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.
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.
"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?
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?
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.