lcastle Spring 2018 lit of horror/fantasy/scifi

      This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.       This week our teacher had us read Blood child specifically. the story itself is about how humans (or terrans as the book calls us) have become enslaved by an alien race and brought to their planet. over time we gained more rights and were pretty much promoted to household pets, but not because we fought for it, because they didn't want us to try escape. In order for the alien race to survive they need to use our bodies to hatch their young, sort of like a forced symbiotic relationship. Our teacher asked us what we felt about the relationship the Terrans and aliens have, and If I can speak candidly, It's really creepy. It ma

      This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.      This week is about cyberpunk, and I am going to take a different direction this time and talk about a video game instead of a book. Games and movies also follow the same confines of story structure, only differences is the visual medium and the length. but saying that isn't enough to prove my point, so I am going to analyze cyberpunk using a video game called Remember Me .      I want to start this by talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the visual medium. The visual medium lends itself more to art, because a lot of the story can be told through how the characters move or react to situations as opposed to dialogue and

      This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.      This week is about Multiverse. With the creation of science fiction also came the idea of different worlds from our own where life exists. Not all science fiction, after all, has to take place in the future. Some takes place in other universes that may have had different evolutionary tracks from our own. For example, in the story Aye, and Gomorrah Part of the earth's population simply has no gender. The story has male and female Frelks, and then you have spacers who have no gender, who profit off of the curiosity of the frelks. The frelks are fascinated by the aspect of no gender, and many of them want to have sexual relations w

      This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.      This week we started our journey into The Final Frontier. In other words, we started learning about science fiction (Originally called Scientifiction or Scientific Fiction because it was meant to be fiction based in science, later shortened to Sci-Fi because what was based in fact slowly dissolved in to what we wished science was). We started in Contemporary space opera, a genre whose name was coined as a joke due to the popularity of western operas at the time. Space was considered the Final Frontier, the final stage of exploration, which explains why this genre was so often compared to westerns. The most obvious example of a Space

     This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it. I understand I have not been posting for a while, that is because I have been working on other classes. I will make up for that and catch up to the curriculum by the end of the week.      This week was about Magical Learning, Specifically we read Night Circus and Harry Potter . From what I can understand, Magical Learning stories are just coming-of-age stories but with magic and fantasy elements as opposed to the realism of The House on Mango Street. For example, in Harry Potter , Harry needs to learn the values of friendship, trust, and loyalty along with magic in order to retrieve the sorcerer's stone. The first Harry Potter

      This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.      This week we read J.R.R. Tolkien's works such as The Lord of the Rings. To be honest this week was mainly about applying "The Hero's Journey", which is a method of constructing some stories. Even though the idea itself is simple, application is not. The reason why is because in order to apply it to fantasy one would need to be able to tap in to their imagination. That would then require me to ask the question: What is imagination? We hear that word all the time but it is never really defined. A simple way to explain it is a unique way everyone expresses themselves due to their past experiences and knowledge. For ex