Pod Together 2025 Reveals

[phoenixfalls]

Title: Pod_Together Rolling Remix
Fandoms: Captains Courageous; Vorkosigan Saga; White Cockades: An Incident of the "Forty-Five"; Kushiel's Legacy; Elementary; Flight of the Heron
Rating: Gen & Mature
Word Count: 11,020 words
Podfic Length: 91 minutes
Summary:
A Rolling Remix project by phoenixfalls and sanguinity, created for Pod-Together 2025. Eight stories and six fandoms, wherein each story reimagines the story that went before. Each story may be enjoyed as a stand-alone, or as part of its chain of remixes.

Approaching this year's Pod_Together, Sang and I both liked the idea of working together again, but also felt intimidated by the success of last year's project - it seemed inevitable that anything we produced this year would disappoint in comparison.

So we chose to eschew comparison altogether - we would create something entirely for ourselves, purely for the joy of it, with no consideration whatsoever to whether there was a potential audience. We hit upon the idea of a rolling remix, just between the two of us, where none of the usual rules applied: we could change tropes, characters, ships, even fandoms at will. (We did not even promise to stick to fandoms we knew the other person was familiar with!)

The writing period was a delight. The podficcing period was challenging, in part because we both did some good-natured poking at each other with the fandoms we chose to write in - Sang started us off with a historical boat fandom I knew nothing about, and also threw some Gaelic at me; I retaliated by giving her an alt!France fantasy novel - but it was a good stretch for both of us, figuring out how to keep up our performance up as we experimented with accents. (garonne and tgarnsl were invaluable to this effort!)

And after posting it all, we discovered we'd written 11,000 words and recorded 90 minutes of audio - an extremely productive 10 weeks or so! In terms of theme, the whole project is something of a meditation on devotion: between friends and between lovers, between liege lords and vassals; between blood family and between chosen family. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.

Here are the individual fics; they can each be enjoyed as a standalone (well, the three Vorkosigan Saga fics are a single AU that should be read in order), and even canon-blind (though you may want to read/listen to the What You Need to Know summaries we put together first):

• A Song of the Grand Banks, Captains Courageous, rated G
  • Cold Fear of Some Pretended Future (The Green Silk Room Remix), Vorkosigan Saga, rated G
    • Stamped with the Seal of Emperor Ezar (The Genie is Out of the Bottle Remix), Vorkosigan Saga, rated G
      • Magnetic North (The Toward or Away Remix), Vorkosigan Saga, Rated G
  • Les Surprises de l'Amour (The Book of Ruth Remix), White Cockades, Rated G
    • Fate So Entwined (The In Ysandre's Name Remix), Kushiel's Legacy, Rated Mature, Warning: Graphic Violence
      • An Application for Scalpels in the Advancement of a Relationship (The Risk-Aware Consensual Kink Remix), Elementary, Rated Mature, Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings
  • to eat the bread of sorrows (The Gift of Sleep Remix), Flight of the Heron, rated G, Warning: Major Character Death