*Note this only covers the first six seasons, it doesn’t (necessarily) address the reboot in season 7 Once Upon a Time is a rather fascinating study. It is imminently appealing and incredibly flawed at the same time. Which means, in many ways, it’s the epitome of a show you love to hate. Or perhaps more […]
If you watch much tv, you hear these words all the time in almost every series. Some tv shows, you hear them every episode. Writers use them to create conflict. Not just conflict but high stakes. They use them to have a character act out of their nature; to pit allied characters against one another. […]
Captain America has a list in The Winter Soldier to keep track of all the things he’s missed in our very modern society. We have the newest technology, decades of great music available at the touch of a button, and the broadest knowledge that the world has ever seen. But Part 1 of this series […]
Part 2 Part 2 in the Captain America series begins at the end, after the action, when certainty has replaced questions and conundrums and the struggle to find the right path. It began at Comic Con in 2011 when my best friend and I went to see Captain America: The First Avenger. I loved Cap. […]
This is actually part 3 in a series; a long running discussion with one of my best friends not about Captain America and Responsibility but where Captain America continues to end up right in the middle of what we’re talking about. So, this week is a series in reverse. Part 3 We begin with Captain […]
For several years I’ve thought about the distinction between myth and fairy tale. It’s an interesting conversation and this is just a blog post on what could probably be an entire college course. In some ways the two might seem unrelated. Especially since we exist in a culture that recognizes the stories that are myths […]
I know it’s not a proper fairy tale but Enchanted was really the first movie that set me down the path of understanding the fairy tale legacy. I know a lot of people love this movie, and this post isn’t meant to diminish that in any way because it is a fun, sweet movie. The […]
We have this false idea that fairy tales are about weak and passive heroines, damsels in distress. So we are always fighting against a fairy tale legacy that doesn’t exist. The interesting thing about The Snow Queen is that most retellings center their story around the villain rather than the heroine. Hans Christian Anderson’s story […]
I really wanted to pull off a sci-fi fairy tale legacy. How cool would that be to look at a sci-fi story that’s really a fairy tale and explore how it fits into or defies the fairy tale legacy? But I couldn’t find one. Mostly I looked at tv shows because that’s my favorite sci-fi […]
We have this false idea that fairy tales are about weak and passive heroines, damsels in distress. So we are always fighting against a fairy tale legacy that doesn’t exist. Snow White is a bit of a confounding fairy tale and in 1937, Disney did it no favors. We all know the essence of the […]