An Explode When Defeated Update (Gratitude, A Question for Patrons, and Season 3 art reveal!)

Hey! It's Nicky, I just wanted to touch base with you guys. It's been too long since I've actually sat down to write out a post, usually this only happens when I gotta fold my hat in my hands and ask you all to forgive us for delaying an episode or something lol. 

This time, I want to approach you all with immense gratitude in my heart for the massive increase in patronage this past month. Explode When Defeated nearly doubled this month in patronage, which I'm obviously going to chalk up to Hazel's kindness in promoting the patreon as well as doing a Podcast Residency of sorts on Rebuild of Congratulations. Her support as well as your support by extension by actually taking the step to pledge money to our silly shows about movies and art means the absolute world to me. If I could do stuff online and make a career out of it, that'd be incredibly cool. We're definitely not at that point yet, but if things were to continue at this rate it'd certainly feel possible. 

However, I do realize that some percentage of you are mainly here to get some extra content featuring our friend Hazel, and that's totally cool! If you guys split after our episode on 3.0+1.0, that's 100% understandable and I just hope you had a good time listening to the episodes. However, if you feel like exploring our catalogue a bit more I'd like to point you over in the direction of our series on Planet of the Apes and Weird Cartoon Guy / Live Action Guy Movies, those are two non-kaiju, non-eva related series that we've done on here that I'm quite proud of. And of course there's also Shit Shooters, our stupid little hangout show, if you wanna hear Wyatt and I rant and ramble about stuff. There's also the Final Fantasy XIV podcast I do with our friend Wayne and Wyatt and Cody's hilarious Bayformers podcast if you'd like to hear some wildly different stuff from us. And of course, if you haven't listened to Discuss All Monsters yet, there's two entire seasons of that show! 

This is all to say, we have a lot of stuff! There's a podcast from us for just about anybody here and I'd just love it if you guys continued to enjoy that stuff as well as the exciting new stuff we're getting into. After our Muppets show, Wyatt is handing the reins over to me for picking our next miniseries, and I think I have a pretty good idea of what to do for it. It'll be a lighter, more fun series after our Rebuild of Evangelion discussions. 

However, now that we've got a good group of people here united in patronage towards this show, I'd like to know what you guys are looking for in the future of this patreon. What kind of miniseries topics or stretch goals or guests or patron benefits would you guys like to see? Please by all means leave any thoughts or ideas in the comments and Wyatt and I will discuss them and take a look at stuff and see if it makes sense for us. We wanna have a good relationship with you guys and get you stoked on our future. We wanna make this thing bigger and badder and we can't do it without your help. Thanks so much for everything so far and in advance for what comes next. 

...And speaking of what comes next, Season 3!! 

This next season of Discuss All Monsters is going to be our best one yet, undoubtedly. We're covering the rest of the Godzilla movies in the Heisei, Millennium and Reiwa eras, including some odds and ends, some that we'll keep a surprise and some that YOU paid for with your patronage like the 1998 hollywood movie and the Legendary MonsterVerse series. Eventually this will all culminate in our episode on Shin Godzilla, a movie that Wyatt and I just absolutely adore and one that will serve as the perfect capstone to our podcast. (We'll likely talk about the other Shin movies too, but think of that as post-game.) We've said this before, but this is indeed our final season and we're so excited to complete this body of work and finish it off before it gets wheel-spinny and we're talking about like, Godzilla board games or something. Do we have ideas for where to take Explode When Defeated after that? Of course, but that's for another day. 

Before I go, I also want to show off our amazing new artwork for the new season! Without further ado, check out this artwork from our friend and my most-valued FFXIV party member Wayne! Be sure to give him a follow @BoltCreature for any of his other work, he did such an amazing job with this piece and I'm so goddamn excited to plaster it all over our episodes for the next year or two. 

Just... take a look at how good that is! Absolutely love it. 

Thanks to everyone that read this far and again, please take the time to comment if you have any thoughts or suggestions on what you wanna see out of us going forward! We'd really appreciate it!