Patricia Lettis- Lit of Horror, Fantasy, and SciFi

When I was a child, I was not interested in Harry Potter. I really enjoyed watching Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon with my older siblings. Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball is about spiritual education in a way. Both have a child who learns how to use magic powers. Sailor Moon has the lead is given her supernatural powers by a mentor character and learns new powers with her other super-powered friends. In Dragon Ball, Goku is trained by Master Roshi in the technique of Kamehameha that produced supernatural abilities. This storyline happens to repeat in the later series with Goku’s son.             These are more of my own personal taste when I was younger. With my adult life, I have become more interested in the Harry Potter series. Probably because of the reflection of my childhood fandoms.             The more I look into all these properties, I realize that the major differen...

I feel like my responses have have gone from well researched into me explaining my emotional reactions to the genre and things around it. Now I am going to reflected on the Heroes Journey as a whole.  My problem with the Heroic journey is how much of a formula it has become. This is really not negative in the right hands. Some people are able to take the tropes and make interesting characters and adventures with them. It’s not relying on twist endings or tongue-in-cheek parodies of these stories. A modern story that sticks to the Heroic Journey very strictly and does not try to create a warping or parody of it is the first Kung Fu Panda (Osborne) movie. You can argue that the fact that Po is overweigh and goofy makes him a parody but, it actually helps show how the stages of the journey is affecting him. Side note, I was going to write more about high fantasy and live action works after this, I decided to stick with Kung Fu Panda. I love The Lord of the Rings Series, Prince...

  This is a Novel for children. It’s a lower reading level and the beginning states that they hope a teacher is reading this for her class. This is the darkest book I have read so far. I would have been scarred if I read this as a child. It has a parent drowning their child throw in causally. They have a girl who is trapped just have her family wait until she dies. A child being shot and eaten. It was made in the 1980’s so maybe censorship was more relaxed. Maybe it is because the children were turned into not humans when the murder happens. It’s terrible. The protagonist’s parent die and he is fine with it because he gets to live with his grandmother.   He did not really talk about being upset over the deaths at all. I understand that his parents were not as ‘cool’ as his grandmother but, I would have more than one page about mourning. I don’t even think the grief took up a full page. It’s really interesting to think that witches are the scary for me because the people...