Clothing and Identity
Even though the social worlds around us have expectations and ways of reading our bodies, this is not done without our own impact. As I mentioned before, people can try and subvert expectations directly by purposefully dressing in a way that denies the expectation. Gender, and the way gender dynamics play on dressing and fashion, is a good example of this.
The Digital Campfire
There is a magic to the campfire. It saves us from the darkness, but it also makes us feel like we are closer to that darkness at the same time. The stories we share also bring the darkness closer to the fires, but the fire is always there to keep it from being too close. It protects us, in a way, reminding us that the darkness can’t actually touch us - it’s just the stories that make it feel closer.
How the Body Tells Stories
The body, therefore, is the primary model through which we tell stories because it’s the primary form through which we exist. As I sit at my computer, writing this blog post, it is still through my body that I write this. My hands move, my back aches in my chair, but also I feel the rush of my heart when I know exactly how I want to phrase the bit I want. Our bodies are the way we experience our narratives, because we are our bodies.
Wednesday and the Art of the Cliche
Netflix's Wednesday was an immediate success, but received critiques that it was full of clichés. In this essay, I decided to delve into what makes Wednesday successful, nostalgic, and why relying on familiar tropes and clichés is the most important part of Wednesday's backbone.
Food and Corruption in Lord of the Rings
Instead, we’re going to focus on one of the ultimate loves of my life. Not my husband, but my literary husband - J.R.R Tolkien. Tolkien is my problematic fav. So we’re going to do a fun romp into the world of Tolkien and one of my favourite elements from Lord of the Rings: the relationship between food and evil.
Food and Storytelling: a Reflection
When I shared my food with my in-laws, I did more than simply help take care of one of the meals for them. I gave them a part of my story. And the food that makes up part of my story is not only a history of myself, but also my siblings and their partners and my grandparents. It’s the make up of the various members of the family that join our fold, and the remnants of those we’ve lost.
Taylor Swift at Midnight
Midnights directly plays with the blurred boundary between fiction and reality in the way that it truly happens to us in our everyday lived reality, especially late at night when our own demons and night terrors trawl through our thoughts. I’ve talked a lot on this blog about how fiction and reality are not as directly distinct as we typically like to think about, and I think Midnights really paints how this works in particular times in our lives.
Mythology as Exoticized Plot
An important part of Said’s argument is the way culture is communicated and understood by the culture doing the exoticisation. Said points out that often the sources people would draw on when picturing these other cultures would be literature or sources that were written by Westerns, and continuing to draw on these sources rather than those from the culture themselves helps to paint the exoticised culture as one which is unable to defend itself or paint their own narrative.
Zelda’s Mythology
For the in-game mythology, it’s a lot more than just the story that gets told to give flavour to the world. It’s there as story, sure, but it’s also present as an important facet of history, architecture and landscape. The history of Hyrule is forever marked by the presence of the story of the goddess/es, particularly in the presence of the Triforce - the mystical wish-bearing divine object the goddesses left behind them.
Tunic, and the Engagement of Story and Player
The recent release of action-adventure game Tunic on PC and XBox has come with an amazing study of implicit storytelling in video games. Tunic's world is left for the player to explore, relying on coded messages and puzzles to solve the questions of the locations and people they encounter. What makes Tunic's story powerful for players is its reliance on the player's engagement with the story and the gameworld, exploiting the nature of the video game medium to great effect. In this essay, I want to explore the storytelling of Tunic: the nature of its cyclical time, and the impact the game has on players.
Kim Kardashian and Marilyn Monroe’s Dress
Seeing how the reaction to what Kim wore that day unfold, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring – appropriately for this blog being too late – in order to look at this fashion moment from a different perspective: that of mythology and storytelling.
Cosplay and Pop Mythology
I think the most interesting aspect of this is in how cosplayers decide on the characters they will embody. When I was first figuring out my own cosplays, this was actually a really hard decision – there was a lot to think about. I like a lot of things, so how do I choose who to cosplay as? Cosplayers generally think of two factors when deciding on their character: the cosplayer and the location of the cosplayer.
The Reality TV Story
Today, I wanted to talk about one of the more interesting aspects of reality television: the story. I’ve talked before about the complicated nature of the “reality” part of reality television, and anyone that follows my work for even a short amount of time will know that I love a complicated view of reality. But stories are important – stories are important in scripted television and in reality television because stories are important to us as people. We tell stories every day when someone simply asks about how our day was. So of course reality television needs a good story.
Star Wars and Mythological Canon
The mythology of the Star Wars universe is not in its structure or strong canonical foundation – not least because there’s not really much of a strong canonical structure. It’s mythology is in it’s flexibility, the fluid nature of it’s notion of canon. What is canonical, what is important to the narrative of the history of a galaxy far away from our own and in the distant past, is up to us – the storyteller, the audience, the people who read the mythologies and come to understand them.
The Antlered Wendigo
Today, I wanted to explore the wendigo, primarily looking at it’s origins in Native American folklore, and how it came to be represented by antlers. I wanted to also reflect on what it means for the antlers to be present, and how their presence has fundamentally changed the wendigo.
The True Main Character of Unpacking
The way the story is constructed and enacted by the player is a fascinating one, and fairly unique to Unpacking. Part of this storytelling is the interesting question of who exactly the main character of the game is, an answer that is typically found within the things we unpack in the game. And while I won’t alter this approach too much, I do have a slightly different way of answering the question of who the main character of the story is. So, lets – uh – unpack this game.
The Valentine’s Day Monster: Cupid as Demon
But I think this view of Cupid as monster, as evil devil, helps to really paint how different interpretations of the same myth can completely change the way the same figure can be viewed.
The Legend of Zelda: Cyclical Time in Myth and History
If we are to understand the Legend of Zelda from this perspective, rather than a structured timeline, then we understand the shifting nature of myth and legend through the experience of history. History impacts mythology, and mythology and storytelling impacts history.
The Wild Hunt, in the Witcher and Folklore
I think the Witcher series in general is a good one for simply displaying aspects and stories in folklore and mythology in ways that I think are interesting and more-or-less true to form, and the Wild Hunt is no different.
Science Fiction, Magic and Mythology
At the core of many of these arguments was one central one: the differences between science fiction, magic, and mythology. I thought this was an interesting debate, and one I wanted to weigh in on. Science fiction, magic and mythology each have something to do with what I do – the intersections and relationships between religion and popular culture. When is science fiction actually science, versus a mysterious type of magic? When is mythology mythology, and can mythology embody science fiction?