The last book

We should end a semester on this because this one story has little pieces of multiple hero stories built in. Salman Rushdie took the stereotypical ideas of hero stories, placed them all in this little book, and then covered them up with fancy names and descriptive details. He played up a lot of these ideas and at first glance you would not realize their importance, but then you notice that he placed them in the story for a reason. Also, this story contains the hero’s journey in full. “Notes from the Underground” started off following the whole hero’s journey, but at a certain point, the underground swayed off the path of what a hero is. This book, from beginning to end, follows the path, as well as makes the path larger because he encounters so many different trials he must face in order to accomplish his ultimate goal of saving his father. Also, another example of something that is incorporated within this book that we have learned about throughout the semester is an anti-hero, or someone who doesn’t have the usual heroic characteristics. In this book, Mudra, the shadow warrior was this. When we first met him we were scared of him, but then he ended up helping us defeat the Chupwalas. Also, a lot of the books we read were written a very long time ago, and as we noticed with Dark Knight, our villains have changed, and the heroes have also. It was good to finish the semester off with a book that didn’t involve a mythical monster, or a book written in 1600. While this book had some interesting and make believe things in it, there was also a sense of us being able to connect with it much more than we could “Beowulf” for example. Also, it was good to see that the hero didn’t have to be a 30 year old man, and instead it could be the little boy, or even the girl page. Lastly, it was a happy book, and it is always great to end on a good note in everything you do.

At the end of class today, you also told us to write about the question “ why read stories that aren’t real.” I think the answer to this is it makes us feel better. If we read a story about a perfect romance, it makes us feel better about it actually being possible some day. We can look back and say “hey that couple did it, it can happen to me.” Same can be said for anything. You could read a book about a man who was not well off, but then something amazing happened to him, and before he knew it things were turning around for him. It just gives the reader a little hope in the future, because sometimes when you watch the news you think there is no hope at all for what’s going to happen next. It is basically for the same reason people used to listen to hero stories a long time ago. They didn’t know what was past their town, so if they had a hero to believe in who could fight what ever monsters lurked on the border of their town, they could easily sleep at night.

Female Heroes

When you think about heroes, the first thing you think of are men with the supernatural powers, that swoop in and save the day. There are not very many female heroes that come to mind even after a few minutes of thinking about it. In the real world, there are female heros like Rosa Parks, and other women who do wonderful things for human kind, but when we look at stories of contemporary heroes, women are most times left out. This is not to say that there are no female heroes out there, because that is not true, the male heroes just extremely out number the female heroes. This makes it difficult to think of the females. One female hero I thought of, however, was Laura Croft, the Tomb Raider. She has feminine characteristics in the fact that she looks like a very beautiful woman, and when she is not in the tombs she has common feminine characteristics, but while she is on the job she contains many more masculine characteristics. She doesn't go in and save the day by being dainty. Instead, she kicks down the door, shoots off a high tech weapon, punches the bad guy, and raids the tombs. Fiona, in Shrek, could be considered a hero as well in the later Shrek movies. She isn't afraid to get her hands dirty and fight crime either. Charlie's Angles are another example of women who fight crime violently, while the Angles use alot of their other characteristics and skills to trick the villain as well. I suppose that we do value that these female heroes are in fact females because we are so surprised that they can do such amazing powerful things. In the first few scenes we don't suspect that these women can defeat the villain without the aid of a man. We are so used to having the male come in and protect the frail women, but these movies show us other wise. I don't think we value the fact that they are women because we want the women to go and fight, we value the fact that these heroes are women because they are now doing things that we are so used to seeing guys do.