Samuel J Ernst

         It's been a while since I've posted anything here. That's entirely by design, as I never intended this blog to be a regular thing. I just wanted a place to put analyses and other miscellaneous stuff I'm writing in between the big projects like novels and screenplays that I'm still slogging away on. I'm making a tiny bit of progress on those.  At this rate, Hunter x Hunter might come back from hiatus before I do. Yeah, this is the third post I’ve done about Hunter. That might be a lot. But there’s something in Hunter that I want to talk about, so that’s what I’m going to do. Source: medium.com      That thing is its use of foil characters.      “Foil character” is one of those terms that I learned back in seventh grade literature class or something, but didn’t really understand because they just had us memorize it and didn’t really discuss it with us or give us meaningful examples. It wasn’t until more recently that I b...

    When using TV pilots as examples for writing beginnings, you need to keep something very important in mind, something that becomes very evident when looking at Community . See, a TV show often ends up being very different from its first episode. On the other hand, with something like a book, the ending and the beginning both get published at the same time. Books don’t have the luxury of “finding their legs” that often happens with TV shows after the first season.     But sometimes a TV show doesn’t even have any intention of being the show the pilot says it’s going to be like.     Maybe Dan Harmon really did intend for Community to be a simple, grounded show about a lawyer becoming a nicer person in community college. But I feel like he wrote this pilot to make TV execs happy, and it wasn’t what he would really do if he was given full creative control. Source: slashgear.com     I mean, take a look at some of the show’s later episodes. Imagine...

       The first episode of the 2011 Hunter X Hunter is just that: a beginning. Unlike other television pilots, this one doesn’t encapsulate what the entire series really is. It hardly even tries. Proof: there’s no Killua. Killua is maybe the series’ second-most important character, and a fan-favorite. He appears prominently in the opening and ending themes, but first-time viewers have absolutely no idea who he is. Killua doesn’t actually appear until the 4 th episode.      The way this episode approaches the story might result from the fact that this series is an anime adapted from a manga. When Togashi started this story, he probably didn’t have all the future arcs in mind, and didn’t realize the rest of the series would get so dark.        But it’s also because the series is an adventure. Even on a purely thematic level, this first episode can’t encompass everything that will happen to Gon over the course of the series. The...

 Warning: this post contains spoilers for Jessica Jones Season 1. I should have mentioned in my past posts that I'll have lots of spoilers in this blog. It just happens that many things in shows, etc. that are worth discussing are also incredibly spoiler-y.      The antagonist of Jessica Jones ’ first season, David Tennant’s Kilgrave, is one of the MCU*’s best villains. As the result of experiments done on him as a child, Kilgrave emits pheromones that make anyone around him obey his every command. He’s really one of the scariest villains in TV. The show explores all the horrific things Kilgrave can do with his powers. He makes a random stranger throw hot coffee in his face for no reason other than that he kind of annoyed him. At another point, Kilgrave forced someone to donate both his kidneys to him. Kilgrave only needed one, but he made the guy give him both, just because he wanted them.      A lot of the horror in Kilgrave comes from how nonchalan...

How to Write a Compelling Villain Ensemble: The Knights of Ren vs The Phantom Troupe     If you’re writing a short story, novel, or screenplay, you probably have a villain. Maybe you even have multiple villains.     What if you have an entire group of villains, who more or less work together? After all, if your story can have multiple protagonists, or friends and side characters for the main protagonist, why can’t the villain have family and friends, too?     In this post, I’ll break down some elements that make a great villain ensemble, using two examples. The Phantom Troupe from Hunter X Hunter is an example of a well-written, interesting cast of villains, while the Knights of Ren from the Star Wars sequels serves as an example of what not to do. 1. Individuality Source:  https://www.cbr.com/hunter-x-hunter-strongest-weakest-phantom-troupe-members/       In a well-written ensemble, both the individuals and the group have thei...