Berri's Couch

From castles and a working literary relationship with faith to an often combative literary relationship with faith with lasers. Jerri takes the wheel as we talk about the relationship the Sci-Fi genre has with faith as a concept, a practice and how they tricked themselves into thinking edgy atheism (for a while) made them different.

Okay a not at all loaded topic just how the fantasy genre handles depiction of religion. Totally chill.........this is just the first chapter for this month so hold onto your butts stuffs about to get prologue heavy in the vibes.

And despite what the flub would have you believe we are discussing independent animation. What defines it? Why does it have such a.........unique reputation? And of course what does it look like in the age of streaming?

Now doesn't that title feel ominous but don't worry we're not talking about chemical in water turning frogs non binary, we're talking about needless nit-picking of details in video games and the community that jumps in head first with immense gusto.

So digital content requires a parasocial element but what if that's the secret to a company's success? How does it work? Can it work long term? Why do it this way? We try to answer these and other questions, emphasis on try.

Can the human experience be retold to us in under 3 minutes skits that eventually gain enough popularity that they were given old media recreations from the creators of said stories exist and are good? You see the length of this buddy so sit back and find out.

I'll come up with something more creative once the headache this show gave me fades; we watched Centaurworld, we have thoughts, talking happens and despite flaws we have positive experiences but wish death on a giraffe.

We're strolling through the home stretch, the last piece of the travelled road we understand as weird cartoons. The comforting warmth of orange hues and chaos gods will soon give way to frigid blues of unknown futures coming to light. Ciphers, cursed birds, mashed potato and molasses, are all we have left.

Defining subcultures, humour and providing power fantasies for young girls. These shows had it all, in what is a seemingly once in a lifetime event these shows were in the centre of a nexus that may have never happened before and seemingly hasn't happened since.

Well it's finally time to get weird and what better place to start than the moment we felt we were getting too old for the programs being shown on TV? Anywhere else? Probably. But that's not how we're rolling, we're talking about Adventure Time and Amazing World of Gumball.

Well we're at the end of the road and we must look back on all that this one story has given us.....and it's not great. After spending weeks discussing various attempts to bring this story to visual media we must now look at the dominoes that have fallen in its wake.

Well the 80's called they want their romance series back and they are NOT GETTING IT!! This is ours now (screeches like a startled marsupial), we have the glorious urban fantasy rewrite of Beauty and the Beast starring Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton.

Well it's their story but how do the French films hold up in comparison to both each other and the more popularised American attempts? Is there even a difference in stories or presentation? And most importantly what is truly scary the beast or those that serve him?

Well may as well get the most recognisable adaptations out of the way. Disney and their grand machine had two hits at this tale, how do they both stand as art and more importantly how do they stand against each other?

Finally Bee fulfilled the self imposed requirements to get to ramble on about Beauty and the Beast. We start with it's origin point, whether it holds up and why it perhaps stands out amongst the list of other fairy tales that made it into the pop culture.

Well we danced around the issue enough, time to break the glass and discuss the conventions on a narrative and what happens when you break them? If they should be broken? And can they even be broken and still be good narratives in their own right?

So we finally reach the episode about wrestling, Bee tries to verbalise why that form of entertainment is important and a legitimate form of storytelling. Jerri is along for the ride and even comes to a new appreciation for the live stunt shows and the way they uniquely tell stories.

What is this? A short prompt and no clear line where a story is going can tell a narrative? Well thank god we're here to make some noise as we question who's line is it anyway and if these small moments that break walls count as narratives or are they just ways to entertain the smallest of us?

Stories told over a table with others while battling not only interpersonal dramas but also the whims of statistical chance, completely ridiculous right? Right. But the math rock stories are so much fun and unique so let's see why that is.

It's the showcase of the immortals, if said immortals were giant kaiju with generational beef. Kong and Godzilla are now separated but there is a challenger for top ape and he has a tag partner, can Kong find him an unlikely tag partner or will he lose everything? Does this film mark a pinfall for this series or will Bee run out wrestling references before she can finish this blurb? It's at least...

After so many years finally we see the big ape fight the radioactive lizard. Does the story telling around the grudge match hold up to our fervor however? And with a new director at the helm can the change in finalised visions lead these films astray from where we started in favour of a Fast and Radioactive franchise?

The King, a usurper, and a flip flopping Dr who needed to figure out what she is actually doing in the plot. All present and mostly visible in this film exploration of the consequences from the last film, building on the foundations the past film set but can it stand up to it's predecessor or is it just lost in the shadows?

After an........... attempt in the 90's we finally got a Godzilla film from a studio outside of Japan and it's good. So good it started a universe of films and juggled themes of fatherhood and trauma. But how does it hold up now or were we just happy it wasn't a lot of fish?

We made it. The ring has been cast into the fire and into the West we travel but before the ship finishes it's journey we look back onto the journey and ponder upon why this journey has stayed with everyone in a way the other's contemparies didn't. Why has Tolkien defined the genre and what are the ramifications of that? Legacy is complicated so let's attempt to talk through some of it.

Smaug Bezo's massively funded project to explore the Second Age in the history of Middle Earth that was destined for responses. Does it deserve the responses it got or was there a darker force in the army of outrage baiters aiming to destroy a light before it could truly shine? Kinda, yeah but also no.