We Need More Hope-Filled Media
by Kristen Csuti Whenever anyone asks me what kinds of movies and shows I like, I tend to just give the vague umbrella answer of “fun and feel-good,” occasionally followed up with, “if I wanted to be depressed, I’d just watch the news.” This usually returns a mixed bag of…
What Happened to Competence Porn?
by Kristen Csuti In 2009, Leverage writer John Rogers wrote in a blog post about how viewers enjoyed “watching competent people banter and plan,” something his team had come to refer to as “competence porn.” This phenomenon, now named, has loosely cropped up throughout all forms of media over the…
Should You Write a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
by Kristen Csuti You’re reading this on the internet, so you’ve probably heard of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You probably have a decent idea of what she is and where she exists in the world of fiction. There’s like a seventy percent chance you immediately associate the term with…
How to Edit Your First Draft
by Jaime Gross Your fingers hover the keyboard. You inhale deeply. Then you do it: you type the words “The End.” You exhale. You blink back tears of joy. You’ve finished the first draft of your story! It hasn’t been easy, but you’ve pushed through. You’ve done the thing. You…
Get Off Your High Horse, the Book Is Not Always Better Than the Movie
It is common knowledge among book readers that the movie version will almost always be inferior to the book it’s based off of. It’s a popular refrain by moviegoers, dinner guests and librarians everywhere. And to some degree this belief is well justified. There are a lot of bad or…
How Spirited Away Is About Unflinchingly Accepting Adolescence
Miyazaki’s masterful storytelling and fine-tuned artistic vision is apparent in many if not all of the Studio Ghibli films, especially in one of the most iconic, Spirited Away. I remember watching Spirited Away for the first time in middle school. I had to ask my mom to buy it off…
Good Literature Is Not Self-Help: A Critique of ‘The Alchemist’
by Scott Mitchell Near my apartment there is a cemetery sandwiched between the river and a main road. If you walk long enough hugging the path near the river you will see a gravestone partially obscured by flowers. If you push aside the leaves, you find a black and white…
The Difference Between INTJ and INTP
Myers-Briggs has become a popular way to categorize people, to generalize and maybe even understand them. Thanks to an overabundance of internet tests and opinionated bloggers, there’s a lot of information floating around out there, much of it misleading or inaccurate. As an imperfect (and often discredited) form of psychology,…
Atticus Finch Is the Male Hero We Need Today
by Scott Mitchell Male protagonists are a dime a dozen, but not a particularly diverse bunch. Take any popular movie or video game and the marketing for it will likely feature a tall muscular white man with short dark hair holding a weapon, staring towards whatever enemy looms on the…
The Lit Nerds 