From Monica: I want to talk about Seabiscuit. Being an archetypal precocious horse girl, at age 9 Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit (1999) was the first nonfiction book I remember reading. It was the first time I was conscious of the popular weight attributed to the New York Times bestseller list, and for once my childhood interests…
Category: Call For Comments
Call for Comments: There’s a TV Show About an English Department… So We Have to Discuss It?
From Hannah: On August 20, Netflix will release its new mini-series The Chair featuring Sandra Oh. It also happens to be about an English department at the fictional, elite Pembroke University. A new trailer dropped a few weeks back and, well, I already have thoughts: https://youtu.be/eOqtBtWGl1Q There’s a conversation that goes beyond this one show.…
Call for Comments: Narratology v. Ludology
From Katya: I recently saw a TikTok from Dominic Myers (@gamestudies101) that summarizes the narratology v. ludology split in game studies. Check out their summary because it’s a good one but, simply put, ludology argues that games are a unique medium because they include interactive game mechanics that are distinct from other representational forms. Narratology,…
Call For Comments: On Multiple Readings and Variant Interpretations
From Mav: I was having an interesting conversation with friend-of-the-show Andrew Darowski the other day about the idea of multiple readings. For those who don’t know, in addition to the Protagonist Podcast, Andrew is host of a podcast called Disney Animation Minute Essentials where he and his wife Kestra step through classic Disney films one…
Call for Comments: Podcasting Yankees in King Arthur’s Court
From Hannah: I can trace my first encounters with the King Arthur mythology to two (very different) Disney adaptations: The Sword and the Stone (1963) and A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995). That my interest in King Arthur began with these, er, interpretations of their source material (not to mention the earlier texts) is…
Call for Comments: Summer ____, Had Me a Blast!
From Hannah: There’s this odd category of media that is seasonally appropriate: Summer ___. We have summer movies, summer television, songs of the summer, summer beach reads … But what makes a piece of media a good “summer movie” or “song of the summer?” When I proposed this topic, Mav asked if I meant blockbusters…
Call For Comments: Serialization Technology
From Katya: It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a game scholar, comics scholar, and Victorianist walk into a bar, they must instantly bond over their shared study of serialization. Except… we never recorded it. It’s rather astounding that we haven’t already; serialization cuts across all of our fields from comics to games and…
CFC: Improv in the Living Room
September 4, 2021
From Mav: Way back in April — which granted, wasn’t actually that long ago, but in the world of COVID, feels like a lifetime — we did a show about how stand-up comedy works in a world where everyone’s socialization is socially distant. Since that time, the world got a little better and then a…