

Episode 575 - Fave fantasy creatures?
Mar 20, 2022
Fantasy creatures are cool and we're here to talk about our faves. One of mine is elves. I love them… Being quite elfy myself. Fantasy is pretty fun to play around with, you have the freedom to create anything but even so there are a few recognised and agreed on fantasy creatures that people stick with.
Topics and Show Notes
Tolkien is responsible for creating iconic versions of creatures like Dwarves and elves among many others but it was really the American students going to university in the 1960s and 70s that solidified things. These were RPG gamers. RPG games had always been popular with that crowd. In previous generations with the SciFi writers in the 30s and 40s it was naval based war games that they'd play on the floor with ship models. But in the 1960s fantasy was all the rage.
These RPG enthusiasts came up with detailed game systems like Dungeons and Dragons which created bibles of fantasy creatures of all kinds. This served to collate, define and refine fantasy creatures for pop-culture as a whole for the decades to come. This is why despite all the freedom, fantasy creatures across different stories and mediums don't changes very much.
So what are YOUR fave fantasy creatures? Here are some of ours, see if you can guess who's is who's: Naked, mysterious, secretive, powerful, necromancer witches; big veiny, musclebound, brutish, ragged trolls; Noble, brave, muscular, archer centaurs.
I also have to mention Tantz's fantasy book series The art of Veiling!
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Little q - An intriguing safari through the dark, misty, damp, green humid jungle of human emotion. Ringing bells of synth vibraphone tones shine like spots of sunlight through the dappled shadows of expectation and obligation. Warm and comforting.
Next week's Quackcast:
Retro Adventure heroes. You know the sort, dressed in khaki, loose shirts and leather, going to exotic places, quick with a gun or a whip, exploring, fighting, doing what's right and adventuring. So we'll be chatting about the likes of Indiana Jones, Brenden Frasier's character in The Mummy, Romancing the Stone, Ace Kinkaid in Pinky TA, Lara croft, El Borak, Alan Quartermaine, Steve Canyon, Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, John Carter and maybe more!
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Welcome to my House - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2022/mar/01/featured-comic-welcome-to-my-house/
Featured music:
Little q - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/little_q/ - by PaddyWolfe, rated E.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
PitFace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
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Episode 571 - Myths of fiction
Feb 21, 2022
There are so many really silly cliché myths from fiction that we all just tend to accept. They're objectively stupid but they get repeated so often that we don't bat an eye when we see them and we can even start to believe them in reality. I thought it'd be fun to dig into them in a Quackcast. I made a thread in the forum for people to contribute to. Unfortunately we didn't get to many in the Quackcast but there's always time to do another!

Episode 565 - Lady Barbarian
Jan 10, 2022
“The Girl Boss in the sausagefest” Pitface and Tantz chat are here to chat with me about the subject or lady Barbarians: What they look like, where they originated, why they originated, what they mean, and the logic behind them. They're often overshadowed by their male counterparts (e.g. Conan), and often dismissed as simply an erotic male fantasy, but they've been around just as long and they've also had just as much of a role to play in the traditional “barbarian” mythos as the male versions. Sure, the sexy versions are abundant, iconic, and visually striking, but they're not the be all and end all!

Episode 564 - Happy 2022!
Jan 2, 2022
Happy New Year! It seems we've all decided to keep going on with the 20's so let's continue… Did you know the year 2022 marks 20 years that Drunk Duck has been around? YUP! The site is actually THAT old THIS year! No other comic host is as old and legit as us. They're all little babies. Even Facebook didn't exist when we stated, no iphones, no smartphones, tablets, no Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pintrest, Instagram, Spotify, tiktok and so on. Jeeeeez man, we're freakin GRANDDADDIES of the internet. Even this podcast turns 12 years old this year.

Episode 551 - Tropes we LOVE to hate...
Oct 4, 2021
Tantz explains why she really hates a bunch of tropes that are super commonly used in things, stuff like very obvious plot armour for the protagonist so that you KNOW nothing can seriously hurt them so you stop caring what happens to them and in the story in general, child-led stories where the adults are all useless and ineffectual because it takes away your suspension of disbelief, and amnesia where a huge bunch of the story is erased so the writers can just repeat stuff over and over. Banes and I join it to talk about stuff we hate too!

Episode 550 - Gaming
Sep 27, 2021
We decided to chat about games. Video game and computer games. They're now a huge part of pop-culture entertainment and they've influenced us in many ways creatively throughout our lives. There are many different kinds of games out there, but one of the really cool things about them is that they're able to deliver a kind of interactive narrative experience that takes things further than Film or comics can easily do. Games were also instrumental in the early days of the first big popular wave of webcomics with gamer comics (PVP, Ctrl Alt Dlt, and Penny Arcade) and sprite comics (8 bit fantasy), being some of the most popular.

Episode 546 - The bad-arse dandy!
Aug 30, 2021
Why aren't there more prettyboy bad-ass characters? Pretty girl bad-asses too! This character type is often a hall-mark of Japanese and Korean fiction more than anything else though it DOES show up in Western media occasionally. There is no age-limit to the type, what distinguishes it is that the character is tough and a very good fighter while also being very obviously concerned about their appearance and looking good- they don't just look good and fashionable naturally, they actively work at it.

Episode 537 - Historicity
Jun 28, 2021
We have a chat about historicity in this Quackcast. What IS historicity? It's historical authenticity basically but a nicer way of saying it! It's pretty important for a lot of reasons to make the best effort you can with historical authenticity- it increases immersion of the audience, gives you a better understanding of the story and the world you're looking at (because things will make sense), and leads you to better understanding of your own history and where we came from. BUT, that doesn't mean you always have to be strict. As long as you as a creator properly understand historical context then you've got a lot more leeway to play without creating something stupid. Playing fast and loose with history is ok as long as you know what you're doing, not just being a moron and faking it (hey, many of us are guilty of that). Historical fantasy, myth, classics, fiction, biography etc are all different classes of story where it's more or less forgiveable to mess around.