wakerscast

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We’ll be taking a social media break as we work on writing for season 2. To hold you over, here’s the full playlist used for writing and inspiration in Wakers!

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It’s been quiet while we prep for season 2, but we reached an exciting milestone: Wakers broke 10k downloads!

Thank you to everyone who has listened to us so far and a special thanks to anyone who has recommended us to your friends! It can be hard out here for a little show, so we’re grateful for the support!

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“This song inspires much of the overall world building/social story of Wakers. As a group of people, the reanimated feel there is no place for them in society, leaving them ostracized and lonely. They are just trying to make something of their second chance at life.“ -GA

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Thank you for the shout! To answer the season 2 questions, we’re aiming for some time in 2026.

Indie Frequencies Review: WAKERS

Today I talk about WAKERS! @wakerscast has a lot of content warnings, so read carefully and listen safely: necrophilia, substance abuse, foul language, graphic depictions of violence, self-harm, suicide, and brief mentions of sexual assault. If you can stomach it though, it's a great show!

I feel like I was a little hard on this show but rest assured that's just because I love it SO much. Even the minor aspects I complained about are not drawbacks for me, they're just things that caught me off guard or that I have yet to understand! I have nothing but love for this show and I HIGHLY recommend it.

Here's where you can learn more about Indie Frequencies and listen to the latest review.

And here's a discussion post for WAKERS if you've already listened!

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“This a song I’m replaying a bit for season 2. Without giving too much away, next season will be dealing a lot with the decision Arnold and Nora make at the end of season 1. Does it work? Are things better? Was this really the right choice? We see how their minds are holding up, which relationships they remember and which ones are just strangers again.“ -GA

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Today we are screaming THANK YOU! Wakers officially has over 5,000 downloads! We wouldn’t be here without you guys. Please continue to share, listen, and spread the word.

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“When it comes to endings, i prefer optimism and new beginnings. Especially in a story when characters are brought to their lowest point, there needs to be a light at the end of the tunnel – even if it’s a small one. This song was chosen for the finale because of its hopeful themes of leaving the hard things behind and moving on. Whether or not it works remains to be seen, but at least it’s a start.“ -GA

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Death Becomes Him: A Review of Wakers

When I go on my annual Christmas and New Years vacation to California to see my father, I always challenge myself to see if there's a Netflix mini series I can finish before me, my brother, and my sister in law are due to head back on our bus ride home, my father's list of recommendations now inevitably ruined and yet not nearly as ruined as his YouTube history.

In 2023 it was Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and Do Revenge, one an excellently animated retelling of a beloved hipster classic that retools the story in such a way that one simple change in the first episode sets the stage for what may as well be an improved Scott Pilgrim canon and the other a nostalgic throwback to early 2000's chick flicks in the vein of Mean Girls and Bring it On but with the same psychological twists and dark humor that feels more in tune with Heathers and Jawbreaker minus the murder, simultaneously constructing and yet deconstructing its very own pastel sensibilities.

And while I certainly enjoyed myself, even going out of my way to write a review for one and shaping a considerable amount of my current aesthetics around the other, I knew that my media intake was pulling absolute rookie numbers.

This time around I had no intention of flinching away from my true potential. I could and I would get some quality fiction down my throat so I could brag about it later much to the annoyance of my peers.

Sandwiched between my first viewing of Carol and my rewatch of Shiva Baby because fuck it, I earned a little treat for my efforts, I aimed for an ambitious two-timer: not only managing a binge watch of Baby Reindeer but also 2023's School Spirits which my father highly recommended even during my last visit.

It's about this teenage girl named Maddie who dies and comes to the realization that she, as well as several other teenage ghosts that have also died at the same high school during different time periods, are stuck on the campus for what seems to be all of eternity.

I'm usually partial to the concept of teen dramas but that I could forget with Teen Spirits seeing as a bulk of it is a murder mystery.

It's nicely written, chock full of twists and misleads and there's this part where we learn that....well, I can't say that just yet. But I can say for a fact that it's a story where a group of hapless, sad people stuck in a limbo-like state of undead purgatory try to piece together what little bits of meaning they have left in a life that continues to fail them.

This is weirdly also how I feel about Wakers, a story where a group of hapless, sad people stuck in a limbo-like state of undead purgatory try to piece together what little bits of meaning they have left in a life that continues to fail them.

The story of Wakers follows Arnold, a recently revived corpse getting adjusted to his new afterlife for you see, in this world, people who die do not stay dead. It's been such a recurring event in fact that society has adjusted to these changes and already has therapy and employment programs lined up exactly for when this kind of stuff happens.

And it does, frequently, at that.

Wakers is my favorite types of magical realism, exploring bustling cityscapes that are undercut by a single bizarre supernatural activity that drives the plot. This isn't too dissimilar to 2019's The Godshead Incidental, an unfortunately short-lived gem of a show that tackles what I like to call the "modern mythology" sub genre.

Replace fully functioning zombies with gods, and frankly the two of them could be cousins or at least some well acquainted roommates.

Upon listening to Wakers, something about the show just really scratched that itch for me that Godshead left behind despite the fact the two only have so much in common plot wise.

Maybe it's in the editing. While Godshead had much more apparent scene transitions backed by its rhythmic clapping interludes, Wakers has this really slick and fast paced flow that weaves through the episodes very seamlessly. Transitions are natural and the passage of time is indicated with such excellent subtlety that allows so much story to be packed into such little time.

A lot of this is helped by Kevar Maffitt as Arnold who hop scotches between the role of both narrator and protagonist, not once ever throwing me off from which setting his voice acting had been adjusted to simply because the sound and narrative cues were just that obvious and just that good.

And yet, despite its ample pacing, I never once felt like Wakers was rushing me along. To be honest, it meshes quite a bit of interesting world building and character depth in such good stretches of time and yet I was constantly intrigued whenever some new information was uncovered in the following episode.

In a ten episode first season, we get a great deal of information of not only Arnold and his past but also the strange world he lives in and the fellow undead he grows acquainted with, all of which makes for this very richly layered listening experience that just continues to build and build on itself until its layers have layers.

If Wakers gets a gold star on its forehead for editing it definitely gets a second one on its wrist for its writing.

Wakers doesn't squander the potential of its concept, going into the psychological, societal, and even religious connotations attached to the meaning of a fully functional afterlife.

Couple that with the fact that Wakers has quite a few roots to millennial and gen-z talking points. The entire show is positively riddled with modern day anxieties that plague the youth of the nation-housing, job hunting, making money-with such a realistic yet humorous perspective you just know its being drawn from personal experience.

Through this alone Wakers presents a much more authentic nightmare than any horror podcast could ever come up with: an existential horror of an afterlife that is near indistinguishable from our days among the living.

And as a hardened agnostic atheist, I wouldn't be lying if I said I find Wakers so silently horrifying for presenting an afterlife that feels so weirdly probable. In Wakers there doesn't seem to be any heaven or hell, there is just death and yet you continue, and are expected to, do pretty much what you were doing when you were alive.

In Wakers there is no avoiding the trials and tribulations of homelessness and taxes and bad coffee because escaping was pointless to begin with.

And that rocks me to my fucking core.

To simply not know is terrifying enough, but to be fully aware is almost worse than being utterly brainless like the shambling zombie you thought you were supposed to be.

The undead are not so subtlety treated similarly like minorities more in a Monster High kind of way than a Detroit: Become Human kind of way, that is to say it's still a somewhat flimsy metaphor but is used more as a world building tool than a constant presence.

A lot of the undead interacting with the living stuff is mostly kept between the leads and their fleeting relationships with their still living family members, and thank goodness for that because when Wakers actually wants to deal with much more touchy topics from sexual assault to suicide, it has a very unflinching approach that frankly makes the show all the more respectable for it.

Wakers is as grim and depressing as it is darkly humorous and while it definitely picks at its biggest, nastiest scabs with a blunt razer, it still positively swells with a heart that beats with empathy, compassion, and humor for humanity.

During the worst of moments, the show always grounds itself with a deep understanding of the human condition and the issues that plague it. For a show about the dead, for a show about suicide, for a show with just a nice little pinch of necrophilia, it somehow manages to be absolutely bursting with life.

if you want to support my own blog, cake radio has a ko-fi and patreon in need of funds to keep this bakery open. thank you for reading and stay sweet.

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“The instrumental version of this song was used at the end of episode 8 in a scene that I’m really proud of. ‘Love is when you burn your lover’s sin’. I mean…how could I not use it?” -GA

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Going over lines.

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Writing #1

When writing a new story do you begin with plot or character first? It's a real chicken or the egg situation and the answer usually varies by project.

For Wakers, the concept came first but the characters were made to drive the plot. But what does it mean to start with character?

I hit a bit of a wall with the plot recently and the way I broke through it was drilling down on character beliefs. What is their world view? By getting more specific and intentional with that, I could look at what beliefs a character had and look for elements to challenge them. Make them question their world view. Shake them up, whether it's a world building element or another character. And from that challenge comes conflict and from that conflict comes the plot. Unless you start with plot first...that's a whole new can of worms.

That brought a wall down for me at least.

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Our first fan art and it’s amazing! This kind of stuff helps keep me motivated to make the best show we can!

Fanart of the podcast Wakers. It’s a dark comedy that I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to and can’t wait for season 2! ^^

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More season 1 bts.

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BTS of season 1.

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Hi! Do you guys have appearances for the main cast of Wakers in your heads? Like, "Arnold has this kind of nose" or "Nora wears exclusively this kind of clothing," that kind of thing? If you answer, feel free to be as detailed or vague as you want! I'm just curious.

Hi and thank you for your question! I like their appearances to be open to audience interpretation, but I do have my own head cannon about some things. Mostly about scars: Arnold has his head wound and Nora has a cloudy eye with a scar underneath it. Arnold is kind of short and thin. Nora has a bit of a ‘west-coast punk rock’ vibe. And Ted I pictured as someone that looks like a dollar store John Goodman.

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“I used this song to visualize a specific scene. In episode 7 after Nora remembers how she died, Arnold finds her in a back room. They are both struggling through a transitional state - ‘migratory animals under changing weather’ - and decide to face these obstacles in very different ways, changing the course of the story.“-GA