Sometimes a story comes along, and you become so invested that you just can’t stop until you reach the end. If it’s a series, that feeling can go even further. Maybe you’ve been following it for years of your life. Even the gaps between each subsequent addition can be filled with conversations online that maintain that series as a permanent fixture for as long as you let it.

But eventually that story comes to an end and you have to return to your own life.

The question of the whether ghosts are meant to be understood as real becomes incredibly relevant when looking at the series The Haunting of Hill House (2018). It’s a show that practically begs the audience to question whether the ghosts in it are real or metaphors, and then simply answers: Yes.

Power ups are a staple of shonen anime, and like anything else that becomes so ubiquitous in a genre, the specific way it is utilized can tell us a lot about what that series is saying. With this in mind, let’s take a look at One Piece.

Video games are a medium where repetition is fundamental, so let’s talk about how it’s used in storytelling.

There is an early scene in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse that I feel is worth taking a closer look at. This isn’t one of the big action scenes, or a piece that gets into all the lore. No, just a small quieter scene, that breaks down the thematic metaphors this movie is working with.

Today let’s look at the pilot episode of Psych. Most pilots are just the average length of an episode for the specific series. Some are 2-part episodes. But then there are some, like Psych’s, with a runtime that’s about equal to an episode and a half.