Now that's a little TOO scary!

Horror is perfect for metaphor and allegory. In fact, a horror story is often allegorical by default, what with its bizarre landscapes and freaky beasties.

Here are some categories of horror and some thoughts on what they symbolize:

Reality Bites


psycho killer! Qu ...

We love a good revenge story.

The entire journey of a character from victimhood to avenger is one that almost guarantees audience engagement and their rooting for the character on the path of revenge.

The reasoning for that is easy: the character suffered a great grievance that is unlikely to ...

Yesterday a scammer on the phone tried to scam us out of around 3k euro by some silly pretense and a bait of around 250 euro supposedly they wanted to deposit on behalf of the government. Now, of course this didn't fly with me or my mom, but it ...

Today’s Character Deep Dive is on an antagonist!

We’re looking at Raidon Yamamura from Used Books by the amazingly proliferate Vickie Boutwell!

Used Books is a crime-noir thriller involving the story of Kaida, an ex-assassin from a highly dangerous network of organized crime and the different people surrounding ...

Finally! It's time for yet another Creator Interview, and as usual, I have the pleasure of interviewing one more fantastic DDer! This time it's Paul Eberhadt, a wonderful artist and comic creator with a unique style I could discern among many!

Paul already has a bio on his ...

A tried and true story trope is the “forced together”.

I think it was the director Sidney Lumet who said that he really enjoyed the tension that came from
this kind of situation. Taking two people who would never choose to be together are stuck in
a bad situation. It ...

badum-tsss

I thought the first time I appreciated comedy that was “bad on purpose”, it was Fred Willard in Best in Show.
It's possible that some of his quips and comments were funny, or funny to some people…but the point of that character (a clueless commentator at a ...

One story structure, that ozoneocean and I talked about many years ago on the Quackcast, was the Lone Protagonist as drifter.

In Pulp Fiction, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) says talks about leaving the life of crime to walk the Earth. “Like Kane in Kung Fu. Help people, get in adventures ...

Damaged Heroes


A well written, standard Protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be ...

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“Passing the mantle” is an interesting phrase. Many claim it comes from a biblical origin; the prophet Elijah was said to have passed his mantle to Elisha when he ascended to heaven, thereby symbolically transferring his authority ...