Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 46
Crown of Thorns Pod'rama is a dramatised, full-cast recording, or multivoice podfic, of irisbleufic’s Crown of Thorns (The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse) ‘Verse, a 275,000 word “Book Omens” fanfiction inspired by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 novel Good Omens. This collaborative fan production involved over 60 people in total, and took about fifteen months to organise and complete. The runtime of the audio drama is 36:47:12, plus an additional 17:18:13 of bonus material, for a total of 54:05:25 of audio content.
The project was conceived, organised, and produced by Literarion, who began soliciting participants via social media and in various Discord communities in October 2019. Podfixx, Literarion and CompassRose voice the narrator, Aziraphale and Crowley, respectively.
Compared to many other collaborative podfic projects, the Crown of Thorns Pod'rama stands out for its scope but also for its process (podficcer auditions, collaborative editing, involvement of the fic's writer as a consultant, commitment to documenting the production process) and for its production values (the work include a large number of graphics and an original musical score.)
Crown of Thorns is a collection of short stories set after the events of the book, with the common thread of following Aziraphale and Crowley's lives in the aftermath of the not-Apocalypse, as well as the people that they meet when trying to carve out a place for themselves in the human world. It features both canon characters and original characters, including themes such as love (and the emotional risks the main characters are willing to take in order to still love those around them), family and found family, friendship, mortality, humanity, passage of time, and the spectrum of morality.