Episode 736 - Resurrection
Apr 21, 2025
Happy Easter! Well that was Sunday, but happy Easter anyway. In honour of that yearly and ancient ritual holiday that has its roots in the rebirth of spring in the northern hemisphere our Quackcast is on the theme of resurrection! The idea that people can come back to life in realty is pure fantasy but it is an essential part of all different kinds of fiction.
Topics and Show Notes
In classic time-loop stories like Groundhog Day, Palm Springs Meet Cute and others everything tends to reset at a set point. People can die and they will all come back regularly to repeat their day again. It's a very regular and understandable for of rebirth, just like spring! Contrast that with the way monsters are randomly reborn for horror movie sequels; they're killed in all sorts of ways but still tend to come back and varying points with no rhyme or reason, more like a random natural disaster.
The place where resurrection has truly found a home is fantasy Isekai stories, usually in manga and anime. The reason for this is because extra lives and resurrection are a key part of game mechanics, originally platform games but later RPGs: you need extra lives in order to complete the games, without them it's just all too hard. Isekai stories already BEGIN with a resurrection because the protagonist usually dies crossing the road to save a kitten, small dog, young child, or schoolgirl in a short skirt, and is reborn in a fantasy land as the new hero. But now that almost all fantasy Isekais are based on the mechanics of fantasy RPGs most include regular resurrection whenever characters die IN the story. Their friends just go to a temple with some gold or a special item and bring them back.
An honourable mention for the regular rebirths in Marvel and DC comics… They usually make use of alternative dimensions but nothing is off limits in those crazy stories. What's your fave sort of resurrection trope? Vampires? Different dimension versions? Cloning? Paying at a temple? Cyborgs? Virtual life uploads? Or magical rebirth?
This week Gunwallace gave us a theme inspired by Geist Gears - Follow the flow into the machine! Clunking and zapping as you traverse the circuits and electric doors inside, swelling capacitors, glowing diodes, flashes of deadly plasma from arcing conduits! It’s deadly but exciting.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Tantz's back from the dead newspost! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/apr/19/back-from-the-dead/
Featured comic:
Turtle House Comics - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/apr/15/featured-comic-turtle-house-comics/
Featured music:
Geist Gears - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Geist_Gears/ - by Emma_Xross, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 734 - When love turns to hate
Apr 7, 2025
When love turns to hate… It's a common trope in fiction: partners split up and their once loving relationship turns to one of bitter acrimony! We see hate turning to love frequently too, that's another common trope, I saw both when I watched Willow again last night. Mad Martigan and Sorsha went from hate to love to hate to love again, and Sorsha and her mum Queen Bavmorda went from love to hate. It's a staple in fiction because it's a staple in reality.
Episode 726 - Ego!?
Feb 10, 2025
Do you have a big ego? Do you know someone who has? This Quackcast is about utilising egos for comic characters for comedic purposes, to humanise character, or to make villains more unlikeable and or funny. Big egos are a sign of poor self esteem, people inflate their egos to cope with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. For examples of that we have a certain prominent politician and also a tech billionaire as perfect representations of every facet of that concept. :)
Episode 724 - America's Plutocratic classism
Jan 26, 2025
Is there a culture of plutocratic classism in the USA? I'm inspired by Trump's America and how people think that people like Elon Musk and him are above the law because they're rich, while conversely the lowest rank in society are the homeless and the poor. But what do I mean by “Plutocratic classism”? A plutocracy is a society where people's position is determined by their wealth, classism is our tendency to discriminate based on social class, put that together and you have people determining social value by how much money a person seems to have.
Episode 723 - Changing tech and design
Jan 20, 2025
We're talking about how technology and design changes so much over the years and how that can change things with plot in story and it can also help pinpoint the date of something sometimes better than other things like fashion. The biggest one we talked about were phones, which have changed so much over the last few decades. Universally connected smartphones mean huge story changes- characters can all look up whatever they need at any time, communicate with people instantly, entertain themselves, take photos and videos etc. That can massively affect plots!
Episode 713 - Gunwallace, Master Composer
Nov 11, 2024
Today we have onboard with us our resident theme maker, our classic composer and musical genius! He does all the DD comic inspired themes that regularly appear on the Quackcast and has done so for the last 10 years! In that time he's done almost 600 musical themes. At the moment Gunwallace is the games-master of a Star Trek roleplay thing that Tantz, Banes, and I all do after the cast. He's based an illustrated story on it called “On the Edge” with art by Banes and Genejoke, and some by Tantz and me, Ozoneocean.
Episode 711 - Lost Boys
Oct 28, 2024
Halloween is on the way and we always do something different for it. This time we're doing a commentary for the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys! We even dressed in Lost Boys themed outfits for the Patreon vid which we will make available to ALL Patrons (even free ones), as a treat.
Episode 709 - Dragons!
Oct 14, 2024
Dragons are cool, aren't they? That's our subject for today, specifically the giant, monstrous beasties of myth, fantasy, and legend. They can be evil, they can be clever, they can be animalistic and wild, they can be friendly, they can be wise and all knowing, there's absolutely no common personality to dragons at all.
