So lately there has been a repetitive sequence of events that seems to carry on until some kind of death- of the story, of the company, or of the genre for a few years or so:

1. Disney remakes a classic fairytale or animated feature (live action/3D/etc)
2 ...

One of my favorite tropes (at least I think it's a trope. Not sure how common it is) is the “unknown hero”.

It's when a character who's known to us, the audience, maybe very well, and is at least somewhat important to us.

The character dies and ...

Foreno has been ordered by the King to recruit twelve individuals for a “boring” (aka Very Important) mission. His inner left wrist is scribbled with numbers and an incomprehensible language; the right wrist holds a countdown timer and when it gets to zero, everything known, loved, and hated will be ...

In the whole “show don't tell” thing that is the holy grail of ‘good storytelling’ (yes but not always, this is for a newspost of another time) what they usually don't tell you is that behavioral patterns are your friend.

To show rather than tell, you need to ...

This character can be insufferably annoying.

No, this character is insufferably annoying, but it's up to you whether that's to the other characters or the audience. When written correctly, the prattler can be comedy gold or a swift ticket to the most delicious kind of schadenfreude: watching the ...

Villains are tremendously important for a story. They set the framework and standard for a lot of things in an unsaid but definite manner: how far your villain is willing to go sets up audience expectations for how big and how dire the stakes will be in the story.

If ...

In rewatching some 1990's movies, I saw quite a few of these Protagonists show up - they're these disaffected types, usually quite intelligent or at least verbose, who are wrapped up in their emotions and sort of spinning their wheels in life as they analyze their problems and face ...

The DD Awards, run by DD Awards Queen Niccea, are already under way!

The first For Your Consideration (FYC) pages are already up on the DD Awards 2023 page, so go check them out if you haven't already.

And since the DD Awards are already happening, you guessed it ...

Generational differences can be quite pronounced and they certainly are in this family, featuring a dog, daughter, mother and grandmother, all interacting and reacting or one another. One has everything, one is getting by and would like to have everything, one has nothing and doesn't know why it's ...

One of the most frequent ways to make characters stand out in fiction or myth is to give them a staggering, amazingly powerful ability. Something that mere talent doesn't give you. Something miraculous, larger than the largest life, unique and insurmountable:

Like a dude that can part an entire ...