Episode 543 - Men writing women writing men writing hilariously badly
Aug 9, 2021
Angela frowned in disappointment. Her boobs seemed to grimace in displeasure, nipples pulsing with abject fury. As she walked the heaviness of their bounce echoed her anger. She sat down at her desk, opened the document she had been working on and began to type. She was halfway through her romance novel, “Pirates of pleasure”. Her boobs swelled and seemed to glow, echoing her happy mood as she worked. She typed…
Topics and Show Notes
“David admired his 6 foot 5 inch frame in the mirror, sweat glistened off the darkly tanned, well defined 10 pack rippling across his abdomen. Well-defined pectoral muscles bugled like fat watermelons. His perky brown nipples drew the eye like magnets. The huge bulge in his skin-tight white semi-transparent trousers pulsed with both threat and promise. Deep hazel eyes glowered beneath strong dark brows and a thick fringe of dark shaggy hair as he drank in this magnificent sight. He thought longingly of the wanton, headstrong, powerful pirate queen maiden waiting alone in his quarters…”
Angela's Boobs rose and fell excitedly with the quickness of her breath as she continued to type…
There's a fad at the moment for finding terrible examples of men writing about women. But this isn't a one way issue by any means. You can find ridiculous examples of women writing about men in any one of a billion romance novels, crappy examples of straight people writing gay people. bad versions of gay people writing straights, Binary writing non-binary, white writing black, and the reverse… Basically people writing about something they have limited personal experience with in a superficial manner and focussing on the aspects they fetishise. It generally produces silly results whoever does it.
This is what we chat about, with some side lines into things like ethnic stereotyping. Check out the weird manga samurai versions of national cultures done for the Japanese Olympic games.
This Quackcast was inspired by a newspost by our own Tantz Aerine. Maybe we should all have a go at some bad writing? The above version was great fun! I did a double layer: a man (me) writing badly about a woman writing badly about a man in a very silly, stereotypical way.
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme to The BirdBoys - creepy cyberpunk weirdness with a big, bouncy beat to move us along. Get lost in the hustle and bustle of a futuristic western crowd. Glowing lights, dark side allys, mysterious whisperings half heard from far away, chatterings in unfamiliar languages… A dry dusty techno future.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Men writing women badly - https://www.buzzfeed.com/farrahpenn/18-men-who-need-to-be-banned-from-writing-female-characters
Men AND women writing each other badly - https://medium.com/inspired-writer/men-women-writing-each-other-badly-9c0f46aeac5c
Woman writing men badly- https://www.thewriterscircus.com/articles/characters/5734/common-mistakes-female-writers-make-when-writing-male-characters/
Tantz post on the subject - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2021/jul/30/writing-women-writing-men/
Countries as Samurai - https://world-flags.org/
Featured comic:
The BirdBoys - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2021/aug/02/featured-comic-the-birdboys/
Featured music:
The BirdBoys - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_BirdBoys/ - by J_vulture, 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
Pitface - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
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Episode 524 - Empathy
Mar 28, 2021
Image credit: There's Something About Mary, 20th Century Fox. Empathy is like sympathy but you don't think about it. It's what happens when you see someone get hurt and you wince in pain watching them, it's when you see a really uncomfortable moment in a sitcom like The Office and you cringe, It's when you feel sad when the characters are sad about something. Empathy is an important tool for audience immersion- if they're feeling that strongly for the characters then you've got them invested in your story! Funny story… the topic of this Quackcast was inspired by us talking about the risks of “going commando” and the fact that it can happen to women as well as men. This led us to go looking for photographic and video proof, as you do… and what we saw gave us instant empathy for the poor unfortunate. Hence the Quackcast topic ;) This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to PleaseRewind: Quiet threat, creepy, seeping, strumming, thrumbing, coming CLOSER, inside, peering around, waiting to begin. This is a quiet track filled with an undertone of urgency suggested by the constant quick rhythm and lonely guitar.
Episode 518 - Gina Carano, no more right to bare arms!
Feb 15, 2021
Gina Carano who plays Cara Dune in the excellent Star Wars franchise Mandalorian has been fired, as we all know by now… It's a great series, really one of the best incarnations of Star Wars since the original trilogy, and Cara's character was pretty cool. Though I personally didn't really like her lunk-head costume- Fully dressed characters in SciFi with bare biceps always look stupid to me for some reason. Doesn't matter if they're men, women, anthros etc, it's just ugly, especially when they're wearing armour. UGH! Be that as it may Gina said some pretty silly things on social media, and kept saying them after she got in trouble for it aaaaaand then Disney booted her.
Episode 491 - Getting retro right!
Aug 10, 2020
DD member Furwerk Studios posted in our forum about how annoying it was that movies try and do an 80s retro thing often get things totally wrong and end up looking dumb because of it: Not just superficial looks-wise but stylistically too in terms of the kinds of shots they do, lighting and story structure. I thought that'd make an interesting topic for a cast! Why do people often mess up retro stuff? We're not talking about historical accuracy here, that's slightly different, what we're talking about is setting something in an era and getting the “feel” of that era right. It pays off hugely when it works, but when it doesn't it comes off as superficial, disappointing and ignorant.
Episode 488 - DD Anthology details!
Jul 20, 2020
This week the brilliant Damehelsing (aka Agiebun), comes on to tell us the details of the DD anthology! Last week Boundbun gave us a general overview but now we're having a look at exactly HOW it's going to be done and how YOU can contribute to it. We'll have details and discussion on the DD Discord server as well as in our Twitter and on the forums. Currently there are 5 themes that we're deciding between: Urban fantasy, Noir, Community, Horror and Halloween. We'll have to decide which of those we like best to tie together the whole thing!
Episode 479 - Big ideas in fiction
May 18, 2020
My original idea for this Quackcast was: “Genre fiction is the best place to explore ideas, straight fiction doesn't do it as well” What I meant was that diverting from straight reality in fiction makes it easier to conceptualise, simplify and explain complicated ideas to a general audience for a whole number of reasons. There was some disagreement between Tantz and I because I expressed myself poorly so she'd thought that I was saying it was much easier to write SciFi and fantasy (Genre fiction), and it was easier to write about big ideas, while straight fiction wasn't good for that- Which is fair enough! My initial statement is so badly worded that's a valid interpretation! Fortunately Banes and Pit were on hand to smooth things out and explain things properly. Pit mediated between us and Banes conceptualised my concept FAR, far better than I did! Unfortunately you don't get much of that disagreement on the Quackcast. You DO get a bit of it on the PATREON only video however ^_^
Episode 470 - What stirred your creative juices?
Mar 15, 2020
For this cast I'd thought we'd go through with our promise of last week and talk about things that have made us have a reaction as a creator. This expands on “The Cartoons that Date us” from last week. So today we're talking the creative media that gave you a reaction: Books, movies, comics, TV shows… Not what specifically inspired the comics you do now, but what drove you to create and why.
Episode 423 - Fave weapons in fiction?
Apr 22, 2019
What's your favourite weapon in fiction? Mine are ridiculously giant swords, huge anti-tank rifles, and mecha. There are a lot of complex reasons for weapon choices in fiction, a Kalashnikov assault rifles for example signals certain things about the person carrying it: They're usually a bad guy for a start. This originated during the cold war, with certain types of bad guys using AKs. First it was Soviet Bloc soldiers, then it was Viet Con and rebels from South East Asia, then it became the “terrorist” weapon. The sub machine gun is the weapon of the bad guy. Terrorists used to use Uzis (before they turned to AKs), bank robbers used to use Mac 10s, now it's the HK MP5. Good guys carry an M-16 or AR-15 rifle. In historical fiction traditionally the bad guys carries curved swords while the good guys had straight swords, this came from crusades. Minor characters carry spears and heroes carry swords. Women, weaker characters and rebels carry bows. Giant swords and guns are often given to smaller characters in anime (usually female), as an obvious contrast with their small size. It's meant to emphasis the fact they're sort of a “mighty mouse”.
