New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 4

In celebration of the New Year, I'm sharing out my favorite posts from 2017. These posts are all written by talented bloggers around WordPress, and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did. Today, we're taking a look at blogs from June and July...

New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 3

In celebration of the New Year, I'm sharing out my favorite posts from 2017. These posts are all written by talented bloggers around WordPress, and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did. Today, we're taking a look at blogs from April and May...

New Years Special: Reflecting on a Year of Your Blogs Part 2

In celebration of the New Year, I'm sharing out my favorite posts from 2017. These posts are all written by talented bloggers around WordPress, and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did. Today, we're taking a look at blogs from February and March...

Finding Shared Warmth and Joy in the Rink of Yuri on Ice [OWLS December Blog Tour: Warmth]

The festive season that starts at the end of November (at least, it does in the United States with the celebration of Thanksgiving) runs clear through to the first days of January. With so many holidays back-to-back, December is a time for sharing warmth and joy with family and friends. In the spirit of sharing joy, I wanted to pull out an anime that exemplifies this theme in multiple ways, both in-universe and in our own real world...

Holiday Special: Eight Nights of Deux ex Machina 6 & 7: Rick & Morty, and My Little Pony

Nearly every holiday has some sort of festival celebrating a miracle that saved its practitioners in some way. Miracles such as these are almost always worth celebrating, and people generally like to celebrate. In honor of the many December holidays (not all revolving around miracles), we're exploring eight examples of narrative miracles through the literary …

Holiday Special: Eight Nights of Deux ex Machina 5: Gravity Falls

Happy Chanukkah and happy holidays, everyone, and welcome back for the fifth night of Deus ex Machina. We're celebrating the eight nights of Chanukkah and other December holidays with this literary device. Tonight, let's take a look at Gravity Falls...

Pop Culture Based on Novels Part 4: The Brave Little Toaster

In solidarity with those of you taking on the National Novel Writing Month challenge, we’re spending the month taking a look at pop culture narratives based on novels. Last week, we covered the popular TV crime drama, Bones, which came to a satisfying conclusion earlier this year. Today, we're discussing a pop culture work that has been around since my own childhood, one which I never would never have guessed was based on a novel: The Brave Little Toaster...

Pop Culture Based on Novels Part 1: The Heroic Legend of Arslan

November is National Novel Writing Month, a 30-day challenge that many aspiring writers partake in every year. The idea of the challenge is to pump out a novel by the end of the month, or to at least have a higher page count than your friends who gave up halfway through. In the spirit of cheering on the writers fighting to reach their daily word count goals, we're taking a look at pop culture narratives based on novels, starting with The Heroic Tale of Arslan...

Family Dynamics in Gravity Falls [OWLS August Blog Tour: Bloodlines]

Everyone has their own experience with and definition of family –some positive, some negative. In the media, however, we often only see certain portrayals such as a positive family with one mom, one dad, and children, or a broken family who all work together to change their ways in the end. In his hit animated series Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch tackles the complicated issues that shape families and addresses the fact that not all families are ideal, but that doesn't make them bad...

Tropes: When You’re Fairly Certain You’ve Seen These Odd Parents Before

Anybody that watches cartoons or anime is familiar with today's topic: the trope. Tropes act as a visual way for the creator of a work to quickly and easily convey a concept to their audience. They can take many forms-- a figure of speech, a character type, a plot device, a location or location type, a pattern of storytelling, a sub-plot. If you've seen the concept before, it is most likely a trope. Let's take a look at a few examples of tropes found in Butch Hartman's The Fairly Odd Parents.