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ALL the tropes!!!!
Based on Emma Clare's newspost, tropes are damn useful but they can also be your undoing if you handle them badly. Tropes are shortcuts to meanings, scenes, procedures or jokes that take too long to set up in their own right. You can use them ...

When you look at a developed artist you can recognise their work straight away. Maybe it is in the way that they do their lineart, or it could be the facial expressions that characters have, (think the Dreamworks Smirk), or maybe it is the tropes that they use in their ...

Tropes aren’t bad. In fact, they are a useful and, at times, necessary shorthand that creators, particularly in the webcomic field, can wield to enhance their work. J Hillis Miller posited a trope as, “… the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect.”

Every ...

Javert is such a stellar and powerful character in Les Miserables that he has his very own trope.

He's the skilled, dogged, unwavering locomotive of a chaser that in the name of the law, the church, the state, the cause pursues and persecutes the hero of a story, and ...

More and more demons are coming into our world! They crave human flesh… The military can't stop them and the angels are outnumbered. Fortunately there's a special team who're dedicated to studying and defeating demons, led by the amazing and young doctor Isia. But are their motives ...

One of the most prevalent motifs in fantasy, science fiction/ space operas and similar folklore style genres is that of the Chosen One- the one character (99% the main character/protagonist) that is destined to save the world from the big bad- the evil sorcerer, the overlord, the empire, the ...

My Life as an American Hero is a tale of revenge, sisterhood, national security and superpowers! Sylvia, Luna, and Rachel are sisters and rivals, but when tragedy strikes their parents they know they'll have to set their rivalries aside to team up and go after the bad guys. This ...

Six weeks ago, at the end of my article titled “Psychopomps and Death Personified”, I asked the question: Can you think of any examples of the personification of Death in a comic? How about on Drunk Duck (Yes, you can plug your own comic)?

Much to my delight, fellow community ...

Starting with Jung’s archetypal motifs, I think it’s best to remind why they’re called ‘archetypal’ first:
Archetypal motifs replicate themselves in stories across time and culture, in all human endeavors to create.

Motifs in general are tokens in a story that appear several times and symbolize something ...

Failure is the stepping stone to success. That’s what I teach my students and my clients, and it is true, right up there with “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”: If you learn why you failed, you won’t fail again the same way- and that brings ...