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Stakes are a part of a story. What does a character want? What means the most to the character? What are they after, what do they care about? Stakes can be really subjective like that and they ...

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Inspired by Banes we did a Quackcast on SUPER TEAMS! You know those groups like the Justice League, the Avengers, the Suicide Squad, or even Monkey, Pigsy ...

When I was a youngster…and as I got older, too, I was always a big fan of the Super-Team. The X-Men, X-Factor, Alpha Flight, The Avengers…some of these were my favorite comics. And of course, the Super Friends was an old school cartoon that we loved as littl ...

Ayanna navigates while Alek takes the wheel of their father’s Amberjack HK-36L-247 during a salvage claim expedition. This is the Planet Madriu, where scavengers, hi-jackers, and claim jumpers are the only threat in addition to being wiped out from riding too fast—not to mention the growing population of ...

There has been a lot of online discussion in recent years about the idea of “strong female characters” - what makes a good one, a bad one, etc. All the accusations of sexism, either anti-woman or anti-man have gone along with these discussions, in the glorious, exaggerated way people argue online ...

There are a handful of cinematic “group shots” that showcase an ensemble of characters in a memorable way.

The Avengers in their first movie have one where they're finally all together, back to back in a circle to face the invading alien army.

There's the Usual Suspects in ...

Last week I talked about what kind of stuff to stick in the middle section of stories.

Here's a tangent I found myself on, about the actual halfway mark:

Well, the middle bit almost always contains the actual halfway point of the story. In many stories this is a ...

I've compared “Avengers Infinity War” to the classic movie cliffhanger in The Empire Strikes Back.

But the Marvel Cinematic Universe actually pulled off an almost-“Empire”-level story a couple years before that, in Captain America: Civil War.

The MCU started off with multiple movies setting up Iron Man ...

Spoilers for recent Star Wars, eg the Mandalorian.
It went unspoken in my year of Newsposts, but 2020 is the 40th Anniversary the release of The Empire Strikes Back.

that's not true! That's impossible!
No, man! Search your feelings! you know it's true! Forty damn years!


Though ...

Imagine a city where a group of seven high-powered “superheroes” (think the Avengers or Justice League) are corrupt and it is up to a lone-wolf vigilante and an audio/visual salesman to be the ones with a lawful moral compass.

At first, the plot twist is refreshing, it answers the ...