Little Talks

Finding your place in the world (or, adolescence) The teenage years can be stressful, awkward, and enlightening. It is during this crucial epoch in our lives that we begin to gain a fuller awareness of the world around us; our eyes are opened to the truth of the human condition, to the realities of social injustice and environmental concerns. As we move from childhood to adulthood, we come to realize—if we haven't already—that things aren't always fair, and we life won't always go the way we want it to. At the same time, we are aware of the growing pressures and responsibilities being placed on us as we make more decisions for ourselves and prepare to step up and take our place in the world. And it can be awkward, when we still feel like children, to try to understand who we are and what we are doing with our lives. It is in this integral stage of life that we meet the protagonist of our story, Jake. Though we don't see a lot of his day-to-day life, we get the fe...

It's been a long time since I've regularly been on this blog, so I'm going to try to get back to that. I'm starting today with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. There will be spoilers for this and future MCU movies, so please read at your own risk. The problem with fathers The second installment in the Guardians of the Galaxy  series was, if I'm being honest, full of a lot of cliches. Honestly, the whole idea of the Guardians and thier backstories is built on the idea that family is not about blood relations. That theme runs through a lot of the GOTG storylines, when I look back on it all now. For example: Thanos, despite being an adopted father to Gamora and Nebula, is their "legal" parent, I suppose (the quotations are there because he did sort of kidnap them, despite the fact that he raised them and they seemed to remain relatively loyal for most of their lives). However, neither of the girls is happy having him as a father; they are not really comfor...

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book  takes the ideas of The Jungle Book  and relocates them to a modern English graveyard. Like Rudyard Kipling's classic, the story centers on a young boy whose family is killed when he is only a baby, and he is rescued and adopted by an unusual group of beings - but instead of wolves, Gaiman's young Bod (short for Nobody) is taken in by the ghosts in the graveyard. Each chapter then recounts an incident from a moment in the boy's life, as he gradually gets older and learns what it means to be a man while growing up outside of the human realm. Neil Gaiman interestingly seems to have tapped into an theme which Andy Serkis' Mowgli  movie also finds in the story of The Jungle Book : the dangers of the human world. The greatest danger to young Bod throughout his childhood is the human world that exists outside the graveyard and occasionally invades his home. His family was murdered by a man who continues to be a threat to his existence,...

The first thing you need to know about Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency  is that it doesn't really make sense unless you're familiar with the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That may seem odd, but I promise you that knowing this famous Romantic writer is crucial to the mystery being investigated by the title character, and the author includes many other more subtle nods to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . The next thing you need to know is that Douglas Adams' writing style is nothing short of bizarre. However, he uses science fiction, mystery, and horror elements in the most uniquely comedic ways. His narrative voice is fantastically whimsical, and he somehow manages to approach all topics--from the mundane to downright gruesome--from a whole new perspective. Never could I have imagined what it would be like to see this world without having prior contextual knowledge upon which to build my understandings, yet somehow Douglas Adams manages to do exactly th...

When I say "just," I am speaking in regards to when I saw the episode, and not when it was released. Season 3 of Daredevil  came out last October, but I only caught up to that point in the Marvel Netflix series last week. But there was a particular moment in episode 11, "Reunion," that I couldn't help but gawk at: Wilson Fisk's press conference. For anyone who needs context (and yes, this will be a spoiler if you haven't seen it), Fisk, the ultimate baddie in the Daredevil  series, is freed from his imprisonment when his conviction is overturned, and his first big move is to hold a press conference. It may be worth noting here that he is only perceived to be innocent because he was able to blackmail the jury. Anyways, he gathers the press outside of the hotel in which the FBI have been keeping him under close watch, and he tells everyone that he is truly innocent, and that Daredevil is the real criminal. I do wonder, sometimes, how he expects people to...

[Warning: this post contains spoilers] I made a rather sad discovery while reading Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (a title which, by the way, tends to get shortened, but that is what the book is actually called). I realized that some of these classic horror stories have become so ingrained in our culture that we already know them too well to get the full effect of the story. Take the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for instance. We've all come across it in numerous forms. The double itself is a very common trope, true. But I can think of at least three cartoons that I watched as a child that adapted this story. Most of you would likely be more familiar with the Looney Tunes  episodes (and, yes, there are a couple), but Arthur  and Veggie Tales  have also done their own takes on this story. The names of the character and his alter ego have even become so commonly associated with the idea of a split personality that it...

After reading Watchmen  by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in my pop lit class, I understood why this comic series, though I had never heard of it, was a total classic. It has so much substance to it. And the visual medium was entirely necessary to make the points that this graphic novel makes. Without the illustrations, the story could never have this kind of depth to it. The novel poses this most interesting question: what if superheroes really did exist in our world? But what if most of them were more like Batman: ordinary people who use their talents to go about in disguise and help the helpless? Yet, in some sense, they admit that this could never happen in our own world, and so there are subtle changes (which become more obvious as the story progresses) which prove that these events are happening in an alternate timeline. The addition of overly vibrant and somewhat unusual colours plays into the fictional atmosphere of the whole thing. At the same time, they use the para...