I like to think this is something that doesn’t need to be said, but let’s just throw it out there anyway: Serial killers are not sexy. Or fun. Or funny. They’re monsters. But then fictional serial killers show up in a story as a well-dressed psychiatrist or a good-looking vampire and they’re tapping into a very…
Whatever you do, don’t press that button. It’s a trope that’s spanned pop culture for generations—and the real world, too. But where did this Big Red Button come from? And why does sick curiosity compel us to mash it down?
Our new favorite hashtag is #VeryRealisticYA, which in addition to pointing out all that is ridiculous about the red-hot but not always relatable YA genre, happens to be gut-bustingly hilarious. (Even better: it was created by an actual teen writer!) Here are some of our favorites.
Last week our own Charlie Jane Anders gave us some excellent advice on the difference between good Worldbuilding and great Worldbuilding - but sometimes creators of some of our favourite worlds run afoul of a few tiresome Worldbuilding tropes. Here's seven clichés that need to stop cropping up in Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
We've called out various movie and TV tropes that we never want to see again in the past. But today we're calling attention to the silly, stupid, brilliant and hilarious scifi tropes that we absolutely, positively love—and hope we never live in a world without them.
Sometimes, a narrative convention is so ingrained in literature that writers reach for it even after it becomes clear that it's not so much "classic" as "offensive." What trope do you see time and time again that simply makes you cringe?
This is it. This is every now-ubiquitous sci-fi thriller trope, presented to us in the form of Eastern Kentucky's football team intro video. It's less than a minute and a half long, but it's a great way to get drunk quickly.
This trope has moved from being a badass boast to being a joke fairly recently, considering that it peaked in the 80s and can be traced to 1902. Esoteric is our other middle name.
Yesterday, we brought you a list of screenwriting tricks and tropes we never need to see again. And afterwards, people tweeted some stuff that we're incredibly embarrassed we missed. Here are more overused gimmicks that really do need to go away.
Yet another literary boffin has said science fiction novels can't be literary, and it's (not surprisingly) sparked some controversy. Benjamin Kunkel in Dissent Magazine wrote a long exegesis on the difference between SF and literature — in a nutshell, literature has more complex characters and trickier dilemmas about…
