Fiction and Fantasy

Thoughts and excerpts from the mind of Jeannette Jonic

Category: Advice

Hype: When Others’ Opinions Affect Our Experience

I finally got caught up on the deluge of Marvel movies. It took my more cinematically-informed friend sorting through the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s must-see’s and optional’s, but several weeks and six films later, I was finally ready to see the big one—Avengers: Infinity War. My friend tried hard not to say too much about it, […]

September 7, 2018
Confession: I Don’t Look for Relatability – I Look for Emotional Sincerity

I have a confession: I don’t really care about a character being relatable. Let me rephrase that: I don’t need a character to be like me in order to connect with them. That may sound like a novel concept considering relatability is one of the “buzzwords” of fiction (as writer Matt Colville would call it)1, […]

August 31, 2018
Why People Hate Mary Sues

She’s perfect. She always says the right things at the right times, people can’t stop gushing over her, and she never does anything wrong. She makes everybody look bad, but she feels plastic, fake. You’re sure her life is secretly a mess, but she’ll never show it. To her, everything seems easy, effortless. She never […]

August 17, 2018
How (NOT) to Handle Exposition – A Lesson from Datalogs

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash Writers can learn a lot about handling exposition through a video game tool called the datalog. Datalogs are small blocks of text that explain something about a video game. They’re used to bring the player up to speed on the game’s setting or characters. Normally, you can access them […]

August 10, 2018
Why The Last Jedi Is So Divisive

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is remarkably divisive, generating more polarized feedback than any other Star Wars film to date. Discussions have often devolved into shouting matches, shaming the other side for their perceived biases. Photo by Radovan on Unsplash It’s taken me a while to express my thoughts on The Last Jedi. What more […]

April 20, 2018
What Makes a Good Remake?

Nostalgia may be a good thing depending on how we respond to it, but it can be used to manipulate us. Just look at all the media geared toward appealing to our nostalgia via remakes, reboots, and adaptations. I don’t think remakes are inherently bad; they stand or fall on their own merit. For instance, Christopher […]

March 30, 2018

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