Another pop cultural fantastic bestiary Sunday. Anybody remember the movie Avatar? Not the kung-fu fantasy one, the tribal sci-fi one. The James Cameron’s Avatar as it was marketed. I still remember it being the movie that REALLY set the standard for what CGI technology can do cinematically, making this ...

The manchild is a very comic trope in fiction over the years. It's the kind of person who is an adult physically, but have not accepted adult responsibilities in some parts of life…or maybe any part of life. They are irresponsible in relationships or work or life in ...

Historical Drama/period pieces present multiple issues for the writer/creator to deal with.

In talking about the drama in his movie “Cinderella Man”, Ron Howard said that the drama was built into the story itself. Meaning the actual true events. The moving radio broadcast where the Depression-Era boxer Jimmy ...

Character Motivation

One thing I appreciate in well written stories is the hidden motivations of characters. Well written characters, just like real people, have contradictions to them. Desires and needs that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Story structure tells us that a character has to WANT something. The ...

Holy Unholy Alliance, Batman!

Last week we talked about what I called the “villain combo platter” with different types of villains that could make for multifaceted kinds of conflicts for the hero to face.

At the time, PaulEberhart mentioned the alliance between villains that happened at one point during Deep ...

Back when the Deep Space Nine series was developing into a more serialized kind of story, the writers wanted to define the major threat from the distant Gamma Quadrant. Who was going to be the big villain for the series?

The stakes were pretty high, here - what if the villains ...

Last week’s post of the Fantastic Bestiary dealt with housespirits of ancient Rome. In this post we’re going to the far east, following up on another suggestion left by DD member marcorossi. We are going to study the Naga today. The Nagas are a race of serpentine beings ...

Peacemaker is probably not everyone's cup of tea…but it must be seen at least once
to appreciate the opening credits dance number. Brilliant!

When Vince Gilligan was co-creating the idea for the Better Call Saul spinoff, he said that one of the challenges he and Peter Gould and ...

not the Smiths

I had a topic in mind for this week, but didn't get to it early enough, and it turns out that it's a bit too ambitious to bring together in time for today.

Instead, I'll go for the low-hanging fruit and spew out a ...

Critics, professional or not, identified a trend in many of the…lesser regarded manga and anime series.
It's the “everyman hero”.

This school of thought is that to make a lead character who is identifiable to everyone in the readership or audience. So the lead will be unremarkable, and ...