Episode Hosts: Emma, Kyla, and Christiana. Today's Trope: Fantasy fiction tends to make recurring use of specific races, species, or peoples and their societies. For example, elves live in forests and practice nature magic, dwarves live underground and ar

Show Hosts: Kyle, Emma, and Allison. Today's Trope: Characters need to get to another galaxy, because reasons! Often that reason is that the planet is dying. Either humans have destroyed it, a giant asteroid hit the surface, or some other cataclysmic even

Show Hosts: Kyle, Emma, and Allison. Welcome to SEASON TWO of the podcast!! We're so excited to be back. Our theme for this season is sci-fi and fantasy tropes! Writers often think of tropes negatively, but they’re just commonly used themes or plot elemen

Back when this podcast only existed as a lightbulb hovering over our heads, we began brainstorming the format, content, and all those other pesky details. While doing so, we used trees as an example topic. “So, say we’re talking about trees, and then this

We avoided talking about castles in our last episode about architecture, because castles get a whole episode to themselves! From Castle Dracula to Hogwarts, castles in the sky to Cair Paravel, these majestic fortresses can bring your settings to life, oft

Underground cities, buildings created by technology or magic, structures surrounded by mystery… There’s a lot of fun to be had by dreaming up interesting architecture for your stories, and today, we’re discussing some fascinating examples from science fic

We’ve been hyper-focused on fantasy lately, so we thought we’d shake things up. Today, we’re diving into worldbuilding in science fiction stories with a discussion about starships and spacecraft. Special thanks to our patron Mitchell W. for making this ep

We're continuing in our series on the Netflix show Shadow and Bone, which is based on novels by Leigh Bardugo! Our topic today: religion and belief systems. How does the show portray faith? What different religions are present? How does religion affect th

We're continuing in our series on the Netflix show Shadow and Bone, which is based on novels by Leigh Bardugo! Our topic today: fashion. How does the series use fashion subtly, without drawing attention to it but using it to enrich the world? How is fashi

We're continuing in our series on the Netflix show Shadow and Bone, which is based on novels by Leigh Bardugo! Our topic today: technology. How does the series blend modern and fantasy technology? How does magic interact with technology? How do they inter