Well, Vivian got sick of Aled and Jonathon chatting about Elden Ring for about two hours before each recording, so we’re doing it on mic this time! Aled and Jonathon chat about what makes Elden Ring interesting: Jonathon’s intense knowledge of From Software means they can give us a detailed overview of the story of Elden Ring, and how it compares to the Buddhist ideologies of other From Software games. We also chat about how Elden Ring is kinda political, how large open world games still need some kind of constraint, and how just gosh-dang difficult this game is. Oh, and Vivian talks about a completely different game.

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This week, Aled Thomas, Vivian Asimos and Jonathon O’Donnell chat about fanfiction and the complicated idea of canon. We talk about the ever-changing canon and history of Star Wars, the ret-coning of Star Trek, and the ever-complicated and TERF controlled canon of Harry Potter. We chat about the power of fanfiction to change the idea of canon and the importance of story to a fan audience.

Pixar’s Turning Red is a movie all about a young girl going through puberty, and the bodily changes as well as the sexual changes that go along with that. It also brings in cultural trauma and familial trauma, particularly the issues associated with being an Asian immigrant in Canada in the early 2000s. Aled Thomas, Vivian Asimos and Jonathon O’Donnell sit down to talk what’s interesting about Turning Red.

Aled Thomas, Vivian Asimos and Jonathon O’Donnell discuss video game music this week! From Breath of the Wild music to Pokémon battle songs, to not listening to the music at all, we talk about what makes the best video game soundtrack, and how our gameplay can be affected by the music in the game.

Sorry! This week, there's no What's Interesting About due to some personal life stuff. But! I thought I'd throw in an episode from the latest season of the Religion and Popular Culture Podcast for those interested. Hope you enjoy!

In this episode, Aled Thomas and Vivian Asimos chat about the claims surrounding Mary Cosby's church in Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (RHOSLC). Many online, as well as outside of the internet, are claiming Cosby runs a "cult". In this episode, Aled and Vivian talk about "cults" from the perspective of a social scientific approach to the study of religion.

This week, Vivian, Jonathon and Aled talk about the complicated relationship between the seemingly seperate worlds of reality and fiction. We talk a lot more about our research fields than we expected to talk about, but also talk about reality television, meaningful fiction, and what the hell "meaning-making" actually means.

This week, Jonathon and Vivian finally gave in to Aled’s intense need to discuss the Hobbit Trilogy. With the Lord of the Rings Amazon show on the horizon, it was actually on the mind so wasn’t too far of a stretch for us. We talk about some Tolkien facts, a bit of LotR mythology and lore, and Aled - you guessed it - complains about CGI.

This week, Vivian, Aled and Jonathon talk about the act and the art of binging. We talk about the format of Netflix’s idea of binging, how it’s changed the format of television shows, and what it means when we say that a show is “bingable”. We also talk about other pop culture we binge: from tv shows, to movies, to podcasts.

In this episode of What’s Interesting About, Jonathon and Aled discuss Persona 5, with a few questions and inserts from Vivian. Jonathon brings up their questions about the game: how nationalist is Persona 5, and which type of nationalism is it embodying? We talk about Japanese culture and the over-arching influence of the United States, anti-foreign sentiment, and how Christmas is the perfect time to summon Satan and murder God.

Today we talk What’s Interesting About… Visual Novels! We didn’t get around to it before, so today Jonathon and Vivian dish all things visual novels, along with an occasional input from Aled. The discussion centers around the interesting question of what defines a visual novel - what makes it a genre, or not a genre? We talk about romance visual novels, but also visual novels that subvert the genre and the player’s expectations.