Welcome to…
The DD Fashion Spotlight!
Number 27.


John Henry Hunter is a terrible dastardly villain in a very classic sense… he's handsome, has a great goatee, fierce eyebrows, a marvelous figure with a powerful chest, and most importantly for this article: he dresses with style and care. He ...

I don't wanna be remembered; I wanna be forgotten


MEMORY and MEMORY LOSS in FICTION

Playing with memory and memory loss is a handy device for fiction writers, from soap opera-type melodrama to exciting-but-thought-provoking stories like The Matrix, and in all kinds of stories betwixt and beyond.

Like any ...

Kim is not a sociopath - but her many nuances make her most intriguing…and she has a scary side


The secret sociopath.

A story trope in fiction that can make for a shocking ending when done well, or probably an eye-rolling one
when not, is the secret sociopath.

A character ...

Welcome to…
The DD Fashion Spotlight!
Number 25.

Hpkomic is sharing the load with Friday newsposts, so we alternate each week. My turn this week!

Kumiko, Maria, and Elda are all dressed as maids, in a very typically manga style. This is solidly a manga trope which comes from a ...

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Retro adventure heroes are an interesting and unique sort of hero. The trope was revived and crystallised by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg with Indiana Jones, but ...

So it's fun to rant about tropes I hate but I actually prefer to gush about tropes I love.

And one of them is what I call “the bargain”: it's really a game of wits between a (usually lawful) villain and a hero (or protagonist/antagonist, take your ...

So I'm exhausted today, at the end of a very eventful week and a lot of work piled on work.

Which means I can't discipline my brain to write something more artsy or tropey. Though censorship is a trope, right?

When do we have censorship appear in stories ...

I've talked at times about how, as I make Without Moonlight, I have to constantly make choices on what to include and what not to from …reality.

By that I mean that true, documented (and even photographed) events from the nazi occupation of Athens during WWII are so grotesquely ...

I revert to talking about tropes I hate, because I don't want to talk about things happening around us but I still want to talk about something I despise.

Tropes I hate it is!

The horrible slap n' kiss or “slap slap kiss” trope.

Especially prevalent in lakorns (Thai ...

Not every story involves the underworld, or however the world of the dead is called in the setting. However, it still exists.

Every time the characters consider their own mortality in the story, the world of the dead looms in the backdrop. The way the characters think about death, life ...