Call For Comments: A Think Piece on Thought Experiments

From Mav: A few weeks ago, I started one of those conversations we’ve all been a part of on social media. I made a Facebook post where I postulated that Luke Skywalker was a fucking psychopath who just likes doing murder. Of course, this is a variation on a thought experiment that Star Wars fans…

e155. Introduction to Ergodic Texts and Reading

What does it mean to be an ergodic text? That’s a complicated question. For one thing, the very meaning of the word “text” can be variable to different people, but we at VoxPopcast tend to use the literary nerd definition. We call all pieces of media that we consume, enjoy and scrutinize “texts” regardless of…

Bad (?) Things We Love (or at least find interesting): Part II

From Hannah: Almost a year ago, the Voxpopcast team attempted to get you to see the inherent value of our …. questionable … entertainment choices in the episode we titled Bad Things We Love. We were perhaps a little Kantian in our notions of taste — at least at first. But the range of material…

Call For Comments: Can We Cancel Cancel Culture Culture or Can’t We?

From Mav: So this is a weird one. We had this idea a few weeks ago that we would do a show on “cancel culture” after Gina Carano was publicly fired from The Mandalorian. But we didn’t get to it. For one thing, everyone else in the world was dumping think pieces left and right on her. For…

Call For Comments: So what should we say about WandaVision?

From Mav: So obviously, we’re going to talk about WandaVision on Disney+ after the finale next week. We’ve mentioned it in passing a couple times, but not really deep dove into it. If you’ve heard our previous recap shows on movies like Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as TV shows…

e150. Sexy Cartoons: You Know… for the Kids!

Have you ever noticed how sexy cartoons are? On last week’s Valentines Day show we talked about sexuality in superhero comics and other media. In that case we were largely talking about the kinds of media that really is targeted at adults or at least teens. Comics that are clearly trying to tackle sexual issues,…

Call for Comments: Sexy Cartoons and the Kid Gaze?

From Mav: As we approach Valentines Day this year I started thinking about our Valentine’s special from last year about “fictional celebrity crushes.” One of the things we drifted into talking about on that episode was characters like Lola Bunny and Harley Quinn — characters that despite originating in children’s cartoons, were clearly created explicitly…

e146. TV in the time of COVID-19

It’s been weird doing a show based around pop culture for the last year. A lot of that weirdness, of course, is because pop culture largely stopped for a bit. Then, it came back staggered as people released what remaining content they had sort of haphazardly. Now we’re getting to a new phase… we’re seeing…

Call for Comments: Why Do We ƒµ¢&ing Love Charts?

From Mav: I love charts. I fucking love charts! Am I alone here? I’m a nerd, when I was a kid, I used to play with this computer program called Harvard Graphics, just for fun. All it did was make charts. Last week, working on the final chapter of my dissertation, I got to a…

e145. 2021 Fantasy Box Office Draft

It’s a new year and that means we get to do one of our most exciting shows. It’s the fantasy box office draft! Every year we play a game (shamelessly stolen form the Protagonist Podcast… credit where credit is due) where we take turns predicting what will be the most successful movies in the next…