Topics: Monique

Pro-Wrestling has been around for decades and has tens of millions of fans, but is often misunderstood by those on the outside. Moreover, the complex and serialized nature of pro-wrestling story-telling makes entry as a new fan difficult. A complete overview of the sport up through present trends and story-lines would be interesting: formation and history of the sport, brief summation of the legal players and corporate/owner factions, explanation of terminology used in the sport, brief summation of story-line factions (faces/heels/teams), and an explanation of why ' it's scripted, not fake ' is essential to understanding the appeal of the sport.

With the rise of awareness of transgendered individuals, a wide look at transgender representation on television could show how the definition of their cultural identity has changed, and how it can still improve. Consider to what extent "freak show" portrayals (a trans person as an oddity or comic relief) have been the bulk of trans portrayal in the past and how that is evolving.

Possible inclusions: Denise Bryson (Twin Peaks character), RuPaul's Drag Race, the media coverage of Caitlin Jenner, the new trans character on Sens8, Jazz Jennings (a young trans model doing a national ad campaign for Clean & Clear).

This could also be done with examples from movies, and be a topic for the Movie section. Buffalo Bill (Silence of the Lambs), The Crying Game, and Better Than Chocolate come to mind.

This topic is currently being discussed around the internet — do thorough searches to make sure you're not duplicating another article.

In _The Big Bang Theory_, Will Wheaton plays the character "Will Wheaton" but that character is an exaggerated version of Wheaton's public characteristics, it's not meant to be a true-to-life version of himself. The same is true for James Van Der Beek's character in _Don't Trust the B— in Apt 23_; though named "James Van Der Beek", we are not supposed to think that character legitimately portrays Van Der Beek's true character.

What challenges do actors face when playing "themselves"? Research through interviews might provide insights into how the actors feel. It seems like both men are having fun with the exaggerations, but are there difficulties? Do they struggle with fans who are unable to make the distinction? Do such roles diminish an actor's credibility by making their career into a joke, or does it create additional name recognition and re-ignite careers?

Probably a third actor/role should be added to round out this discussion.

Once upon a time, the music in video games was an after-thought — small, repetitive loops of tinny electronic sounds was the norm. With some games being built to hold up to literally hundreds of hours of game play, the music scores have gotten considerably more impressive. A friend of mine was recently surprised to realize the cool song playing on her Pandora "movie sound track" list was actually from TES5: Skyrim.

I would love to see an in-depth article about working in the video game industry as a musician. Are musicians permanently on staff, or are they contract-hire? Are most scores now done with orchestras, or does electronic production still rule? To what extent do video game musicians need to learn to code? How hard is it to break in? Do the musicians also create sound-effect loops, or is that a different specialty? Are there awards for video game music? Is there cross-over between video game musicians and those who regularly work in television or movies?

Domestic violence is a prominent theme in country music. Songs like "Goodbye, Earl", "Gunpowder and Lead", and "Independence Day" (to name just three) feature violent, deadly retribution from women onto the men who have abused them. But while "Independence Day" is a somewhat mournful song, the other two mentioned are upbeat tunes, almost party songs, and there are many others.

What is it about the country music demographic that makes these songs not only acceptable, but popular? Are the rates of domestic violence higher in the demographic that listens to country music, or lower? Since the popular versions of this song form promote retributive violence by a woman against her husband, is it possible to track the incidents of wife-on-husband violence w/in the demographic to see if it's higher than average?

No other genre of music has a niche just for this kind of song. I'd like to see someone explore why.

When it's time for a popular series to come to an end, the decision is sometimes made to extend the story by creating a new show using secondary or background characters. Sometimes these efforts are a success ("Saved by the Bell" was a bigger hit than "Good Morning, Miss Bliss"); sometimes they could/should have worked but didn't ("The Lone Gunmen" from "X-Files"); sometimes they were ill-conceived from the start (why was "The Raven" spun-off from "Highlander" and not, say, "The Joe and Methos Show"?).

Why do some spin-offs work and others crash and burn? How do the elements of setting, story, characters, and actors combine to create something fresh and exciting from a fading star? Are there spin-offs that might have been successful on their own merits if they weren't being compared to a beloved predecessor? Are there examples of shows that were more successful than they merited, due to the reflected glow of their source material? Are there spin-offs-in-name-only that bore so little resemblance to their original shows that they were unrecognizable as being part of the same world?

After the success of the Harry Potter series, the YA market exploded. The books released by publishers under the YA category today are not as "dumbed-down" or childish as was the trend for a long time — offerings for the last decade have tackled many social issues and provided bleak scenarios of the future. As with HP, the success of the Hunger Games series has also inspired a number books and series, except the HG wave is filled with post-apocalyptic or near-apocalyptic settings.

My initial reaction to the premise of the Hunger Games series was sadness — I was not interested in reading about children fighting to the death for food. Recently at a convention I asked the group about whether or not they believed the dystopia trend signals a despondency amongst the young people reading them — a lack of hope for the future of the world. A junior high teacher spoke up to say no, that she hears that a lot but she believes the trend is a hopeful one, because even though the main characters of these novels are struggling to stay alive in ruined worlds, the fact is that within the story, humanity has survived whatever collapse has been portrayed, and the young people in the story are re-building a better society.

I'd be interested in seeing a well-researched article from a psychological perspective that compares several different popular YA series, and discusses the issue of hopefulness within those series.

I'm putting this in Literature, but it could also be an article for the Writing category, depending on approach.

Berkeley Breathed has announced that he is picking up the adventures of Milo, Opus, and the rest. This is a good opportunity to do a Bloom County retrospective, and possibly muse a little on dangers of an artist returning to a creative well. Older fans will compare the new work to the previous; new fans will not have the base to draw from and will need the work to be fresh and compelling before they'll be drawn into it.

Could go in Arts or Writing categories, either, depending on the focus.

People often say of modern art, "my pre-schooler could draw that" or some variation. But I read an article in Psychology Today a couple of years back describing a study someone had done — they showed little kids art by masters and then had them recreate the image. The closest matches were shown side by side with the original and people were asked to pick the better version. Overwhelmingly, participants picked the piece done by the master artist. Turns out pre-schoolers *can't* do that.

So what are the fundamentals of modern art, and what basic terms and information does one need to appreciate or evaluate a Pollock, as opposed to kindergarten splatter? If I'm watching ballroom dancing, I know how (for a layman) to assess the way the torso and arms are held… what's the modern art equivalent to that?

It would also be interesting to see a comparison and brief synopsis of the major artists in the movement; Pollock is the only one I know.

This would require some research and probably a good handle on statistical analysis, but I would love to see an article on how Nielsen ratings cover the new television marketplace in comparison to how they worked when "tv" was three channels. How do modern Nielsen techniques account for Netflix, people who only watch the DVD collections, or torrent streaming? Do DVRs "report" which shows are live-viewed and which are time-delayed? And most importantly, how much effect do the Nielsens still have w/r/t to which shows are cancelled and which remain? Are cutting edge shows being dismissed because their fans are accessing them through non-traditional means?

Any fiction that focuses on a certain kind of technical profession inevitably makes short-cuts and cinematic allowances that cause experts in the field to grimace — my mathematician friends didn't want to watch NUMB3RS; the nurses I know won't watch Grey's Anatomy. This article would give examples of errors repeatedly made when portraying specific fields or professions.

This topic could actually be done as several different articles: say, 5 Shows that get Computers Wrong, and then a paragraph on each listing 2-3 commonly-occurring mistakes each show makes w/r/t to computers. (Like that trope about images being able to be refined until a fuzzy reflection in a window is a recognizable face, for instance.) Or the focus could be 5 medical dramas that repeatedly lean on bad medical procedures or tests.

Or from another angle, the focus could be on a specific show and abuses it makes w/r/t representing its field — 5 Times The Big Bang Theory got Physics Wrong, for example.

It used to be there was "Fantasy" (swords and magic) and "Science Fiction" (ray guns and technobabble explanations). Now there's urban fantasy, dystopia, a much stronger Young Adult market, and a dozen other variations and distinctions at use in the publishing world. A look at what genre classifications are currently in use would be interesting, and possibly a discussion of the extent to which those classifications are helpful in today's marketplace. (Perhaps we should all be learning to think in terms of "keywords" or "tags" rather than genres.)

There have been a number of ' where are they now ' type articles about reality shows stars that focus on the careers (or not) of reality show contestants like American Idol or America's Next Top Model. Did their careers succeed, etc. A more interesting question would be to look at a wide cross-section of reality show participants from many different kinds of shows and ask how the experience affected their lives in a broader sense. Are they comfortable in the long run with the exposure? How did the process of filming disrupt their lives? What (if any) were the long-term consequences of being on tv? What would they change or do over? A good version of this article will require sorting through published interviews, but would be even better with original interviews if they could be obtained.

Some settings or physical locations play such a strong role in a film that they can be considered a character in their own right. There are a lot of ways to develop this into an article — you could focus on a genre (John Ford's westerns come to mind), or do it as a top ten best, or look at a particular director's use of settings (Stephen King movies tend to take place in cramped, trapped, isolated settings which add to the horror and unraveling of the MC's sanity). Lots of opportunities for striking or visually interesting images in the article as well.

The show Scandal, written by African-American Shonda Rhimes, features a powerful woman of color as its central protagonist. (Olivia Pope) However, most of the other characters on the show are white, and race is often an important undercurrent in the plot. A recent episode featured a story about a white cop shooting an (unarmed, it is eventually proven) black youth. Olivia is hired by the police to "fix" the situation, but she soon is fired and puts herself on the side of the black community instead.

To what extent does Scandal subvert expectations about black/white race relations in the US, and to what extent does it tacitly support the status quo? Is it problematic that all Olivia's main love interests are white men? Does the show empower black women, or prove that they can't get ahead without a white/male patron? Does it matter that Olivia dresses primarily in white and frequently refers to herself as a "white hat" when she's protecting the innocent? What can we assume is the show's "race agenda" (if any) and how well does it fulfill that agenda?

Serialized story-telling has both benefits and pitfalls. On the one hand, the publisher/producer has a guaranteed (sort of) audience built-in, and on the money side, that means easier profits. On the creative side, but the writer(s) and the audience have a certain comfort level with the setting and characters, and the deeper questions in the work have more time to be asked and answered.

On the other hand, if a plot only matters to the extent that it affects change in the protagonist, how many serious conflicts can the protagonist go through before they are changed to the point of being unrecognizable to their established fan base? How does the story stay continually fresh and avoid the re-hash of proven plot-lines? To what extent are writers "trapped" by elements introduced in the beginning of the story that they are unable to change in later volumes?

I'm thinking here of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, and Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books. But the article could be done using long-running tv shows as the focus (Supernatural comes to mind) or certainly most comic series fit this question as well. (Neil Gaiman once said that serialized story-telling was like jumping out of a plane and knitting yourself a parachute on the way down.)

This topic could easily go in the Comics or TV sections as well.

A great number of shows now include characters who are considered a legitimate "genius" within the context of their own canon. Big Bang Theory plays the trope for laughs, but most shows with geniuses are (crime) dramas. Frequently, too, the genius in question is a child prodigy (or as in the case of NUMB3RS, had been a prodigy) and often the genius has a wide range of specialties across multiple fields of study, and in some cases, possesses multiple, unrelated PhDs.

I'd love to see an analysis of the trope from the standpoint of how realistic the portrayals are, esp. w/regards to the socialization issues these characters so often have. Also, if the analysis could be done in loose chronological appearance, I'd be interested in seeing if there's been a sort of "grade inflation" with these characters — have they gotten younger and broader in ability in an effort for each canon's "genius" to out-genius other characters in a given genre?

Suggested shows: Big Bang Theory, NUMB3RS, Scorpion, Bones, Stargate, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Sherlock (possibly over-used), House…