Princess Monster Truck

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, beyond the iridescent waterfalls and enchanted forest with an oh so story book, cookie cutter, generic royal family. This established, well-endowed family had everything, except for a loving and supportive mother figure to guide the children’s feminine actions.  Money, beauty, power, and adoring villagers seemed to be enough to gloss over the lack-of-a-mother syndrome that these sorts of stories tend to possess.

The King of this land had three wonderful daughters, Anna, Sophia, and Dylan. One day, the King summoned his daughters and asked them what they wanted to be when they were older. Anna, the oldest daughter, was asked by the King first, “My daughter, what is it you would like to be when you are older?” She replied, “My King, I dream of singing with the birds and befriending all the forest animals.” The King was pleased. He turned and asked Sophia the same question, and she replied, “My King, I dream of being locked in a tower, waiting for my true love to rescue me.” Again, the King was pleased. Finally, he turned to Dylan, the youngest and most mischievous daughter, and awaited her answer. Dylan replied with exasperation, “I want to be the best monster truck racer in all of the lands. Ok, man?”

The King was appalled. He ordered her to her room for the night, and when nightfall came, commanded a guard to kill her in her sleep. When the guard reached her door, he opened it to see her climbing out the tower window. With a change of heart, he followed her down the bedsheet rope into the night.

The two ran all the way to the land of Truck to join the regional monster truck meet. To disguise her regal appearance, Dylan dyed her hair silver, got a nose piercing, and wore an outfit she found and the thrift store as the guard drove them in a ginormous truck that he conveniently purchased. They dominated the meet that night and continued onto each regional match. Filled with adrenalin and determination, they continued their climb to the top of the monster truck world.

Months later, the King traveled to the land of Truck to make a political alliance with the mayor. To celebrate their partnership, the mayor took the King to the lands largest meet. As the evenings events began, the two competitors stepped onto the track. Still believing that his daughter was dead, the female contestant was announced as the Princess of Monster Trucks, Dylan, which shocked the King beyond disbelief. Just as anger was overcoming him, he watched the crowd roar with praise and her dedicated fans cheer her on. Sitting back in his seat with curiosity, the championship match commenced.

Following her victory, Dylan was swarmed by crowds of fans. Among these people was her father. Once he was able to make his way to her, he bowed his head in shame, saying, “I was wrong to assume you were out of line.” Never having had feelings of malice towards her father, Dylan hugged him and said, “Just goes to show you that I’m a princess in my own right.”

Fin

Beware of Drowning

Baptism is the symbolic death a rebirth of an individual and is typically known to have a religious connotation that relates back to biblical stories. Depending in what happens during the baptism, how it is done, and what the aftermath has in store for the character, the survival or death during the submergence in water will give foreshadowing to the rest of the story. If they do not reemerge from the water, the tale may contain further detail about the character’s strife and rebirth in a new life. If they happen to emerge, how they surface and what they do afterwards will illustrate in symbolic meaning of the blessing by water.

                There does not have to be a physical submergence of the body for the event to count as a baptism or rebirth. Simply crossing the body over a source of water or being touched by droplets can display the healing and cleansing properties of water. Just as the idea of baptism can be looked upon from many viewpoints, the character can have many different encounters and experiences during their baptism. Fire, just like in Fahrenheit 451, can be cleansing, leveling, and a renewing element just as water is. Even though its powers are more destructive and seen as an evil presence, it can bless characters and their surroundings by bringing things into a new life. Relating back to the liquid baptism, once Neo takes the red pill in The Matrix, he awakens inside of this little pod with wires attached to him. The wires are snapped off and he is ejected from his fluid filled pod into the sewer below, like being put down into the blessing water. He was completely submerged with no strength to fight back. Neo, being weak and unable to support his own body weight is pulled forth from the water by a giant mechanical claw to be resurrected and given new birth. He is brought to a hospital where they care for him and nurse him back to strength, much like a baby at the hospital being born for the first time. Neo’s rebirth cleansed his mind and body of his past, giving him a new start in a distopian alter-reality.

                Baptisms can kill a character due to drowning or struggles during the process. If the character just so happens to pass, they are given a new beginning just as if they had survived but in a new world. There, they can be faced with new problems that can be crucial to the characters development and learning experience. There is no limitation to the meaning or the usage of symbolic baptism. I believe that for a character to be cleaned and start a new path, they must let go of some past struggle and be faced with new obstacles and challenges. These events are the crossing of the threshold for a new adventure and page in the story. Rivers, oceans, rain, snow, and alien plasma can all be used to clean characters bodies and minds. Whether it is obviously stated or must be reexamined after the conclusion of the story, a symbolic baptism of any character can bring them a new life style and a previously unknown outlook on their lives even if they did not intend for these changes to be brought upon them. 

Chapter 18: If she comes up, its baptism

Unsuspecting Dastardly Deeds

Chapter 16: It's All About Sex...

Literature has explored various story paths and situational outcomes; from following great heroes to victory or corrupted nobles to their doom.  Authors carefully illustrate worlds built in their minds to create new stories for their audiences. Each detail is thought over and edited until no other description can do the story justice. The goal is to create the most human and relatable character with a world that is equally as believable. From crossing of the threshold to a resolving conclusion, we as readers get to follow the main character through everyday life and all that they encounter. Their human achievements and downfalls are what make the characters so read to the audience, even their deepest and dirtiest thoughts. Sex and sexuality have been a part of literature and media since the dawn of time. It is a natural human characteristic that comes with age and discovery of new knowledge. Simply including it in a story makes for an odd and almost pornographic experience for the audience, so writers and directors have turned to blatant objects to symbolize and portray the thoughts and acts of sexual nature.  

But how could simple, everyday tasks and household objects secretly symbolize the sexuality between characters? It’s pretty simple. Sex sells. Even if you live a pure lifestyle, devoted to a god and removed from other people, the subconscious can create lewd thoughts, turning everyday objects into sex icons such as keys or a bowl. Writes face the challenge of making their characters as human as possible. As creatures made to reproduce, sex, or at least the thought of sexual appeal, is natural and therefor human instinct. To be able to portray human nature in text without making the readers or author feel uncomfortable, most writers stray away from the explicit actions. But then how can readers understand what the motive of the characters is? Simple. The subconscious will warp images to be more provocative than what they appear to be. Because of Haynes Code, the depiction of actors in sexual content was prohibited, even keeping husband and wife characters in different beds when they went to sleep. This became another obstacle for the portraying of sexual situations but this time in film. Directors turned to how authors suggest the idea without explicitly saying what is happening.

Just because a movie or a book is classifies for a certain target audience doesn’t mean that sexual content cannot be implicated through hidden symbols. It is widely believed that these innuendos can only be spotted but those whose subconscious is capable of understanding their meanings. If this is true, why haven’t we noticed any sexuality in children’s media? Maybe because we want our children to live ignorant to the filth that is the adult mindset but that has not stopped many writers and film producers from testing their capabilities. In Walt Disney’s cartoons, there has been controversy over whether or not some of the films content is categorical as adult content. Obviously there would be nothing in these films to disrupt the children’s rating that each movie receives, but Mr. Disney and his teams are trained just as writers of the 1900’s were. In TheLion King, the battle for male dominance between brothers over the Pride Lands demonstrates male and female encounters, implying that females can be “dominated” and must be in order to keep a fertile and healthy land. Once Scar overcomes his brother and became the King, the once fertile Pride Land is transformed into a land which suffers from drought and falls into darkness. This can be due to the homosexual characteristics that Scar possesses and because of that, fertility and reproduction are impossible under this new ruler.

Is this really the main idea for The Lion King? No. But it is an example of how various story producers can have a bit of fun, knowing that younger audiences may not be able to pick up on the small hints. Sexual expressions do not have to be in plain sight or even the highlight of a shot. They are kept hidden and only noticed by the trained or extremely attentive. That’s what makes them so amusing to older audiences. The more we observe media and literature carefully, the more innuendo we can discover in each story. 

Living With the Vampires

Chapter 3

In the past decade, books and movies have followed a common trend to attract more audiences and make a quick buck if needed. The implication of vampires into a book or film has become a way to swoon the hearts of teens and young adults. The use of vampires in pop culture has progressively become a dulled, romantic indicator rather than a villain or a threat to the protagonist. As Foster points out, "ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.", meaning that the addition of this mythical being into a plot was used to symbolize and drive the story a certain way. Vampire tales could be tragic, dramatic, or even a twisted, taboo love story. The modern day representation is not too far off from the roots of vampirism where a twisted old man would shroud himself in youth and beauty to attract a fair lady into his presence. The diabolical crime that would be committed involved a loss of the girl’s innocence, whether that be mentally, physically, or sexually.  Vampires are not loved by those he comes across but rather hated and hunted for by clans, townspeople, or hired assassins. If the story is not from the vampire’s point of view, he is seen as a great evil and a threat to human’s way of life.

The literal use of vampire generally follows the typical old man addicted to young women and blood sucking scenario, but what about the theoretical vampires? The characters who blend into society but control and leech off of their peers can be characterized as “vampires”. Wrecking the weak and innocent for their own self advantage, we can observe these character archetypes in everyday society.  Jordan Belfot, protagonist as well as societal villain of “The Wolf of Wall Street”, claws his way through the filth of Wall Street by using his friends, coworkers, and various business ties as rungs on his latter to riches. His driving motivation in the creation of his stock company is to gain wealth and create his own place in the world. Modest dreams turned to corruption just as many are driven by promises of fame and power. The want for money is just as the want for blood from a vampire. To get it, the hunter will do whatever it takes to get it. Using people as pawns is not big deal to someone so self-motivated. Jordan Belfort is a symbol for the life sucking nature of Wall Street and many entrepreneurs not only being a story character, but also a real human who committed these crimes.

To classify as a vampire, the character does not need to have fangs, live in the dead of night, and possess super natural powers. Vampire in literature may not be recognizable at first, but because of archetypes, readers may draw new conclusions if they look deeper into the characters behavior and actions.  Vampire characteristics such as greed, manipulation, lust, and a misleading façade, are things that we typically experienced on regular if not daily basis in the media, pop culture, and our own lives. The vampire in your life could be a roommate who constantly comes short with their end of the rent or a corrupted boss who only envisions his own personal success rather that the well being of this company as well as his workers. 

(Biography of Jordan Belfort: http://www.biography.com/people/jordan-belfort-21329985)