Week Five: Witches

       This week, I read the book of Aunt Maria, the story is clearly aimed at younger readers, but it also is a bit scary for those too young. I'd say readers from 12 up would enjoy this enormously. I loved the main character and really disliked Aunt Maria. Unfortunately, she was so well developed, and her motives so normal, that I loved her too. Despite her frightening abilities, she was only human. She wants to keep the world the way she has been used to and is scared of change. There are many people in our world these days that are just like that. I also loved the way the main character found ways to do things her aunt disapproved of. Of course that got her deeper and deeper into problems.

       A powerful woman character in a fantasy or horror type of story or film is usually in the form of a witch. Witches have magical powers and are usually more evil than good. But when talk about witches, they are usually very ugly and a bad character. But in the other hand, good witches are usually very beautiful. I recently watched a TV show called American Horror Stories the 3rd season, it is a story of a bunch of teenager witches, powerful and attractive, I think it is kind of fit nowadays young people’s imaginations of witches.

         But the Movie Kiki’s Delivery Service we watched in class is another whole different story. A young witch, on her mandatory year of independent life, finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service. I feel the witch Kiki is neither the ugly one nor the untouchable beautiful ones. She is more close to a normal person.

Week Four: The New Weird

Being in school as students we can often hear “that person is weird” or “that thing is weird.” I always like to ask why. What makes something or someone weird or normal? Something is weird when it breaks societal norms. For example, if someone puts his hand over his mouth while talking, you would probably consider that trait as weird.  But why is that? Because it is not a normal thing a person will do while talking.

A good way to demonstrate this point is to look at different cultures. What’s weird in one may be the norm in the other or vice versa. For example, slurping your noodles or soup in America would be considered weird, but not slurping could be weird or offensive in Japan.

Even though our society may deem a certain person or trait as weird, at the level of individuals, it can still be desirable. If a girl blushes constantly, she may be considered weird by her society but some men may find it cute. For them, it is a good weird.

For my self, I like weird things such as weird illustrations or weird music, they maybe not fit my taste, but I always like to try. I think 'weird' is very compelling, because it gives you a break from a stereotype. I really respect people who use the old fashion way to do their job but I admire those who create new things. For me, I don’t really care if a thing or a people is weird or not, as long as I think they are good, I will respect.

Week Three: J-Horror

            This week I read part of the book A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. From my experience, he is one of the most popular Japanese writer in China, a lot people like his books especially teenagers or young adults. But I was never a big fan of his books. I remember I tried to read the book Norwegian Wood, which is a very famous book, but I just hated it and could not finish it. But this time, when I read his work again, I found some interests.

            From what I read of the book, I feel the novel is more like a story of emotion journey than a story of a physical journey.  There was an actual journey involved as the main character went in search of the mythical sheep, but the true focus of the book was on the character's emotions. Murakami didn't even give a lot of the characters names. The main character could stand for any one of us. I believe that the mythical sheep can be seen as either "the meaning of life”. The main character finds himself at the end of his marriage. His wife have left him for a friend of his, and he can't understand what that guy has that he doesn't, since the friend doesn't have a lot of money and he plays the guitar too much. The girlfriend that the main character hooks up with following the breakup of his marriage is a talented, quirky girl who compliments his own quirks nicely. Yet throughout the relationship, he is obsessed with her ears, a part of her, instead of the whole of her. She, on the other hand, has shown herself to be quite devoted to him, even supporting and joining him on his quest for the sheep. These examples, and his friendship with his business partner and the company that they ran together, all worked together to form a meaning to his life that the main character was unable to recognize or embrace. He was on his own sheep chase looking for meaning that he already had. When he finally caught up with The Rat and had their final chat on the mountain, he realized, to a small degree, what he had been doing wrong. 

            And I also read some of the short stories from Kwaidan. The Story of Mimi-Hashi-Hoichi is probably my favorite. The whole story offers a lot of imagery descriptions and I quite enjoy it. I found that the biggest difference between western horror and Asian horror or J-horror is that Asian horror is more about emotion, and the scary inside someone, which the western horror is more on visual. There is a Chinese book called Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, which is very similar to Kwaidan, I read a lot, also got a lot of inspirations from it for doing my illustrations.

 

Week Two: Vampire-- Love and Pain

        This week I watched the movie Interview with the vampire and half way through the book. What make vampires so sexy? There are a lot of undead species, such as vampire, zombie and ghost. Zombies are usually too bloody and rotted and ghosts are insubstantial. So I guess this leaves us with vampires, who are permanently young, beautiful, and possess a fierce need to suck things. 

        To me, vampire is not very familiar in my knowledge. In Chinese culture or Asian culture, there is no such thing like vampire even the zombie is a very different kind. So most of the vampires that I knew were either from western movies or books.

        In the novel and movie Interview with the Vampire, the main characters Louis and Lestat decide to have a preternatural child and turn a gorgeous little girl named Claudia into a vampire like themselves. Everything is great until she's the mental age of an adult and realizes that she'll be trapped in a little girl body forever.

        In the Anne Rice novel, which takes place partly during the nineteenth century, Claudia uses her girlish looks to attract men who are looking to buy a little pederasty for the night. She plays into the Victorian appetite for young girls, and thus assures herself a steady supply of blood. But she never actually has sex with these men, or anyone for that matter. Rice's vampires are chaste, though we are given to understand that the act of drinking blood provides a kind of sexual thrill for them.