The debate has been raging over the past week. Does presenting evil or immoral material in literature or movies cause people to be desensitized to it, or even to seek it out? Did we say the past week? We’re sorry, we meant to say that this debate has been raging over the past 160 years, ever since Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, help create a new genre called children’s literature. Carroll wrote stories which would later collectively be called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with a sequel called Through the Looking Glass. Carroll, writing under his real name of Dodgson, also wrote essays on the dangers of publishing literature which might lead readers into sin; being an Anglican deacon with a great love for the innocence of children made him particularly sensitive to this. Of course, there are those who believe that even Carroll’s stories of Alice are dangerous to children, but wasn’t that always the point of children's stories (a.k.a. fairy tales?) Weren’t fairy tales meant to warn people of danger? And what danger could possibly be had from reading about falling “upside down” into a dark underground hole where nothing is as it seems? Listen as we discuss the potential pitfalls of presenting stories aimed towards children, and please tell us what you think in the comments. — Streamed December 5, 2025

This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark are back after a four-week break just in time to obsess over the first installment of the final season of Stranger Things. Along with other obsessive fans in the world, we’ve been engaging in conjectures about the direction of the story and how it will end. But as writers, we also found ourselves obsessing over the depth of the story’s structure and the many clues to Henry’s backstory. We loved the inclusion of a model of the Tesseract from Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, as a plot vehicle. We also loved that there was more D&D lore. We talked about the Duffers’ strange habit of always including close-ups of the characters’ shoes when they come on stage for the first time. What kind of trope is this, and why do the Duffers use it? And what does it tell us about their skill as storytellers that we get so caught up in such details? —Streamed November 28, 2025

What makes a monster a monster? In this episode, we continue our discussion of Stranger Things, focusing appropriately enough for Halloween night on the monsters. From the Demogorgon of season 1, to Henry Creel’s transformation into Vecna in season 4, we tried to determine exactly why each of the monsters worked as vectors of horror. Why was the Demogorgon terrifying? Why was the body horror of the Mind Flayer so resonant? Why was the psychological torture that Vecna visited upon his victims before he killed them more terrifying than their actual deaths? And what of the humans of Stranger Things and the monstrous things they did; are their actions a separate horror, or inextricably connected to it all like so many corrupted vines? —Streamed October 31, 2025