The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Still Feeds on Insecurity
The manic pixie dream girl trope simply puts down girls who don’t fit the blueprint. Manic pixie dream girls — or rather, the men who write them — feed off…
Netflix’s City of Ghosts Maps a Better Way to See LA—and Everywhere Else
Ito’s delivery mechanism for all that is a hybrid. The show’s characters are finely designed 3D ’toons, but the backdrops and settings aren’t. They’re photographs by the LA photographer Kwasi…
How Hollywood Is Complicit in the Violence Against Asians in America
Reducing Asians, women and sex workers to flat punchlines isn't just degrading — it's dangerous {read}
Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny
Today’s stars are action figures, not action heroes. Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others.
‘The Dig’ – Hiding Sutton Hoo’s women
My immediate impression after watching the film was to question why the three female leads were presented as a vulnerable, passive, with a dull ongoing focus on their fictional problems,…
The rise of Indigenous horror: How a fiction genre is confronting a monstrous reality
Indigenous writers, on the other hand, acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences. In…
The Myth of Rugged Individualism
The idea of the “rugged individual” is all over the place in science fiction–especially in the United States. Who is this loner hero, and why are there so many stories…
Abduction As Romance
Abduction as Romance is a media trope where a man kidnaps or imprisons a woman and she eventually falls in love with him. Abduction as Romance is one of a…
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted
Bradbury says Fahrenheit 451, is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
‘Alias Grace’ Is a Fierce, Timely Adaptation of Atwood’s Masterpiece
It’s easy to say Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace speaks to the cultural moment. But that “moment” — the predatory sexual behavior of men and the undue burden it places on…