Fiction and Fantasy

Recent Posts

  • 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,…

  • 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,…

  • How Your Lie in April Impacted My Life… and How It Can Impact Yours

    Your Lie in April was one of those shows I’d heard people praising, but I didn’t check it out right away. Going in, I only had a general idea of what it was about: musicians, a young love story, etc. I had no idea how deeply this story would impact me. Your Lie in April…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Type Casting: Roy Mustang

    Some characters are so well-written that they seem life-like. But how would these realistic characters stand up to real-life personality typing? It’s time to put the Enneagram back to the test by gauging characters’ personality types based on their core drives and greatest fears. Type Casting: Personality Typing Your Favorite Characters The remainder of this…

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