I was watching the 2015 series of Poldark the other day and I noticed something strange;
None of the characters have the moral grey areas and twists that we expect of characters in modern stories, where they behave one way but it turns out they were thinking the opposite all ...

Emotional Charges and Diminishing Returns

Many writing methodologies suggest mapping out the emotional change of each scene. The scene either starts positive, and goes to either negative or “extra positive”, or starts negative and goes to positive or “extra negative” by the end of the scene.

So if a lovelorn ...

Feedback from your audience has always been important- from the renaissance palace parlors to enlightenment salons to the modern art galleries, how much the audience is pleased by what the creator procures is central.

But in the age of the internet and webcomics, where comics are updated page by page ...

This is mainly an issue with female characters…
But what IS objectification?
Objectification is when you rob a character of traits that make them human and turn them into something closer to an object.

One common view, that I feel is in error, is that characters are objectified by how ...

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In this Drunk Duck Quackcast we chat about the importance and the process of reviews! Good ones, bad ones, why they all matter, and also why they often don't! ;)
Reviews are an interesting animal, they're a parasitic form of entertainment. They rely wholly of other forms of ...

Chihiro and No Face from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Studio Ghibli

I was driving home from work this evening and an unusual, rather old fashioned looking car with bright high beams began following me on my route. When I made a turn, I looked in the side mirror ...

Apollodorus Kratos is a dashing, young artist and scholar of archeology stuck in the shadows of his deceased father and floundering relationship with his female colleague. He is generally an observer who captures secret glances of couples at train stations in his sketchbook. After speaking publicly at a conference, he ...

I think I spent my Saturday night the same way as plenty of other people did–in a movie theater watching a film based on a book by Stephen King (and No, I am not talking about The Dark Tower). It is still September since the last time I checked ...

SINGLE PAGES vs. The GREATER WHOLE

I'm at a nice place in my webcomic right now. Well, it's nice as the writer, at least.
The characters have a nice history now, with some adventures behind them, some established relationships, and a stable of supporting characters who can be ...

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The saying goes that “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, it's attributed to various luminaries such as TS Elliot, Picasso, Tantz Aerine etc, but the important thing is the true meaning: there are very few original ideas, culture is built up out of inherited inspiration that is built ...