Dungeons and Daddies is an actual play dungeons and dragons podcast about four fathers from our world who are flung into a fantasy world and are tasked with saving their sons and finding their way back home and later dealing with the consequences of their situation. This podcast is so good that I have been autistically obsessed with it for more or less the past year, constantly thinking about it, changing my personality to reflect it, and always wanting to bring it up in conversation. I would consider this a good thing except for the fact that it: a. sounds like a weird sex thing, and b. nobody knows what the fuck it is so im just gonna dump my love for it into this shrine ^w^

Warning!! I will be giving likely a good amount of spoilers here and if you aren't cool with that go listen to the series and come back later!!!

What Makes it So Good?

There are of course, a variety of reasons that the show is so incredible to me and I will express this in a segmented format starting with:

THE CAST!!

The way the cast interacts with one another is a large part of why this show feels so genuine. They bounce off of each other perfectly and you can just feel that they are friends by the way they talk to each other and god damn do friends do some dumb shit together. If they weren't as close as they are the vibe of the show would be totally different, likely still humorous but more forced. Their improv bits that they do both in and out of character to make each other laugh turn into major plot points and i don't think that things like that are nearly as possible if there isn't a genuine bond between the players!!

THE CHARACTERS!!

I have never viewed another piece of media that had characters that I so strongly connected with. The players and especially the DM, Anthony Burch are amazing actors, expressing characters that just feel so much like real people. Even completely absurd jokey characters have this air of genuinity about them that I adore. Will Campos with his mainline characters Henry and Normal Oak is honestly the best at acting out his characters as just strange guys with fucked up complexes. They honestly, despite how strange the entire concept of the characters are, feel the most human and I don't think I have the words to describe this but if you listen you will understand what I'm talking about. Beth May also plays her characters excellently. I am particularly impressed with her work as Ron Stampler because despite him sort of being played for laughs about it she shows everyday effects of deep rooted trauma in her character very very well. (this is coming from somebody who was in a very similar situation to this character but I will talk about it more in a different shrine) Overall, characters feel real and they are very likeable.

FATHERHOOD

This show's main theme is parenting and specifically fatherhood and god to they explore it well!!! I of course, have no experience with fatherhood as a 14 year old trans dude but hey, it makes me think lolz. Anyway there is so much that this show does to make you think about fatherhood and especially the generational trauma that gets passed down. There is always this thought that you might turn out like your own horrible father or that you will never be as good as your own father. There are issues that come with people's personalities like Darryl Wilson's inablity to be open and talk to people which eventually leads to his own son refusing to even try to talk about his own issues with his father especially after the onset of his depression. There is also Ron, who was never ready to be a father but came into step-fatherhood and he was horrible at being an attentive father because of issues that were caused by his own childhood trauma but he really truly did care for his stepson and he eventually did sort it out with him but it took time. Then there's Henry Oak who grew up under the watchful eye of a perfectionist who never let him express his emotions and so when he was raising his twins he was very lenient on them and of course he tried his best but in the end there were components that made his relationship with at least one of his kids not work out. lastly there is Glenn Close who was very close with his son but did not have a "father-son" type of relationship. These are all issues with the main fathers' parenting tactics that they really did their best with but in the end the cycle was not broken, leading to the second season where their sons have kids and again, they keep the cycle of generational trauma running strong. Generational trauma in this show quite literally manifests as a curse passed down the family line reaching out as far back as at least five generations at this point. There is of course more to fatherhood explored than the depressing. The joy of fatherhood is also seen quite clearly by the interactions between the fathers and their sons and it is heartwarming. This show honestly portrays fatherhood as a very complicated multifaceted concept and I find it so very interesting. To be honest I have always found the idea of fatherhood an interesting topic though.

REPRESENTATION!!!

There is such amazing casual representation within this podcast! Like I would say it's no big deal because it isn't treated like one in the show but you know what fuck it its important to me!!! The representation that I speak of here btw is queer. I honestly have no idea if any of the cast is openly queer irl but that's none of my business. They are amazing allies in and out of game. Here is a good example of this rep in a major character: When the dads meet up with Darryl's son, Grant at the four knight tournament Grant is hanging out with a couple of other kids, Killa Demmal and Yeet Bigley. It is very quickly shown that grant has a large crush on the boy of the duo, Yeet. Darryl's first reaction wasn't "my son has a crush on a boy?" It was "Wow my son has a crush." and he went to embarass his son as he would have whether he was into guys or not. I love this representation because Grant's orientation is never once made the butt of any joke. He is never just "the gay kid" but rather just one of the kids. And the rep carries on into season two as well, him being grown up and the only one of the season 1 kids to be married to a man! There is also things mainly in season two that stick out to me as they are playing the teenaged kids of the season 1 kids and in an episode where the teens need to get dates to a dance the cast as a whole seems very open to the possibility of going with any gender. In this arc there is also the start of and I quote "the only real romantic will they/won't they" of the season which is between Normal Oak and Hermie the Unworthy, as this strange method acting kid was the only one who went for the flyer that Normal had set out for people to go to the dance with him and so he accepted in an attempt to fix him. Ever since then those two have had consistent flirtatious and as tender as two disgusting freaks can be moments and this is acknowledged in an episode of the aftershow Where the DM straight up calls it romantic and also says that they are "two disgusting perverts who should never kiss because it would be too gross" and also "I never said they wouldn't I just said it would be nasty!" And this sort of acknowledgement of a possibility of queer main character romances is really important I think. Me and many others questioned if these two were just queer coded or if we were actually supposed to be shipping them. It's really nice not to be queerbaited in a show as good as this one. Honestly though I do wish there was more explicit trans rep but they do have more variety in that than I've seen in any other popular show with both a bigender and nonbinary character respectively. These characters are amazing but they are both characters that are only relevant for short amounts of time. The cast however, has said that they do not feel comfortable trying to make representation with things that they do not personally experience and I respect that but I do believe that there could be at least some good trans npcs. Honestly I have a whole list of reasons as to why I think that Lincoln Li-Wilson is trans but he is a player character so I doubt it will ever be truly canon but what we have right now is great and I love the normalization of queer people in media!!!

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I will likely continue adding to this but for right now this is where it stands :333