Episode 548 - Foreign Influence
Sep 8, 2021
Translating cultural concepts so they can be understood in a different country can be really tricky, most people never bother. Often the audience is just left to guess what's behind certain concepts and idioms. As an Australian, growing up as a little kid we were bombarded by media from everywhere, but mainly Britain, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. There was so much about American media that was utterly alien to us and we were just left to puzzle it out, especially American high school concepts: The level of seriousness with which they regard team sports in schools, cheerleaders, jocks, jockstraps, school kids driving cars, homecoming, pep rallies, summer camp, proms, tick or treating, thanksgiving… We just had to make sense of those things ourselves. Some we could work out from context but others I never really understood and never really will.
Topics and Show Notes
Tantz tells us a bit about how she translates concepts from her Greek WW2 comic Without Moonlight to be understood by an English speaking audience and we all have a chatter about things we see in the media from other cultures that we just don't really get, but mainly from the USA since Tantz, Banes, are not from the US, only Pitface and she wasn't IN this Quackcast!
What are the cultural concepts in media from different countries that you don't get?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme to Speaking in Tongues - A lonely and delicate piano rises out of the shadows to paint an intricate and pretty picture with sound. Backed by gentle synthesised strings, it swirls and rises like a tiny new vine, weaving its way up towards the light.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
The Last Aviatrix - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2021/sep/07/featured-comic-the-last-aviatrix/
Featured music:
Speaking in Tongues - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Speaking_In_Tongues/ - by Quinn O Matic, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
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Episode 539 - Schemers
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Episode 535 - the teachcast
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Episode 531 - Same Stories From Differnt Perspectives
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Episode 526 A return to Mary Sue!
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Mary Sues are always a fun topic! There are some misconceptions about them though… Mary Sues aren't all female, they can be any gender. Being super powerful or super popular or super pretty etc doesn't equal a Mary Sue, not even if your character super stands out next to all the others, those things ONLY indicate they might possibly be one. What equals a Mary Sue is a character that doesn't have to struggle very hard for anything, a character that is almost universally admired, and or loved (even by the enemy), a character that masters hard skills with ease and ends up teaching the teachers and beating the masters, a character that's destined to succeed and does in spite of internal story logic… All these things and more can add up to make a Mary Sue.
Episode 510 - STUFF WE SPEND OUT MONEY ON
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Episode 507 - Say my name again!
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Coming up with character names isn't easy. It can actually be really, really hard! Tantz did a couple helpful Newsposts about it and we decided to spin that into a fun Quackcast about naming and names! The names behind stuff often has interesting stories, the Quackcast itself is no exception. When Wowio told us we had to do a podcast back in the day we tossed around a few names and the one they came up with was “Quackcast”, because of the whole “duck” theme we have going here. I protested because there was a highly regarded skeptical medical podcast with that name already run by Dr Mark Crislip, but I didn't have any real say and so the name stuck! When I DID have the power to change it, it was already way too entrenched.
