Office Hours with Dr. C

Rather than focusing on media that has representation problems, @Barnabyontheinternet joins us in talking about media that made us feel represented as young people.

It's been a year of Office Hours and we take a quick break to survey the land and assess damages. 

 

What happens to stories we like when other fandoms get involved? Jeremiah McCoy takes us back to the '80s to talk about how our games, movies, shows, and comics have evolved together, interconnected by overlapping fandoms. 

Long-time player, game designer, and game commentator, Jeremiah McCoy joins Dr. C's office hours to talk with us about how aspects of our culture find themselves in TTTRPGs, and how aspects of TTTRPGs end up influencing much of our Pop Media. 

Dr. C and Barry discuss some of the complexity of representations of queerness in comic books because of the medium's history of various and problematic displays of queerness. 

Dr. C and Barry discuss John Kent, Clark Kent's son, and the revelation that he came out in his comic series as bi-sexual. With the latest outrage buzz about "woke" casting decisions for film and TV, and accusations of shallow tokenism in fictional stories, how do we interpret the motives of the media industries that produce the stories we consume?

With scholar and historian Julian Chambliss We discuss how Iron Man and other hero stories provides us meaningful ways to discuss what we see in future selves. 

Dr. Phillip Cunningham joins us again to talk about the super hero film genre, how long it's been going, where it's going, and are we tired of it yet. 

Joined again by Maxwell Paul, Professor of Ancient and Classical Studies, we talk about how white supremacist groups distort and appropriate  Greek and Roman history to manufacture claims of legitimacy. 

We are joined by Maxwell Paul, Professor of Ancient and Classical Studies, to talk about Greek mythology and how our stories today are affected by stories of our past. 

Dr. Phillip Cunningham talks to us about villains and some of the ways in which they might help or hinder positive representations of marginalized people. 

Is it possible to betray your fans when adapting a book into a TV series? What do creators owe to the established fanbase and how far can they deviate from source material? Let's end our discussion on Wheel of Time by discussing how well the adaptation was received and whether or not fans were betrayed by this new series.

Let's talk about Wheel of Time's Rand and how his status as an adoptee affects his motivations and those around him.

The Wheel of Time series just ended its first season on Amazon Prime and we discuss the ways in which the TV series--as well as the books from which the series is inspired--builds that world, its cultures, and characters.

We talk about the common war movie tropes, why they exist, and acknowledge some candidates for future war films, such as Audie Murphy, Francis Pegahmagabow, Alvin York, and Harriet Tubman.

The ups and downs of darkness. What's its usefulness and what does it say about us?

How do our superheroes stack up against real-life vigilantes? 

What are our favorite heroes if not hired guns for law enforcement? Here we talk about the difference between heroes that uphold the social order and those that strive for social good, and how stories about each reflect on the world we live in.

How do symbols change over time? We may not get to the bottom of that question in this episode, but we do come to a conclusion about Han Solo along the way.

Let's talk about Symbolic Convergence and the lengths and limits of playing things we aren't. 

We have to talk about X-Men. Justin Jordan (@freddiesroommate) is here to help us cut through the weeds of Krakoa and the new ways the X-Men do things.

Is anything real, really? Today we talk about Narrative Construction and how the stories we tell and consume shape the way we see everything.

What to do with the white savior stereotype?

Advocating for things big societal change is work that doesn't often have a clear end point. We use a Marvel's What If...? episode as a launching point into a discussion about extent of this labor and how hard it is for outsiders to support in ways that actually help.