Science Fiction Parody & Satire - Week Fourteen

I think parody and satire work really well with the science fiction genre, especially after watching The Stepford Wives during the break in class this week. I'd seen the movie before and it has been one of my favorites, just because it's so brilliantly funny. Despite how it ends (as most movies that begin really good and fizzle out at the end *cough* horror films *cough*) The Stepford Wives more than makes up for it during the exposition scenes where Joanna is set up to be her own woman and she is removed to a society that is basically a 1950's Better Home & Gardens magazine come to life.

It's a hilarious and, in my opinion, well paced first half of the movie and if they could have maintained that throughout, The Stepford Wives would have been a knockout. It's a great sci-fi satire where the men of this gated community want to have the perfect life and the perfect wife, so they go out of their way to make robotic clones of their currently existing wives. In typical sci-fi fashion, the heroine of the story takes it upon herself to set the little society back to rights any way she can, even without the help of her friends (who were also turned into robotic clones) and the entire Stepford society completely flips with the previously cloned and replaced wives taking their revenge by putting all their husbands on house arrest. Seems fitting.

Literary Speculation - Week Thirteen

I've heard of the concept of Ice-Nine and have been intrigued with it for quite some time now so I took the chance to read Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and I was definitely not disappointed. The entire concept of Ice-Nine, though entirely fictional, is so intriguing.

Ice-Nine is a polymorph of water that has the ability to instantly freeze any body of water or water substance and create more Ice-Nine, like seeds to spread at a rapid pace. This includes oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and even the human body (say if the Ice-Nine hits the eyeball). And of course, as all good end of the world sci-fiesque stories must go, Ice-Nine freezes the entire world, killing off most of the world.

After reading Cat's Cradle, I did as much research into Ice-Nine as I could because I wanted to know absolutely everything about it (spoiler: there isn't much because it doesn't exist but you do get some interesting reads about the actual melting points and things like that) and I think that's the mark of good literature.

In terms of writing strictly for genre or writing elements of genre in your writings, I think it should be open. The beauty of art is that you can explore different avenues of one thing and (since we're talking about literature) if an author wants to use elements of sci-fi or horror or fantasy in their writings, they should! I suppose the only time that it would be a necessary or important distinction is if you're specifically looking to read something that is strictly genre or if the added genre elements add or take away from whatever you're reading. In my personal opinion., that should be the only time that the distinction matters.

The Aquatic Uncle - Week Thirteen Point Five

1. Are there any prominent symbols in the story? If so what are they and how are they used?
There are a lot of symbols that permeate The Aquatic Uncle such as fins versus feet, water, and land. Talk of fins and talk of paws is the subject of a good majority of the story, as it's a way to separate the more "civilized" animals from the ones that cannot renounce the old ways of living in the water. In regards to the more "civilized" and more evolutionarily developed animals, there is the constant battle of land versus water. It's not an actual battle, like with wars or anything, but there definitely is strife between those who choose to stay in the water and those who try to coax their loved ones out of the water and into a new way of life.

2. What connections did you make with the story? Discuss elements of the story with which you were able to connect.
As I stated in my last answer, I definitely picked up on the differences that are seen between old and new generations. The younger generations are generally more quick to adapt to new ways of thinking, new ways of life, and new ideas that present themselves to them rather than constantly dwell on how things were decades ago.
When uncle N'ba N'ga tries to coax Qfwfq and his family into coming back into the water with him, saying that there is plenty of room and more worms than ever to eat when they come to visit him is reminiscent of how some parents or grandparents or what have you try to convince the younger generations to slow their pace of advancement. Sometimes it seems like older generations don't understand how the newer world works and think that it's easy as anything to go back to the old ways.
Like how college students are in severe debt after graduating and getting jobs is a lot harder than it might have been in their grandparents' time -- as an example.

3.What changes would you make to adapt this story into another medium? What medium would you use? What changes would you make?
I think it would be cool to adapt this story into maybe a short animation. I would probably give the beginning animation a quick voice over to explain that the species were evolving and separating from the water (or in Uncle N'ba N'ga's case, staying in the water and relate how this caused strife between families). I wouldn't change the story much as it's pretty straight forward and self-explanatory, but I would probably make it clearer as to why Lll chose to go live with N'ba N'ga instead of her fiancé since she was so accustomed to living on land and had only known that her whole life.

Diverse Position Science Fiction - Week Twelve

For this week, I read Octavia Butler's Bloodchild with the rest of the class and I actually quite enjoyed it. Octavia Butler puts a nice spin on a very different kind of future where it's the men who are bearing children, and not human children either, but the children of a species that we've never heard of before.

At first I thought this might have been a slave narrative in the form of an alien co-habitation story but Octavia Butler has said in a few interviews that this is not about that at all. It's been explicitly stated that this story is about love, symbiosis, and male pregnancy. As unsettling as the narrative is, I think it really is a beautiful story from start to finish. The humans (or Terrans) as they're called have come to this planet and have eased into a very specific life with the Tlic. They are very good at incubating Tlic eggs, raising the young within them until they're ready to be taken out (through a graphic surgery performed by the Tlic, themselves.

Bloodchild was written and published around the same time as Bell Hooks' Feminist Theory so we can interpret this story from a feminist point of view. We see an interesting role reversal in Bloodchild where men are the ones tasked to bear children (even if they're not human children) and the women are pretty much left alone to continue the human race for the Tlic. We could see how this story affects people just by reading it and discussing it in class. Some were visibly uncomfortable by the graphic description of the Tlic infant birth, simply because it's not "normal" for men to give birth, but some of us in class were interested in the turn of events.

I think Octavia Butler does a great job of exploring gender role reversal (in terms of who bears the children) and I think the story works very well within its context.

Monsters, directed by Gareth Edwards, is a movie about large, octopus-like aliens who've piggybacked on a NASA probe and fell to earth (around the Mexican-USA border) and are now roaming (and multiplying) within both countries. Andrew Kaulder, a photographer, is tasked with going to Mexico and retrieving his employer's daughter, Sam (although why would they send a photographer? I don't know).

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. One of my favorite tropes in movies (especially monster/alien movies) is to not show the threat until the very last (or even not at all) and this movie did that really really well.

In keeping with the topic for this week and whether or not the movie reflected the values and perspectives of majoritarian culture, that's hard to say. Most of the movie took place in Mexico, but I often found myself forgetting that, because both of our characters were white and they were alone for a good chunk of time. It was nice to see how the outer Mexican towns were faring against living with these large alien creatures, and how it seemed that daily life just kept going on like normal because "where are we gonna go?" as one man responded when asked why he and his family didn't just relocate.

I actually liked that not everybody was trying to relocate to the United States or flee further south. The aliens were pretty predictable, having specific migratory seasons that could be tracked and counted on time and again, so the people of these smaller towns, and even a larger port city, just made it work with their daily lives.

Cyberpunk & Steampunk - Week Eleven

I find stories/movies/tv about altered realities/alternative realities really interesting. It's incredibly fun to entertain the idea that, in an alternate timeline, there are people who are living out their lives as we are, but say, with Kaiju running around, or with the ability to enter people's dreams, etc. Both William Gibson's Neuromancer and Satoshi Kon's Paprika were a refreshing look into how humans can tap into a wireless network of both the internet and dreams.

Gibson's Neuromancer tells the story of Case (or Henry Dorsett Case) and his quest to find a way to hook himself back up to the global computer network that was ripped away from him when it was found out that he was stealing from his boss. Neuromancer's world is one of linking up to cyberspace via a virtual reality dataspace they call the 'Matrix' and its also one where, if you have the means, the connections, and the money, you can basically build your body from the ground up.

The thing that I liked most about Neuromancer, as illustrated by the book cover above, is that there are multiple layers of reality. Much like most stories where there is a Matrix of some sort there's always the "real world" the world of the Matrix and possibly (depending on how deep the creator wants to explore this idea of layers) multiple other worlds within the original context of the story (think Inception and all it's levels, Limbo included). It's a great way to explore narrative especially when your narrator is unreliable.

I unfortunately haven't gotten the chance to finish Neuromancer, but from what I've read it's a pretty wild ride. It moves pretty fast for a book written in the 80's, I think. We're in one location with Case and Molly, working for Armitage, the next, we're on a boat out at sea, the next we're somewhere else entirely. As was stated in class, Neuromancer doesn't take a whole lot of time to get from one place to another. It doesn't concern itself much with scene transitions or visible montages the reader can follow and that can be a little disorienting. Then again, the entire world of Chiba City can get pretty disorienting, especially if you're still able to freely access the global computer network; you're in, you're out, you're everywhere.

In much the same way Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon is a pretty disorienting film, simply because the world of dreams that the DC Mini allows us to access is expansive, and easily bled into the real world. Some people can't even tell when they've been uplinked to the dream world because the transition is so quick and seamless.

In a world where there is a machine (the DC Mini) that allows people to enter other people's dreams and record them for review, Doctor Atsuko Chiba uses the DC Mini to illegally perform psychotherapy on people outside of the research facility by assuming her alter ego Paprika to help them get to the root of their anxieties. It all goes wrong though as the world of dreams is taken over by someone with a god complex and they begin to meld the dream world with the real world.

What I really liked about Paprika was that Paprika wasn't just a created alter-ego for Dr. Chiba to use to protect her identity when psychoanalyzing patients. As the movie progressed and we learned more about the world of the DC Mini, Paprika became a full fledged character in her own right, even going so far as to save the world when it was really needed.

This movie had an interesting "Inception"-like quality to it, which I really enjoyed. It's always nice to see how media affects other media and this movie also demonstrated the different layers that Neuromancer provided, even blurring the lines of those layers. The watchers of this film are taken on an interesting and face paced ride of what it means to be lucid in this world and we're never really sure 100% what is real and what is dream.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel" -Neuromancer

The Fiction of Ideas - Week Ten

For this week, I read I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harland Ellison and it was a ride from start to finish.

The story takes place 109 years after the destruction of humanity at the "hands " of a self-aware supercomputer who refers to itself as AM (originally meaning Allied Mastercomputer, but eventually referring to its state of being by basing itself off of René Descartes philosophy, "I think there fore I AM").

AM's Talkfrield #1: "I THINK THEREFORE I AM"

AM takes full control of the third World War that has been raging and carries out mass genocide, save for four men and one woman. The narrator of the story, Ted, maintains that they have no reason why AM decided to keep the five of them alive, if only to torture them for the rest of time. That's exactly what AM has done. Each character has been either physically or mentally altered (AM's doing) and is tortured on a daily basis, sometimes not eating anything decent for months, often subjected to the elements (whatever elements AM can created in his vast, cavernous computer underground and each wishing that they were dead.

I think the world that Ellison has created is terrifying, and definitely a sy-fi future that I wouldn't ever wish to see. To think of the world run and destroyed by a computer that we created, completely taken over by this entity that is made up of binary code and some strange God Complex is something that I often think about, so to see it manifested in writing makes me even more curious.

There's a lot of media present where humans create artificial intelligence, whether in the form of humanoid androids or stationary computers, and they always turn on us in some way. Always. create them to make life easier for us, to give us less responsibility for our daily tasks (whether those tasks are keeping a house clean or running a government) and we always, always have to take full responsibility in the end, either by being punished and tortured for 109 years or watching everybody around us get eliminated and very few of us are left behind to pick up the pieces.

So I guess the real question is, do we actually think that this could happen if we were to create a super computer with hyper intelligence like AM, or Portal's GLaDOS, or even HAL 9000, would they turn on us like we think they would? Or are we just being paranoid? Should we even risk it?

The Space Opera - Week Nine

This week I read Murray Leinster's First Contact and was pleasantly surprised at how much information Leinster was able to fit in a short amount of time.

Tommy Dort is a photographer on the ship Llanvabon, set out to photograph the turn and evolution of the Crab Nebula (a feat that nobody on Earth would be able to see considering how long it takes light to reach our planet) and is present on board when the Llanvaon encounters another ship, hovering amongst the mist of the Nebula. The two ships sit quietly, neither wanting to turn tail to retreat for fear the other would blast them or stealthily follow them back to their home planet.

Eventually the crew establishes contact with the "aliens" on board the other ship, which is described as jet black and absorbs all light, and they figure out that the aliens don't have ears, and they don't speak from mouths. Instead, they send pulses from a part of their head and communicate in a way that we'd easily recognize as being telepathic.

While the skipper of the Llanvabon and the skipper of the alien ship barter and debate with each other on what the best protocol is, Tommy actually connects and establishes communication with what can only be described as his counterpart on the ship. They "talk" for about two hours and feel a sense of camaraderie while their skippers are conversating about whether or not to kill each other, and Tommy eventually states that the aliens have the "same psychology as we do".

I like that Murray Leinster brings in and explores the idea of duality in this story. There's is a theory that somewhere out there (mostly dealing with parallel universes) there is someone who is just like us, living out their lives as we are (though perhaps a bit differently, maybe they'd made different choices, turned left instead of right for example). The theory typically tends to mean that the other "us' is human as well, but I don't see why that can't apply to "aliens". We already know that there are people living on our won planet who tend to remind us of people we already know. Maybe there's someone you've seen on the street who looks like/talks like/laughs like an ex, your sibling, or a friend. I think this theory and idea could definitely apply to a foreign species, especially one that has the "same psychology as we do".

Mythic Fiction and Urban Fantasy - Week Eight

Myths have been around for ages, and by that, I mean, they've been passed down from generation to generation; from nearly ancient times up until our modern day. They've lived through word of mouth for the longest time, until humans innovatively decided to write everything down so we wouldn't lose important information, stories, etc through the unintentional game of telephone that is played when one person tries to relay a story to another. Details are bound to be lost or changed.

But that can also be a wonderful thing to happen.

The novel and movie for this week, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water are all about reinventing the myth and, in my opinion, they do it beautifully.

I'll be honest and say that I've never really read a whole lot of Anansi stories but I did a bit of research after finishing Anansi Boys and was pleasantly surprised at how much Anansi was kept the same as well as how he was changed. Since he dies in the very first pages of the novel, we only get to really see who his character was through the eyes of his son, Charlie, and everybody else who'd ever known him (the old ladies, and the animal spirits in the other world). We know, through Charlie, that Anansi embarrasses him (like a total dad) and has a way of getting people to like him through almost doing no work at all.

We find out through Mrs. Higgler, that Charlie's dad is actually a god and that Charlie has a brother who inherited all of Anansi's tricksiness. Though this is completely new information to him, Charlie accepts it pretty quickly and is suddenly rocked out of his mundane, everyday life into the world of the gods when his brother, Spider, shows up and messes up his life (though not in a cruel-hearted way).

Lady in the Water completely creates an entirely new legend (at least I haven't heard anything about it, nor can I find much about the Narf legend online) and ties it in with man. In ancient times, we lived in harmony with sea nymphs and coexisted with the magic that was in the world, but eventually (like man must do in all creation myths) we turned away from the old ones to form a new path and we've ended up forgetting the old ways. The "old gods", as it were, do their best to turn us back to the light but we refuse to see and refuse to believe.

Cleveland Heep is a maintenance man for a building complex who has a pretty intense stutter and whose family were murdered. He knows he must keep on keeping on, but he doesn't feel like there's much to it day in and day out. That is, until he meets Story a Narf (water nymph like character) who's very presence eliminates his stutter and awakes a strange sense of hope within him, and he finds that he is able to bring people together and inspire others to do good. Cleveland Heep is your ordinary person who has something out of the ordinary happen to him, and he takes to it bravely and sees his promise to help Story get home all the way to the end.

The retelling and reinvention of a myth is a great thing. In both of these stories, the new twist on the "old" myth allows ordinary people (or in Fat Charlie's case, people who think they're ordinary) have a pretty grand adventure to find out who they are. Today, we are all about finding out who we are and feeling like we need to go through long trips (eg: backpacking through Europe) in order to discover what makes us tick, and these stories reflect that I think. It's a nice thought that ordinary people can do extraordinary things and still be able to help people in great need when they may feel they've nothing left to live for (lookin' at your Mr. Heep) and I think that's why updating and placing old myths into contemporary culture is important. Even though there may be magic involved, the lessons are still the same; individuals can do great and amazing things.

"You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it all all. It was doing the best it could.

"...There are myth-places. They exist, each in their own way... They are inhabited still..." - Anansi Boys

The Novel of Spiritual Education - Week Seven

It's always interesting when authors use magic as a form of navigation through our complex youth in young adult novels. For the most part, magic is there to be an interesting component of every day life, a way to make little tasks easier (depending on what book you're reading or what movie you're watching). What these books tell us, though, is that magic, like anything and everything we encounter in our lives, takes work, hard work, and a sense of deep understanding of ourselves at our very core.

I could talk about Harry Potter all day long, and how it takes years and years for even the most talented witches and wizards to master all manner of spells and potions. The Night Circus  is no different. Celia and Marco are two... Magicians, I suppose it would be better to call them that, who train and are trained their entire life in two very different forms of magic for a competition that neither of them signed up for, yet one of them has to win. Without fully realizing why or what they're training for, they dive blindly into their studies in order to master their magic and in order to emerge from the competition as the victor.

Like most teenagers (though I think Marco and Celia are adults) the two characters are forced into "extracurricular activities" in addition to their daily life of growing into fully realized adults. Even though their extracurricular activities and the activities of normal every day teenagers are vastly different, the feelings are similar. During those years, especially if you've been doing those lessons for a long time, it can feel like it takes a lot of courage to go against your parents and back out. I think that's something that readers of the book can relate to. When Celia and Marco decide they don't want to participate in the competition, things get dangerous and they end up paying the ultimate price. Sure, we won't actually die if we decide to end our cello lessons or quit soccer practice, but it can sure feel that way.

Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits has interesting spiritual undertones. Although, I suppose they can just be tones, as the head honcho of the Time Bandit world is literally called the Supreme Being. He is God, or a god at least in that realm, and is complete control of Creation. The dwarves who Kevin accompanies on their adventures through time are his helpers.

The entire movie is spent wandering time and evading Evil (who I guess can be compared to the Devil) and trying to keep the Supreme Being from finding out they have the map, which, as it turns out, is completely moot. The Supreme Being already knew that the dwarves had the map, he, in fact, let them take it, like some handicap in a game they were all playing. He knew everything was going to happen and let it happen so he could test out his Creations, much like a god (I'm just going to accept the fact that SB is God and he's bored and toying with Kevin's little life for his own amusement).


                                                                    The map of all that was and will be

Time Bandits tells us that we can have awesome adventures and choose our own paths but ultimately the Grand Creator (or Supreme Being) is the one in control and that was His plan all along. We are nothing but pawns for Him to test and play with. He knows how everything is going to play out and we are doomed to believe that we have free will and choice. We are even shown that He will punish us if we don't do as we're told (in this case, Kevin and the Dwarves forgot to pick up a piece of Evil once he was defeated and the Dwarves get a 16% pay cut, jobs they don't want and Kevin's parents exploded, rendering him an orphan).

The Heroic Journey Through Week Six

At first I wasn't sure what to write about for this week in terms of the heroic journey in regards to The Hobbit but after Monday's class I think I'd like to talk about the heroic journey in general and women in fiction (specifically women in Tolkein's universe).

It was a topic that had to come up during discussion because how could you talk about The Hobbit without talking about the movie and how could you talk about the movie without talking about Tauriel? It was a topic that I almost wish we had taken more time to discuss rather than let it sputter out and die in silence, but I was "too tired" when I really shouldn't have been because this is important to me.

Tauriel, in the second movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, is a brand new character that Tolkein's universe had never seen before. She's the Captain of the Elven Guard underneath Thranduil's rule and realm and she's absolutely different from the other female elves that we'd seen before (in reference to the Lord of the Rings movies). I can't talk about Tauriel without comparing her to Arwen and Galadriel, yet she deserves to stand on her own. Galadriel and Arwen are both elves of different areas of the world, hold different titles and, of course have their own (pretty small in my opinion) part to play through the Fellowship's journey.

Both Arwen and Galadriel are etherial, otherworldly and seem, at times, quite aloof, though we know that they hold nothing but information for Frodo and his friends. They are written (again, at least in the films) as information holders, and tend to not "do" very much. Arwen saves Frodo from the wound the Ring Wraiths inflict on him and bring him to her father's kingdom so he can heal, and then promptly spends the rest of the trilogy fighting over her personal decision to give up her immortality so she can be with Aragorn without the threat of outliving him.

Don't get me wrong, Arwen and Galadriel are wonderful, amazing characters, both of them adding to the mystery and complexity of Middle Earth but for me (and a lot of other people, I'm sure) Tauriel offered something a little more. She was created and implanted into The Hobbit as a way to break up the dominating male cast and, admittedly, to give women more of a reason to see the film. From the promotional posters and the trailers and such, Tauriel looked amazing. She was a kick ass, no nonsense character who, although Elves and Dwarves were supposed to loath each other, decided to help out a rag tag group of Dwarves and their Plus One Hobbit get out of Mirkwood so they can continue on her journey. I had hoped that she was going to tag along as extra security. I had hoped that she was going to stay as her own character and not be written as a potential love interest, but that's exactly what we got.

And people hate her.

This is what we're greeted with on her Wikia page. She's a character in the movie, she's cannon now! 

This isn't a fanfiction that someone wrote.

Tauriel's appearance in the film was a great step forward, her writing in the film forced her to stay where most women in film stay and that's not okay. The audience is immediately forced to watch a growing love triangle between her, Thranduil's son Legolas, and one of the youngest Dwarves, Kili. Now if you want two characters to fall in love, that's fine, great even! But to fall back on the crutch of the love triangle is weak, outdated, and annoying. I want her to be so much more. Yes, she's based heavily off of the "Strong Female Character" trope, which just hearing someone devalue a female character to that one single trope is annoying, but she's what we've got and we need her in the movie. So what if she's non-cannoncial? The entire Hobbit trilogy should be counted as non-cannonical because of the appearance of the White Orc (he wasn't in the books) or the Necromancer (who was just mentioned, briefly, in an offhand comment, way at the beginning).

I read an article a while ago that I think about sometimes, especially when I'm reading/watching anything that has only one or two female characters. It's about this father who read The Hobbit  to his daughter one night and was surprised when she told him that she thought of Bilbo as a woman. At first he wasn't very receptive to it, but once he began changing Bilbo's pronouns to she/her/hers, he found miraculously (sarcasm intended) that there was no change to the story. Lady Bilbo was just as strong, sarcastic, clever and brave as Male Bilbo and, guess what, THE STORY DIDNT CHANGE. Bilbo being a woman didn't ruin the story as some people might claim she would. She didn't grow whiny, or weak, or think any of her Dwarf companions were attractive; she continued on with her adventure, just as lost, just as heroic, and just as wonderfully cunning as the original Bilbo did.

Women don't ruin stories. Women don't have to be written as weak, something to be saved, as only information holders. They're awesome and great additions (especially in Tolkein's universe where there are thousands upon thousands of male characters with names! and only a handful of named women, and even a smaller few who aren't barmaids). This is important to me and it should be important to everybody.

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow bones on his fellow man" - Joseph Campbell "The Hero With A Thousand Faces"

Witches and Women in Genre - Week Five

When someone mentions witches, we tend to think of old, ugly, crone-like women with warts on their noses and, perhaps, a high pitched voice that just instills fear into every heart that's near enough to hear (lookin' at you, Wicked Witch of the West). They're the stereotypical witches of fiction, movies, and folk tales, which makes sense because, way back when, stories about witches were meant to teach children lessons about not wandering too far from home or obeying their parents lest there be consequences. In those stories, witches had to be old, ugly, and evil.

That does not necessarily feel like the case for the witches in Diana Wynne Jones' Aunt Maria (pronounced ma-RYE-uh). At least right off the bat. We enter this world with news that the main character Midge's father has recently passed and their relative (by marriage only) may need some help in her daily tasks as she is quite old and might be unable to care for herself properly. Midge, her mother, and her older brother, Chris spend the rest of their Easter holiday in Cranbury, a quiet, seemingly deserted town by the sea.

It's interesting to read about the witches in this book, because they don't embody the witch stereotype at all. They don't fly on brooms, or practice potions, have black cats (Aunt Maria seems to really hate animals of all sorts -- mostly because she knows those animals were created by her out of other people) and they certainly don't wear extravagant gowns or robes. They're more of a mystery as we really only get to see them through Midge's eyes, and way after the fact when Midge writes down everything she can remember that day. They have power, yet they rarely use it and seem to bow down to Aunt Maria, who Midge at one point secretly dubs the Queen of Cranbury.

I think the witches in this novel conform more to an archetype of witch than a stereotype. In Aunt Maira the witch's power comes from the spoken work (eg: they could carry on a conversation with someone and their magic would be warping that person without them knowing). The Stereotypical witch would use a wand or some incantation. The women are also just... normal looking women. They are the types of old ladies we'd see walking down the street. They're not particularly ugly, or impossibly beautiful, they're fairly normal. Not to mention they use wheelchairs to get around rather than broomsticks. It's an interesting take on the witch that Diana Wynne Jones does and I think she does it absolutely well.

A little more comfortable than riding a broom for hours?

There is a definite "battle of the sexes" going on in this book and it seems that the women have been "winning" for at least twenty years. All of the men seem to be zombies (not in the undead sense) and the ones that can think clearly and articulate their feelings, constantly express disgust for the women of Cranbury and especially Aunt Maria. While these feelings if discontent are understanding, some of the men say offhand comments to Midge (like "this is men's work") when she's the only one who seems to be trying to help them.

I suppose we could look at this as our culture fearing women in power. Aunt Maria seems to have a lot of patience when it comes to people who annoy her (she often ignores them or sends them away to do menial tasks) but when they finally hit the last straw, bad things tend to happen. The men of the town hate Aunt Maria, yet they're afraid of her, fearing that they are "too weak" to do anything about it because their leader disappeared and without him, the men view themselves as useless.

The best part of the book is that Midge is the one who does all the work and help to bring peace back to Cranbury. She helps take down Aunt Maria because of the horrible things she's done to the people she loves, and the other people of the town and believes that there is a better way to co-exist rather than keeping everybody under her thumb. Once Chris gets turned into a wolf and her mother brainwashed into believing that they've left Chris in London, Midge really steps up to right all the wrongs that have been done to her family. 

The Weird - Week Four

Weird is a word we typically use to describe when something is out of the ordinary/it's something we've never seen/when it makes us feel uncomfortable, etc. I like that the term "weird" can cover all sorts of bases with just a single utterance. The "weird" is something people are drawn to for their own reasons, which vary greatly from person to person.

For this week I read Feed. It's one of my favorite books of the past few years and I wanted a chance to re-read it so I did. Feed takes place twenty years after the Rising, a time when an (un)deadly virus swept the nation and eventually the world, infecting every single person on the planet that, at any moment, could cause people to become zombies. The virus, originally meant to cure every disease and illness from cancer to the common cold, turned hostile and effectively unstoppable.

What's weird about Feed isn't that the world tries to get back to absolute normal while coexisting with the zombie hoards that live on the outskirts of their safe zones. It's that the hardly focuses on the zombies at all. The threat of spontaneous amplification (turning into a zombie) as well as the zombies that already exists are constantly mentioned and touched on throughout the novel, but more than that, Feed is about a brother/sister journalism team uncovering a global conspiracy done by the very forces that were put in place to keep the world safe.

I really really enjoyed everything about Feed and I'd recommend it anybody (which I have, on several occasions). The thought that a political scandal/conspiracy could still thrive and fester when there are zombies looming on the horizon just blows my mind. It's weird to think that a political/mystery/monster/horror novel could exist but it does, and it's done beautifully. I came for the zombies, I stayed for the unveiling of a scandal... With zombies.

The Cabin in the Woods was weird in the beginning and only really got weird for me at the very end. The opening begins with two scientists walking through a secret facility (assumably underground - because what's movie science without and underground facility?) discussing trivial things like having children and how strange their girlfriends are. It all seems pretty normal and nonsensical and then the title hits us in the face like a pet trying to wake you up in the morning:

Wow, okay, Cabin in the Woods, we see you.

I'm not going to spend too much time talking about how strange this movie was, because it was very weird. Besides the beginning, we're treated to what feels like a normal horror film (the group is stranded in an unknown place, there is a strange backwater character blatantly foreshadowing all the dangers the group is going to face and who they, of course, dismiss, and there was a sex scene where there probably shouldn't have been a sex scene).

But that's where all the normal things ended. In this film, we find out that weed ultimately saves the day, and the "fool" character is the only one able to do anything about the monster that attack them. There was all sorts of technology present that I'm sure we don't have (or maybe I'm just in the dark about these huge forcefields just chilling out in the middle of the woods somewhere which could be a definite possibility).

I think we enjoy watching/reading/absorbing weird media because it shocks us, it takes us out of our comfort zone. We are allowed to live in the "what if" moment for a while. What if the zombie apocalypse happened and the human race continued and adapted to it? What if giant monsters were real and we treated hunting them like we treat hunting deer or fishing? What if we had to routinely sacrifice five people to keep the "ancient ones" from destroying the world? It's compelling to us because we're able to imagine a world where real life doesn't necessarily have to apply.

Ground floor: death and early retirement

PS: Shout out to John Dies at the End for making the "Weird Movies and Recent Horror List". The film is excellent, the book is a wild ride of fantastic 'what the fuck'

J-Horror - Week Three

I think people tend to assume that J-Horror is much scarier than Western horror. In some instances they might be right (like how Ju-On is scarier than The Grudge, or Ringu instills fear in greater quantities than the Ring, which tends to be more comical in places). I definitely assumed that the Kwaidan would be scarier than it actually was.

Personally, I expected the stories in Kwaidan to instill fear into my spine, to make me recoil away from the pages. There were times where I thought some of the stories were leading up to that, but then was kind of let down by how... Tame the scare was.

I actually found myself comparing the stories in the Kwaidan to a short horror manga I'd read over the summer and the differences were pretty interesting. Sure, they're not the same medium, once is visual and contemporary while the other is far older and only has the written word to rely on, but I liked how different the mood was in both of them (at least to me. Maybe others found the stories in the Kwaidan more bone chilling than I did?). The Manga is called The Enigma of Amigara Fault by the way, and revolves around the story of a fault in the earth suddenly appearing one day with thousands of human shaped holes carved in the sides. The fault draws hundreds of people to the spot and the crowds grow larger and larger every day, but people are also disappearing (some of them claiming that is a hole that is specifically for them, though they can't explain the feeling). You should give it a read, it's pretty spooky.

Click the picture to go to the Manga

The Kwaidan  was good, don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed reading the stories in it. Each and every one was so varied and different from the last. I was interested to see how the stories evolved over time and just what kinds of subjects they would cover and I wasn't disappointed in that aspect. Ghosts, demons, suicide, people without faces, reincarnation... Wow. It was a lot to take in and while I wasn't able to read the Kwaidan cover to cover, I'd like to go back and finish it sometime in the future.

I had two favorites in the Kwaidan were "The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Mōïchi" and "A Dead Secret". I was genuinely surprised by how the blind bishi player had his ears ripped off and managed to sit there as still as he did. I thought the twist that the was playing for a bunch of ghosts was really nice, and the language of the story felt pretty peaceful, as if there were nothing wrong. We were lulled into a false sense of security.

In "A Dead Secret" we had the typical tale of a woman, O-Sono, who died and came back to haunt her family every night after that. As it usually plays out in horror media, everybody is afraid of her, believing that the only time a ghost comes back from the grave to walk amongst the living, it's with evil intent and surely they must be cures. Really thought, this one had more of a happy ending, with O-Sono just wanting to clean out some of the secrets she'd been harboring for years (love letters from when she was studying in Kyōto) so that her family won't think any less of her.

Western horror rarely has those types of happy endings. The ghost is almost always malignant, cursing any family who dares to live in their house. The spirits may seem to have good intentions to begin with but there is always an ulterior motive just below the surface. When we watch a Western horror, we assume that the ghosts are evil and something bad is going to happen, and we are pretty much always right.


P.S. I watched The Audition with a friend of mine and he pointed out to me that the movie seemed familiar to him and pulled up a music video for one of my favorite bands, so I thought I'd link it here. It's pretty much a shot for shot of scenes from The Audition:

ENJOY!

Interview With a Vampire - Week Two

I think a central theme that almost every piece of vampire literature (that I've read at least) is the idea of immortality and relationships and how they work (or don't work as is much of the case of Interview With a Vampire).

This week was my very first time reading Interview With a Vampire, and I'd actually enjoyed reading it. While there was a pretty noticeable lack of gore and human feeding, as I'd come to expect in my vampire literature, I was pleasantly surprised by how much Anne Rice explored the relationship aspect of immortality. We always hear about Vampires tending to mope around when they reach a certain age, discontent with losing all their friends, watching their loved ones die, and not being able to connect with many other Vampires who are busy with their own bloodlust to care much about forming bonds with anybody else.

"Immortality: what a drag"
Sure, immortality at times can be daunting, but Anne Rice shows us, through the protagonist and narrator of the story, Louis that it's important to make friends when you're going to be around for a long time.
Louis and Lestat (the Vampire who creates Louis out of desperation for a companion) spend a good chunk of the book warring with each other. They constantly argue, bicker, and disagree about many things, such as what/who to eat, how to treat Louis' preexisting servants, and what to do with Louis' money and property. Louis does not trust or even like Lestat but must stay with him because Lestat has conveniently left out certain parts about living as a Vampire that could potentially lead Louis down a path of destruction. I thought the parallel of parasitic Vampires living in a parasitic relationship was killer (pun intended?) and thought it was fleshed out pretty well.

Eventually, of course, Louis finds proper and healthier company in Armand, a centuries old Vampire who's been living in Paris and took to Louis from the very first moment he'd seen him. It was interesting to see Louis actually push Armand away after several years of living together, still poisoned by Lestat's cruelty and crushed by the loss of the only other Vampire who was nice to him (Claudia). I guess the saying 'time heals all wounds' isn't true for even the most eternal of beings.

In the same way, the movies Byzantium explore different types of Vampire relationships that are almost exactly opposite Louis and Lestat's. Eleanor and Clara in Byzantium are mother and daughter and have counted on each other for nearly two hundred years. Clara does everything in her power to keep Eleanor safe, which includes not being completely truthful with her daughter about the people that are hunting them, and have been hunting them for as long as they've been changed. Clara and Lestat have similarities when it comes to the truth. They don't tell it, and it ultimately ends up hurting the one they're keeping in the dark for their protection.

In the end, Eleanor decides to change a boy she'd met, who is dying from Leukemia, and wishes to part ways with Clara, choosing her own path for the first time in her life, which was what I really liked about the movie. The mother/daughter relationship felt real, the audience can see the issue from the eyes of both sides and understand where each character is coming from. The mother only wants whats best for her child, and to keep her child safe and healthy, but might not understand the impact of making every decision without consulting their child first. Even with Vampires, if you love someone you've got to set them free at some point.

I could probably go on about relationship aspects for ages to be completely honest. I really enjoyed both Byzantium and Interview With a Vampire. Their uniqueness is what makes them good media and relationship exploration is what makes them interesting.

I guess if you're going to spend eternity with someone it had better be someone you like.

Frankenstein - Week One

When someone brings up the 'gothic' in todays times, we'd usually jump to thoughts of groups of teenagers dressed all in black, scowling at the world and hiding from the sun, but it's much older and a lot more complex than that. 

In terms of the gothic as it appears in contemporary culture, the first two things that popped into my head were The Woman in Black and Sleepy Hollow.

The Woman in Black centers around a young lawyer from London, Arthur Kipps, who has to go to a small town to arrange a sale of an old estate called the El Marsh house, left when the owner of the house sudden passed. What Arthur doesn't realize is that there is a specter that resides in the house who is the cause of many deaths of children from the nearby town. The Woman in Black, as a whole, is a classic example of the gothic because it covers many of the elements that make up the gothic genre, like the main character, after living in London his whole life, finds himself in an unfamiliar house, that seems far removed from the rest of society. There is a definite air of mystery and suspense in the air as he explores the massive amounts of stuff that the woman who owned the house left behind and the entire film is dominated by a dark and gloomy atmosphere, which sets and keeps the mood for the entirety of the film. 

In a similar vein, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow is a good example of a gothic film, as well as an exaggerated gothic film. Normally, gothic films have a more serious tone to them, as somebody has usually died, or the threat of death looms above the character's heads so there's very little room for comedy or much lightheartedness. Sleepy Hollow manages to keep a fairly gothic atmosphere, through the colors, the isolation and unfamiliarity, as well as the supernatural elements that pervade the storyline, but because it is also Tim Burton, there is underlying humor that comes with the dialogue and actions of the character that show that a movie can still be true to the nature of the gothic genre and yet twist it in new and interesting ways without detracting from the overall theme of the film.