When I was growing up in the 80s, stories that were marketed as ‘children’s' were occasionally brutal.

Characters got maimed or killed, tortured or traumatized, met with horrid ends in worlds that were anything but rosy. And this was a pattern that wasn't limited to, say, English literature ...

Normally in stories there is the hero vs the villain or the protagonist vs the antagonist. As the audience, we generally expect to root for the hero or the protagonist and hope for the villain's or antagonist's comeuppance.

But there come those times when we find ourselves rooting ...

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There seemed to be a lull for a while after the 1990s and the massive sequel craze of the 80s, but nowadays we're back in full ...

Star Trek: A Piece of the Action

So this could be considered Part Three of my loose-knit series on science fiction: The Distorted Society.

This is a sci-fi convention where there is an Earth…or another planet, at least somewhat Earth-like, that has some aspect of society that is a ...

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Why aren't there more prettyboy bad-ass characters? Pretty girl bad-asses too! This character type is often a hall-mark of Japanese and Korean fiction more than anything ...

So you have uploaded your latest page, and it's one of your best.

The story is at a point where the suspense is cranking up to eleven. The plot thickens. Everyone wonders what is going to happen next…

…and then that one fan GETS IT RIGHT. Right there in ...

When this guy appears for a fight, there are eyerolls or scoffing sounds. The opponents start smirking and giggling, taunting and goading him because he's dressed to the nines. Or maybe he's got a very intricate hairstyle that takes hours to get just right. Or perhaps he has ...

Greece is burning, as I'm writing these lines.

There is fire everywhere, and it's only getting worse. It's probably going to extinguish itself in the sea, when it gets there, in all areas, from central Greece to Attica to Euboia. The ecological disaster is enormous. The consequences ...

We've all seen the cringy dialogue. The weirdly stereotypical and awkward situations. The sheer effort of the script writer, the novelist, or the comic book writer to write someone they don't know: a woman, or a man.


Too often the problem is very stark when comparing character designs ...

Sometimes the arch villain of the story is the one pulling all the strings in the background, and the protagonists don't know about them until the endgame.

And other times, the arch villain gets to clash with a protagonist (or an opposing character) that is also a mastermind pulling ...