People often complain that movies are telling "dumber" stories in general as time goes on, but is that true? One possible explanation for this viewpoint may be that movies are just focusing more on "fun" stories than "smart" stories. In other words, they're focusing more on "genre fiction" than "literary fiction." Let's talk a little about why.
We see them all over the place here in America--on our cereal boxes, in cartoons, in parades--but what are leprechauns? Where did they come from, and why are they so iconic?
In the spirit of St. Patrick's day, we talk a little about our favorite creatures from Celtic folklore. There are so many though--we couldn't possibly fit them all into this video. So every day for the rest of the month we'll be sharing one creature or legend of Celtic origin on our websites. Visit our Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr for more!
What would it be like to live among humans as a creature of the fae? What would you do if someone offered you a chance to rejoin your people? With this story, we tie up our March theme of Celtic folklore! The elements of this story all come from videos and posts that we've shared over the course of the month, all of which you can find here: https://goo.gl/xgmQU0
Game of Thrones is perhaps the most influential piece of fantasy to arrive on any medium in many, many years. A lot of people will be getting their first taste of the genre through this show, so it's worth exploring what the show does with its reach, which is why we've dedicated this month to the show!
Game of Thrones (moreso the book series it's based on: "A Song of Ice and Fire") has a setting the scope of which we rarely see in fiction, and not just in terms of size. The sheer number of different and unique elements within the setting is absolutely staggering. It's incredible that any author could create a single, cohesive narrative arc that uses so much material. And yet, somehow, that's exactly what George R.R. Martin did. In this video, we try boil this incredible world down into three major components: Geography, Culture, and History.
Industry can be a dangerous thing. A lot of people drown beneath the tide of progress, without ever knowing what's happening to them. Sorry for the lack of visuals. We've been struggling to keep up with everything lately, so for the foreseeable future, we'll only be able to do a single animated background image for our stories. When we can get another artist on-board, we'll definitely spice these up again!
Let's kick the month off with a break-down of genres and how weird fiction allows us to subvert them in an interesting, marketable fashion.
Ready to feel simultaneously confused and inspired? Are you looking for someone to wring your creativity for every ounce of originality it can muster? Good. Because we know five different types of fiction that'll do that for you. Join us as we break down Steampunk, Fantastique, Slipstream, Bizarro, and Weird fiction.
"Welcome to the carnival of desire, where anyone can put on a lovely show, so long as they're willing to abandon their apprehensions." A story of alchemy, twisted compulsions, and the worst kind of claustrophobia.
Video games are still a fairly young medium. Understandbly, people are still trying to figure out how best to use it as a platform for telling stories. So far, most games just sort of stick to the traditional cinematic approach. But Dark Souls does something different. Something new and interesting. Something that has the potential to change storytelling across all mediums.
The Dark Souls games have a rather singular method of storytelling, but we could talk about the technical aspects of storytelling all day. In this video, we want to show you how Dark Souls tells its stories by breaking down the 6 key elements of its lore.
Watch through the eyes of an eldritch abomination as five individuals grapple with faith, ignorance, and curiosity, each feeding the beast with their hubris.
The USA is pretty unique in its youth. It lacks the deep mythological background many other countries have developed, but that doesn't mean the early Americans didn't tell stories. In fact, their fiction is some of the most self-aware we've ever seen. So let's talk about the "mythology" of America and what it means to the country today.
Some of our favorite American folk heroes, a few of them lesser-known, a few of them on adverts across the country, and all of them reflective in some way of the unique zeitgeist of a newly-developed country.
In this story we create our own modern American folk hero! But heroes aren't always everything they promise, and ideas can always be killed...
Things have been interesting for us since we've started this show. I thought it might be worthwhile to give you my two cents on what this all means to me. So here's a bit of my story. Perhaps it's more questions than answers, but maybe some of you will find it interesting all the same.
There's a lot more to these little pocket monsters than meets the eye. As a matter of fact, across all their games and animations and Pokémedia in general, they've got one big story that they're trying to tell us. If you're a fan, you might even be familiar with the story's main character...
After spending a video getting all technical and literary about how Pokemon is a transmedia story, we thought we ought to spend another video showing *how*. So buckle up. This is an odd one.
Have you ever felt more at home in the fiction you love than in real life? Rin is going through something similar, and it's shaping her in an interesting way...
Prepare to lose sleep as we shine a light into the dark parts of the internet! Let's discuss creepypasta, where it came from, and why people like it so much.
Let's get real dark and spoopy—let's dive down the rabbit hole and explore the different types of creepypasta that have come slithering out of the internet so far. Warning: video contains flashing colors and paranoia-inducing heebity-jeebities.
Do you ever get the feeling you've been staring at the computer screen for a little too long? Ever feel like your vision isn't adjusted for the real world anymore? Maybe that movement in your peripherals is more than your tired eyes playing tricks on you.
After almost a decade without a new Harry Potter film, Rowling's graced us with a fantastic entry into an all-new series set in the same world: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The film shines a light on something unique about Rowling's other work: the rather singular use of allegory.
We've talking about Rowling's use of allegory in her fiction — now it's time to see some actual examples before we set to trying her approach ourselves.
A little corpse wakes up after years in the ground, confused and conflicted. The world has changed, and it's not sure how exactly it belongs.
A park full of intelligent, feeling creatures, reduced by their human masters to mere instruments of pleasure. Sounds like it should be pretty easy to point out who the "bad guy" is, but this show will give you a run for your money. Let's see what we can learn from it...
Westworld's the kind of show that seeds questions within its answers. Each plot twist is more a premise than a proposal, and almost all of them are posed by the show's ingenious antagonist: Robert Ford. So, let's break them down and figure out how they get the wheels turning in our heads.
Mythology is and always will be a favorite source of inspiration for fiction-writers everywhere. We're all casually familiar with Egyptian, Norse, and let's not forget Greek mythology, but why not Irish mythology? Let's talk about it..
Wherein we thoroughly abridge Irish pseudohistory.
A sequel to last year's story "Devil of the Cradle," this time we follow the changeling child Lorchan as he ventures into fae territory. The question is: will he find himself, or will something else find him?...
Behind every story is a good character... most of the time. But what about a story whose appeal lies in its spectacle? What if we're drawn to the story to learn about the hideous monster and not to make emotional connections? This is the kind of story Junji Ito excels at, and we think there's something to learn from him.
Junji Ito doesn't necessarily scare everyone, but he certainly unsettles them. Here are three methods he uses to do it.
"There's something wrong with grandma Kathy." Miriam's grandmother has been insisting that all the lights in the apartment stay on at all times. It seems like simple, if very annoying, paranoia. That is, until Miriam turns the lights out herself and discovers the truth behind her grandma's strange obsession.
Long ago, before The Onion or Terry Pratchett, a Spanish author was playing with satire in ways the world had never seen before, and has hardly seen since. Miguel De Cervantes took the world by storm with his two-part novel: Don Quixote. In this video, we want to discuss how he did it.
We've already discussed the genius behind Don Quixote's satire. Now it's time for us to talk about how it *works*. Let's dig into the three styles of satire that give Don Quixote its unique dynamic.
Mankind stands at the brink of a new frontier: digital reality. An R&D team has developed a way for people to explore it, but who says they're ready?
For such an important and well-loved genre, sci-fi is rather difficult to define. Is it space opera? High-brow philosophical parables? Serious speculation about the future of technology? Is it all of those things? And then, what isn't it? In this episode, we attempt to "solve" this puzzling genre by answering one simple question: "what is science fiction?"
In our first sci-fi video we came to a single unifying definition that we felt expressed the breadth of sci-fi. This time we're taking a look at the genre's history to show why we chose that definition.
Is it better to dream blissfully forever, or to live out your days in the genuine squalor of reality? A complicated question, but never fear: the Sunshine Kids will protect you from making a choice.
There's something strange going on in Lovecraft's mythos, behind the tentacles and cosmic dread. Something of mythological significance that few other writer have ever achieved...
Lovecraft's work is full of vast, incomprehensible cosmic entities. We won't pretend to understand them per se, but this video provides a good primer on some of the most important of them.
How does a species attain its perfection? What must mankind do to hurdle all barriers and begin its ascension? Under the guidance of their long-dead exemplar, a master and pupil embark on a journey to find out.
If the first video in our Slavic folklore series was an exercise in map-making, consider this the travel guide. Join us as we wander the forest of Slavic myth and marvel at the many creatures who call it their home.
In the wake of his wife's death, Vadim struggles to understand the growing changes in his daughter. When a dragon kidnaps her, the task becomes infinitely more complex.
A not-so-quick primer on some of the basic methods of worldbuilding!
All spindle sylph are born with a twin; a mirror image of themselves who shares the half of their soul. But there's a revelation that's sweeping through their lands, changing the way they see each other. How will these creatures face the new, impending solitude? How will they face the Quiet?
In each of his works (and there are more than 100 of them), Terry Pratchett managed to do something few authors ever have—he wrote with a sense of unity. All his many separate voices have a strange feeling of familiarity. Let's investigate how, and whether this is something other writers can do as well.
Terry Pratchett was a busy bibliophile. He did write Good Omens with Neil Gaiman and pen more than thirty Discworld books, but he also created more than 100 works total during his lifetime. Quite a tall stack, even for the most intrepid reader, but worth the delve if you have the time. In this video, we help you orient yourself within his massive oeuvre by introducing you to some of his strangest—and cleverest—characters.
In a harebrained scheme to humiliate two sprawling internet communities, a forgotten machine and a sinister stranger don their disguises and begin a doomed show.
Anyone who's delved into SCP has felt it: that strangeness. The competing sensations of curiosity and mystification. As soon as you get a taste you have to know more, even though you know part of the fun is knowing that you'll never know. A paradox of disbelief. It's a strange, strange thing, not seen in much fiction. Let's try and figure out how to capture it and make use of it ourselves.
SCP is such a strange example of fiction, so many breaches of reality in one place. Maybe we can learn a little something from it about how to categorize this stuff...
"How do I tell the audience about my world without losing their attention?" It's a question pretty much every writers asks at some point in their career. If you find yourself vomiting up pages' worth of information to catch your audience up, this discussion could potentially be a good starting place for you...
We writers can get pretty weird about our craft. The further we slide into our obsession with creating (or the failure to), the stranger the lines of logic we begin to follow, the more perilous our mental paths. I've been down all of these avenues, and far more beside. Hopefully this video will help some of you to notice whether you're doing the same. The awareness alone can do a great deal to help... But, maybe we should do videos on each of these lies on their own, provide some more in depth information on how to untangle ourselves from them?
An old dream hunter, past his prime. A tempest, for lost love. Something simple to tie the frayed threads of family back together. Reviewing your stories this month was a somber, bittersweet joy.
An outline is a complicated thing. How do you organize your story? Where do you focus? What is YOUR story, and what's the story someone else is telling you to write? This isn't everything you'll need for outlining, but the Matryoshka Method will help you organize your ideas—ensure they're all connected in the ways that matter most.
Dracula is an icon. There are countless iterations of him, countless stories that have drawn inspiration from Brahm Stoker's original novel. But... they've mostly been missing out on something. In just a few little throw-away lines, we find something that could change our image of the book forever, and how we draw inspiration from it.
Does genre box us in? Does it take some of the creativity out of our craft, turn it more into a predictable manufacturing process? Easy to think jump to a conclusion here, but our answer might surprise you...
Lovecraft is basically the grandfather of weird fiction, a name he gained for himself by writing the infamous Cthulhu mythos. But the tentacle monsters and aliens are far from the strangest thing Lovecraft wrote about. In fact, much of his life was spent on an entirely different body of literature: The Dream Cycle Let's take some time to appreciate the setting of his dream cycle stories, The Dreamlands. Who knows, we might even learn something in the process...
One of things we writers try to do with our writing is control emotion. Not just the big, dramatic motions, but that lingering, ambient background emotion as well. But that's a really weird, nebulous territory to approach. At the very least, it helps to know where your emotion as writer ends, and where the emotional response of the audience begins.
A lot of stories are doomed before they ever begin. Why? Because the author is paralyzed by the idea of finding the perfect opening line. It's hard... but maybe it doesn't have to be.
Cosmic horror is a strangely fascinating subject. You could talk for a literally eternity about your place in the cosmos, your feels of ignorance, impotence, insignificance. ...but what happens when you lose the luxury of time? What happens when you have to confront all of these things here and now, at the edge of the void? Hellstar Remina gives us a peak at what that might look like.
"Why don't I feel like writing" is a really sad question to hear from anyone passionate about writing. But if you find yourself asking this, it doesn't mean your well has truly run dry; that you'll never write again. You and your craft might just need some... relationship counseling. Maybe we can help
My Neighbor Totoro is such a special movie. It's more than big furry fantasy creatures and happy children, although we love those things. It's the nuance of the world. When you watch this movie, you genuinely believe, if only for a moment, that there could be magic in the world... just like you did when you were a child. The ability to do that as a storyteller is a form of magic unto itself. Thankfully, Miyazaki's shared a little bit of his thoughts on how to perform this sort of wizardry. So, instead of just being entranced by another studio ghibli film, let's take a moment to learn from one.
Pan's labyrinth is a masterpiece, full of thought-provoking material. But the horrifying, child-eating Pale Man has a way of sticking in the mind. It feels like more than just a monster... Why?
The Name of the Wind is one of my favorite fantasy books, and I've been haunted by it's incredible magic system for FAR too long not to take an opportunity to make a video about it when it arises. Incidentally, I just learned that the magic in Name of the Wind is a type of magic used throughout the world... So, let's talk about it. Who knows? Maybe you'll come away with a fantasy of your own.
Who knew an edge-dwelling game like Cyberpunk 2077 could be so darn effective? The way it handles character and conflict are a great example of one of the cyberpunk genre's greatest strengths: punks as protagonists. There might even be something all of us writers can learn here, whether we have a special affinity for mirror shades or not.
In the old days, "thaumaturgy" was a word that meant wonder-working, but as science and technology developed, the nature of wonderment itself changed. Now, thanks to the proto-scientists of the renaissance and enlightenment, it means something far different. Not all magic is divine or supernatural or ineffably linked to the cosmos. Sometimes it's just a matter of perception. And the authors who know how to play with that can create some really interesting things.
Stephen King's Pet Sematary is a classic. There's plenty to say about it in terms of theme, tone, character, tension, drama, the list goes on. But strangely, the part of the story that's really stuck in my mind is the sort of a tangent. Behind all the dark things that happen in the story, there's one operator pulling the strings: The Wendigo. I had no idea what it was at the time, but I'm using this as an opportunity to find out more, AND to find out if King struck anywhere near the mark with his interpretation of it.
The alchemical homunculus shows up in plenty of modern stories, but as it turns out, the actual history is far stranger than fiction!
There's more to Poe than darkness and melancholy. There's wonder and fascination as well, a rarely-scene passion for the truths that shape our world: science. His science fiction isn't very well-known, so let's take a moment to appreciate it, shall we?
Breath is a fabulous symbol for spirituality and control. You see it used throughout history, mythology, and most important for our purposes, fiction. It's so often the tool people use to mediate and interact with their magic. Entire magic systems have been built on this interaction. But what about when the breath itself becomes the source of the magic? I'm not talking about firebreath or solar beams from the mouth; I'm talking about breath as we know it, made magical. Pneuma. The Ancient Greek term for it. In his book Imajica, Clive Barker puts this very idea to use. I found it so inspiring when I started to look into it, I had no choice but to make this video.
So much of Tolkien’s work has this strange, familiar depth you can scarcely find in any other place. His ents in particular touch on something so deeply human—so relatable and poignant—that we had to make a video about it. Tolkien’s ents are the intrinsic character of trees, given life. Something we’ve all seen before, something we’ve felt, realized to its full potential.
Settings can have just as much life as the characters in our stories, but if we’re careful, we can also turn our settings into characters unto themselves. The Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake is perhaps the best example of this I’ve ever seen. He makes Gormenghast, the city-sized castle, a living, breathing, empathetic character, and he does it in so subtle a fashion you don’t even realized it’s happened until you finish the book and you find yourself thinking of the setting as an old friend.
We’ve been trained to recognize zombies as shambling bags of flesh. Undead punching bags. A convenient stock monster. But I don’t think that’s giving them enough credit. I think there are depths to the zombie archetype that have scarcely ever been explored. You might be surprised by just how much you have in common with these rotters. Maybe they’re not quite as monstrous as you expect.
You’ve probably heard of the chimera before. You PROBABLY think it’s just a mythical monster. But our connection to this strange beast goes far, far deeper than that. It has more to teach you than you might have guessed.
You always hear wizards going on about this in fantasy novels. “I call you by your true name and bind you!” Why, though? What does it do? Why does this keep showing up in our stories? You even see it in the old folk legends. Turns out the answer is a little more interesting—and a little more highly philosophical—than you might expect!
Edgar Allan Poe has a reputation for darkness and gloom, but that’s just because most people don’t know him well enough. He wrote some really bizarre, optimistic stories as well. Including probably the weirdest of the bunch: Mesmeric Revelation.
Some villains are absolute geniuses, able to engineer the world around them to their benefit. Some… not so much. Koschei the Deathless, a famous wizard from Slavic Folklore, is one such figure. In trying to escape the thing he fears most in the world, he actually brought himself closer to it than ever. And he’s not alone. You’d be surprised how many villains are foolhardy enough to follow the same path.
CAUTION: THIS VIDEO IS CRUEL TO SENSITIVE SOULS. Seriously. It will crush you if you have a tenderness for creativity and imagination. It’s all the cruelest realities we dreamers have to face rolled into one 20-minute video. But it’s a good one. The story we share here, about dragons, their death, and the eventual loss of all fantasy… it’s so good, it’s even instructional, provided you can keep watching through the tiers.
Hans Christian Anderson wrote a great many pleasant, adorable, child-oriented fairy stories. He also wrote some less-pleasant stories. The one I want to share with you here is among the least pleasant of them all. Not just because of the story’s contents, but because of what they mean. According to Andersen, your own shadow is just about the scariest monster there is.
“The King in Yellow” is a name I see thrown around in a lot of different media. Usually it’s treated like some kind of eldritch space monster a’la H.P. Lovecraft, but it… really isn’t very much like that at all. Really, it’s just a play. But that doesn’t stop it from being just as dangerous.
This isn’t an easy topic for anyone, but I think it’s about time we addressed it. Writing isn’t an easy passion to pursue. It weighs on you in ways that are difficult to understand—ways that can make you feel as if destiny itself is against you. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
Okay, so maybe this isn’t precisely “in the holiday spirit”, but it’s interesting! Christmas is a very strange Holiday, and the story people tell each other about Santa Clause every year is so, so specific to the domestic life of parents and children. But seeing how they used to do it? What the ancestors of Santa Claus were like? It really sheds a new light on the whole ritual.
People have been asking us to make a video about Dune for ages, and for the longest time I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It just seemed like another pseudo-space-opera on another dusty planet with people in the future using swords for some dumb reason. But now that I’ve read it? I can see why people love this story. And it’s a shame they don’t explain it when they talk about it. So let me tell you the version of the story that I love so much, without all the crazy, distracting bells and whistles.
In our longer Dune video, we had to leave out a lot of content for time’s sake. There were a lot of painful cuts, but perhaps the most painful of all was leaving out our thoughts on the setting. Dune happily rides the line between science fiction and fantasy in a way I’ve never seen before. So, I want to take an opportunity to gush. How does a story so obviously science-fictional still manage to feel so magical?
Listen. Not every fantasy book you read is going to be Tolkien or Sanderson. Some of them have things like parents who are still alive and magic that doesn’t crackle with actinic light. Some of them might not have magic at all. And stranger than all of these, some may have very real, very visceral things like sex in them. Imajica is one such book. In fact, it’s a weird fantasy book in a lot of ways. But the weirdest of them all is how deeply and how directly it cuts into the heart of what it means to have a healthy relationship with your own creativity. Sex is just one form of magic is uses to explore that. So although we may not be talking explicitly about all the explicit stuff in this video, I still recommend you buckle up. Imajica is not like other fantasy stories. Not even a little.
We TRIED to do a video about Imajica, but this is an 800+ page book with a new worldbuilding surprise every few pages. So, there were some casualties for the final cut of the video. Luckily, we have Nebula! So, let’s talk about the weirdness that is IMAJICA.
Magic systems look pretty spectacular at the best of times, but it isn’t always that way. Sometimes the best magic comes from the simplest sources. Sometimes something as a small as a promise can change the very fabric of reality, if we, the writers, let it.
This story is as much about you as the characters within. It is a journey through all the aspects of your identity, but writ large, on a cosmic scale. It is the Tree of Life and the map of your own life, all in one. Welcome to the Angelarium.
No matter how deep the dogma goes, how articulate the scripture, at some point, someone always has to imagine. Interpretation has to be done, even for the highest on high of the divine. And the interpretations of the angels over the ages are particularly interesting. Especially… these ones.
I think we all have a tendency to idealize childhood. Children are meant to have fun. They should be happy and free and unburdened. That’s how they’re supposed to be. But it’s not really like that, is it? Being a child is hard. And Neil Gaiman’s heartbreaking book, The Ocean at The End of The Lane, reminds us.
This may come as a surprise to a lot of you, but it just seems like the natural direction for the channel from here. People have been saying the content gives them ASMR for years, so we thought it was about time we leaned into that! Enjoy the tingles!
There’s a strange kind of magic in human art and artifice, and I mean that literally. It shows up throughout fiction, but in even stranger places than that too. Let’s soak some of those ideas up and see what we can do with them in our own stories!
Life itself is a kind of magic. I think we can all agree to that. So what happens when it becomes a crafting material as well? What kind of magic can you build when animation and sentience are in the mix? History and fiction both have a lot of very interesting answers to this question…
There’s a monster lurking behind some of the myths and stories you’ve been seeing all your life. A monster hungrier and more dangerous than you’d ever have guessed.
The Princess Bride is one of the most beloved movies of all time. I don’t think that’s disputable. And yet, for some reason, most people still haven’t read the book. Which is a shame, because it drills into the heart of the story in a way most people will miss. Sure, the movie still has the top-notch jokes, the insanely-quotable dialogue, the timeless action… but it misses part of what lies just underneath the surface: the romance. The movie is secretly a loveletter to unabashed, unashamed romantics everywhere, and the book says that in ways I’ve never anywhere else. And you, casual viewer who has likely not read the book, deserve to see it too.
Animorphs, Redwall, Watership Down and the rest have a certain unfortunate reputation: they’re like modern animal fables. They’re cute. For kids. But I think stories about things that AREN’T human sometimes have even more to say about your humanity than the Hemingways and Falkners of the world. Xenofiction is not just a children’s genre, and we want to show you why!
What can you learn from a story about a few rabbits, looking for a new home? Far more than you think.
You can spend a lifetime searching for your purpose, but how do you know when you’ve found it? How do you know what you’ve found truly IS your purpose? Unsurprisingly, we find our answer… in a book.
There’s a reason little people and wee folks have shown up throughout world mythology and fiction. Small though they may be, they have a strength that you do not. Better listen to what they have to say.
All adventures start in the home, but then we just kind of forget about it as a setting. Which is a shame, because the home is one of the most interesting and animated settings we have to offer as writers. Maybe you just need a shift in perspective to see it.
There’s a world of characters all around you that you probably rarely think about. Which is honestly reasonable, because they aren’t really people, are they? Let’s talk a bit about personification, projection, and what we can learn about our own world from Patrick Rothfuss’s book The Slow Regard of Silent Things.
Villains are always making deals and contracts, which half the time don’t even make sense. Even when they have the power to get what they want, for some reason they just can’t resist trying to get the hero to put their X on the line… But it seems like there’s actually a pretty good reason why.
We all love our Jack Sparrows, our Furiosas, and our Gandalfs. But don’t you ever just feel the need for something… simpler? A little more vulnerable? A little less… like a character? If you do, this video could give you the remedy.
We all know that classic children’s stories tend to have some darkness in their past, but there’s something even darker going on with children’s stories that, beneath the glossy, plastic veneer, has become sort of hard to see…
It’s always a scary moment when the movie’s monster is finally revealed, but you know what’s even scarier? When it hides from you in plain sight. When the ones you know and love lie to you to keep you from it. The horror of deception can be worse than any slasher or beast, and there are a lot of great stories out there that prove it.
Every artist has a world inside them, populated with the things they create, governed by its own unique rules. Worldsmiths from Tale Foundry peels back the pages of their lives to give you a peek inside.
Junji Ito has become one of the most beloved horror artists of this generation, perhaps of all time. But where does his strange brand of dissonance come from? How does he create stories that are both beautifully disturbing… and kind of goofy? Let’s take a peek into the world of Junji Ito.
The Enigma of Amigara Faults is perhaps Junji Ito’s best-known story, but also one of the hardest to understand. For such a simple story, it’s got a shocking amount of depth.
There’s a feeling you get when you stand in the shadow of a creature so much larger than you, it hardly knows you exist. A complex feeling. Something deep enough to change your entire outlook on the world. Which, unsurprisingly, makes it quiet good for Worldbuilding, too. Let’s talk about it!
There are certain things human beings don't even have the capacity to imagine, let alone render artistically. And yet... they still try. This is our attempt at trying to understand why. Turns out, you don't have to look much further than H.P. Lovecraft to find a reasonable answer.
You've probably heard of the Sandman, but not many people have heard the original fairytale. The one where the Sandman comes and steals children's eyes from their bloody sockets to feed to his strange moon-babies; where a man falls in love with a very convincing machine. It is a strange and shockingly dark tale. Buckle up. This isn't the Sandman you know.
We've all seen slashers and demons and Lovecraftian tentacle monsters. But Clive Barker is one of the greatest imaginers of our time, and he has some miracles of horror to show us yet. This story will bring you face to face with something you never thought you'd see, and question you may have forgotten to ask. Let's discuss In The Hills, The Cities, by Clive Barker.
Clive Barker is one of the biggest names in horror. When you look at his work, with all its body horror and strange sexuality, it’s easy to imagine a dark, sinister, fang-y creature behind the text. In person, he’s nothing like that at all. But that separation of author and artist is one of the most important secrets behind his work; how he makes the pages “bleed” for him. Let’s take a look into the surprisingly pleasant world of Clive Barker.
Some things are simply beyond description. Not ink, not paint, nor spoken words can capture their entire beauty... but that doesn't mean they're beyond imagination. Let's look at some of the legends of China, and the interesting light they shine on this concept of beauty that is beyond description.
Heroes do not always look heroic. In fact, some of the greatest heroes of all are the most burdened, the most troubled, the weakest. Few other pieces of media embrace this idea as well as Dark Souls and the other Fromsoft games, which make death a feature, not a bug.
As an artist, it’s easy to want to help your audience understand your work, give them the tools they need to become invested in it. But sometimes the closest connection someone can feel with your work actually comes from the challenge of understanding it in their own way. No one understands this better than the creator of Dark Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki. Let’s take a peek into his world.
Some things simply cannot be said... but that's kind of our job as writers, write? To use words to say the things which cannot be said? Of course, there are boundaries, even for the best of us. Some things are literally IMPOSSIBLE to write... But that doesn't mean we won't try. So here are 10 tricks to help you look the ineffable in the eye... and eff it.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many edgy, dark re-tellings of classic fairytales? Why people always seem to want to take them in that direction? Me too. So, this time, we're looking at how fairytales so easily seem to slip out for the territory of Grimm... and into the territory of Grimdark.
If you could cheat death... wouldn't you? If there were some magic to keep the reaper away, steal back your loved ones from the underworld, you'd almost certainly use it... But why, then, does it always turn out to be such a bad idea in fiction?
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most-beloved, most-adapted characters in all of fiction... but that doesn't mean people really know that much about him. In fact, the mystery of who Sherlock Holmes really is runs SO deep... it might even change the way you think about writing your OWN characters.
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most beloved characters of all time… but everything about him—all his exploits, adventures, mannerisms, traits, quirks, abilities—are far more real than you might expect. In fact, they belong to his author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who has an important lesson to teach anyone who wants to write fiction.
If you aren't reading fantasy and fairytales, there's one key ingredient your life may just be missing: sweet, sweet whimsy. Here's your opportunity to get a taste.
In the West, haiku have a certain reputation. They're almost a meme. A funny, pseudo-sagely way to sequence a few words for a cheap effect. But there's a reason this form of poetry is so well known, so enduring. There are hidden depths to this sequence of seventeen words you may never have expected.
"Happily Ever After" is probably one of the most well-known phrases in all of literature. But have you ever really stopped to think about what that means? What would happen to the characters in the story if they really were exactly as happy as they are at the story's end... forever? Almost eery to think about, isn't it?
Mankind has been inventing deities since before there were even stories to tell about them. It's been part of the fabric of human existence forever, shaping how people think and behave. But perhaps humanity also has it a little backward. Perhaps it's not their deities that shape them, but the other way around? Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" explores this idea in spectacular fashion. It'll leave you questioning the potency of the omnipotent, and whether mankind is as frail as we tend to think.
Fiction and fantasy have a reputation for escapism. And certainly, they do provide that. But there’s also a shockingly large amount of truth in the lies we invent for our stories. And no one knows this better than one of the most beloved authors in the world: Neil Gaiman.
Sometimes authors go beyond just telling you the story. Sometimes they tell you the story of... the telling of the story.
Lovecraft is one of the most beloved speculative fiction-writers of the last century. He defined a genre and changed much of horror itself forever. And yet... More than a few people are still wondering, after reading his work, if was even... good at writing?
H.P. Lovecraft horrifies us by turning our thoughts to the vast and unknowable cosmos we occupy… but he also managed to do that from the tiny landscape of his own bedroom, within his extremely limited purview. Perhaps we as creatives can do something similar. Perhaps there’s a brand of fantasy in the tiny worlds that we each occupy, waiting for us to find it.
Fate has chosen you! The favorite among the gods. The prophesied one. Your cosmic role is great, your destiny assured. Fabulous. You have no idea how much this is about to suck. The Chosen One is one of the easiest tropes to hate, but I think it has more depth than we like to give it credit for. It's certainly more tragic than it lets on, that's for sure...
The "worth" of art is difficult to quantify. The value is almost always subjective. So how, then, have we gotten away with using the phrase "a picture is worth 1,000 words" for so long? What does that even MEAN? Well, according to clever poets and artists, it actually has quite a DEEP meaning... just not in the way that you'd expect.
Near the end of the Sci-Fi's Golden Age, one author wrote a story that felt far different from all its peers. It had a strange, creative underpinning. Oddly cynical, oddly precient, and oddly powerful, even to this day. Even though no one's heard of it, it still stands as a testament of what this genre can do. Let us introduce you to Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon.
Sherlock Holmes may have been the greatest detective of all time, but that doesn't mean he was above murder. And his sole victim? The one who suffered the most? His author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
We’ve heard of Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Deiselpunk and friends… but what do any of those things mean? Why attach “punk” to them? What does that say about the genre? And why has that lead to such a massive variety of “punk” genres?
Art is an act of translation. Translation, it turns out, is essentially an act of destruction.
You've probably heard of Roald Dahl's famous BFG, but did you know there's actually a BUNCH of these across world mythology? Giants that aren't destructive, but benevolent? Builders, caretakers, life-givers, and more?
That title might shock anyone who watches this channel regularly. You know we love art, so why would we call it useless? Well, you might be surprised to find how wonderful "useless" truly is, and how it makes art the beautiful, necessary thing that it is.
Yes, fairytales are weird and dark. Sometimes they make no sense. But, by the same token, those precise things are also what makes them feel so magical.
You know antiheroes, you love antiheroes, but chances are it's hard for you to say what an antihero actually is. Where's the line between violence and villainy? Where does hero end, where does villain begin, and where does antihero sit between them?
What even is a "magic system"? It's a word that gets tossed around a lot in the fantasy-writing and worldbuilding communities. It certainly has its uses, but there seems to be something much deeper at play, here. Something that questions the very nature of "magic" itself.
Is this character really just another eldritch, tentacle-ridden, Lovecraftian horror? Or is there something more going on, here?
The Back Rooms are one of the strangest internet phenomena in the last decade. Why are people so gripped by this yellow, parallel dimension office-labyrinth? Why is it so scary?
What would an angel do if you made it live like a human? If they had to know what it was like to sweat, bleed, stink, hurt, fail? Surely they would handle it with more grace than a mere mortal, wouldn't they?... The first Angelarium story was one of divine light and transcendence. Now it's time to face the Earthly shadows.
AI has already changed much of creative landscape, but is it really primed to take over fiction-writing, too? Is that something it could even do? In this video, we give that thought a little test.
It's all fun and games until one of your characters realizes they're just a character in a story. But what happens when you have the same realization about your own life?
Okay it's not technically "magical realism", but the effect is so similar and so powerful, it's the closest term we could find. In some ways, what Ghibli is doing with these animations is even more powerful than magical realism.
For how much reverence humanity has for the divine, it's interesting how much of your fiction is about killing them.
We've all heard of Anti-Heroes, everyone's favorite unrepentant "good guy". But what about their opposite? What about everyone's favorite "bad guy"? They aren't talked about nearly as often, but there is a word for it. They're called: Anti-Villains.
It's easy to lose sight of the things that matter most in life. Sometimes we need a reminder to stop look with our eyes, and to look with our hearts. The Little Prince just so happens to be the perfect story for the job.
Time travel is one of the wackiest tropes out there. A little too wacky, maybe? Maybe not worth the trouble, trying to make it work in your story? Or maybe that's exactly why you should be using it.
You've heard of antiheroes, you've heard of antivillains, but have you heard of the most dramatic hero in fiction? The Byronic Hero?
We're used to magic systems full of runes and spell uttered in long-forgotten tongues. But there's another language fantasy stories use all the time that you might not even be aware of. One we have here in the real world: Legalese.
Okay, so maybe you're not afraid of Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth or the host of other tentacled Lovecraftian space-things. But maybe you don't... have to be?
Memes are like cognitive viruses. They stick in your brain and evolve with every expression, until they're just part of the collective conscious. But what if there was an idea that did the opposite? That protected itself from being shared, remembered, understood, or even observed altogether? That could actively corrupt or destroy your memory, rather than adding to it? The answer lies with the SCP foundation, who has a whole branch for investigating such phenomenon: The Antimemetics Division.
Analog Horror, Mascot Horror, Liminal Horror. Perhaps the most popular horror genres in fiction right now, and they all have on unlikely thing in common: a sense of nostalgia.
Myth is one of the oldest and most human forms of storytelling. It's been with mankind for as long as stories have been told. So why, then, does it seem to be dying out?
We're all familiar with death as an icon, a figure, a personification of a natural force... but what about as a character? An individual, with thoughts, and feelings, and desires? What would that death look like?
Tired of being mortal? Well, maybe you don't have to be. Turns out, at least according to a lot of fiction, becoming a God might not be quite as hard as you'd think.
Who doesn't love a good revenge plot? It's hard not to get behind someone seeking justice... even when they're doing some pretty deplorable stuff in the process?
We all know what happened when the Grinch stole Christmas... but what if he had tried to save it instead? How different would an ANTI-GRINCH act, and what kind of lessons can we learn from them?
We all love to talk about the characters we consider to be the best, most evil, most effective villains. But what about the ones who are bad... at being bad?