Long Read I Know But I Am Trying To Be Better At Acknowledging Small Wins Like This - Blog Posts

This makes me so damn proud.

When I was first spinning this show up I had a lot of reservations with putting it out into the world. The time period I wanted to set the show in comes with a LOT of bigotry, religious zealotry, racism, sexism, and xenophobia. With that, fictional media coverage of this time period is traditionally through the lens of a glorified "tough guy" acting under the eye of the Christian God or guided by the principles of Manifest Destiny. Which means the audience that flocks to Westerns are traditionally cis white dudes in which the bigoted, racist, sexist, xenophobic rhetoric has the possibility of feeding into their lived experiences and view points. Hell, I even started a TikTok for the show to help market it. My first podcast episode EXPLODED from a couple of posts I did over on TikTok, with 90% of the listener-ship being funneled over from social media identifying as men. Which on it's own isn't a huge issue; it becomes one when some of these commenters on Tiktok have usernames like "yourn*zihero88." Saying they see this being their favorite podcast in the future. (Username exaggerated for this post, but not by much.) So seeing stats like this give me a lot of hope for the future of the story I am working on telling here with Dead West. And we haven't even gotten to the real depth of this world or the stories I want to see come to life in it yet. Still on the horizon: - Sapphic Betrayal and Revenge - Trans Outlaws - POC Monster Hunters All informed by real life examples from the Wild West. Don't believe me? Go check out Henry Allen! I know at this point and time we have a little white boy as our driving narrative force, but my intent with the show wasn't to stay with Conrad forever.