Tropers / Magnus Force

Anime and Manga

Admittedly, I don't watch anime or read manga. I tried to get into the medium during high school, but ultimately didn't. However, I do have a few anime and manga series I would consider my favorites if I was were asked to pick.

• Azumanga Daioh
• Dinosaur Sanctuary (created the page for this one)
• Fullmetal Alchemist
• Inuyasha
• And while I do admittedly need to see more of them, I am partial to Doraemon and Keroro Gunsou.

Comics

I really enjoy the comic medium in general. However, I'm not really into the superhero stuff most typically associated with the medium, and instead am more of an enthusiast for literary graphic novels, to the point where I'd call it my favorite genre of literary fiction. I also used to be a major enthusiast of newspaper comic strips, and while I still have a fondness for the genre, I have its reservations with it these days. If I had to pick favorites:

• The Adventures of Tintin
• American Born Chinese
• Anya's Ghost
• Asterix
• The Far Side
• Foxtrot
• Persepolis

Film - Live-Action

I took a few film classes in college, but I wouldn't say I am a cinema nerd. In fact, I really do not watch many movies and tend to avoid big mainstream franchises. But if you asked me to pick my favorite movies.

• Anything featuring Ray Harryhausen (I consider Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad to be my favorite movies of all time)
• Forbidden Planet
• The Three Stooges
• And while I tend to stay out of major blockbuster franchises, I will admit to be being somewhat partial to Jurassic Park, Godzilla, and Star Wars.

Literature

I absolutely love books and bookstores, so literature is among my favorite mediums. However, I'm more of a non-fiction guy than a fiction guy, so my bookshelf is absolutely crammed with encyclopedias, textbooks, guidebooks, popular science/history books, and the like. My favorite topics to read are:

• History (Have two shelves worth of history books)
• Paleontology (Have one shelf worth of dinosaur books)
• Zoology (Have two shelves of books about animals)
• Mythology (Have one shelf worth of books about myths and legends)
• While I don't read much fiction, I do have a great love for Dinotopia and greatly enjoyed Leviathan and Dinoverse.
• And while I don't read as much of them as I sometimes wish I did, I am very fond of classic Speculative Fiction or Adventure Stories, such as The Lost World (1912) (my personal favorite of this mini-genre), Around the World in Eighty Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, Treasure Island, Frankenstein, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Some of these I've read graphic novel versions of or seen movie adaptations of, but I'm hoping to read more of the originals in the future.
• I also have many childhood favorites when it comes to fiction, with my top picks being the BIONICLE novels, Guardians Of Gahoole, Captain Underpants, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

Live-Action TV

To be perfectly honest, I'm not really a live-action TV person. I don't really watch sitcoms and dramas and consider reality TV to be a time-killing guilty pleasure and decent background noise at best. I do however greatly enjoy documentaries (primarily about nature and history, but I also enjoy TV about food and travel) and do consider myself a fan of Tokusatsu to a certain degree. My favorite TV shows though are:

• Blue Planet (wait, we DON'T have a TV Tropes page for this one???)
• Planet Earth
• Prehistoric Park
• Prehistoric Planet
• Ultra Series (my favorite entries are Ultraman Mebius, Ultraman, and Ultraseven)
• Walking with Dinosaurs
• And even though I have never seen it, I must admit that I have always wanted to get into Doctor Who but have never found the time to watch it.

Tabletop Games

Even though I have never played it in my life, I am extremely fascinated with Dungeons & Dragons (and Pathfinder. My personal book shelf actually has several Monster Manuals from different editions and I have managed to download PDFs of several more D&D/PF books. I even designed my own D&D world that incorporates elements from PF.

Video Games

I tried getting myself immersed into the world of video games during high school, but ultimately, I've come to realize I really only enjoy video games on an extremely casual level at most and thus lack the dedication to be a gamer. Plus, I find I prefer obscure, simpler, stylized, and/or independently-produced works. Regardless, I mostly play PC games and my library has a few favorites.

• Plants vs. Zombies
• Rising Dusk
• Röki (created the page for this one)
• Scribblenauts
• The Treasures of Montezuma
• While the big mainstream video game brands generally aren't my thing, I will admit to being partial to Starcraft I and Team Fortress 2.
• I've also been rather interested in getting into the "zoo builder" genre as of late, but currently haven't found any that suit my tastes or are able to run on my computer (Planet Zoo and Prehistoric Kingdom do catch my eye though).

Western Animation (WIP)

I am a HUGE cartoon enthusiast and absolutely LOVE cartoons. It's probably the medium I engage with the most actually (as you'll likely see by My Contributions below) and the one I actually find easiest to pick my all-time favorites from due to my extensive experience with it. My very deep dive into the medium means I have also developed a particular fondness for obscure and underrated cartoons, primarily those originating from outside the United States. However, I do like and respect the more mainstream stuff too.

Unlike all of my other interests, I keep this one entirely online, meaning nobody I know offline is aware of it and I do not talk about it with people I know in real life (which definitely explains why I dedicate such a significant chunk of my online persona to it).

• As a Canadian, I grew up watching a lot of Teletoon (and to a lesser degree YTV and Family Channel). While I am extremely aware of the negative reputation of Canadian cartoons (and at one point I would have mostly agreed with the popular opinion), I believe Canadian cartoons are actually extremely underrated and full of overlooked series, to the point where its a major focus of my editing work on this website. In particular, I would consider myself an especially big fan of the following Canadian cartoons:
  • The works of Nelvana. While it is borderline impossible for me to name all their works that I consider great (I greatly enjoy many of their works), I am especially big fan of their Late 80s-Early 2000s work, such as The Adventures of Tintin (1991), Babar, Rupert, Beetlejuice, Blazing Dragons, Stickin' Around, Moville Mysteries, and Redwall. Among their later Flash-animated shows however, my favorites are Detentionaire, Ruby Gloom, Jacob Two-Two, and Spliced.
  • The works of Fresh TV (Total Drama, 6teen, Stōked, and Grojband).
  • The early originals of Detour of Teletoon (Clone High, Undergrads, and Delta State). Also very fond of Bob and Margaret, which I often lump with the aforementioned three despite it not being a Detour series (probably because it was also an adult-aimed Nelvana series like '"Clone High and Delta State).
  • Additionally, I consider the Late 2010s to be a minor renaissance of sorts for Canadian cartoons that likely would have grown in the 2020s were it not for the massive decline in original productions occurring at the time that ultimately climaxed in 2023 with Teletoon's shutdown. Many of these shows remind me strongly of 2010s Cartoon Network and Disney TVA shows or Late 2010s-onwards European, Australian, etc. cartoons (see below), with my favorites from this period being Atomic Puppet, Wishfart, Cupcake & Dino: General Services, Fangbone!, Summer Memories, and Cracked (2016).
  • Canadian cartoons that don't fit into any of the abovementioned categories I'd also like to give a shoutout to are The Raccoons, Freaky Stories, Fred's Head, What's with Andy?, Cybersix, Jimmy Two-Shoes, Toad Patrol, ReBoot, and the works of Nerd Corps Entertainment.
• My interest in Canadian cartoons has also made me extremely interested in non-US western animation as a whole, and I have started watching many foreign cartoons as a result. I heavily credit my fondness for Canadian cartoons for getting me into these shows, and in fact, I find many non-US cartoons are extremely similar to Canadian cartoons (to the point where I have seen people mistake some for being actually Canadian). I'm still relatively new to this area of western animation but very eager to discover more. Expect to see additions to this in the future.
  • Among Australian cartoons, everyone loves Bluey (and I respect it greatly), but my personal favorites are actually The Strange Chores (which is my current avatar) and Kitty Is Not a Cat.
  • Among European cartoons, my personal favorites are Vikingskool and Monster Loving Maniacs. Additionally, I've greatly enjoyed 50/50 Heroes, Droners, The Unstoppable Yellow Yeti, Kaeloo, and Kaput & Zosky.
  • Among Latin America's animated series, I've seen and loved Oswaldo and Ba Da Bean.
  • Still haven't seen any African cartoons or western-inspired Asian animation, but I've heard of a few that seem enticing!

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• Among American cartoons, Cartoon Network has always been my personal favorite of the "Big 3 Kids Channels", as I used to watch a lot of it on trips to the US and saw many CN shows on Teletoon. In fact, it's the only one of the Big 3 I can easily give you a Top 10 Favorites from. In fact, those are: The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Camp Lazlo, Chowder, Samurai Jack, The Powerpuff Girls (1998), Ed, Edd n Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Regular Show, The Secret Saturdays, and Class of 3000. Honorable mentions include: Codename: Kids Next Door, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Adventure Time, Cow and Chicken, and We Bare Bears.
• I used to not care very much for Disney Television Animation and Disney Channel, but this changed big time in the 2010s thanks to its many hit series of that decade. Consequently, my fondness for Disney cartoons is grossly biased towards the 2010s and early 2020s. My favorites from them are: Amphibia, The Ghost and Molly McGee, Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero, Big City Greens, Gravity Falls, and Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja.
• Even as a kid, Nickelodeon was a kids network I paid little attention to, even despite seeing many of their Nicktoons on YTV. As a result, I'm not super obsessed with many of their extremely popular shows like most people are, but I do have my favorites from that channel. Said favorites are: My Life as a Teenage Robot, Rocko's Modern Life, Harvey Beaks, El Tigre, The Wild Thornberrys, ChalkZone, Rock, Paper, Scissors (Nickelodeon), and It's Pony.
• When it comes to American adult cartoons (my knowledge of non-Canadian international adult cartoons is extremely poor), my personal favorites are all from Fox (while I have enjoyed [adult swim]'s stuff, I don't have any personal attachment to them). And while Futurama is in fact my favorite TV show ever, I also love The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Bob's Burgers, and the early seasons of Family Guy (while have greatly enjoyed what I've seen of American Dad!, I still need to see more of it).
• I never watched much of PBS Kids' shows as a kid and even today, I still don't, but I do have my favorites from them (plus I take a lot of personal national pride in the fact many of these shows were made with the help of Canada), namely Let's Go Luna! and Wild Kratts.
• When it comes to streaming services, I must admit my knowledge of their animated series is atrocious and I really need to see more streaming-exclusive cartoons. Nonetheless, I do have a few I love. The biggest of these is easily Hilda (the only cartoon that competes with Futurama for my top spot), but I also greatly enjoyed The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants.

• 1001 Nights (2011)
• The Adventures of Chuck & Friends (technically this is a revival; the old page was cut)
• Agent Binky: Pets of the Universe
• Anatole (for both the books and their Animated Adaptation)
• Best Ed
• Big Blue
• Chop Chop Ninja and Chop Chop Ninja Challenge (made the former first despite it being the newer show!)
• Cracked (2016)
• Dino Ranch
• The Dumb Bunnies (for both the books and their Animated Adaptation)
• Fangbone! and Fangbone! Third Grade Barbarian
• Freaktown (my first one; although admittedly, I consider the page an Old Shame)
• Funpak
• Genius Genie
• Kingdom Force
• Little Charmers (credit to Excelsior 123 for helping with tropes for the show)
• My Goldfish is Evil
• My Pet Monster (the Animated Adaptation; the film already had a page)
• Norman Picklestripes
• Pirate Express
• Pirates: Adventures in Art
• Powerbirds (actually a revival, as the old page was cut)
• Ranger Rob
• Remy & Boo
• The Tofus
• Trucktown
• Urban Vermin
• What It's Like Being Alone
• Wishfart (also a revival, since the old page was cut)
• Zafari

Other notable contributions of mine:

• Vastly expanded the pages for Canadian series Atomic Puppet and Summer Memories.
• Added indexes for shows produced for Teletoon, YTV, and Family Channel.
• Created the page for the well-known Total Drama fanfiction author The Kobold Necromancer and for the Jimmy Two-Shoes fan project Jimmy Two-Shoes the Movie: Misery Loves Company.
• Resurrected the page for the Brazilian animated series Oswaldo.
• Created pages for the memetic uber low-budget Tokusatsu series Redman, the classic Tsuburaya series Kaiju Booska, the obscure kaiju flick Daigoro vs. Goliath, and the Toho disaster film Gorath.
• Launched the page for the manga series Dinosaur Sanctuary.
• Launched the page for the 2020 video game Röki
• Made most of the Character Sheets for the Ultra Series for all major entries up to 2015, as well as a page for the infamous Space Warriors 2000 (I still cannot believe I watched that...).
• Created the page for A*P*E, one of the best worst movies ever.
• Wrote a ton of pages for Toronto-based Canadian voice actors and more general Canadian actors, including Bryn McAuley, Dwayne Hill, Cory Doran, Scott McCord, Stacey DePass, Terry McGurrin, Seán Cullen, Lyon Smith, Katie Griffin, John Stocker, Richard Binsley, Jamie Watson, Darren Frost, Martin Roach, Annick Obonsawin, Harvey Atkin, Adrian Truss, Catherine Disher, Tajja Isen, Stephen Ouimette, Dan Petronijevic, Joseph Motiki, and many, many more.
• Made a couple pages for a few children's authors, as well as the original Scaredy Squirrel books.
• Launched pages for Teletoon Retro and Teletoon at Night, as well as Family Jr. and Family CHRGD.
• Launched pages for several animation studios, such as Cyber Group Studios, Alphanim, and Ellipse Animation.
• Created the pages for the Danish cartoon Monster Loving Maniacs and Brazilian Preschool Show Ba Da Bean (the second as a collaboration with ToonAbby), and also expanded the pages for the Finnish series The Unstoppable Yellow Yeti and the Australian cartoon Monster Beach.