e170. What is Serialization? Tune in next week!

In today’s pop culture landscape, serialization is everything. TV, movies, novels, comics. Addict people to your ongoing series and hope they keep paying for another installment. Somehow, despite the fact that we are 170 episodes into a podcast SERIES about pop culture media, much of which is SERIALIZED, hosted by people who literally study SERIALIZATION…

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…

e164. Why Do We Love Plot Twists?

On today’s episode we reveal that secretly this geeky little pop culture show was always actually about education and academic all along. Did you pick up on the clues we’ve been laying out for three years? Ok, maybe that one isn’t much of a plot twist, but what about the fact that one of Hannah…

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…

e75. Judging a Show by its Pilot?

It’s fall and if you’re a television fan that means you know that we are on the cusp of dozens — or these days maybe even hundreds — of new shows hitting the TV airwaves. And every new TV show starts with a pilot… an episode that introduces you to the show and tries to…

Call for Comments: Can you judge a show by its pilot?

From Mav: Back when the Game of Thrones aired their finale, we devoted an episode to not just talking about that finale, but the idea of finales in general. We talked about what makes a finale succeed or fail and what some of the best examples were. How important (or not important) is it to…

e59. Game of Finales

Well, the Game of Thrones finale has come and gone and of course we have to talk about it. The internet had opinions and so do we. But this is this show so we’re not going to just stop there. Mav, Hannah and Wayne are joined by returning friend of the show, Michael Chemers, to…

Call for Comments: Great Expectations for Disappointing Endings to the Game of Thrones

From Hannah: Game of Thrones ends Sunday and, based solely on audience opinion of the last two-to-three seasons (particularly the penultimate episode ever), it’s going to be bad. Depending on who you ask, it may be the worst finale of a television show ever (except maybe Dexter). There are a lot of reasons people are…

e39. Media Addiction

Once any TV show is on the air for long enough, a curious thing happens. It amasses enough devoted fans that watch it every week that they begin to turn on it. They constantly rave about how they now hate the show… it’s not like it used to be… but they’re still watching it anyway.…

e35. SPOILERS! (and Mystery Boxes)

Ever since the rise of the Internet we have all lived in constant fear of all of our favorite movies, books, TV shows and every other media being spoiled by some jerk who just wants to be the first to ruin everything for everyone else… or maybe he’s just an idiot. It doesn’t matter… once…