Ohohohoho. Post numero dos.

Okay, do today we revisited the summer reading assignment thing and Jon explained to us our project, which is a presentation on the books we read. So to recap, there are two parts to the presentation: 

•    PART ONE is the plot summary and our own understanding of the plot, symbols, themes, characters, etc. You know the drill. 

•    PART TWO (the thing I'm going to talk about after this) is how could the novel be understood differently if it was read in a different culture or at a different time. 

Okay so now on to that. I'd like to start off with the idea of how things would be received differently due to different people’s perspective, and first off before anyone goes bashing on anything, please keep in mind that this is just my perspective and my opinion and it’ll probably differ from yours.

So let’s talk about Watchmen. If Watchmen, hypothetically speaking, was released in around the time the Cold War was still going on, I’m pretty sure it would raise a few eyebrows. If it was released in a different part of the world with a different set of conservative values, like let’s say the Middle East, readers there wouldn’t warm up to it as fast as I did. Would it have been taken seriously at the time of the Cold War? Would people read it and go: “Hey! Maybe this guy’s on to something.” or would they have just been terribly offended? Who knows? Watchmen deals with several themes and matters that (horribly and terrifyingly enough) happen in several cultures, and it really do make you think about where you stand morally to say the least, and it makes the point that yeah, the world isn’t all rainbows and sunshines and yeah terrible things actually exist, and comic books aren’t always men in tights saving a damsel in distress or an Amazonian woman with a lasso fighting for justice; they can serve as a wake up call. And I’m not just talking about how at the brink of nuclear war and Red Scares “what would you have done?” doesn’t it make you think really hard about people? [SPOILER] One man deciding to band the world together through crisis and evading war killed millions of New Yorkers, after Eddie tried to rape her, Sally consented and had a child with him and hid the truth about her father from Laurie, Rorschach going from leaving the criminals to the police battered and bruised to full scale slaughter. All of this is perspective. In Rorschach’s eyes, what he did was right, in Sally’s eyes, she did what she could for Laurie, and in Adrian’s eyes, what he did was the right thing to do even though ‘nothing ever ends.’ Though Adrian does somewhat question his actions, but with his meticulous planning and the actual execution of the plan shows how much he wanted it to happen and how determined he was to make it happen.

A lot of people would think differently.

In a conservative Muslim culture, like in some parts of the Middle East, just the very idea of scantily clad women and sexual matters is a huge no-no. And the idea of one man viewing himself above others due to superiority in intellect? It’d be completely absurd to people there.

And in Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry’s views wouldn’t have been received well if it were to be read by modern day hardcore feminists.

I’ll, uh, think of more eventually.

Pheew, that was wrong.

Alright, I guess that’s all for now.

‘Till next time.