I'm Eating an Apple

Character tropes, referring “ to a common motif or pattern in a work of art” according to www.masterclass.com , can be a valuable asset to a story when used in refreshing, ironic, or criticizing ways. However, when written incorrectly, these motifs can be cliché or even boring.  Tropes aren’t exclusive to books and can be applied to other media like TV shows or movies. Some of the tropes I will be covering today might not strictly fit into the definition of a “character trope”, but they all have the ability to leave an unpleasant taste in your mouth.  Perished Parent(s) After reading a modest selection of children/young adult books, you start to notice some patterns in the set-ups, like the fact that ap- parent -ly every children/young adult book has to contain an orphaned protagonist or a single guardian working 14 hours a day to support their kiddo. It’s a staple at this point. I suppose it adds some sympathy for the main character, but after a while you can start to wonder ...

  You guys seemed to enjoy my Percy Jackson book to movie comparison last month, so I have decided to do another installment in the series- but this time, an adaptation gone right. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Of course, it still follows the rule that the book is almost always better than the movie. There are a few things they left out that I wish they hadn’t, but for the most part, I found both very good and enjoyed both the book and the movie. Here are some of the things the movie added, removed, and changed. Warning: spoilers ahead. Though if you haven’t read Harry Potter at this point, are you ever going to do it? Added- The Shrunken Head There wasn’t a whole lot that the movies added onto the books, but this was one of the few things. It was just a little touch that added all the more chaos to the Knight Bus scene. Reverse Aging This isn’t really a point about how the movie adapted from the book, but I thought it was worth mentioning. How did Professor Flitwick...

       Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is one of my Favorite Books I have read. So naturally, I was very excited about the film adaptation released in 2018. After watching it though, I was disappointed in the film as it just rewrote or removed parts of the plot.     The Major Spoiler-free plot of Ready Player One revolves around Wade Watts a teenager inside the OASIS. The OASIS is an open-world virtual reality game where you can do whatever you want. Wade however is taking school inside the OASIS so he is stuck on the school planet with no money to travel anywhere else. When suddenly the creator of the game James Halliday dies and he launches a massive challenge inside the OASIS for anybody to complete to win the OASIS. The challenge is to find three different keys, the Copper Key, the Jade key, and finally the Cyrstal Key. To find these you must complete smaller challenges each time to grab ahold of the Keys. These Keys then unlock a corresponding ga...

Often, fanfiction is looked down upon as a form of writing not worthy of approval or recognition. People have a mental image of a fanfic writer as an 11-year-old banging away at a keyboard about My Little Pony or some other “childish” fandom. Now, I’m not saying that’s bad, because it does fall under fanfic. However, there is so much more than that--there’s a huge range of creators, from aforementioned 11-year-old to people in their 30s and 40s writing about the characters they’ve grown to love. That being said, I’m going to leave the arguments for another time and simply introduce you directly to some terms you need to know if you ever decide to venture into the gold mine of the fanfic community. Headcanon and canon (not to be confused with cannon) are used to differentiate between things from the source material and fan-created content. Anything canon is explicitly stated in the source material. For example, it is shown that Ron and Hermione date and eventually get married, therefore...