A world is either load-bearing or it is scenery. This tag collects reviews and craft pieces on worldbuilding: geography that forces choices, cultures that grew out of their conditions, and invented rules that hold under pressure.
1930sRobert E. Howard was born on January 22, 1906, and sold his first story to Weird Tales at eighteen. In ten working years he wrote boxing yarns, westerns, horror and the Conan stories, then died at thirty in Cross Plains,…
Fiction WritingCan a vampire show up on thermal imaging, use a smartphone or trigger an automatic sink? How to build vampire rules from an origin, with lessons from Dracula 2000 and Blade.
2020sMoonfall (2022) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Roland Emmerich spent around a hundred and forty million dollars of independent money on a film where the moon is a hollow alien megastructure, and it is one of…
2000sThe CSI Trilogy rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three separately produced network shows ran one continuing investigation across three consecutive nights in 2009, with three production teams, three visual styles and one case. Nobody has attempted…
2020sJurassic World Dominion (2022) rates 2 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The previous film ended with dinosaurs released into the world, which is the only genuinely new idea the series ever had, and this one is about locusts…
2020sThe MCU from Phase 4 onward rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Scoring every project I have seen puts Phase 4 at an average of 4.4 and Phase 5 at 2.67. The interesting part is not the…
2000sThe Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) rates 2 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred million dollars was spent on a lunar nightclub comedy that took about four and a half million in North America, which is among…
2010sThe later Pirates films rate 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. On Stranger Tides cost four hundred and ten million dollars, which made it the most expensive film ever made at the time, and Dead Men Tell No…
1990sStar Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucas had not directed a film in twenty-two years, owned the company outright, and answered to nobody. The result opens with a trade dispute, gives…
2020sLoki Season 1 (2021) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The best thing the Marvel streaming era produced, because it has a governing idea and obeys its own rules. A bureaucracy that files away every life that…
2020sWhat If...? Season 1 (2021) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. An anthology is the correct form for a franchise this size, because each episode can end somewhere unrecoverable. The Doctor Strange episode is the darkest thing…
1980sNausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Miyazaki made it in about ten months for the equivalent of a million dollars, and its success paid for Studio Ghibli the following…
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