Preface

During Fall 2021, I wrote an essay on the first two seasons of Timestorm through the lens of a customized 20^th century theory of interpreting the world. Its original incarnation, called “grotesque realism” is attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin of Russia. My Latinx American pop culture class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign simply called it the grotesque. The name is misleading, hence why I’ve added this preface to help readers better understand what I mean when I say “grotesque.” At its core, the theory is about openings and inclusivity rather than closed loops and exclusion. Something referred to as part of the new bodily canon. Also spoilers for seasons 1 and two of Timestorm.

Essay

Spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Timestorm

Timestorm is an audio drama podcast, which ran from 2019-2021 and lasted 3 seasons. Created by Dania Ramos for a middle-grade audience (ages 8-12), the story follows two Puerto Rican twins, Beni and Alexa Ventura, as they travel through time to “witness, find, remember” important artifacts that have been lost to history.

The first task of the Ventura twins brings them to 1838 where they meet Celestina Cordero—a schoolteacher for girls in San Juan before public schools in Puerto Rico or the United States were even a thing. Celestina and her brother Rafael were both figures who led the charge for equal education regardless of one’s background or identity. The story’s plot concludes with episode five and is one way that Timestorm mirrors the grotesque. That being of serialized fiction and the correlation between it and independent publishing.

Serialized fiction is not as mainstream compared to earlier centuries. Whether it’s the written word or an audio adventure from the golden age of radio, or the modern-day audio drama movement of the twenty-first century—incomplete stories are often deemed unpublishable in the traditionally published landscape of today. Predominantly focused on white American and European writers until recently, the lack of representation in book publishing is the new bodily canon in practice.

Going back to the Timestorm episode where Alexa and Beni meet the Cordero siblings to “retrieve a plea of equality” the episode splits the twins up early on, as was customary at the time due to a gender bias in education. They soon learn people from the nineteenth century aren’t that different from their twenty-first descendants. Despite being in an all-girls school, the other students gang up on Alexa for accidentally breaking some chalk. A school supply that is not easily replenishable, because of the sexist tendencies of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican society and government. By the end of the two-episode story arc, we understand the gravity of a certain question the twins struggle with. Why do something if you know it will end badly? In the real world, the answer is that nobody can predict the future. Alexa and Beni, they have the choice to change the past, but can’t despite all the hardships they would potentially prevent. The people behind the show could’ve let the episode speak for itself in terms of its relevancy today. Instead, they took the time to include an episode guide for the first ten full episodes of the series. These guides include their research into lesser-known historical figures whom Beni and Alexa encounter on their adventures.

Unlike season one, season two of Timestorm has an overarching plot broken up into pieces to create a sense of progress for the twins. At the end of several episodes, the artificial intelligence known as Atabey (also the name of one of the Taíno’s—indigenous Puerto Ricans—supreme deities), tells the two time-traveling kids that the quest is incomplete. Through this multi-part journey, they learn just how horrible the Atlantic slave trade was for generations of African slaves.

While the life of African slaves is far too gruesome to depict on a children’s program, the listener can still feel its weight as they learn about what happened to an African from Senegal named Idrissa and how he is the twin’s ancestor. This revelation is appropriate for a middle-school age demographic, but the sequence of events leading up to it can be a bit confusing.

However, more interesting than the chronology of events is how the creators—Dania Ramos and the rest of Cocotazo Media—use our course’s modern idea of the grotesque to explain history in a complex, yet simple way. For the full effect, I recommend listening to the first half of season two, which focuses on the multi-stage quest depicted above. These are episodes 11-17.

In addition to the transatlantic boundary-blurring of what it means to be of African and Puerto Rican descent, Timestorm also tackles discrimination against black and brown people today in a manner that is succinct and poignant. A good example is the bonus minisode titled “Beni’s Silence” the listener learns the reason for Beni being quiet on the car trip home in episode 15. While a bit heavy-handed, it’s by no means an inaccurate portrayal of white supremacy in action. The decision to make this a short or “miniature episode” of an event we already experienced, but told from a different perspective, is a tried-and-true method of writing craft and storytelling technique.

In some ways, Timestorm is a new paradigm as it blends the simple and the complex into something fresh. Unlike the new bodily canon, this viewpoint is not closed-off or restrictive. It’s also not that complicated to understand, sympathize, and act respectfully with the other.

8/10 Stars

Bonus

Pre-orders are now open for the next book in the Audio Drama Reviews’ Review Collections series. This is the Podtales 2019 book I gave out to people and sold to some others. The book releases on March 7, 2023