Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Comic books and angry women who don't understand them

Normally I wouldn't bring attention to something like this, but I am so annoyed with this video and many others on this woman's youtube channel. I wish I could just write her a quick comment getting my point across, but she has her comments disabled. I'm talking about this woman:
She clearly doesn't read comic books, but feels ok talking about them because she's seen someone else's youtube video. Oh, and she says Fable 2 is a video game in which you are forced to play as a male getting revenge for the death of a female family member. The funny thing about that is that I have that video game and I play it as a FEMALE character. In this video she talks about all comic books being so awful to woman because a lot of females die in the comics. Well a lot of males die too, and not only that both male and female characters frequently come back from the dead, most of the time stronger. Jean Grey is the perfect example of this, since she comes back as the Dark Phoenix. Gwen Stacey is back as Spider Gwen. This woman also keeps referencing the Killing Joke and Barbara Gordon being shot by the Joker. Yes, she does get shot by the Joker, and she does later become the Oracle (which many people look up to as a strong female character), but she also later gets to walk again and even takes up the mantle of Batgirl again. What about comics where female characters don't die? Does this woman even know there are comic writers who are FEMALE? This woman also claims that many of the male characters who died went down fighting and the female characters did not. Elecktra dies by fighting Bullseye. Just about every female who died in the Walking Dead died fighting, and I know a lot of bad things happened to some of the women in that book, but I believe that the Walking Dead portrays violence very accurately. These are things that actually could happen to people if they were in the same situation. There are many others who have, and yes some woman in comics were killed in very unfair ways, but there are many different genres of comic books and to just group them all into one genre is unfair. One of my dreams is to create a comic book. Sorry for the rant, but it's clear this woman was just looking for something to be angry about. If she happens to stumble upon my blog I would like to advise her to do research next time before posting an angry video.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Early Influences

When I went to elementary school, none of the kids enjoyed reading, myself included. When I was about in second grade, or the end of first grade, we had a book fair. I bought a book based on the cover and that it was cool to buy things at the book fair. I didn't read the book until I did something bad and got punished from my tv. That book was the Spanish Kidnapping Disaster. I don't remember much about it, other than the two sisters get kidnapped. An hour or so into reading it, my parents announced that my punishment was over, but I opted to finish the book. I read the book over and over until I outgrew it.
 
Around the same time I started reading for fun, I started watching Ghost Writer. Ghost Writer was an educational show aimed at children. I remember watching it and thinking about how I would love to be a writer, or how I would love to have a friend like Ghost Writer. There was an episode where they wrote a scary story, and I decided that I wanted to be a horror writer, although my mother thought it wasn't good for a young girl to write horror stories. I wrote about vampires, werewolves, and anything else that I found scary at the time. I'm actually still writing about these "scary" monsters, but now I write them into an urban fantasy setting.


 
Then came the Goosebumps craze. I'm fairly sure that I was one of the only kids at my school who read the books. I also watched the tv show. I remembered the first show being introduced by the Crypt Keeper and R.L. Stine. I loved the series, and would try to read the books before their television counterparts aired. I was also reading the Babysitter's club and Sweet Valley Twins at the time, but nothing could compare to my love of Goosebumps. I'd still watch the tv show if they were still making new episodes. I joined the summer reading program at my library and had to use a piece of paper to add in more books then the space allowed. Most of those books were Goosebumps.
 
 
When I got too old for Goosebumps books, I found R.L. Stine's Fear Street series. I think I check out just about every Fear Street book that my library carried and I requested that they get more. Now that I'm an adult, I really should consider reading R.L. Stine's adult books. I think reading R.L. Stine's books made me even more interested in reading scary books, since that's all I would read in my teenage years.
 
 
 
Now the books I read range all over the place. I love urban fantasy, but I also love books like Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Carrie by Stephan King is one of my favorites. I also love the Fight Club. Reading the books I read when I was younger opened me up to trying out so many different books as an adult.