My litmus test for any adaptation of Pride & Prejudice essentially boils down to the scene where Mr. Darcy slights Lizzie. How the writers of the adaptation chose to make her respond pretty much establishes how well they know the character of Elizabeth Bennet.
Framing a Lightsaber Battle: A Brief, Close Read of the Cinematography of “Twin Suns”
Three seconds. Star Wars: Rebels told us a story and gave us a twist ending in three seconds primarily through staging and cinematography.
“Twin Suns” spoilers ahead.
Emotional Attachments: A Character Analysis of Obi-Wan and Maul
A while back there was an analysis on Maul from Tumblr user scribbleymark, about how Maul is a sympathetic villain because he genuinely cares about certain individuals. This analysis has stayed with me throughout my watch of Star Wars: Rebels and influenced my understanding of the duel between Obi-Wan and Maul in the latest episode “Twin Suns.”
Spoilers beneath the cut.
Continue reading “Emotional Attachments: A Character Analysis of Obi-Wan and Maul”
New Page on Dillon Development!
A while ago, I had begun working on a “list essay” to submit to a magazine.
Essentially, the submission needed to be a creative non-fiction piece told through some sort of list. As a student of library science, I decided to create a reading program with events, books, all that jazz
Unfortunately, I missed the deadline, and the essay was lost to sea of writing projects on my computer.
I recently rediscovered it and decided I actually really liked it, and I didn’t want to see it remain incomplete. I finished it, and in lieu of a magazine providing context for the existence of this tongue-in-cheek, autobiographical reading program, I created a quasi-creepypasta framework story:
The Committee for Individualized Reader Development is dedicated to creating unique programs for each potential reader’s needs and interests, as well as tracking the progress of each participant as they grow in their consumption of fiction and non-fiction books alike.
The Committee does not allow children or their families to “opt out” of their programs. They are as inescapable as they are beneficial. Under our guidance, the world will be literate.
The full framework story and the list essay can be found its own page.
Halo Wars 2: A Summary
Mass Effect’s Place in Science Fiction – Revelation
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
“Reading Journals” are one of the main, and currently the only, sub-series for Gaming’s Place in Literature. These Journals are used to explore individual novels within a game’s expanded universe. The general format will be to write about the book’s writing style and quality of story before diving into a genre analysis. Exceptions to this format will likely occur.
Continue reading “Mass Effect’s Place in Science Fiction – Revelation”
Gaming’s Place In Literature
It was November 2007. I was waiting with my family for a connecting flight in a very large airport and stepped into a bookstore to pass the time. Sitting on the shelf was a title I recognized from a popular game whose plot had been summed up in my mind as a standoff of galactic proportions.
Curiosity properly piqued, I made the purchase. A few hours later at 36,000 feet in the air, I cracked open Halo: The Flood, and there was no turning back.
One of the things that I deeply missed when stepping into Halo was the critical literary analyses. When I first found The Flood, it was when the pop culture was still feeling the after-effects of the Tolkien boom from the Lord of the Rings films. My family and I had stockpiles of books analyzing the films and the literary world of Middle Earth. A particular treasure of mine was a collection of essays from TheOneRing.net, which peeled back layers and layers of Tolkien’s work. I wanted to read pieces like that for Halo.
Today, not only have I found such pieces, I have been writing them as well. I created a Tumblr blog in 2014 initially as a place to explore Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as it applied to the character of Thel ‘Vadam. Starting in early 2015, I began writing for the community site Halo Archive, most of my articles examining the different novels or short stories produced by the franchise. I’ve also written for the online magazine Christ and Pop Culture.
The passion and critical exploration I used for Halo is exactly what I am bringing to this new series on Patreon. Expanded universes are now a staple of gaming franchises, tie-ins and novelizations are being written by big names in the genres. It’s time these books, and other pieces of game-related fiction, were given the same examination as other pieces of literature.
