Magical Mondays: Take a Look; It’s in a Book

(via the svtfoe wiki)

I very recently started watching Star vs The Forces of Evil (no spoilers, please!) and was amused by an episode where Star needs to undo a spell she’s cast on Marco. She pulls out the wand’s manual, an ancient, crumbling tome filled with the wisdom of ages of wand users to consult, only to realize that all of their notes are so cryptic and poorly organized that it will take her ages to make any sense of them. This got me thinking about magical journals in general. A common staple of fantasy fiction is a magical guide to the world in question, typically in the form of some kind of handwritten diary or log. Sometimes a book is just a book; I can’t imagine, for example, that Newt’s finished version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will be anything but a basic bestiary. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, these books are often most compelling when they serve a greater purpose than simply as a how-to or a reference of some kind. By including these books in a layered way, we can add additional complexity to the stories we tell.

Snape Apologists: Is Snape the Greatest or the Worst?

I’m not going to lie; when I was reading the Harry Potter books, I loved Snape. I even have a t-shirt that says, “I trusted Snape” on the front, and on the back it says, “Oh, the cleverness of me. *smirk*”. So yeah, I really liked Snape. I mean, I’m a self-identified Slytherin, so of course I did. But now that I’m older and consider myself a feminist (I knew nothing about feminism while reading Harry Potter), I decided to go back and look at Snape from a critical feminist lens. And now I wonder if I was too kind to Snape.

These two are not mutually exclusive.

Spoilers: the Good, the Bad, or the Ugly?

With the advent of the Internet and the ability to find the answer to every question you did or didn’t want to know with the click of a button, I thought I’d look at whether or not spoilers enhance the reading/watching experience or take something away from it. Lord of the Flies, Harry Potter, and Prometheus spoilers after the jump.

In Brightest Day: The Common Factor

In fiction, there are usually common concepts that drive a work. It’s the action that drives the main character towards the story’s resolution. Sometimes, the concept can be something as simple as a contest. Sometimes it’s as complicated as a war.