We talk a lot about Franchises here because those have been the big, widely known movies/stories in the culture in recent years.

But it's not all about Franchises - one thing that a standalone story can do, and occasionally does, is have an ending that changes the world forever ...

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 ...

Since I first read it, the book “Save The Cat!” has been incredibly useful to me as far as thinking about stories, outlining them, and finishing them. It's a fun way to approach structure, and applies to a LOT of mainstream stories.

It's become an essential textbook in ...

Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

So for some reason my youtube is being besieged by rant videos over The Little Mermaid live action movie by Disney… AGAIN. You'd think the algorithm would know by now that I only watch ER skits and debunking videos, but here we are.

The controversy (again) is over the ...

Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. This week as I weigh possible panel challenges for later updates, I wanted to return to our more usual analysis of panels. This week we're turning to the comic Heaven Hunters by ...

I was reading a critique of a series, a successful series, of novels. I think it's an urban fantasy/horror thing where the main character has a specific paranormal ability, limited, but useful in her detective work. She had a love interest, who was maybe on and off, but ...

I was supposed to write the last post on my ‘toxic’ character design series, but I've been deep cleaning the house all day and I'm exhausted. My brain refuses to think so that post will need to wait till next time. Instead, I'd like to talk about ...

I did come across this podcast channel last week browsing through Soundcloud called Predator Movie Minute. Now, I only listened through one podcast and decided it wasn’t my cup. However that podcast did bring up an interesting observation that made me look at the movie Predator (1987) from a ...

Last year (har har har obligatory New Year's Joke done) I'd started talking about Found Family, one of my favorite tropes in pretty much any narrative work, from movies to novels to comics and webcomics. Found family is when a bunch of characters, usually unrelated and mismatched, end ...