Paracosms: Know Your Fiction

AMC says that the Walking Dead franchise has the potential to last as long as Star Trek has. I have an issue with that. In comparing the Walking Dead's decade of success to the fifty years that Star Trek has been around, I don't have much faith in the franchise's longevity.

But there is a chance. The Walking Dead's narrative exploration of human nature is not worlds apart from what made Star Trek a success, though the underlying structure of the walker world's narrative limits how far the series can go. Can a dying world realistically compare itself to a galaxy brimming with life?

 

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Zombies… The final frontier.

These are the stories of the outbreak survivors.

Their continuing mission:

To endure this strange new world.

To create new life; new civilizations.

To suffer like no one has suffered before.

During a Goldman Sachs conference, AMC Network President Jo

The Marvel Cinematic Universe highlights its heroes and neglects its villains. Why is this? Marvel has a history of creating complex comic book villains with rich character depth, but the MCU movies display the bad guys as hollow shells of their true selves, nothing more than stepping-stones for the heroes to show their own growth.

But there is one Marvel villain who was given proper attention and nuance. Loki, the God of Mischief. What makes Loki different? Why was he the one villain given any respect in the MCU? There is narrative reasoning behind these creative decisions, and it is something Marvel must explore as the company seeks continued fan support for its growing cinematic universe.

 

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The Marvel Universe may be home to more memorable characters than any other imaginary world in existence. Thousands of heroes and villains have battled across countless comic book pages for most of the last century, their iconic per

J.R.R. Tolkien did not write his books for you or for me. Middle-earth was a personal project, firstly created for himself and his family. Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit as a story for his own children, but after his breakout book became a great success he was convinced by his publisher and fans to create a sequel to Bilbo Baggins' adventure. Fans of The Hobbit wished for more of the same, wanting more dragons and whimsy.

But the author turned inward as he wrote The Lord of the Rings. Middle-earth darkened as the texts grew more dense over the years. Tolkien sought to please an academic audience that held no respect for fantasy literature, and instead he found that his works were being appreciated by a type of person he knew little about.

 

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When working on a creative project, authors tend to have an audience in mind. Writers of fiction are often told to fight against such thoughts. A story should be pure, constructed