Hey! Merry Xmas! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Kwanza! Merry Festivus! Happy Yule! Happy Saturnalia! Winter Solstice and all the rest ^_^ In this Quackcast Banes, Tantz, and I chat about our fave Christmas stuff, from films to music, to what we like to do on the day and the popular Christmas traditions of our parts of the world- Australia for me Greece for Tantz, and Canada for Banes. What is your fave xmas movie, music, or activity? What's you fave things to do at this time of year? Do you have any rituals or practices that are particular to your part of the world? Let us know! :D
2 weeks ago we discussed the topic of religion in fiction: basicaly how we use real world religions to inform the perspectives of our characters and make the worlds more real, how we use religion in fiction, and how we make up religions for our worlds. We had so many great responses to this in the forum and about the Quackcast that we thought it'd be great to feature and chat about them! DD is a community after all and we love our community members to be a part of the Quackcast!
Smack Jeeves has been sold out from under its community to a Korean mobile content provider company NHN. The same company approached us last year but the deal didn't go through because we were too strict on retaining control of the site and protecting our community, SJ apparently didn't have those same concerns for the people that made the site so special and that is a huge shame. What's happened now is that NHN is streamlining the site, minimising the creative members who host their comics there and turning it into a content delivery site for its hand-picked pro work, turning it into another souless clone corporate of Webtoons or Tapas.
We're talking about how religion is portrayed in fiction and a bit about WHY. This was a surprisingly fascinating topic. I came up with the idea while watching the old 2000s SciFi series Andromeda: one of the alien characters there is sort of a space Buddhist, and I felt like that was a pretty common thing in American TV Scifi, so I wondered about what other kinds of religious tropes exist in contemporary fiction, fantasy and other SciFi worlds.
This week we look at the famous quote by respected film director Martin Scorsese that “Marvel movies aren't Cinema” and also the quote by fellow director Francis Ford Coppola that Marvel films are “despicable”. We try and look at the proper context of these remarks outside of the twitter garbage and social media outrage to see if either had any point or whether they're way off the mark and deserving of criticism.
Where does your main audience come from? And how do you change your work to accommodate them?
For a lot of us it's north Americans (mainly from the USA), which is interesting, especially for those of us outside of there because our cultures are slightly different. We THINK we totally understand each other but there ARE differences. So to make ourselves properly understood with the original intent of the story we often have to translate things slightly (much more in Tantz's case!). This goes doubly when a story is set in a different era. How much do you localise your story for the audience, how much SHOULD you?
Storytelling styles change over time for various reasons: fashion, audience expectations, competition for audience attention due to increased choice and availability of media, technological limitations and abilities, and culture. We chat about the reasons for the changes and how styles have changed.
“Toxic fans” is a bit of a catch cry now and that has seemed to turn into the idea that any fan who is critical of something or doesn't like it isn't a “true fan”, fans must should love everything. I find this a dangerously silly notion and one clearly driven by business interests with only a limited relationship to reality. It's quite similar to the idea that you're “either for us or against us”, the twisted idea of “patriotism” that says you must agree with and love everything your country and your leader does no matter what or you're a traitor.
Tantz is dressed fabulously as a queen and I'm a skull faced monstrosity… I'm also wearing a costume, hahaha! Which you can see in our Patreon video ;) Queen Tantz Bathory and prince of horror Banes join me to talk about Horror movie franchises, what makes them work and what doesn't- as franchises rather than just a stand alone movie. The problems facing a movie series about horror are different from other genres and focus more on formula than just characters the way they do in most other types of film so it's an interesting discussion.
As promised we dive right into the second half of the Star Wars chat! We cover all the Star Wars stuff besides the original trilogy and the new trilogy. There's a lot to cover and we only touch on most on it: Solo, the Star Wars Christmas special, Droids, the Ewok films, Clone Wars, the games, the books, comics, Solo, Rogue One…
Continuing on our focus on movie franchises for the month of October, THIS time we focus on the king of them all: STAR WARS!
This was a genre defining series, not only for movies but for space opera, “SciFi”, and science fantasy on all media! The original trilogy was quite a milestone. Predictably further instalments weren't quite as well received but it still remains popular even so! Currently it's having a resurgence in popularity once more.
For the month of October we've decided to look at a different movie franchise each week, starting with Indiana Jones! Banes and Tantz have way more knowledge about the films than I, having watched them much more, but we all have a fondness for the character.
Today we're getting all META and interviewing the creator of another webcomics podcast! Jamais Jochim is the host of Webcomics Reviews and Interviews! It's a podcast that covers much the same ground as we do, but with more research and less winging it, also more interviews with experts and webcomicers, so he's really worth checking out. Our $5 and up patrons can see video of us chatting with him in the flesh!
Copyright is a complicated thing and something that all creators should have a little bit of a working understanding off! Checkout my newspost lined bellow for more info! you need to know this stuff. I must apologise… I hadn't had much sleep and it was very late so I occasionally drift off into nonsense during the Quackcast.
Endings… getting them right is SO very hard. We've chatted about this before but this time Tantz has a number of good methods to make them happen right! What are some of YOUR fave endings?
