Call for Comments: Pop Culture Pet Peeves

From Hannah: A long time ago in a reality that now seems far far away, we did an episode on Media Addiction that discussed hate consuming media. We thought through why, exactly, fans continue to still engage with TV/book/comics/film franchises that disappoint them (Star Wars comes to mind). I’ve wondered, in the time since we’ve…

e125. It’s the End of the World as we show it…

It’s 2020 and the world is ending… or maybe it’s not… or maybe it ended months ago and we just can’t tell anymore. Honestly at this point it’s pretty much just impossible to tell. With what seems like one disaster after another shaking the planet, we decided to take a look at apocalypse and disaster…

Call for Comments: How to Reconstruct Deconstructed Superhero Media

From Mav: A couple weeks ago, our good friend Matthew Brake of Pop Culture & Theology, posted about appearing on another podcast about deconstructing comics. Matt was really just pimping his discussion on that show talking about Animal Man (which is a good conversation and you should listen), but it got me to thinking about…

e124. Marveling Over Marble League!

If you’ve been following the show for the last several months, you know that in our COVID pandemic quarantine imposed death of media, we have turned our constant starvation for content to the internet and become big fans of Jelle’s Marble Runs, a YouTube channel featuring athletic competitions between… well, marbles. What started as a…

Call for Comments: It’s the end of the world … no, I don’t feel fine

From Hannah: As we’ve said in just about every blog post and podcast since March, 2020 is a waking nightmare. If Twitter is any indication, a large majority of the U.S. population has gone from joking about it being the end of the world to wishing for that event to occur. Good Omens, this is…

Call for Comments: Revising Race in Dungeons and Dragons

Dark elves aka drow From Katya: Wizards of the Coast recently announced (by recently I mean mid-June. It’s been a YEAR y’all) ways that they’re attempting to address the game’s racist characterizations of, well, in-game races. In their announcement, they acknowledge the widespread critique of their rules surrounding races, particularly the ways that stereo-typically dark-skinned…

e123. Culture, Context, Protest, and Memefication

Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone on the Internet and they tried to prove their point by forwarding some meme that was a quote of a famous person for historical figure that seemed to vaguely relate to their point in the most perfunctory possible way? When this happened, did you think to…

Call for Comments: Marveling Over the Marble League

From Hannah: Joy, like the Nintendo Switch, has been in short supply throughout 2020. To put it mildly, it’s been a time. A time where a little comfort can go a long way. Enter this podcast’s greatest discovery of 2020: Jelle’s Marble Runs. And the sports series that easily eclipses the Olympics, the Marble League.…

e122. twentysomethingteen

There are a lot of television shows and movies about teenagers, both comedies and dramas.There always have been. And yet, actual teenagers on television are extremely rare. Teens are typically played by twenty-something actors (or older). This is especially the case when it comes to teenagers in shows with a heavy sexual or romantic components…

Call For Comments: Erasing Cultural Activism in 50 Easy Years

From Mav: I ran across an interesting meme on conservative (MAGA) social media the other day. It was a picture of Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the original Woodstock that was being used to complain about athletes kneeling in protest during the national anthem. The text of the meme is what really got…