Tale Foundry

In the West, haiku have a certain reputation. They're almost a meme. A funny, pseudo-sagely way to sequence a few words for a cheap effect. But there's a reason this form of poetry is so well known, so enduring. There are hidden depths to this sequence of seventeen words you may never have expected.

"Happily Ever After" is probably one of the most well-known phrases in all of literature. But have you ever really stopped to think about what that means? What would happen to the characters in the story if they really were exactly as happy as they are at the story's end... forever? Almost eery to think about, isn't it?

Mankind has been inventing deities since before there were even stories to tell about them. It's been part of the fabric of human existence forever, shaping how people think and behave. But perhaps humanity also has it a little backward. Perhaps it's not their deities that shape them, but the other way around? Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" explores this idea in spectacular fashion. It'll leave you questioning the potency of the omnipotent, and whether mankind is as frail as we tend to think.

Fiction and fantasy have a reputation for escapism. And certainly, they do provide that. But there’s also a shockingly large amount of truth in the lies we invent for our stories. And no one knows this better than one of the most beloved authors in the world: Neil Gaiman.

Sometimes authors go beyond just telling you the story. Sometimes they tell you the story of... the telling of the story.

H.P. Lovecraft horrifies us by turning our thoughts to the vast and unknowable cosmos we occupy… but he also managed to do that from the tiny landscape of his own bedroom, within his extremely limited purview. Perhaps we as creatives can do something similar. Perhaps there’s a brand of fantasy in the tiny worlds that we each occupy, waiting for us to find it.

Fate has chosen you! The favorite among the gods. The prophesied one. Your cosmic role is great, your destiny assured. Fabulous. You have no idea how much this is about to suck. The Chosen One is one of the easiest tropes to hate, but I think it has more depth than we like to give it credit for. It's certainly more tragic than it lets on, that's for sure...

Lovecraft is one of the most beloved speculative fiction-writers of the last century. He defined a genre and changed much of horror itself forever. And yet... More than a few people are still wondering, after reading his work, if was even... good at writing?

The "worth" of art is difficult to quantify. The value is almost always subjective. So how, then, have we gotten away with using the phrase "a picture is worth 1,000 words" for so long? What does that even MEAN? Well, according to clever poets and artists, it actually has quite a DEEP meaning... just not in the way that you'd expect.

Near the end of the Sci-Fi's Golden Age, one author wrote a story that felt far different from all its peers. It had a strange, creative underpinning. Oddly cynical, oddly precient, and oddly powerful, even to this day. Even though no one's heard of it, it still stands as a testament of what this genre can do. Let us introduce you to Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon.

Sherlock Holmes may have been the greatest detective of all time, but that doesn't mean he was above murder. And his sole victim? The one who suffered the most? His author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

We’ve heard of Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Deiselpunk and friends… but what do any of those things mean? Why attach “punk” to them? What does that say about the genre? And why has that lead to such a massive variety of “punk” genres?

Art is an act of translation. Translation, it turns out, is essentially an act of destruction.

You've probably heard of Roald Dahl's famous BFG, but did you know there's actually a BUNCH of these across world mythology? Giants that aren't destructive, but benevolent? Builders, caretakers, life-givers, and more?

That title might shock anyone who watches this channel regularly. You know we love art, so why would we call it useless? Well, you might be surprised to find how wonderful "useless" truly is, and how it makes art the beautiful, necessary thing that it is.

Yes, fairytales are weird and dark. Sometimes they make no sense. But, by the same token, those precise things are also what makes them feel so magical.

You know antiheroes, you love antiheroes, but chances are it's hard for you to say what an antihero actually is. Where's the line between violence and villainy? Where does hero end, where does villain begin, and where does antihero sit between them?

What even is a "magic system"? It's a word that gets tossed around a lot in the fantasy-writing and worldbuilding communities. It certainly has its uses, but there seems to be something much deeper at play, here. Something that questions the very nature of "magic" itself.

Is this character really just another eldritch, tentacle-ridden, Lovecraftian horror? Or is there something more going on, here?

The Back Rooms are one of the strangest internet phenomena in the last decade. Why are people so gripped by this yellow, parallel dimension office-labyrinth? Why is it so scary?

What would an angel do if you made it live like a human? If they had to know what it was like to sweat, bleed, stink, hurt, fail? Surely they would handle it with more grace than a mere mortal, wouldn't they?... The first Angelarium story was one of divine light and transcendence. Now it's time to face the Earthly shadows.

AI has already changed much of creative landscape, but is it really primed to take over fiction-writing, too? Is that something it could even do? In this video, we give that thought a little test.

It's all fun and games until one of your characters realizes they're just a character in a story. But what happens when you have the same realization about your own life?

Okay it's not technically "magical realism", but the effect is so similar and so powerful, it's the closest term we could find. In some ways, what Ghibli is doing with these animations is even more powerful than magical realism.

For how much reverence humanity has for the divine, it's interesting how much of your fiction is about killing them.

We've all heard of Anti-Heroes, everyone's favorite unrepentant "good guy". But what about their opposite? What about everyone's favorite "bad guy"? They aren't talked about nearly as often, but there is a word for it. They're called: Anti-Villains.

It's easy to lose sight of the things that matter most in life. Sometimes we need a reminder to stop look with our eyes, and to look with our hearts. The Little Prince just so happens to be the perfect story for the job.

Time travel is one of the wackiest tropes out there. A little too wacky, maybe? Maybe not worth the trouble, trying to make it work in your story? Or maybe that's exactly why you should be using it.

You've heard of antiheroes, you've heard of antivillains, but have you heard of the most dramatic hero in fiction? The Byronic Hero?

We're used to magic systems full of runes and spell uttered in long-forgotten tongues. But there's another language fantasy stories use all the time that you might not even be aware of. One we have here in the real world: Legalese.

Okay, so maybe you're not afraid of Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth or the host of other tentacled Lovecraftian space-things. But maybe you don't... have to be?

Memes are like cognitive viruses. They stick in your brain and evolve with every expression, until they're just part of the collective conscious. But what if there was an idea that did the opposite? That protected itself from being shared, remembered, understood, or even observed altogether? That could actively corrupt or destroy your memory, rather than adding to it? The answer lies with the SCP foundation, who has a whole branch for investigating such phenomenon: The Antimemetics Division.

Analog Horror, Mascot Horror, Liminal Horror. Perhaps the most popular horror genres in fiction right now, and they all have on unlikely thing in common: a sense of nostalgia.

Myth is one of the oldest and most human forms of storytelling. It's been with mankind for as long as stories have been told. So why, then, does it seem to be dying out?

We're all familiar with death as an icon, a figure, a personification of a natural force... but what about as a character? An individual, with thoughts, and feelings, and desires? What would that death look like?

Tired of being mortal? Well, maybe you don't have to be. Turns out, at least according to a lot of fiction, becoming a God might not be quite as hard as you'd think.

Who doesn't love a good revenge plot? It's hard not to get behind someone seeking justice... even when they're doing some pretty deplorable stuff in the process?

We all know what happened when the Grinch stole Christmas... but what if he had tried to save it instead? How different would an ANTI-GRINCH act, and what kind of lessons can we learn from them?

We all love to talk about the characters we consider to be the best, most evil, most effective villains. But what about the ones who are bad... at being bad?