Rian Johnson's Knives Out series, of both Knives Out and Glass Onion, helps to recapture the spirit of the whodunnit. It recalls the nostalgia of previous classic mystery narratives while also presenting them in new and and interesting ways to help present their own spin on the format. In this video, I explore the structure of the whodunnit and the innovative alterations to the structure that Knives Out does.

Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space on Netflix provides us with a wonderful blurring between categories. It really echoes a main theme of anthropology: making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. In this video, we explore the way Bee and Puppycat complicate subject matter and characters which are extremely familiar to the viewer, while also taking figures and setting incredibly unfamiliar to the viewer and making them incredibly relatable.

Massive Monster's new Cult of the Lamb is a combination rogue-like dungeon crawler and cult management simulator. What makes Cult of the Lamb interesting is in how it treats aspects of death. While death is not as relevant to the lamb itself, it's constantly touching the world around the lamb. In this essay, I want to explore the role death plays in this game. From the way death is managed in the cult management, to the way it's embedded into the flow of the game's narrative, Cult of the Lamb's conversation around death is deeply connected to both the lamb and the One Who Waits.

Over the Garden Wall was initially released in 2014, but has a wonderful timeless feel to it that has made it an autumnal favourite. The show was spawned so many theories and questions about the structure of the narrative. In this essay, I'm exploring the role of the Unknown and the ever present question of the purpose of the journey the brothers are on. The Unknown is a place of required adaptability and necessary constant change, and when an individual becomes too overwhelmed and find it too difficult to go on, they fall into the Hopeless stage that allows the Beast to take them.

Originally aired in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's episode Hush introduced the audience to perhaps the scariest monster in the Buffy series: the Gentlemen. Their silence, creepy smiles, and methodical removal of their victims' voices make them a monster that still haunts fans of Buffy. In this essay, I explore the episode of Hush, and the themes of silence and communication as a form of storytelling. From a myth studies perspective, Hush gives us interesting examples of how language and language disruption can change a community, as well as how the body can also form as an important anchor of communication.

Orville Peck is a South-African born, Canadian-based, and openly gay country musician. His voice, song writing and style all paint an image of a new kind of cowboy mythology: the myth of the gay cowboy. By transforming a typically white-hetero-based mythology, Orville Peck actively transforms the mythology of the cowboy into one that is not only accepting of the LGBT+ community, but actively represents it. His fringed mask does not hide an identity, but rather provides an identity that isn't just for the singer, but for the whole culture.

In the fifth episode of the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian admits to struggling with her fashion in her life post-Kanye West. She voices insecurity about finding her own style after years of Kanye's styling. In this essay, I want to explore this part of Kim, using her as a case study to discuss how fashion communicates our identity to the social worlds around us. While Kim does often control avenues of power, she is also subjected to it. After her image being owned by Kanye West for years, she is suddenly free to not only find her fashion, but to figure out who she is.

The recent release of action-adventure game Tunic on PC and XBox has come with an amazing study of implicit storytelling in video games. Tunic's world is left for the player to explore, relying on coded messages and puzzles to solve the questions of the locations and people they encounter. What makes Tunic's story powerful for players is its reliance on the player's engagement with the story and the gameworld, exploiting the nature of the video game medium to great effect. In this essay, I want to explore the storytelling of Tunic: the nature of its cyclical time, and the impact the game has on players.

CW: violence against women and sexual assault

One of my favourite video game antagonists is Portal’s GLaDOS. In this essay, I want to explore the meaning and development of GLaDOS, and explain why she’s one of the most misunderstood antagonists in video games. We talk about how she gains her power akin to Foucault’s Panopticon, how her assault was hidden and misconstrued in the game and by writers, how GLaDOS’s bound woman theory shows an interesting side of her assault, and how GLaDOS’s role as the unsilenced victim makes her one of the most amazing antagonists.

We finally start to dig into the world of Star Wars. The direct binary of good vs evil in Star Wars is not subtle, and has the tendency to pain all Jedi in a positive light with the Sith being all evil. However, looking at Star Wars through Transhumanism, and in particular the treatment of droids and robotics, we can give some nuance and complication to the easy binary of good and evil.

Netflix’s Hilda takes after a lot of other urban fantasy stories by using the role of the supernatural creature as a metaphor for non-fiction Otherness and racial differences. The way that Hilda’s trolls are portrayed and explored in the series, and the movie Hilda and the Mountain King, shows a lot about some of the more complicated aspects of the way Hilda views Otherness. This video explores troll Hilda, and some of the tropes associated with trolls and the show, ultimately figuring out what the show is saying - or not saying - about our racial others.

The zen puzzle game Unpacking is the comfortable and relaxing game of simply unpacking boxes. It almost makes moving house seem not quite so stressful. But what is the story of Unpacking? How is the story of Unpacking told to the player, and what does that mean for the main character? In this video, I'm - ahem - unpacking the game of Unpacking, opening up the box of the story, the characters, and the objects we use to understand ourselves.

In the Legend of Zelda, the world, and its history and mythology, are all tied to cyclical notions of time - particularly the cycle of death and rebirth. In this video essay, I want to discuss cyclical time - how it manifests in physical on-video game mythologies and histories, and also how it manifests in Hyrule. Drawing from the Zelda timeline, as well as an important paragraph preceding the timeline, I explain how meaningful our own stories are, and how they change our landscape and our history with each telling.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has long been seen as Zelda's darkest game. It's ominous atmosphere and creepy uncanniness is unrivaled, even when compared to Twilight Princess. Today, I wanted to spend some time explaining exactly why this is. While some see the darkness in themes of grief and death, I believe that Majora's true darkness rests in the power of the constant repetition.

Pan's Labyrinth is one of my favourite films, and for this year's Spooky Season, I wanted to give a deep dive look into its greatest, most memorable monster: the Pale Man. The Pale Man's structure and role in the film reveals the power, aggression and ultimate fear of white patriarchal society. But it also gives us hope, and an avenue to fight against oppressive power regimes: to eat from their table.

Netflix's She-Ra has an amazingly true-to-life take on mythology. The show makes the understanding of mythology nuanced while also highly accessible. In this essay, we explore the role mythology plays in the world of She-Ra, looking at the She-Ra mythology, as well as transformations of myth through time. We look into the role of the First Ones in their own storytelling, as well as the stories they actively changed through their colonial influence.

CW: discussion of pregnancy and miscarriage

The Myth of Maternity is the social myth that all women are inherently maternal beings and are wanting of children - any woman who does not fit this consideration is either not a woman or is simply confused on the matter. This social myth is taken up by popular culture and televsion shows in particular in a variety of ways, and how these shows handle the myth says a lot about their views on it. While the Big Bang Theory, Scrubs and Brooklyn-99 uphold the myth, the Bold Type alters it.

Worldbuilding is one of those words frequently used in circles of video game developers and fans. It's process, development and successes can be best understood through a concept given to us by the anthropological study of mythology: implicit mythology. Implicit mythology teaches us that myth is performed, lived, and shared between individuals. Video games as implicit mythology tells us that worldbuilding in video games is a symbiotic experience fostered between developer and player.