Episode 703 - Cross Cultural Influence
Sep 2, 2024
Cross cultural influence is a marvellous thing and very enriching to creativity! It's lovely when you can see multiple cultural influences in things, whether comics, movies, art, fashion, music or anything else. It's inspiring and leads to new and more interesting things. I picked promo images from some recent Pixar movies Turning Red, Encanto, Coco, and Moana, because they're good examples of the process and what it can result in.
Topics and Show Notes
The flip-side of that is “cultural appropriation”. That's where you take something that's important, sacred or representative of another culture and you claim ownership of it or use it in an inappropriate way, not giving the true source any respect and not seeking permission. unfortunately this is often used as a false accusation by people who either try and white-knight or are just trying to weaponise the idea in order to gain status or make a point, which has a number of very negative effects: It drives people toward monoculuralisim in their expression, makes people afraid to experiment, it can make people less likely to see ACTUAL examples of cultural appropriation and more likely to discount or ignore real examples of it.
In the Quackcast we mention Big Trouble in Little China, which was a wonderful blend of American action film and Hong Kong kung-fu movie. The Clint Eastwood Western A Fist Full Of Dollars is a version of the Japanese samurai film Yojimbo, made by Italians. And then of course the Samurai films of that era were inspired by America westerns anyway, so there was all sorts of deep cultural mixing.
What are some of your own fave examples of cross cultural influence?
This week another re-release of an older theme by Gunwallace, this one inspired by Thrud Goddess Of Thunder - Big fat beats and an epic sound! This one really brings the thunder! It’d be great as the intro tune to a professional wrestling match. It builds anticipation perfectly and really slams home and delivers on its promises. Epic sounds! This is the theme that became our Quackcast theme!
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
The Sloggs Gang Go To Comic Con - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/aug/26/featured-comic-the-sloggs-gang-go-to-comic-con/
Featured music:
Thrud Goddess Of Thunder - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/THRUD_Goddess_Of_Thunder/ - by takoyama, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 232 - Creating a Rounded World
Aug 17, 2015
Hello, hello, hello! This is the second part of our hugely long expose on the tricky art of WORLD BUILDING! And it really IS extra loooooooooooog… that's because we take so much time crafting the Quackcast world for you. To recap: world-building is a big part of ALL fiction from SciFi and fantasy to your common or garden police shows or even comic strips. You create locations that have relationships with each other, characters that have jobs, families, friends, histories etc, all that is just as much world building as a fantasy world with a specific style of magic and monsters or a SciFi world with aliens and a 1000 year war. Typically, if you do your homework and set up your world nicely then it makes it easier to write stories within it, but you also have to remember not to show all that research to people in the form of big long explanations. Banes and Bravo1102 join Ozoneocean to talk about it! Listen to Gunwallace's lovely theme for Regarding Dandelions!
Episode 231 - The importance of world building
Aug 9, 2015
You always do a bit of world building in fiction, in some types of stories like alternative histories, fantasy and Sci-Fi you have to do a bit more, in things set in the real world you don't have to do nearly as much - maybe only limited to a few rooms, character occupations and relationships etc, rather than planets and political systems, but the point is you're always doing it. There are good ways to do world building and bad ways i.e. work out as many details as you need to but have that all behind the scenes, not introduced as a wall of text or long explanations on how things work. World building should inform you story and make it work seamlessly, not prop it up like a rickety scaffold. The topic of the importance of World Building was previously touched on a few years ago by Skoolmunkee and Kroatz for Quackcast 39, but things happened at that recording was lost to history, so now we approach it again with all new contributions, strident opinions, and points of view on the subject. Gunwallace did a cool theme for Red Velvet Requiem!
Episode 228 - Conflicting conflicts conflict
Jul 19, 2015
This time we're talking about conflict in webcomic writing, and any writing in general really. Conflict is one of the main drivers of a story, so you pretty much have to have it in there somewhere! But how do you approach it? Do you set it up really carefully or just put a bunch of volatile characters together and see what happens? I think for a lot of us we don't think too much about the science of our conflicts, rather we approach it artistically and develop things by feel and instinct because conflict is such an intrinsic trait. But understanding how you use it can be very useful when you're writing satisfying resolutions and climaxes. A good understanding of the types of conflict in your story is also pretty essential when you're writing a good comedy (it's a great source of humour!), and also when you're explaining or selling your work to the public: It's all very well to chat about your clever setting and your funky characters, but conflict is the reason they're IN a story to begin with and that's really what will get people wanting to read out it. I hope you enjoy Gunwallace's great porn style music type theme for Tales of Two Tiny Titty bars!
