Cover For Ray Bradbury's : 'The Autumn People' By Frank Frazetta, 1975.

I really feel like le morte darthur lends itself to a the green knight 2021 esque interpretation a little too well

We were robbed honestly

Imagine if you will a curse gone wrong-

We get the whole castle and town exploding into song, and a refrain and melody developing that echoes through the rest of the songs, maybe asking if things will ever return back to normal

There's an opera style back and forth between Uther and Gaius about the cause of the curse and whether it's dangerous, they don't resolve anything

Uther tasks Arthur with rooting out the cause, and it's a kind of call and answer, with Arthur following Uther's orders

We get Morgana, terrified her magic will be found out. Her song transforms into an "I want" song, maybe she wants fairness, maybe revenge, maybe power

The knights have a barbershop quartet thing going on and we love that for them

Merlin finds the cause, and maybe the curse is ultimately deadly although it seems innocuous enough. Maybe people are already starting to feel the ill effects. He needs help, but he just has to get someone to believe him. Cue his moment to sing, appealing to Arthur and the knights his voice turns out to be so sweet and heartbreaking (see Colin Morgan's work with PJ Harvey) and to his surprise everyone rallies around

We get a song with Merlin, Arthur, the knights and maybe others like Gwen and Gaius working together to fix the problem, the song builds to a crescendo and stops short the moment the spell is seemingly broken

It cuts to the next day and some normal speech indicates that their efforts worked. But Arthur hovers just outside this chambers because Merlin is cleaning inside and is singing as he works, his singing finally resolves the melody. Arthur laughs quietly and enters the room

The End

merlin should have had a musical episode

Stollwerck’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Fritz Phil Schmidt (c.1898)

The Goose Girl, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Godfather Death

Sliding my timely fic into the reblogs here. Credit for the prompt goes to @futurepastme

Love Hold You 'til the Morning Sun

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61994113/chapters/158533081

Teen and Up | No archive warnings

At the whims of his magic and the demands of the world's various turnings, sleep never came easily to Merlin, that is, until he met Arthur.

Or

Lifelong insomniac Merlin discovers that he sleeps better next to Arthur, and better still in his arms.

You cannot convince me that Merlin and Arthur didn’t cuddle on trips through the forest. Like come on, Arthur literally sleeps holding his pillows and you cannot convince me Merlin doesn’t run cold in his sleep. There’s no way they didn’t cuddle, even if they didn’t mean too, they definitely woke up curled around each other. They never spoke about it, but it just got to the point where they’d place their cots right next to each other because they knew they’d end up snuggling at some point through the night.

For most witches, it is often appropriate to blend the spoken charm with certain physical rites of folk magic. These are usually understood within the two pillars of what we call simulacra and contagia. The first of these refers to an object that represents something else. . . . Contagion, however works differently, spreading its influence slowly and regularly by proximity to the target of the charm. . . . For the witch who desires to pair well-established folk magical methods alongside the work of incantation, any of the following methods would be more than appropriate . . .

from The Witch's Art of Incantation; Spoken Charms, Spells, & Curses in Folk Witchcraft by Roger J. Horne

you are not unloveable you are just sad and a little bit angry. let’s go have some soup

the clanging of his armored ass cheeks brought down the walls of many a castle

I also love how audio fiction has always been a highly experimental medium, and likely always will be.

Financially, it has a low barrier for entry, a low point of diminishing returns, and a relatively small potential market. It's basically impervious to being taken over by giant studios - even the "big" networks like RQ would be considered indie in the film or game dev industries. With the exception of the BBC, they tend to dip their toes into audio fiction, figure out quickly that, although it's beloved by its fans, there isn't that kind of money in it, and proceed to leave us alone forever.

Then there's the fact that it propagates largely by word of mouth. Audio dramas owe everything to obsessive nerds forcing nearly everyone they know to listen to that podcast they just discovered.

So it's more about the thing being actually good, plus a decent amount of luck and persistence.

There's no optimally marketable success formula being relentlessly enforced by gatekeeping jellybean-counters because they don't exist here. So people make whatever they want. So it draws people to it who are looking for something different. And the cycle feeds itself, and the medium gets weirder (in a good way).

It may very well ALWAYS remain the wild west of storytelling.

So listeners tell your friends about that podcast!

And creators, make the weird thing! There are no rules! It can be an hour long or Breaker Whiskey short, or Re:Dracula all over the place length. It can be another tape recorder framing or another voicemail framing or basically just an audiobook. It can be any genre or blend of genres. This creative space gives us the opportunity to be our own target audience in a way rarely found elsewhere.

If you enjoy the thing you're making, odds are somone else out there will enjoy it too. I've already found this to be true, and my time as an audio fiction creator is still just beginning.

Peace and love on every planet, y'all!