teacher, teacher, can you teach me –

I was revisiting a classic movie, one of the ones on this list, in the past week or so, and thinking of the archetypal teacher/student dynamic in fiction.

So, in line with my Top Five Tales of Bands from last year, here's ...

The sheer power of a good team is so defining that it's a trope. Some of the most iconic characters and beloved personalities have emerged from stories featuring teams of main characters.

Each of them are vital to the story, each of them contribute both in terms of the ...

Wrapping up this series of character designs for antagonists, villains, and even protagonists with toxicity as their flaw, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the toxicity of inactivity.

The motto is well known- all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to ...

Tough love is so cool, eh? It's going to magic the “whining” right out of you, won't it? You just need to stick out through the harshness, and then when you reap the benefits, you'll realize your tough loving benefactor had the right idea. You'll be ...

Zadie is a precocious little monster of an eight year old girl! She's excitable and eager to prove herself, especially now that she's come into her special powers of destruction as a Shadowborn. It wasn't entirely unexpected, she grew up in the underworld with her ferocious mother ...

The idea that an individual (or many) have managed to escape death has always been alluring to creators. being able to live through history, being a constant in an ever-changing world, never having to die, can have its perks: you have innumerable chances to live the ‘good life’, you can ...

So it is Sunday again. Following up on the suggestion left by Kou the Mad in my last article, today’s Sunday’s Fantastic Bestiary post is gonna be about Goblins. We’re pretty much all familiar with goblins. Ever since Tolkien they’ve become a common stock creature in ...

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 ...

Often when there are children in a cast of characters, especially in sitcoms or certain types of movies, audiences groan because they tend to be immensely annoying. They are a very special type of uncanny valley in the way they are written to talk and react. Usually, we get one ...

So maybe the verb ‘hate’ is excessive, but there are some tropes that can really throw me off a story. Or perhaps, what throws me is the way they are used. I firmly believe that any trope can be part of a solid, enjoyable story, even the ones I hate ...