I must admit that I have never been the type of person to listen to podcasts. My very limited experience has been on the serious or academic side of the genre, think NPR, very calm, smooth spoken and focused. If decorum is meeting the expectations of the audience, then from my perspective, this podcast lacked decorum. I went in expecting a focused discussion on the amazing women of Black Panther. While I appreciated the exuberance and passion, I was greeted with, I also found it very distracting. While most of the discussion was related to the movie, it took quite a while before they made it to the recap, and until almost halfway through to bring up the female characters. Whether or not the movie passed the Bechdel test did not come up until the last fifteen minutes.

I didn’t recognize the names of the guests but because the podcast is about women in movies and this episode is about Black Panther, I assumed they were the actresses who played the main female characters. That assumption was wrong. Both special guests are notable black comedians, one woman and one man, who have knowledge and pride in their heritage. All speakers seemed to have great knowledge of the movie and seen it multiple times. Most of the speakers also expressed familiarity with the comic book and other background information.

As an auditory presentation, the speakers of this podcast did a great job conveying emotions without visual cues such as facial expressions, posture, and hand or arm gestures. This is aided by the lack of scripting giving the speakers free reign with their wording and expression. That same freedom combined with the conversational structure and length of the episode was problematic in my opinion. Use of like, um, uh, and other such pause words and some stutters, breaks, and repetitions made it very hard to focus on what they were saying and occasionally reduced it to babble. For me, it was a fight to stay engaged with constant banter and digressions.