Week Five: Witches and Women in Genre

Week 5

            I personally believe that any archetype is a stereotype. I touched upon this during class but I wanted to expand upon it. To me everyone’s reality is different and not ever similar to anyone else’s regardless of if the information around them. Because just because there is information out there in the world for us to base our opinions of people doesn’t mean it is all received the same way into our brains. This is where interpretation comes in. I understand the point of archetype and its hope to try to categorize characters into a certain type of person but I think that is extreme limiting and only encourages copycat writing in the future. I think trying to categorize people in the first place is futile. There is so much that is NOT known in the world (what we touched upon during the new weird stage) that trying to identify us just seems silly. Why not just create a character completely unconventional. We all have women AND men in our lives that blow our opinions and perspectives out of the water because they choose not to gobble up what society force feeds us. To me all archetypes and stereotypes are the same regardless of how different they are because they are so limiting to the imagination. I don’t think the creative part of the brain needs a basis of which to pull from. You think of children and how they can think of insane things when they've had so little exposure to the world and we find it silly and yet we praise the mundane mind of an adult that was watered down by our "archetypes." 

Week One: Frankenstein and Gothic as it appears in contemporary culture

Frankenstein and gothic as it appears in contemporary culture:

“How impressive would you be, if the world couldn’t see?”

This quote kept repeating in my head as I went through the reading. Having never read Frankenstein before and only known the general idea behind the story, I was shocked to find just how disturbing and eerie the reading was. I imagine the monster coming into the world as an immature mind and because he is so quickly seen as a monstrosity his life begins on negative energy. Not because of anything he did but solely because of his looks. What if he had been a beautiful woman? Then perhaps Victor would have taken kindly to him and the monsters life would have begun on positive energy. Imagine what he could have made with that positive energy? You will get your answer by seeing the monster go as far as murder on that negative energy given to him by Victor.  Even at such a young mental state the monster was able to see what he had done was wrong and go to Victor hoping for forgiveness and with a plan to solve his psychological issue with a mate. Which would have worked and yet again Victor could not follow through with it because of the visual repulsiveness of making another creature. So I ask again. How impressive would you be, if the world couldn’t see? Would you base so much of your life on your feelings from sight? Or just hearing about who a person was? Would you be a man who creates a life and because of your vanity soils its experience on this world? Or would you look beyond the visual?

My first though when I think of the word gothic is the style of dress that was prevalent for a selective group of people when I was growing up in the 90’s. To me it seems to be an obsession with the abnormal and the obscure. Which is funny because in my architecture classes I’ve taken I came to know that the “Goths” were originally an East Germanic People that helped shape what we call the Medieval times of Europe. The gothic I think about is a subculture derived from that 19^th century and its literature. Although the literature was dark in nature most of the typical optics we know for “Goth culture” (ie. black clothes, metal music, horror films, etc.) were taken from early horror films and more recent works of the 20^th century.