Tale Foundry

A little corpse wakes up after years in the ground, confused and conflicted. The world has changed, and it's not sure how exactly it belongs.

A park full of intelligent, feeling creatures, reduced by their human masters to mere instruments of pleasure. Sounds like it should be pretty easy to point out who the "bad guy" is, but this show will give you a run for your money. Let's see what we can learn from it...

Westworld's the kind of show that seeds questions within its answers. Each plot twist is more a premise than a proposal, and almost all of them are posed by the show's ingenious antagonist: Robert Ford. So, let's break them down and figure out how they get the wheels turning in our heads.

Mythology is and always will be a favorite source of inspiration for fiction-writers everywhere. We're all casually familiar with Egyptian, Norse, and let's not forget Greek mythology, but why not Irish mythology? Let's talk about it..

Wherein we thoroughly abridge Irish pseudohistory.

A sequel to last year's story "Devil of the Cradle," this time we follow the changeling child Lorchan as he ventures into fae territory. The question is: will he find himself, or will something else find him?...

Behind every story is a good character... most of the time. But what about a story whose appeal lies in its spectacle? What if we're drawn to the story to learn about the hideous monster and not to make emotional connections? This is the kind of story Junji Ito excels at, and we think there's something to learn from him.

Junji Ito doesn't necessarily scare everyone, but he certainly unsettles them. Here are three methods he uses to do it.

"There's something wrong with grandma Kathy." Miriam's grandmother has been insisting that all the lights in the apartment stay on at all times. It seems like simple, if very annoying, paranoia. That is, until Miriam turns the lights out herself and discovers the truth behind her grandma's strange obsession.

Long ago, before The Onion or Terry Pratchett, a Spanish author was playing with satire in ways the world had never seen before, and has hardly seen since. Miguel De Cervantes took the world by storm with his two-part novel: Don Quixote. In this video, we want to discuss how he did it.

We've already discussed the genius behind Don Quixote's satire. Now it's time for us to talk about how it *works*. Let's dig into the three styles of satire that give Don Quixote its unique dynamic.

Mankind stands at the brink of a new frontier: digital reality. An R&D team has developed a way for people to explore it, but who says they're ready?

For such an important and well-loved genre, sci-fi is rather difficult to define. Is it space opera? High-brow philosophical parables? Serious speculation about the future of technology? Is it all of those things? And then, what isn't it? In this episode, we attempt to "solve" this puzzling genre by answering one simple question: "what is science fiction?"

In our first sci-fi video we came to a single unifying definition that we felt expressed the breadth of sci-fi. This time we're taking a look at the genre's history to show why we chose that definition.

Is it better to dream blissfully forever, or to live out your days in the genuine squalor of reality? A complicated question, but never fear: the Sunshine Kids will protect you from making a choice.

There's something strange going on in Lovecraft's mythos, behind the tentacles and cosmic dread. Something of mythological significance that few other writer have ever achieved...