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emilymaesar · 7 years ago

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The Nerdicon

When I was in college, my friends and I started a nerd and pop culture website where we wrote articles and reviews (and had a podcast!) Here are some excerpts (and links) to some of my favorite pieces.

The Swinging Pendulum: Hannibal, Fannibals, and Bryan Fuller (June 24th, 2013)

Hannibal Lecter is one of the most well-known fictional characters of all time. Thomas Harris will go down in history for changing crime novels, crime stories, and for creating the popular culture’s need for serial killers. Bryan Fuller will go down in history for creating some of the most beloved television series about death, the after life, and food. All of which were tragically cut short. Hannibal,however, has been renewed for a second season on NBC, something which Bryan Fuller was actually pretty sure about (x).

But what does season two mean for the story of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham? Well, personally, I think we’re going to see the reverse of what happened in the finale. Fuller said that Will Graham is going to be scrappier because now he has nothing to lose and everything to gain. We’re going to see Will’s dark side. According to Fuller’s timeline (x) season four of Hannibal is going to be the story of The Silence of the Lambs, but that doesn’t mean that Lecter’s going to jail right before that storyline begins. Dr. Lecter was in the institution for a few years before Will Graham goes to visit him about the Tooth Fairy.

Sitting at a Round Table: Merlin in Retrospect (January 9th, 2013)

Never could I ever write nearly as much insightful commentary about the legend of King Arthur as there already is. There are people who have dedicated their lives to studying the Once and Future King with his duel kingdoms. I can, however, talk about King Arthur as a life-long fan of the legends. I’ve always been an Arthurian girl – and I always will be. There’s something amazing and inspiring about the legends of Arthur and his knights. Whether it’s uniting a nation with Lancelot, or even the quest for the Holy Grail, Arthur will remain one the of the West’s greatest myths.

Because of that status, there are a lot of retellings of the great and mythic Arthur. Some are awful, some are great. And some are Merlin. More recent adaptations of the tale have taken the side of telling the story through the eyes of Merlin, the old wizard who sometimes helps, sometimes hurts, but is always there. There is no true tale of Arthur without Merlin.

And that’s where Merlin comes in.

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We also did a Joss Whedon retrospective period, where I did a few pieces I’m still pretty happy with:

A Brief Life Before Buffy: A Look at Pre-Vampire Joss Whedon (February 5th, 2013)

Hello friends! This particular article is going to be painfully short, and I’m sorry about that. It just so happens that Joss’s career before Buffy Summers came along was less “Joss Whedon” than we’d like to admit. It was filled with working on a TV staff, working as a script doctor, and writing animated films (or at least doing the stories).

I Cannot Believe My Eyes: A Retrospective of the Quest to Dr. Horrible (March 20th, 2013)

The 2007-2008 television year was a dark time. Well, for some people. For fans it meant that there weren’t going to be new episodes, but for the writers it meant that the future of contracts would yield so much more. That being said, the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike hit like a storm that we, as fans, didn’t really predict. Or at least I didn’t because I was fourteen and I didn’t pay attention to the industry the way I do now.

Had Joss Whedon had a show on television at the time, though, he would have had the same problem that 120 other “hyphenates” had. Joss is a showrunner – meaning he’s both head writer and executive producer. He, quite literally, runs his shows. The WGA strike causes a lot of conflicts because head writers were striking as writers, but they were still contractually obligated to work as executive producers. Whedon, however, wasn’t running a show.

Signing a Contract to Be a Slave: Dollhouse in Retrospection (April 5th, 2013)

Dollhouse. How do we even begin to talk about Dollhouse? It might be the most ambitious of all of Joss Whedon’s shows, and, while it is deeply flawed, it’s also one of the most interesting.

Let it never be said that Joss Whedon doesn’t follow the adage “go big or go home.” He’s a man of many big ideas and some of them are way ahead of their time. Firefly and Dollhouse fall into that category. They are both shows that, at their cores, are about consent and slavery. They’re both shows about what consent means and the different ways that slavery is presented in a culture. And for those reasons, they are both shows that were streets ahead.

As It Ever Was: The Cabin in the Woods in Retrospect (April 8th, 2013)

The Cabin in the Woods isn’t your typical horror film. Well…it is, but it also isn’t. I’m gonna put a spolier warning on this article – just in case. If you haven’t seen Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s groundbreaking entry into the ever growing genre of horror, then you should. It truly is a cross-genre masterpiece. Not since Scream has the horror genre been so utterly flipped on its head, and beautiful so.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Five friends go to a cabin in the woods…

I read a review for The Cabin in the Woods when it originally came out. It was a spoiler-free review, because it’s one of those films that you don’t want to ruin for people. It’s just too amazing. It’s a film you wish you could erase from your memory – so you can experience seeing it again for the first time. Although I can’t remember which review it was (dammit), the article said something I stillstand by: How you feel about the official summary of the film will determine how you feel about the film as a whole. The official summary is this, “Five friends go to a remote cabin in the woods. Bad things happen.” That might be the greatest description of this film ever, and the reviewer agreed. If you don’t love that summary, then I don’t think The Cabin in the Woods is the film for you.

#my writing #articles #pop culture

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