“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.
-William Zinnser
Welcome to the website! Here you will find my ideas on stories and the like. Enjoy and investigate if you wish. Join us! We don’t have cookies.
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Once upon a time, I was a little girl enthralled with Disney movies (particularly, the princess ones that told the story of fairy tales). Then, as time went on, I expanded to books, other movies, t.v. shows, etc.
I would spend all my time reading and writing, and I would always look forward to English class until I discovered texts that were old and unapproachable. These “classics” they were teaching us didn’t make sense! Not just word choice but also the plot. One of the biggest problems I have seen for students when it comes to literature taught in schools is that they do not connect with it. Like me, it didn’t make sense, so I shut down. How was it all these adults were telling me Shakespeare was good? How was Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice pinnacle texts? They didn’t make sense. Romeo and Juliet were stupid. There was such a culture difference that the gap between me and potential enjoyment was just too much.
This made my degree in English very difficult because I was fighting against it almost the entire time. Then, as in fairy tales, a fairy godmother appears. Or, in this case, a scholarly mentor came to save the day. As it happens, she was teaching an upper level undergraduate course on Shakespeare. The first thing she did was connect us with the language, explain the differences, then, she showed us a movie version of the plays. This is when I learned one of the most important things about literature, and it was two fold: not only were plays meant to be experienced physically and vocally (not really read) but literature also includes the moving picture.
For me, literature was no longer a static and physical collection of words. It was vibrant, alive, and constantly changing and adapting just like society and the contents of a book.
My mentor was a popular culture scholar who specialized in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: one of my favorite of all time shows. So, in a last ditch effort to connect (and pass the class), I started forming my own out of the box connections.
This class lead me to the play Henry IV, Part 1’s Hotspur and Hal. These two characters inspired me to look underneath the underneath and, finally, make my connections and bridge that gap with greater distance than Pluto to the Sun. Hal’s actor was, currently, the actor for my current obsession: Loki.
Hal had some in common with Loki, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that Hotspur and Loki were closer as they had something intrigued me: they were antagonists seen as “villains”…but they weren’t. In short, people take for granted the words “hero” and “villain,” but I doubt most know what these words actually mean. Hotspur wasn’t evil. At the time, a comparison between them wasn’t something I thought could be done. Instead, I wrote of Hotspur and Hal. After attending a conference presenting this paper, I made other connections (my brother was introducing me to Batman at that time). Hotspur and Hal were not unlike the Joker and Batman when it came to aspects of their relationship. That lead to Hamlet and Loki and Wonder Woman venturing off to classics of African literature.
And all of this lead me here. I am a decipher of puzzles that are characters of literature. I want to know what makes them tick. I want to know everything about them which, always, includes their relationships to those around them because this is when they reveal their true selves. This is where, ultimately, I figured out that certain characters are key to their stories a little bit more than others.
I first began with comic books and their connections, as adaptations, of classical literature. Of fairy tales and the culture they embody as the original or newer, modern age adaptations (or even the ones in between). Or even the expansion and exploration outside of these into other T.V. shows, games, and other literature that draws my attention. And finally, for the one, who inadvertently, started it all. Loki.
I want to share my love with this subject with everyone thus the focus of this website. I am also hoping that it will spawn discussion and, even more selfishly, spur me into working on these projects that I hope will, one day, turn into publications that will inspire new scholars and help them through school and life as it has me. After all, without literature and the escape it provided as a child, I would have sunk into a depression that I would never have escaped.
Please find below a list of the different sections of this site:
| Story Time (Updates) |
| Loki Breakdown |
| Classics & Comic Breakdown |
| Fairy Tale Breakdown |
| Other Breakdown |
| Resource Breakdown |
Please feel free to join in on this adventure as we boldly go into the unknown and known and make it our own.
Catalyst of the Story 