Those Marines are almost as cute as the kittens. It's delightfully contrary to the stereotype.
7 Terrifying Prehistoric Creatures makes me go all Zoology-fangirl. I love stuff like that.
Never Make Friends With People Who Have More Problems Than You
On the surface, this one really pisses me off. I never really thought about it like that before, and the idea that disability or mental problems somehow render someone broken or that it will end poorly to befriend them is just...absolute fail and completely unfair to people who live with those things every day.
But the other way to look at this is that these stories raise attention for issues that kids may not have thought about before they started reading YA fiction. It's all very tragic, but at the same time I think many of the stories fitting into this category have an underlying message of friendships that arise in spite of these problems or differences.
I think the fact that it ends in tragedy is more a way to initiate teens into the idea that, no, life isn't always "happily ever after". That's still not right, since it programs people to think that serious situations will end in blood and guts. But let's face it- literature has a long history of only dealing with serious issues through the metaphor of character death, which provides an alternate explanation for why so many of these end horribly.
These stories seem to represent more the "death of innocence" with foundations in reaching beyond what your world view may be. I can see where the meta-er is coming from, but I'm tempted to think that the moral of these stories is less along the lines of "do not befriend people with problems" and instead is "people have problems". At least that's what I've always taken away from books like that.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
7 Terrifying Prehistoric Creatures makes me go all Zoology-fangirl. I love stuff like that.
Never Make Friends With People Who Have More Problems Than You
On the surface, this one really pisses me off. I never really thought about it like that before, and the idea that disability or mental problems somehow render someone broken or that it will end poorly to befriend them is just...absolute fail and completely unfair to people who live with those things every day.
But the other way to look at this is that these stories raise attention for issues that kids may not have thought about before they started reading YA fiction. It's all very tragic, but at the same time I think many of the stories fitting into this category have an underlying message of friendships that arise in spite of these problems or differences.
I think the fact that it ends in tragedy is more a way to initiate teens into the idea that, no, life isn't always "happily ever after". That's still not right, since it programs people to think that serious situations will end in blood and guts. But let's face it- literature has a long history of only dealing with serious issues through the metaphor of character death, which provides an alternate explanation for why so many of these end horribly.
These stories seem to represent more the "death of innocence" with foundations in reaching beyond what your world view may be. I can see where the meta-er is coming from, but I'm tempted to think that the moral of these stories is less along the lines of "do not befriend people with problems" and instead is "people have problems". At least that's what I've always taken away from books like that.