of art with that viewpoint and that message.

And the second thing that I am proud of is being able to stand behind not only the message of that work, but the quality with which that work is delivered. Because I genuinely believe that this is a remarkable piece of craft alongside the piece of art that it is. That the writing, that the acting, that the sound design…

I think it's really easy for podcasting to get tossed in a bin with a bunch of talking heads. But actually what we're doing here is creating a medium that has immense storytelling potential. And I really feel like Silt Verses is one of the programmes that pushes the edge of what that potential can achieve.

LUCILLE:

it is, straight-up. Yeah.

MARTA:

I mean ,I couldn't put it better, honestly! So, yeah I think I will start with…yeah, proud of the show as a thing that we all made together. I will never tire of of praising it and of talking to other people about it, and I am very happy to go online and - and in my opinion! - claim that it is one of the best pieces of audio fiction ever made ever anywhere. Because it is, I genuinely believe it.

It's very difficult to be absolute about these things, because, you know, absolute truth is not a real thing. Perfection doesn't exist. But it gets pretty…yeah, it's pretty damn close!

And it's also - whether you achieve it or not - it's the desire, and the intention behind it and the sheer effort of will to truly make something extraordinary, by everybody involved, that is really remarkable.

JON:

OK, I think that's about it! Unless anyone has any final thoughts they want to-

LUCILLE:

(Mock-furiously)

Yeah, I have some final thoughts, Jon!!!

JON:

…oh, shit.

​

LUCILLE:

(Laughing)

Okay, like no. Like, I want to, no, no, no-

I want to say that, not even from a creative perspective, in terms of, like, the writing and the sound design everything, yes, that's all amazing, but -

​

I really truly appreciate and respect the shit out of Jon and Muna as showrunners. Because they've never - like, in my experience, anyway - they have never been unaware of what it was they were asking people to do, in terms of the things that they were asking us to perform, and they were never inconsiderate of how that might be affecting us, if it was affecting us.

Because some of it is pretty heavy stuff, and I've never felt like that wasn't being taken into consideration.

And also, like - I'm like, I'm a trans person, and I've had to work with shows that I have had to have conversations with the creators about how they were either treating me, or how they were like writing the character, or things like that.

​

And I never once had to even think about it with Jon and Muna. Like, everything was just like…I just had to walk in and everything was perfect. As it should be.

And that was a tremendous weight off of my shoulders going into the recording booth, and that's something that I will never cease to be grateful for.

SARAH:

Yeah, if I can echo that! I, uh - also trans, also never felt anything other than like comfortable and welcome - and I am used to doing very violent, often very effortful, very vocally intense kinds of recording because of the kinds of work that I'm used to doing.

And I would say that more care was taken with me with the Silt Verses than I am used to as a professional standard, and I was worked with collaboratively as an artist. And it was kind

of me going, “hey, it's easier for me if we do the recording this way around; is that okay for you guys?”

That kind of thing was so accepted and welcomed that it made it easier for me to sustain more demanding performances; it made it easier for me to do my job as well as I could, which I really, really appreciate.

MÉABH:

And our final question of the Silt Verses Season 3 Q&A is from Brandi.

“Could we have a reading of the chapter titles’ poem? Thanks for all the work and love.”

​

The jazz fades out.

We’re left again with the sound of running water and birdsong.

MÉABH:

(Reciting)

Let me speak first of revelations

And next of dark deceit

Then I'll speak of champions

Of lovers, gods and beasts.

My song is long and twisted,

It worms, it winds, it wends.

it carries few; it drowns many

And those I love it rends.

My song has taken hold of me

It grips my tongue, my throat.

My voice cries truths I never knew

And to fight is just to choke.

So let me dwell eternal

And in ruined flesh ascend

For my song has no beginning

And the current flows on without end.

If I could trace with bloodless fingers

If my hands could shape the flow

I'd bear this song to the precipice

And rend us both to dust below.

We'd both go plunging downwards,

One final fall from grace.

I'd howl, I'd scream, in victory

And we'd be gone without a trace.

But we'll never be rid of each other;

My song, my sorrow, and I.

So I'll bear it trembling onwards

To drift on, to dream, to die

And where my final footsteps fall

Something dreadful shall arise.

Its gaze shall fall o’er trembling plains;

Its wrath shall scald the sun

And where its howling forebears walked

Someday there shall be none.

The wise man knows the taste of rot;

All lovers part as dust.

And even the kings in their bowers of steel

Shall wither in ruin and rust.

This rotten world shall wheeze its last

This hateful hymn shall cease

But as my last breath splits my throat

I'll wheeze through splintered teeth

One last song of revelations,

Of prophets’ dark deceptions,

Of love and gods’ defeat.

Of love and gods’ defeat.

Silence.

MÉABH:

And now we'll let you go.

But maybe we'll see you again.

Grabbing a plate of ribs at the Chitterling’s Chapel. Being mistaken for produce by the servants of the Stalker-in-the-Shadows. Or perhaps out on a hike somewhere, stumbling across an elk that shouldn't look like that, and seeing movement amongst the trees.

If you never wanted the story to end…well, it doesn't. It's still there. Just go back and listen.

Close your eyes and listen as two cultists travel upriver…

…together.

Editor's note: we considered looping right back to Faulkner's first "Marco!" here but it would have felt too much like ending on a jumpscare.

Thank you, once again, for listening.

And I really like that I cannot put a finger on a moment when they decided to be a different person, I think they just made the next choice in front of them within the context of what they were doing.

But I feel like it is a gift as a performer to be given the trust with, “we know you can get this person where they need to go.”

And I feel like the the sheer fact that you can ask every character’s actor, “hey, you did a huge about-face; what did that feel like?” is proof that we've been given an opportunity to do something really special here because you don't normally get that.

LUCILLE VALENTINE:

Yeah, I really relate to the feeling of satisfaction that you were talking about. Because there's nothing that's more dull as a voice actor than playing a character who is just kind of the same person the entire time. It just kind of feels like…you know, it feels like you're stagnating through however long the character is around.

And so just…it really is really rewarding to be able to play a character that's so different at the end of the show than what they were at the beginning.

In terms of like…if I, would I have changed something in my portrayal? Uh yeah honestly! But that's just because I…like, I started to understand Paige a lot better towards the end of it.

As most, like…I feel like that's pretty normal for voice acting. The more you stick with a character, the more you start to understand them. And it's the thing of - like if I had known, or understood them better earlier, then I could have changed some of the delivery

And also I'm just, like, really critical of my own performances, and stuff like that. So I'm always like, “damn, I should have done that again; I should have done that a different way.”

Jon, if you ever want to do like a remaster or anything of the Silt Verses you have to fucking let me! Like, I will…I will jump on that like no one's fucking business. Like, you have no fucking idea, dog!

MÉABH:

Pinky asks, “I would love some additional info about sibling rane, I don’t even care what it is, what’s their shoe size? Do they like bananas? Did they get back pains from carrying Faulkner legacy? I must know – sincerely, Sibling Rane’s number one fan.”

…I like that Pinky has thrown the gauntlet down. There are a lot of Sibling Rane fans out there. You might just have put a target on your back.

JON:

So I actually went straight to the source for this one - I spoke to HR Owen, who plays Sibling Rane, and I asked them to answer these questions from their perspective. So hopefully these are are helpful to you, Pinky.

​

H.R. OWEN (SIBLING RANE):

Hello, Jon, and hello to my beloved Rane-iacs! I hear there are literally dozens of you.

Before I answer I want to be very clear that everything I'm saying is absolutely canon. You are free to have your own interpretations, but just know you are wrong.

So Sibling “Purple” Rane’s shoe size is 12. And two, they get through about eight tins of Taylor of Bond Street’s Herbal Aroma Moustache Wax a week.

And they had never actually tasted a banana until they escaped Faulkner's murder attempt and swam away down the river to open a tropical beachfront cocktail bar where they first encountered a banana daiquiri. They thought it was nice but a bit too spicy for their tastes; it was another 5 years before they discovered they are in fact allergic to bananas.

Finally, they have no back pain at all from carrying Faulkner's legacy, because they never skip back day or leg day or arm day or chest day or wrist day or ankle day or any of the other days.

You can imagine they're basically a very large crab-themed muscle-daddy. I hope that helps.

JON WARE:

…oh, no they, they made it canon. They made it canon. There's nothing I can do, my hands are tied.

OK, so - confirmed Sibling Rane did in fact survive. I hope that makes you all very happy.

We're going to take a break here, but tune in soon for the next half of this Q&A. Thank you for listening.

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