Twisted Folklore [AUDIO/2021.12.2]

★★★★☆

  At this point, I still can't tell whether or not Lizzie Hopley finds it easier to write stories that are part of a bigger narrative than she does writing completely standalone tales. What I can say for certain, however, is that Twisted Folklore is the best Hopley audio drama I've listened to by a country mile. There's a confidence to this script that I simply couldn't catch in her other stories, a drive that surprised me since the pace of her scripts were usually very slow in nature (not necessarily a bad thing). I suppose it's easier to make a tense, high-stakes tale when it's about getting in the middle of the action in an oppressed world to be the revolutionary catalyst, but still, Hopley deserves all the flowers for Twisted Folklore. 

  The thing with these revolution stories is that they often face the risk of being too bleak and too lifeless. Being bleak is not inherently an issue, since the narrative is almost always about fighting oppression, but there are multiple ways such a downer of a topic can lead to something that's simply hard to experience. Twisted Folklore doesn't have that problem, with a script jumping from set piece to set piece in an easy and fun manner, and it helps that every lead (sans Andy this time) sounds heavily invested. The lives Rakrelians lead under the rule of humans are painted with such an unrelenting blush (focusing more on cultural extermination than brute massacre, which was a good choice as it's the more horrifying aspect), and all this allows Twisted Folklore to further delve into the horror of the new timeline Divine Intervention has crafted themselves. Stranded 3 is most focused on exploring Divine Intervention's past, present and future, and this episode is a must for understanding exactly what the cult is capable of -- so it's nice that it's a bloody fun audio drama as well. Listening to the Doctor, Helen, Tania and Liv go through the most excruciating events... nothing quite like it.