“Marvel is canceling titles left and right! What has happened to the House of Ideas!?…
Browsing: opinion
If you’ve been following the comic and pop culture blogosphere over the last couple of…
The announcement of Modern as a format for the Community Cup sent quite the buzz…
I first started playing Magic: The Gathering out of necessity. After moving from Ohio to…
The publicity for X-Men: First Class has been in overdrive these last several weeks, and…
On Monday morning’s The Morning Stream with Scott Johnson, someone in the chat room asked…
Since Modern Warfare’s release back in 2007, the Call of Duty franchise has been dominating…
When I first started writing this article I was wondering what Nintendo was doing wrong,…
Imagine this: Our handsome hero has located the hostages of a terrorist cell. Slumped…
If you’re a console gamer, or hang out with someone who is, you’ve probably noticed…
A few weeks ago I reviewed Fable III for the Rootin’ Tootin’ MSP. Not being…
For almost two decades the Schmuck has been the undisputed king of comedy. There’s just something about a guy (or girl, a Shmuckette, if you will) who doesn’t have it together that just makes people laugh and laugh. Or at least it did. Now it seems the winds of comedy are a-changin’ and it doesn’t look good for the schmuck.
A trope is a recognizable theme used in storytelling. The kidnapped princess, the final battle, the training montage, these are all tropes we have seen again and again. Usually recognition of a familiar trope is a good thing, it lets the audience know how they should feel about things and sets them up either for a satisfying conclusion or an excited twist. But what happens when a trope goes stale? When you can’t watch two hours of TV without seeing the same situation over and over, like the wriiers just emptied their cliche bladders all over the place? Some themes have suffered this fate, through excessive use now they accomplish the opposite of what the writers want, to take the viewer out of the experience. What follows is a list of tropes that I find tiresome, troubling and most of all trite.
Lately There has been a resurgence of talk about racial politics in comic books. On…