Episode 684 - The hero is dead?
Apr 21, 2024
What happens when the hero dies? Especially when it's early on in the story… do things fall apart or does someone else take over? Our topic is about a story style where you establish that a character is the hero or chief protagonist, only to do a bait and switch and swap them out with a less likely character like a sidekick. This makes the audience rethink the way things are going, instead of sticking to an expected formula you force the audience to wake up and wonder what will happen next. This can be very effective!
Topics and Show Notes
Some notable examples of this trope are “the Other guys”, the anime “The legendary hero is dead” (cover pictured), and Mystery Men but there are many others. The seemingly main hero doesn't even have to die, they just need to be replaced by a character you wouldn't expect for the role, as in My Hero Accademia where Almight is replaced by Deku at the beginning, of Steve Rogers in the first Captain America film becomes the hero even though his friend Bucky Barnes better fits the hero architype.
Have you ever used this trope? What are your fave examples?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Animal Society - Don’t cross at the red light… traffic signals flash. Make way for the zebra at the zebra crossing! This is a flashy cityscape sound with a touch of the jungle.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Tantz Aerine's newspost on sidekick heroes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/apr/17/the-understudy-hero/
Featured comic:
GRM - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/apr/16/featured-comic-grm/
Featured music:
Animal Society - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Animal_Society/ - by CressidiasComics, Rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 683 - Hot for Teacher
Apr 15, 2024
This week it's a short cast because my computer broke and we wasted time trying to fix it! We're chatting about teachers in fiction, a topic inspired by Banes' newspost on the subject. There have been many memorable teacher based fictional stories, To Sir with Love most famously, The Sound of Music, Blackboard jungle, Goodbye Mister Chips, Assassination Classroom, Educating Rita, My Fair Lady, the Mighty Ducks, Dead Poets Society, Kindergarten Cop, Welcome Back Kotter, and so much more! What are your faves?
Episode 680 - Intelligence in Fiction
Mar 25, 2024
Today we're talking about the depiction of “intelligence” in fiction! There are a lot of ways this shows up: the genius detective who can understand any clue and uncover any lie, the amazing doctor who can understand any disease, the computer nerd who can do ANYTHING with computers, the genius savant with Asperger's, the crafty serial killer with plans within plans…
Episode 607 - Horror Sci-Fi
Oct 31, 2022
Happy Halloween! Our topic is horror Sci-Fi. Sc-Fi brings with it a whole lot more interesting things you can do with horror and scary stories and there are so many great examples, from the worlds of HP Lovecraft, Alien franchise, Dead Space, Doom, Warhammer 40K, Event Horizon, the Cell, the SCP universe and more. We were inspired by Bane's newspost about horror and technology and all the cool responses he had. What's your fave horror SciFi?
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 558 - The surreal adventures of Edgar Allen Poo aka Dwight L Macpherson!
Nov 22, 2021
Interview with Dwight L Macpherson, creator of The surreal adventures of Edgar Allen Poo, now known as The imaginary voyages of Edgar Allen Poe! Dwight joined DD back in the old days, well over a decade ago. Back then he hosted his comic with us, about Edgar Allen Poe. From the very beginning I could see that both it and its author were destined for bigger and better things and I'm pleased to say that came to pass. Through a lot of hard work, with the efforts and both him and his wife working as a team, Dwight has found success as an independent published author with a number of projects under his belt and more ongoing ones in the pipeline.
Episode 556 - That's What She Said!
Nov 8, 2021
The other day Tantz Aerine wrote a newspost about an article critical of Squid Game. The crux of things was that the Squid Game creator had said their message was anti-capitalist, while this critic was saying that the author's message with the Squid Game was an anti communist critique and not a very good one at that. The issue here is that isn't how you do criticism. At all. You can give an interesting reading of something and tell us why YOU think it's anti-Communist, or tell us how it looks through the lens of post-colonialism or new wave feminism etc, but you can't say that is what the author is saying or what the work means, especially if the author explicitly says WHAT they are saying. This may seem like a small distinction but it's actually very, very important. Bad criticism often tells us what the creator is saying. Don't do that. Don't be that person.
Episode 554 - Return of the Living Dead Halloween Special
Oct 25, 2021
This year for Halloween we've decided to do another commentary! It's of the 1980s Zombie movie “Return of the Living Dead”. It's extremely 1980s in style. There are zombies, punks, yuppies, electronic music, toxic waste… It's quite an entertaining, quite comedic, nihilistic cold war zombie film with very good effects for the time that really hold up today. Even the gore is tasteful. I am NOT a fan of horror in any way, Banes and Pit lobbied hard for this movie… but even so it was not a bad film. The zombies are animated by a man made chemical contaminant, which is quite an 80s theme in of itself. They're not contagious like modern zombies, there's no infection or outbreak to contain. The problem here is that they're virtually indestructible because of the chemical that animates their flesh, they're also fully intelligent and fast moving, this makes the zombies far more menacing and scary than any modern shambling brainless decaying infected version.
