In many TV shows, there will be a character who is meant to be annoying. Sometimes this happens so that the writers can use them to be the butt of cruel jokes. Sometimes annoying characters can be foils to the main characters, and sometimes the best villains are annoying...
I enjoy a good redemption arc just as much as the next guy. However, not every arc is the same, and not every arc is good. I want to bring two examples of redemption arcs to the table, one that I like and one that I dislike, and then I want to compare them. he first arc, the good one, is from, you guessed it, Avatar The Last Airbender. Zuko’s redemption arc was great because of how thought out it was...
Arguably, the most important part of a show is its characters. A show can have amazing plot, but if the audience dislikes the show's characters, they won't want to watch the show. Take The Legend of Korra, for example. I think the show had sloppy writing for the first two seasons. I liked the 3rd and 4th season better, but I still didn't really enjoy watching the show...
There have been a few cases where a cartoon will rush a gay relationship on screen. This is usually fine with the audience of the show, because they want gay representation on TV. The writers of the show usually make up for the rushed nature of the relationship by giving the couple a lot of chemistry. This chemistry makes people support the relationship, even though the chemistry is unearned...
There’s a time in all anime (about fighting) where the characters realize how weak they are. The main character is already gifted, or they have a lot of potential, and we get to see them grow. That’s where Demon Slayer is right now, it’s in that stage. I have a lot to say about this show, the subconscious minds of the characters, the characters themselves, and the magic system, but I’ll keep it short...
I feel bad for my friends who have to listen to me rant all the time. I talk fast sometimes. I knew that, but sometimes I can’t even understand myself. I also notice that I talk in a choppy, but also somehow circular way about things. I am a mess of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. I guess just like every human...
It seems like the older I get, the less I care about certain things. I get less anxious about things out of my control, and I have let go of past burdens. One of my major flaws was and still is not being able to live in the present moment. I still look towards the future, I need to plan after all, but I don’t look back at the past anymore. And If I do look back, the looking is usually accompanied by happy feelings...
School is back in, and it has been for a month. It was like I never left. I'm back to eating junk food and reading on the bus. Nothing has changed, which is nice. I'm happy my senior year, which is possibly the last year of this podcast, will be as normal as possible. Oh, I almost forgot, if you didn't already know from the podcast episode, I like a new boy. If you know...
I finished Bojack Horseman a few days ago, and it had a good ending. I feel like the main message of the end of the series was that life goes on and that things happen for a reason. Every character in the show has their own life unconnected to Bojack, and they wouldn’t have gotten to their happy endings without all the bad things they went through. In life there really isn’t any other...
I started watching Bojack Horseman recently. I like it, and it’s not too weird. A lot of shows with a similar art style tend to have weird and confusing jokes. This show has some weird jokes, but in general, it’s an easy show to like. It’s a show about a broken actor, so, you guessed it, the main character goes through self-revelations. My personal favorite character is probably Princess...
We might as well go big for the first installation of the thoughts section of the blogs (although the blogs in this section will be short). So I’m starting it off with the age-old question, why do we exist? It’s weird to think that anything exists. There could be nothing, but there isn’t, and I find that wonderful and strange. It also makes me think about how the universe is expanding. What is there...
Unfortunately, this will be the last literature blog post I will make for a while, but we’re going out with a bang. Many people know, or have heard about, about Pride and Prejudice. If they haven’t read it, they’ve at least heard of it before. Pride and Prejudice is a book by Jane Austen written during the late 1700s. I would describe the book as a pragmatic romance novel. It’s full of marriages and proposals, but...
This is only loosely related to literature, but I wanted to talk about Harry Potter. I thought a fun subject to discuss would be the different hogwarts houses, and my opinion of each house. First, I would like to say that I am a Gryffindor, which I know, is surprising. So, my views of each house will be from the perspective of a Gryffindor...
Life of Pi is a novel written by Yann Martel. I just finished reading the book, and I watched the movie in 2012. I remember trying to read the book a few years after watching the movie, but I only read a fourth of it. I was waiting for the famous part of the book, the part where Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel is stranded on a lifeboat with a 450 pound Bengal Tiger. The first part of the book, which is about Pi’s life...
My middle school favorite book is called Counting by 7s Holly Goldberg Sloan. You might’ve heard of it before, but you probably haven’t if you’re not in a specific age range. The protagonist is a middle school age black girl, which is what I was when I was in middle school. She is adopted to two white parents, who tragically die at the beginning of the story. She then goes on a journey of...
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a book about an African tribe facing colonization. The main character is Okonkwo, a strong warrior and good farmer. He has made a name for himself in his village, which is proven by his multiple wives and many children. Okonkwo is characterized by his masculinity, which is often a bad thing. He rules his house with a heavy hand, he only shows the...
The Alchemist is a book by Paulo Coelho. This book is known for bringing a creative take on a stereotypical hero’s journey story. The main character is named Santiago, a young shepherd who travels the world with his sheep. He then has many strange dreams revolving around a hidden treasure. Long story short, he meets with an old king (he didn’t know the man was a king at the time)...
Beloved, by Toni Morrison, is a book that dives into the trauma of African American history. The main character is a woman named Sethe. She escaped slavery some time ago, and now she lives with her daughter, Denver. The two women are isolated from the rest of their town, but they have a ghost to keep them company, or, Beloved. Beloved doesn’t just represent one person. Instead...
1984 was one of the first classic books I’ve read, and it’s sparked in me a desire to read a series of famous novels. The classic dystopia was written in 1948 by a man named George Orwell. The dystopian novel is probably famous because it takes what actually could happen (and arguably, what already does happen) to an extreme. In 1984, you’re always being watched by a telescreen...
Macbeth is a social tragedy, or a tragedy of disorder. It’s also an unusual tragedy, usually in tragic plays, the main character does a crime without knowing all the facts. Like if I killed someone who I thought to be one person but it was actually someone else. In Macbeth, Macbeth is very aware of what he was doing. He wound up trying to kill the king, and he did, and he knew that was wrong. Anyways, for this play...
100 Years of Solitude is a book by Gabriel García Márquez, a Columbian author of many books. I decided to start the literature series with this book because of how unique and praised this book is. I also decided to start it off with that book because it’s my favorite one. For a quick summary, the book follows the Buendía family over seven...
First of all, we would have to establish that any power I chose would come without possible defects. Any ability I would have would be under my complete control, like, if I could read minds, I would be able to read however many minds I wanted when I wanted, and I could turn it off. Anyways, if I could have any...
This isn’t necessarily a popular question, but I do see adults complaining about the school system and kids complaining about school in general. So, I wanted to give my two-cents about school. First, I want to talk about the public school system. I used to go to a very unique school, so going to a public high school took a little bit of...
So an obvious answer is Avatar the Last Airbender. I mean, what other choice do I have? Avatar has a nice magic system. A lot of the people have bending, and while it’s possible to just be naturally good at it, you can also become good by practicing. It’s one of the only magic systems that I would actually be interested...
Two other alive people whom I would invite are Malala and David Letterman. I watched Malala being a guest on David Letterman’s show, and she is so interesting and funny. David Letterman is hilarious, and has a dark past Oprah could dive into. I would also invite Michelle and Barack Obama because who doesn’t want...
The first thing I have to say is that the suspense was crazy. Everything to do with the election is so crazy and dramatic. I talked about it with Kay in my podcast episode for the week, and we were just saying how stressful it is to have to wait for the results of an extremely important election. I won’t lie, I went to bed...
I think everyone reading this knows that I’m partial to philosophy. A few summers ago, I asked people the following question: Imagine there are 1,000 randomly selected parallel universes in which you exist. All these universes are at least slightly different from each other and you are slightly different in each one. These differences may...
So for the next bit of time the topic of my blog posts will vary but they will all ask a question that I will answer. I thought this would be a fun question to start with because it’s easy to answer and I have three answers. So my first thought was the practical answer, I couldn’t live without my computer because I do...
Karl Popper noticed that there were two different ways science was done, that not all science was equal. Sigmund Freud, a famous psychologist, might predict someone’s emotional issues by their childhood or by a traumatic event. Albert Einstein would make a prediction about his general theory of relativity and wait for an eclipse...
This is the final post in the freedom series. This week, I wanted to talk about free will vs. determinism. Libetarian Free Will states that every action we do while being able to do something else is a free action. This is the principle of alternate choices. So if I ate a sandwich for lunch while also having the alternate choice to eat a...
Plato and Aristotle said everything has an essence. An essence is the defining quality of something. A knife can be a knife as long as it has a blade and if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a knife. A mug may hold liquid but if it’s lopsided and my drink always spills out of it, it’s not good at being a mug. It’s not good at living up to its essence. Just like....
Imagine a world with no rules, leadership, or restrictions. A world without rules might sound great, you could do whatever you want. Then you remember that everyone else is also doing whatever they want. Thomas Hobbes described this as the “State of Nature” and life in it isn’t good. Imagine in the...
Imagine you’re on a runaway trolley and the breaks are broken. On the track ahead of you, there are five construction workers who can not escape from the track. Luckily there is a switch that you can pull that will transfer you to the next track. Unfortunately, there is one construction worker...
Utilitarianism is a family of ethical theories that follows the utility principle. The utility principle states that the best action is the one that serves the greatest number of people. So for utilitarianism, an action is only as good as its utility. If you read my post on Kant, you would...
For some background, Immanuel Kant is a famous philosopher. He believed that there were certain moral absolutes, or rules, that were always true when it came to morality. He believed that for something to count as a moral absolute, it had to have a certain amount of universality to it without...