#extra content
Hello everyone!
Today we’re bringing you an interview with @literarion, the director and lead organiser of the project, and the voice actor of Aziraphale!
You can find it here:
We hope you like it! This has been the last interview of our project, and it’s been an honor to get to know better so many amazing folk from our cast and crew!
Love, and a very happy New Year,
~The CoT Pod'rama Team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION
Crown of Thorns
Cast and Crew Q&A
Image: There’s a microphone to the left, and a seashell at the center. They’re on a wooden table, in front of a blue background. The text is on the right side.
Hello, everyone!
As promised, even though the main story is over, we have some extra content ready for you!
We’ve put together our final set of bloopers, ranging chapters 51-75! Find them here:
We’ve also organized a PDF Zine of all the covers of the chapters, arranged along excerpts of the fic itself. You can find it here on AO3!
Finally, we’ve pooled together all the resources we’ve been using for the past year: guides, transcripts, spreadsheets… everything you might need if you’ve been considering making a project like this of your own! You can find these guides and resources here on AO3.
The year is nearly over, and it’s been a strange one! But we’ve persevered, and we want to go out with a bang. For this reason, stay tuned for normal interview hours (6am AEST! - when is that in my timezone?). We have a final interview coming your way, with @literarion, our project leader, about what this experience has been like.
The team of the Crown of Thorns Pod’rama wants to say a huge thank you to our listeners, and supporters. Every kudo, comment, and interaction through our social media channels, have meant so much to us and have kept us going.
Thank you so much for being with us through this project!
We’ll see you on the next one.
~ The CoT Podrama Team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTIONS
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Crown of Thorns
Thank you~
from the cast and crew
of Crown of Thorns Pod’rama
January 26 - December 24, 2020
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Now Available. The e-zine - 85 pages with over 80 pieces of art by 26 artists plus excerpts from Crown of Thorns by irisbleufic, the story that started it all. DOWNLOAD IT NOW. The words are sitting beside a hard copy of the Zine and some dried roses.
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Contributors
AJfanfic Betaart0 catofapocalypse/(BratofA) Chonaku CompassRose Dearest-Angel Ecchima Firefly Grin HatsuAka Jeebs Khenq Kakushimiko Madcheshirefox Mageink Ouida Pandi Petimetrek qwanderer Shae-C squidsticks suvroc Tezca Tifaria Tio-trile ZeTomato
Hello everyone!
Today we’re bringing you an interview with @lenalawlipop, the host of these interviews, an organizer, editor, part of the social media team, and the voice of Mary Hodges and Rashid Bhatia!
You can find it here:
We hope you like it! Next time, for the last interview in our podrama, we’ll be posting an interview with @literarion, the director and lead organizer of the CoT project, and the voice actor of Aziraphale! So keep your ears ready for that!
Love,
~The CoT Pod'rama Team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION
Crown of Thorns
Cast and Crew Q&A
Image: There’s a microphone to the left, and a seashell at the center. They’re on a wooden table, in front of a blue background. The text is on the right side.
Hello everyone!
We’re going to be doing an interview on Saturday 26th, with @literarion, the director and lead organiser of the project, and the voice of Aziraphale!
Literarion is the lead organiser of the CoT project. She came up with the idea and organisational structure, and brought the team together to create the Crown of Thorns Pod'rama. She is also the voice actor for Aziraphale. She fell head over heels into the Good Omens fandom in June 2019, and fell in love with Crown of Thorns not long after. Lit has created a variety of podfics in the fandom. She works in research, and has managed both large international projects, and groups of volunteers, for many years.
You can also find her on AO3andtwitter!
By the time we record, the podrama will have come to an end! We’re sure you guys have some questions for her on that regard. Send us an ask, or mention us @crownofthornspod!
~The CoT Pod’rama team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION
Crown of Thorns
Cast and Crew Q&A
Image: There’s a microphone to the left, and a seashell at the center. They’re on a wooden table, in front of a blue background. The text is on the right side.
Hello everyone!
Today we’re bringing you an interview with @tio-trile, one of our artists!
You can find it here:
We hope you like it! Next time, we’ll be posting an interview with @lenalawlipop , the host of these interviews, an organizer, editor, part of the social media team, and the voice of Mary Hodges and Rashid Bhatia! So keep your ears ready for that!
Love,
~The CoT Pod'rama Team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION
Crown of Thorns
Cast and Crew Q&A
Image: There’s a microphone to the left, and a seashell at the center. They’re on a wooden table, in front of a blue background. The text is on the right side.
Hello everyone!
Today we’re bringing you an interview with @ladylier, a graphic designer, the voice of Iván Sagarra and Jaime Hernez, and an organizer of the project!
You can find it here:
We hope you like it! Next time, we’ll be posting an interview with @tio-trile, one of our artists. So keep your ears ready for that!
Love,
~The CoT Pod'rama Team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION
Crown of Thorns
Cast and Crew Q&A
Image: There’s a microphone to the left, and a seashell at the center. They’re on a wooden table, in front of a blue background. The text is on the right side.
Hello everyone!
Today we’re bringing you an interview with @khenqart, one of our artists!
Because it’s a text interview, we only have it on AO3 today! You can find it here:
We hope you like it! Next time, we’ll be posting an interview with @ladylier, a graphic designer, the voice of Iván Sagarra and Jaime Hernez, and an organizer of the project! So keep your ears ready for that!
Love,
~The CoT Pod'rama Team
IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION
Crown of Thorns
Cast and Crew Q&A
Image: There’s a microphone to the left, and a seashell at the center. They’re on a wooden table, in front of a blue background. The text is on the right side.
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Li-Po Backstory Document: Ford
Ford grew up in a family of accomplished eccentrics. His mother was an ambassador, his father a noted scientist. But most of what his parents did was a mystery to Ford, because it was highly classified. He and his brother and his sister attended private school with the other ambassador’s children. They grew up surrounded by international intrigue. They continent-hopped for vacations. They dined with presidents and kings. They were expected to grow up and rule the world.
And Ford did in fact exceed at everything he tried. In fact, that was kind of the problem, because nothing held his interest for very long. As soon as he mastered something he lost interest and moved on.
In school he played football, baseball, hockey, and lacrosse. He won the national championship in bocce ball and curling. By college, he had lost interest in sports, but he managed to become a star javelin thrower anyway. He only pursued the sport to kill his spare time as he completed a triple major in Neuroscience, molecular chemistry, and Theology. He finished up in three years, but hung out for the following summer to pick up doctorates in Astrophysics and Philosophy.
After college, he wandered through a series of odd jobs: Jockey, Tugboat captain, Astronaut, that sort of thing. When his parents had to go into a special form of the witness protection program, that’s when he found out that they had been spies all his life. They vanished completely, but would still get postcards from them for years. Even when he was at the south pole working as a bounty hunter, or repossessing semi-trucks in the deep south, or away fighting for the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. The postcards finally stopped somewhere between his stint as security chief for the pope, and when he was testing experimental, high-altitude aircraft.
He tried to find out what happened to them, but was only able to pick up a thin thread, and it led eventually to little-known-at-that-time organization known as the Psychonauts. Turns out his parents were spies AND psychics. Ford decided to give it a shot himself. He didn’t know if he was psychic or not, but he figured what the hell, he’d try anything once.
Turns out he was a psychic, and a very good one. Within two years, the Psychonauts had elected him Grand Head. In that time he had managed to discover Psitanium, the powerful, extraterrestrial, psychoreactive quartz that is so plentiful in Whispering Valley. Under his direction the Psychonauts bought land in Whispering Valley and mined the special mineral. They also set up a research facility here, and on top of it all, a training camp for young Psychonauts—Whispering Rock.
He might have lost interest in the Psychonauts at this point, only because he had risen as high as possible in their ranks. But a mysterious organization known only as the Poison Path emerged, and begain a campaign of psychic terror across the nation. Their psychic prowess was considerable. No one knew where they came from or what they wanted. There were even theories that the founders of the Poison Path were ex-Psychonauts, or had someone working on the inside, because they always seemed one step ahead of the game. Ford managed to thin their numbers through a series of manhunts and clever sting operations. But eventually it came down to a duel–Ford had to go up against the Poison Path’s enigmatic leader, Botulo Kanker.
They traded blow for blow, trying to gain control over each other’s mind, a mental armwrestling contrest. But Botulo was fighting dirty, and was more interested in just chewing up Ford’s noodle. He knew Ford was the better fighter, but he also knew he could do some damage before he went. Botulo ended up in a maximum sercurity insane asylum, his mind completely gone.
Ford seemed to come out of the battle unscathed, at first. Before long, however, the damage became apparent. Ford would completely forget who he was from moment to moment. Some sort of schism erupted in his mind, and left his identity lying in shards on the floor like a broken mirror.
The Psychonauts eased him out of the Grand Head position, allowing his Second Head, Molton Yuppa to take over. They put him in a figurehead position at Whispering Rock, the very summer camp which he had founded. They made him scoutmaster, because he was still good with kids. But they couldn’t get him to remember what his job was. Every time he reached a new place in camp, he thought he had a new job. In the kitchen he became the chef, on the docks he was the harbor master. They eventually had to fire a lot of their staff because Ford was doing everybody’s job for them. But no one complained because Ford saved them a lot of money in personnel.
So now he is the camps scout master, janitor, chef, and nurse. And anything else that comes up. Except when it’s a monstrous lungfish that’s attacking the camp and kidnapping your friends. That he can’t help you with.
Li-Po Backstory Document: Boyd
Boyd Cooper spent most of his early years as an only child. At first, he received the full attention of his kind and loving parents. His father delivered milk and so his work was done by noon, and was home very early to spend time with his only son. Boyd’s mother stayed at home full time to raise Boyd. Her only work was with volunteer organizations, including acting as a den mother for a local scout troop.
Through her scouting work, however, she met another man. He was a widow, and a single father of 14 children. Eventually, the two began an illicit affair that when found out, became the most talked about scandal anyone could remember in their small, suburban community.
Boyd’s mom left his dad, took custody of Boyd, and moved in with the blue-collar widower and his huge family. Boyd was suddenly not an only child. He wasn’t the oldest child; he wasn’t the youngest; he wasn’t even very close to either end. His age put him right in the middle of all the kids, where he spent the rest of his adolescence alone in the crowd, anonymous in his own house.
Boyd became more and more introverted. He resented his mother for dumping him in this new home, and he began to develop paranoid fantasies about the widower’s other kids conspiring against him, the new comer. The sad truth was, none of the other kids really noticed him at all. Still, his fantasies escalated until he managed to surround himself by an imaginary web of self-centered conspiracy theories. They stretched out beyond his family to include city hall, the federal government, multi-national corporations, some foreign governments and interests, and above all, the dairy industry.
This lead to troubles at school, and in his junior year, Boyd dropped out of high school and got a job as a security guard in a busy department store. For a while he was fine. He kept to himself. But eventually his paranoia became a problem. He started detaining random shoppers on a regular basis for interrogation. No matter what they said, Boyd would eventually accuse them of spying on him for some agency or secret group. After numerous complains and threats of lawsuits, the store’s manager had no choice but to fire him.
Boyd, of course, took this as validation of all his theories. It was evidence of a secret plot against him, and much to his co-workers horror, he showed up at the store the next day with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. He declared his intent to burn the store down and “stick a burning stake in the eye of the Cyclops that has a million eyes.” This was the first time many of his co-workers were aware he even existed.
Before he could burn anything besides his fingers, he was overpowered and wrestled to the ground by a mob of perfume-counter ladies. The police showed up and hauled him off to jail. Due to his vehement distrust of lawyers, he made the unfortunate choice of representing himself in court. After a 4-hour closing argument, in which he spelled out for the jury, the judge, and ever person in the courtroom what part they played in his personal persecution, he had so annoyed the judge that he was handed a life sentence, to be served out at Thorney Towers Mental Sanctuary.
When the institution ran out of money and closed a few years later, nobody came to pick up Boyd. He shunned any help from the social workers assigned to place him and chose instead to hide out in the foliage surrounding the asylum. He hid for weeks from the asylum workers, who, in fact, had looked for him for about 20 minutes, and then left.
Eventually, Coach Oleander, while setting up shop in the abandoned asylum’s towers, found Boyd and brought him back inside. Because of Boyd’s ductile mind, and security guard experience, the coach picked him to be his own one-man security force and back up failsafe plan. Using MK-ULTRA, Manchurian Candidate-style hypnotic suggestions, the coach planted two sets of instructions into Boyd’s mind—one in the foreground, and one deep in his subconscious.
The one that showed was Boyd’s security guard identity—to keep unwanted visitors out of the asylum at all costs and thereby protect the coach’s secret base. But the coach knew that there might come a day when he would need to cover his tracks. In case he needed to bury operation Children’s Crusade, he gave Boyd secret instructions to burn down the entire asylum if so ordered.
These instructions were buried in the form of an alternate identity for Boyd: The Milkman. The Milkman’s purpose and location are a secret to Boyd. The Milkman sleeps inside Boyd’s mind, waiting for the day when he is awakened to fulfill his purpose.
For now, Boyd guards the asylum, happy to have a job again. He knows that someday the Milkman will come and change things. Until then, he waits.
Li-Po Backstory Document: Gloria
Little Gloria Von Gouten was born in scandal. Her mother, the famous opera star Estrella Von Gouten, had the child out of wedlock, and kept the identity of the father a secret. Estrella was famous for her strong-headedness and independence, and she seemed unphased by the flood of puritan judgment that was heaped on her by the conservative opera press of her day. She declared her intentions to raise the child alone, and it seemed the world turned on her. Her popularity faded overnight. Producers stopped calling her, casting her, or even inviting her to parties. The public, it seemed, did not approve. The critics were merciless. Gloria’s sole confidant, her controlling and shifty manager, Loman Kricke, who had pleaded with her not to have the child, pressured her endlessly to put little Gloria up for adoption to save her career. Estrella refused for a very long time, but not forever.
When it looked like her career might actually come to an end, she finally conceded to Loman’s demands. She dropped Gloria off at Hagatha Home School for Girls. A sort of Peking Opera of rigorous—and sometimes brutal—schooling in the performing arts, Hagatha Home was a cross between Juliard and the Gulag. This is where little Gloria spent most of her childhood. Estrella would write Gloria long, loving letters from her world tours, but Mr. Kricke would intercept them. He was afraid the child would write back, and he wanted nothing distracting Estrella from her career.
Estrella was Loman’s meal ticket, but little did she suspect the truth: that he was eating a little more than his share. She trusted him completely, and it took her 12 years to realize that he had been cooking some pretty shady books when it came to her accounting. She finally fired, sued, and wrote a book about her ex-manager, but was only able to relaim a portion of the funds he had embezzled from her.
In the book she dispelled rumors that Loman Kricke was Gloria’s secret father. She would never reveal the true father’s name, but did confess that he was a fellow opera singer, and had seduced her with his angelic voice.
Free from Loman’s spell, Estrella returned to Hagatha Home and rescued her daughter from the confines of her theatrical death camp. She brought her now beautiful, 18-year-old around the world with her on tour, where Gloria enjoyed a most celebrated coming out. She exploded on the social scene with a fanfare. She was famous even before she followed in her mother’s footprints onto the stage.
Her training in theater, although painfully learned, served her well. She could dance; she could sing; she could act. She would star in huge Broadway musicals, full of synchronized dancing and elaborate production numbers like “Sunshine Shenanigans.” She was the happiest she would ever be in her life, and also the most popular. She quickly became ten times the entertainer of anyone else working at the time, including her mother.
And her mother noticed. Her own daughter had shoved her out of the spotlight. Once again, work started slowing down for Estrella. The press, the fans, they only wanted to hear about Gloria. As her fame ran through her fingers like sand, Estrella’s heart became twisted and dark. Another side to her personality emerged, seemingly out of nowhere. She became a cruel and bitter old woman, bent on destroying Gloria’s self image. “They only want you because you’re young, you know. When it fades, you’ll have nothing!” She would tell her. “You know who your father was? He was my gardener! And he couldn’t carry a tune!”
Gloria was destroyed by the cruel words of her mother. She would beg Estrella to stop, but the old woman had snapped. Gloria left for an extended production in Paris, just to get away from her mother, but while she was away, Estrella broke in to her old theater, climbed into the catwalks, and leaped to her death on the boards of the stage far below.
Gloria, already a tortured soul from her harsh childhood, was not prepared for this shock. Guilt pulled at her and unraveled her sanity like a nail pulling on a sweater. She tried to throw herself into her work, but she began to have panic attacks at the thought of taking the stage. Her performances became nervous and agitated. She would fumble her lines and trip during stage numbers. Finally, when a moving cloud platform pulled her up over the stage for her show-stopping solo, she looked down at the stage and became paralyzed. She just froze. She couldn’t say a word. They lowered her down and she ran back to her dressing room and refused to come out–Ever again.
Eventually, they had to have her dragged out by the police. She was thrown into a paddy wagon an in no time she found herself at a new sort of Hagatha Home, this time Thorney Towers Mental Sanctuary. She would ignore the doctors’ attempts to get her involved in some of the plays the inmates put on for each other. She chose instead to spend all her time in the garden, tending roses. She isolated herself in her secret garden so completely, that when they cleared the place out, she was simply overlooked.
And now she still lives in that garden, performing daily to an audience of dead roses and dried up shrubbery. Waving and taking bow after bow to applause that only she can hear.
Li-Po Backstory Document: Sasha
Sasha was born in Germany, the son of a humble shoe repairman. His mother died giving birth to him. As soon as he could talk, Sasha pestered his father constantly for stories about his mother, asking him what she was like. His father, Lars Nein was heartbroken and couldn’t talk about it. This was incredibly frustrating to Sasha. Maybe it was by shear force of will, born out of an intense desire to know his mother, but Sasha eventually broke through—psychically. He was able to mentally penetrate his incommunicative father’ mind and see Lars’ memories of Sasha’s mother for himself.
Sasha worked in his father’s shoe shop until his teen years, spending most of his time with his nose in a book. He studied philosophy and psychology, fascinated with the nature of identity and the human soul. Is your soul really inside your head somewhere? And if so, could he travel inside and find it? He had been inside his father’s head many times, had he seen his soul? He had to stop before he found out because seeing his mother from his father’s perspective became just too weird for him, he began to visit the minds of random customers as they came into the store.
He’d hear them thinking about their shoes. He’d hear them thinking about his father’s prices. Mundane stuff. But then one day, he heard someone planning to blow up the children’s hospital. Sasha told his dad and his dad (who was pretty familiar with his son’s gift) confronted the guy. They got into a fist fight, and were hauled down to the station, and sure enough, the lunatic was wired to explode. The police didn’t believe Sasha’s story about hearing the lunatic’s thoughts. They assumed he was just covering for his dad, who had started the fight himself.
But before long, the shoe repair shop had an important visitor: Ford Cruller, then head of recruitment for the Psychonauts. They brought Sasha in, had him tested, and that was that. Sasha became a Psychonaut. At first he was sent on simple recon missions, eventually covering the world as a psychic spy. Then he became an in-mind agent, or an Injectable. That is where he did some of his most famous work. He became a Psychic James Bond, traveling the world, jumping into the heads of heads of state, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and Queens; and also into the minds of some of the worlds greatest menaces: Dictators, Terrorists, Super Villains. He’d find information, retrieve lost memories, implant false ones, fix psychosis, create psychosis—he could do anything.
(put something in here about how he helped Milla, and had feelings for her but that he kept them locked away deep in the cube of his heart, because she was his student)
To psychic groupies, he was a rock star. But Sasha seemed unaware. His exploits in the field were only interesting to him as experiments. He was gathering data to further his research. His laboratory was where the real excitement was for him. Sasha was pursuing a million theories at once, including the therapeutic effects of lucid dreaming, the preservation of psychic energy in the closed system of the mind, and control over the minds automatic mental entities, eg: censors.
He spends time at whispering Rock where he has a secret lab, access to vast quantities of psitanium, and a plethora of the best kind of research subjects: children. Young psychics have the most pure gifts, and they are invaluable when it comes to researching psychic development. He hopes to discover why some people are psychic and some are not. It’s Sasha’s belief that all people could be psychic if they could just find some way to make contact with the collective unconscious.
To Sasha, being a Psychonaut means exploring the mysterious universe of the human mind. The ultimate quest for self-awareness and enlightenment.
Milla Vodello won’t talk about her past. Those who know her now as the upbeat party girl around camp would never recognize the girl she was in her youth.
Hair up in a severe bun, the dedicated Nurse Vodello toiled for years in the pediatric ward of the poorest hospital of her equatorial homeland. She dedicated her life to the children, working day and night. Reading stories to the kids who couldn’t sleep. Sleeping by the side of the children when they could. She never went out. She didn’t belong to any social scene. She had no friends outside of the hospital. The only time she was away from the ward is when she was out trying to find parents for the children who were orphans.
Returning from one of these missions one evening, she saw flames and smoke rising in the air over the site of the hospital. She ran all the way back to find it engulfed in flames. She broke past the line of firemen and charged into the hospital, but the flames in the children’s ward were too high. She couldn’t get through to save the children. She just fell to the floor and wept.
Perhaps it was the intensity of her emotions that caused a door to open in her mind, or else it was just a cruel trick of fate, but this exact moment is when Milla had her first psychic experience. She started hearing screams in her head. She thought she was just losing her mind. The voices were real, but not real. She recognized them. She could hear the terrified thoughts of the children caught in the fire. She covered her ears and screamed out loud, but she couldn’t shut them out. She ran out of the hospital and down the street, and ran all the way to the next town before the voices stopped.
Milla couldn’t stand her new gift. She couldn’t take the thoughts in her head—it all reminded her of the children and their anguished cries. She tried to avoid contact with people, but in her populous country that was nearly impossible. The police eventually picked her up wandering down a deserted country road, all alone. She resisted them and put up such a fight that they took her to the local sanitarium.
The voices were even worse there–more numerous, more tortured. Her mental state fell into decline. They didn’t know what to do with her there. They transferred her to a bigger and more high-security institution. And then another, and another. Finally, at a national hospital one of the doctors recognized her condition for what it was. He notified the one group he knew could help her—the Psychonauts.
The Psychonauts took her to one of their own facilities, and after a couple of weeks in a psychoisolation chamber, she began to heal. She had assigned to her a therapist who specialized in mental control: the famous research scientist Sasha Nein.
Although his personal style was a little aloof for most people, he was perfect for Milla because he could stop his own thoughts from entering her head. He taught her to have the same control over what she could hear, psychically. She learned to shut out the voices when she wanted to, which was most of the time.
She also learned that she had other gifts. Although she refused to learn firestarting, she proved to be a powerful telekinetic and clairvoyant. But her specialty, it soon was discovered, was levitation. She began to spend much of her time in the air, and loved it. It seemed to lift her spirits as well as her body.
A new Milla began to develop. One not afraid of her psychic potential. She joined the Psychonauts, and threw herself into their fight against psychic terrorism with the same passion she once reserved for the children at the hospital
Note to tim: put something in here about what a cool secret agent she is.
Recognition, promotion, and fame soon followed, and Milla soon had a new life. She resolved to forget about everything that happened to her before the Psychonauts.
This is her first year at whispering Rock. She longed to work with children again, but wasn’t sure if she could handle it. So far it’s been good, but she is sometimes a little overprotective with the children. She has fought to keep firestarting from being taught at the camp. And at the nightly campfires, she is nowhere to be seen. Usually, she is off somewhere quiet, lost in her own thoughts. In her head is a non-stop party. A non-stop party is what she now believes life was meant to be. And by using music (and levitation) she always keeps the mood around her up, up, up!
For Milla, being a Psychonaut is all about helping other people. And not being alone.
