A colleague of mine recently introduced me and a group of others to the NEXT update of No Man’s Sky. Having smoothly floated from teasing his early failures, advising the best next path, tracking needed materials and off-screen dangers to ultimately naming and providing a suitably operatic origin story for the little iguana-parrot shaped humanoid we lovingly came … Continue reading A Sky for Every Man
[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s June 2015 Blogs of the Round Table feature] One day, a hero searching the wilderness (for a meal in a drought? for her missing sister?) stumbles upon a mysterious blue-haired boy. This boy is alien in two ways: he is stark naked and he is completely human. … Continue reading They Think They’re People: Domestication, Wildness and Personified Animals in Breath of Fire
Tropes are difficult to work with. They’re broadly useful to tease apart patterns but because they interact with one another, each individual instance of a trope will slightly escape perfect definition. Encountering this uniqueness is where we have to do the work of reading and figuring out just how texts co-mingle to communicate something greater than the … Continue reading Girl at the End of the World
Imagine yourself wearing a pair of latex gloves, scraping some dust off the surface of your favourite book or movie with a scalpel and tapping it into a glass vial of clear fluid. Now seal the vial and shake it, stare into its contents. When little Venus symbols to start floating in the solution you can declare to all … Continue reading On Evaluative Criticism
Violence is paramount to maintaining fantasy fiction and disembodied violence is a pillar of the fantasy genre. Disembodied violence is the celebration of violent power, or the expression of violent power against unthinking but vaguely human-shaped antagonists; it’s the kind of violence that isn’t really violent because it doesn’t take place against another person. Take Iron Man 2: in … Continue reading Imagine the Power: Disembodied Violence in Fantasy Traditions
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