Call for Comments: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love F9

From Mav: I’m a guy who loves movies. I really love going to the movies… A LOT! Not being able to go out to the movies was actually one of the things I missed most during the last year and a half of lockdown. I remember a time early on when Chris Nolan decided that…

Call For Comments: Why Are There Still Superhero Costumes?

From Mav (with Monica Geraffo): This is going to be about superheroes and fashion. But it’s not going to seem like it at first and there are a billion concepts that I want to tie together, so bear with me. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that I love superheroes. I love…

Call for Comments: She’s Not Like Other Girls! Introducing the Fanboy Gaze

From Mav (with Matt Linton): We’ve talked a lot on our show about Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “the male gaze”. In short, the male gaze describes the tendency of narratives to position female characters primarily as objects of desire to be consumed by male protagonists and readers. It argues that regardless of the reader’s…

Call for Comments: The Male Gaze and its Discontents

From Katya: This week we’re revisiting the Male Gaze. I know we’ve been here before but we have a string of guests coming up offering their own spin on various “gazes” and related subjects so we thought it was worth a revisit. (If you’d like to check out our previous conversations, check out some of…

Call For Comments: Why Are Plot Twists?

From Mav: It’s the episode you’ve been waiting for. After Katya’s sudden and surprising death via plot device, on next week’s show we’re going to explain which of Hannah, Wayne or Mav is the secret traitor and did her in!!! Will the others make it out alive? Or will they fall prey to the VoxPopKiller…

Call for Comments: American Girl

From Hannah: As a kid growing up in the nineties, I loved American Girl, especially its historical characters and books. I still remember excitedly reading the adventures of Kit Kittredge and Kirsten Larson and Josefina Montoya … and really any character introduced between the company’s inception and about 2000. So when I discovered that American Girl is re-releasing…

Call for Comments: Thoughts on Falcon and Winter Soldier

From Mav: So, we’ve been watching Falcon and Winter Soldier, because of course we have. We weren’t sure if we were going to do a show on it. We’re not really a recap kind of show. On the other hand, we’ve sort of fallen into a pattern of doing … not so much recaps… well,…

Call For Comments: Memory Triggers In The Digital Age

From Wayne: I think about memory a lot. I’ve always had a pretty good one, enough so that people comment on it. My ancient mother has lost a lot of her short term memory in recent months, so that’s on my mind. I’m getting old enough to feel nostalgia for stuff. I’ve been going through…

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…

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…