I'm having a little trouble staying caught up with the blog this week, so here for today is a goofy conversation I had with my sister Bethany yesterday. There's some important relationship advice in here!
(The conversation starts off as we're discussing Vanilla Sky.)
Bethany: I think I would've enjoyed it more if I had seen it on my own
Bethany: But by the time it got to the end, I thought the plot was very interesting
Bethany: And he did a good job
Me: He meaning Tom Cruise?
Bethany: Yeah4
Bethany: -4
Me: LOL, I thought you were grading him.
Me: "He did a good job. -4."
Bethany: Haha. What do I rate the people I hate?
Me: -4 BILLION
Bethany: And what's my highest? Do I ever get above -?
Me: God gets a 2.
Me: Your future husband and children will be a 0.
Bethany: LOL
Me: Close friends and family members now are -1.
Bethany: Hey, who says that my family and friends are less than my husbands and children?
Me: *shrug* I dunno, I figured they would be.
Me: Jacob ranks higher than my friends and family.
Bethany: YOU'RE SAYING THAT TOM CRUISE IS ONLY 3 BEHIND FRIENDS AND FAMILY? I do NOT like him that much!
Me: LOL
Me: But HE DID A GOOD JOB!
Bethany: But not THAT good!
Me: Well, maybe you typoed and you meant to say -14 for Tom.
Bethany: And yeah, I guess they will definitely be higher than my friends. I can't say over family until I marry somebody who actually IS over my family. I'm sure they will be.
Me: Yeah, ranking people in order of how much you like them is a little weird.
Me: I mean for me Jacob is definitely my favorite of all the people. haha... but I don't feel bad telling anyone that.
Bethany: Haha, well that works. I haven't found my favorite of all the people other than my own family yet... but maybe that will be a defining thing about whenever I DO find a guy. If I don't like him more than/at least as much as families, then I can't marry him.
Bethany: *MY family
Me: AS MUCH AS ALL FAMILIES EVERYWHERE
Bethany: THAT'S WAY TOO BROAD
Bethany: And unhelpful
Bethany: If I don't like him better than the Bluth family, than I DEFINITELY shouldn't marry him
Me: LOL LOL
Me: "Things to look for in a husband:
1. I like him more than the Bluths."
Bethany: LOL
Bethany: I think I should set my standards a little higher
Me: Well, that's just the first of 942 things on the list.
Bethany: LOL
Me: "544. Wears size 10 1/2 shoes.
545. Sometimes dreams about Disneyland.
546. Has never known anyone named Curtis."
Bethany: LOL
Bethany: I like your suggestions. But not because I'm going to use them.
Me: Fine.
Bethany: Hey, if YOU want to write out a list of 942 things for me, I can compare the next guy to that and see how well he matches up
Me: LOL
Me: Well, that dreaming-about-Disneyland thing is going on there.
Showing posts with label discussions with friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discussions with friends. Show all posts
Monday, April 13, 2015
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
On Fantasy and Sci-Fi
I had this discussion last week on my MovieQuest 2014 Facebook group. I found it pretty fascinating and wanted to share it here. It began with my review of the 1988 film Willow but led pretty quickly into my issues with the fantasy genre as a whole and pondering what the genre was meant to be.
"It's hard for me to judge fantasy movies, because as a whole I feel like they're depressingly (and weirdly) unimaginative, falling back on the same tropes and mythical creatures over and over again. (If you have an opportunity to make up a world all your own, why wouldn't you take advantage of that more?) And this does have a lot of that. The characters are familiar, the plot is familiar, and while there are one or two new creatures, a lot of them are pretty standard."
Jennie: I'd also argue that part of what fantasy is IS tropes. That's what fairy tales have always been. Three brothers, three wishes, talking animals, good vs evil, good guy always wins against all odds, etc. That's part of what is attractive about them, for me, at least, is they follow similar rules, and teach the same lessons.
Me: It's not necessarily just the plot tropes, though. More than anything, it's the creatures. Why on earth would you create your own world and then only use species that other people made up? I mean, that's partly why I like The Hobbit. Hobbits were new. Gollum was new. But most fantasy stories feature humans, dwarves, trolls, goblins, elves, The End.
Jennie: And now I'm curious -- out of all the fantasy movies you've seen, which might you say is your favorite?
Me: I checked out my list of fantasy movies on Flickchart. Typically, I like fantasy/reality mixes -- stories clearly set mostly in our world or populated with characters from our world but with a couple fantastical elements (at the top of my list are Beauty and the Beast, Monsters Inc, Mary Poppins). I like ones that play around with the tropes a bit (Into the Woods is #4). The highest straight-fantasy one is The Princess Bride, but again, I grew up with that one so I love it for more nostalgic reasons. Ditto Ladyhawke, which is a bit further down.
The highest all-set-in-a-fantasy-world movie that I didn't watch a child is... The City of Lost Children, maybe? (#385 on Flickchart.) I can't remember how strictly fantasy that is. It's REALLY hard to find a movie high on my chart that most people would instantly think of as belonging in the fantasy genre. Oh, there we go. Stardust is #903. But that's almost halfway down my chart.
I'm not sure what to do with Studio Ghibli, though. Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro fall somewhere in between the fantasy/reality dichotomy, and they're both quite high on my list. But they're also wonderfully imaginative in the characters they create.
Jennie: Okay, I can concede that point. It is difficult to find a fantasy anything that uses the other-than-standard creature array.
Me: It's just WEIRD to me that so few of them do. You'd think SOMEONE would want to make up something new once in awhile.
Jennie: I think some prefer that their creatures be familiar to their audiences, or it's possibly a lazy choice. Some, however, perhaps play on a different IDEA of a creature, such as Tolkien did with his books. Elves have been in stories forever -- he turned them into ancient wise warriors for, I believe, the first significant time, choosing to imagine the "truth" behind all the "devolved" elves in the fairy tales and stories, the kind that would help a cobbler with his shoes or make toys for Santa. Willow's idea of trolls is different from Harry Potter's is different from Tolkien's, etc.
Perhaps they stick to the standards because that's what sells. Different is beautiful to create, but we both know the mass audience likes the accessible and doesn't always like to stretch their imaginative muscles to accept something so foreign to them as, say, garthim and skeksis, when they can have comfortable, familiar monsters such as werewolves and goblins. (btw, I'd nominate The Dark Crystal for an amazing new array of original creatures).
Me: I think it's nice when people play on creature ideas, it's just weird that the creativity so often stops there. I mean, compare it to sci-fi, which is superficially more grounded in reality. Sure, there are plenty of stereotypical aliens that we see all the time in movies, but there are also a LOT of new types of aliens that look different and seem different and relate to us differently. There's a moderate chance that if I watch a sci-fi alien invasion movie, I'll see something new I haven't seen before. That chance is nearly zero if I watch a fantasy flick.
I do need to see The Dark Crystal sometime. Jacob owns it, I've just never watched it.
Derek: You have to also consider that there's money and sometimes digital effects involved in creating different creatures. In 1988 when Willow came out, it was years before all these other movies made us sick of the same types of creatures. It's hard to see a movie from the perspective of the people who saw it when it first came out. This is why it's extremely difficult to watch black and white movies and see them as original, because you are only aware of all the people who have copied -- and often parodied -- these movies.
Me: I actually was thinking about that a bit, but I run into the same thing with pure fantasy books, which don't require effects. Granted, I haven't read as many fantasy books as I have seen fantasy movies (I got tired and stopped reading them when they all seemed the same) so I may be missing out on the ones that stretch the genre.
But the point about the same creatures not being overused at that point is a good one. I don't have a good sense of when specific incarnations of fantasy creatures became canon, so to speak.
Jennie: They've been canon for ages. Perhaps the reason is because those incarnations are so SET is because fantasy has been around so much longer than Sci-Fi. Those legends and myths go back centuries in our literature, some of them all the way back to ancient Greece. Fairies, goblins, elemental spirits, etc.
Also, in some ways, the creatures of fantasy depend upon the world we live in now, where science fiction has no such boundaries. It can choose life forms that never would develop on this planet and bring them here in spinning flying saucers or interdimensional portals or massive warships. Humans can also travel out to the stars and encounter all these for themselves, where in most stories humans aren't allowed in the realms from which the fairyfolk originate, so their origins are traditionally rooted in myth and mystery.
Derek: When they became canon and when they became canon AT THE MOVIES are two different things, though.
Jennie: Well, yes, I suppose I'm talking in general. AT THE MOVIES might have become canon with Disney, really, as that's when full-length features of fantasy became big. Evil witches, the fairies from Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan, dragons and mermaids and wizards, oh my!
Me: "The creatures of fantasy depend upon the world we live in now" <-- That's an interesting thought, because I would definitely have thought of it the other way around. For example, sci fi still depends on, to some extent, adhering to the laws of physics and at least on-the-surface plausible scientific explanations. I think of fantasy stories as being an opportunity to create an entirely new world from scratch, including impossible things like magic. But maybe that's not the idea.
Jennie: I've personally always considered fantasy to be a vehicle, rather than it's own end. Think about the Brothers Grimm, fairy tales, myths, etc. They were told not only to entertain, but to teach the morality of the day. Good vs evil, as I said. Kindness pays back. Appearances can be deceiving. Be careful who you trust. One of the main points of fantasy was and is to explore humanity. That's why the stories have lasted, that's why the tropes endure, that's why everything repeats and it still has an audience, is perhaps because we see ourselves in it. (This is all my own theories and speculations, and are you guys enjoying this discussion as much as I am?)
Me: Huh. That's an interesting thought. *Especially* because I feel like that's what a lot of sci fi does now, if sometimes with less straightforward morals (but not always). A LOT of sci fi is very moralistic -- District 9 is about immigration, WALL-E is about about technology making us lazy, dystopian "government controls the world" movies are about the dangers of giving up freedom, post-apocalyptic movies are about war... the list can go on and on. Maybe fantasy has lost its edge a little bit in that department BECAUSE the characters and the world become comfortable for us? (Although obviously reality-based movies can present strong morals and lessons as well.)
I am really entertained and intrigued that everything you say about fantasy, I keep saying, "But sci fi does that!" Maybe we'll find out in the end that they're really the same genre. TWIST!
Jennie: Which is why you notice I didn't say that scifi DIDN'T do those things, because it totally does. In fact, you could argue that there is QUITE a large overlap because fantasy and SciFi. Superheroes, for instance. Fantasy or SciFi? Hulk is scifi -- or is he an iteration of The Beast from Beauty and the Beast? Thor is fantasy/myth -- or is he an alien from another dimension? Spiderman is sci-fi -- or is he a were-spider? Fantasy is magic, Sci-fi is science -- but isn't magic just science we haven't discovered yet? Fantasy leans more to the medieval and the earth-bound (or at least earth-connected) and sci-fi leans more to the futuristic and the other-planetary, but you are right in that they are both Stories and Vehicles in the manner I discussed above. Perhaps SciFi only seems more varied and new is because it is so young in it's own development. Perhaps after another millennia sci-fi will go the same way, and we'll be tired of starships and large-eyed aliens and blaster-ray-guns.
Or not. Perhaps as time goes on they will continue to merge until the differences are picky, or they are only differentiated by their origins.
Or maybe we are tilting back the other way, developing new fantasies. Slenderman is an excellent example of this, as is, I think Avatar. With the modern technologies we have that make literally anything possible onscreen, perhaps we're only a turn away from a new era of fantasy creation.
Me: I do agree there's a lot of overlap there. Perhaps for me, sci fi is (often) simply a fresher, more inventive way of telling the same stories. Except for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is clearly fantasy, rather than sci fi, and does EVERYTHING PERFECTLY.
Oh, Slenderman is an interesting example. That IS a fantasy character who is only about a decade old, and I love him. I would be a big fan of a new era of fantasy creation. When that happens I'll start paying attention again.
And the discussion ended there. What do you guys think? Chime in with your comments!
The Part of My Review That Triggered the Discussion
"It's hard for me to judge fantasy movies, because as a whole I feel like they're depressingly (and weirdly) unimaginative, falling back on the same tropes and mythical creatures over and over again. (If you have an opportunity to make up a world all your own, why wouldn't you take advantage of that more?) And this does have a lot of that. The characters are familiar, the plot is familiar, and while there are one or two new creatures, a lot of them are pretty standard."
The Discussion Begins
Jennie: I'd also argue that part of what fantasy is IS tropes. That's what fairy tales have always been. Three brothers, three wishes, talking animals, good vs evil, good guy always wins against all odds, etc. That's part of what is attractive about them, for me, at least, is they follow similar rules, and teach the same lessons.
Me: It's not necessarily just the plot tropes, though. More than anything, it's the creatures. Why on earth would you create your own world and then only use species that other people made up? I mean, that's partly why I like The Hobbit. Hobbits were new. Gollum was new. But most fantasy stories feature humans, dwarves, trolls, goblins, elves, The End.
Jennie: And now I'm curious -- out of all the fantasy movies you've seen, which might you say is your favorite?
Me: I checked out my list of fantasy movies on Flickchart. Typically, I like fantasy/reality mixes -- stories clearly set mostly in our world or populated with characters from our world but with a couple fantastical elements (at the top of my list are Beauty and the Beast, Monsters Inc, Mary Poppins). I like ones that play around with the tropes a bit (Into the Woods is #4). The highest straight-fantasy one is The Princess Bride, but again, I grew up with that one so I love it for more nostalgic reasons. Ditto Ladyhawke, which is a bit further down.
The highest all-set-in-a-fantasy-world movie that I didn't watch a child is... The City of Lost Children, maybe? (#385 on Flickchart.) I can't remember how strictly fantasy that is. It's REALLY hard to find a movie high on my chart that most people would instantly think of as belonging in the fantasy genre. Oh, there we go. Stardust is #903. But that's almost halfway down my chart.
I'm not sure what to do with Studio Ghibli, though. Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro fall somewhere in between the fantasy/reality dichotomy, and they're both quite high on my list. But they're also wonderfully imaginative in the characters they create.
Jennie: Okay, I can concede that point. It is difficult to find a fantasy anything that uses the other-than-standard creature array.
Me: It's just WEIRD to me that so few of them do. You'd think SOMEONE would want to make up something new once in awhile.
Jennie: I think some prefer that their creatures be familiar to their audiences, or it's possibly a lazy choice. Some, however, perhaps play on a different IDEA of a creature, such as Tolkien did with his books. Elves have been in stories forever -- he turned them into ancient wise warriors for, I believe, the first significant time, choosing to imagine the "truth" behind all the "devolved" elves in the fairy tales and stories, the kind that would help a cobbler with his shoes or make toys for Santa. Willow's idea of trolls is different from Harry Potter's is different from Tolkien's, etc.
Perhaps they stick to the standards because that's what sells. Different is beautiful to create, but we both know the mass audience likes the accessible and doesn't always like to stretch their imaginative muscles to accept something so foreign to them as, say, garthim and skeksis, when they can have comfortable, familiar monsters such as werewolves and goblins. (btw, I'd nominate The Dark Crystal for an amazing new array of original creatures).
Me: I think it's nice when people play on creature ideas, it's just weird that the creativity so often stops there. I mean, compare it to sci-fi, which is superficially more grounded in reality. Sure, there are plenty of stereotypical aliens that we see all the time in movies, but there are also a LOT of new types of aliens that look different and seem different and relate to us differently. There's a moderate chance that if I watch a sci-fi alien invasion movie, I'll see something new I haven't seen before. That chance is nearly zero if I watch a fantasy flick.
I do need to see The Dark Crystal sometime. Jacob owns it, I've just never watched it.
Me: I actually was thinking about that a bit, but I run into the same thing with pure fantasy books, which don't require effects. Granted, I haven't read as many fantasy books as I have seen fantasy movies (I got tired and stopped reading them when they all seemed the same) so I may be missing out on the ones that stretch the genre.
But the point about the same creatures not being overused at that point is a good one. I don't have a good sense of when specific incarnations of fantasy creatures became canon, so to speak.
Jennie: They've been canon for ages. Perhaps the reason is because those incarnations are so SET is because fantasy has been around so much longer than Sci-Fi. Those legends and myths go back centuries in our literature, some of them all the way back to ancient Greece. Fairies, goblins, elemental spirits, etc.
Also, in some ways, the creatures of fantasy depend upon the world we live in now, where science fiction has no such boundaries. It can choose life forms that never would develop on this planet and bring them here in spinning flying saucers or interdimensional portals or massive warships. Humans can also travel out to the stars and encounter all these for themselves, where in most stories humans aren't allowed in the realms from which the fairyfolk originate, so their origins are traditionally rooted in myth and mystery.
Derek: When they became canon and when they became canon AT THE MOVIES are two different things, though.
Jennie: Well, yes, I suppose I'm talking in general. AT THE MOVIES might have become canon with Disney, really, as that's when full-length features of fantasy became big. Evil witches, the fairies from Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan, dragons and mermaids and wizards, oh my!
Me: "The creatures of fantasy depend upon the world we live in now" <-- That's an interesting thought, because I would definitely have thought of it the other way around. For example, sci fi still depends on, to some extent, adhering to the laws of physics and at least on-the-surface plausible scientific explanations. I think of fantasy stories as being an opportunity to create an entirely new world from scratch, including impossible things like magic. But maybe that's not the idea.
Me: Huh. That's an interesting thought. *Especially* because I feel like that's what a lot of sci fi does now, if sometimes with less straightforward morals (but not always). A LOT of sci fi is very moralistic -- District 9 is about immigration, WALL-E is about about technology making us lazy, dystopian "government controls the world" movies are about the dangers of giving up freedom, post-apocalyptic movies are about war... the list can go on and on. Maybe fantasy has lost its edge a little bit in that department BECAUSE the characters and the world become comfortable for us? (Although obviously reality-based movies can present strong morals and lessons as well.)
I am really entertained and intrigued that everything you say about fantasy, I keep saying, "But sci fi does that!" Maybe we'll find out in the end that they're really the same genre. TWIST!
Jennie: Which is why you notice I didn't say that scifi DIDN'T do those things, because it totally does. In fact, you could argue that there is QUITE a large overlap because fantasy and SciFi. Superheroes, for instance. Fantasy or SciFi? Hulk is scifi -- or is he an iteration of The Beast from Beauty and the Beast? Thor is fantasy/myth -- or is he an alien from another dimension? Spiderman is sci-fi -- or is he a were-spider? Fantasy is magic, Sci-fi is science -- but isn't magic just science we haven't discovered yet? Fantasy leans more to the medieval and the earth-bound (or at least earth-connected) and sci-fi leans more to the futuristic and the other-planetary, but you are right in that they are both Stories and Vehicles in the manner I discussed above. Perhaps SciFi only seems more varied and new is because it is so young in it's own development. Perhaps after another millennia sci-fi will go the same way, and we'll be tired of starships and large-eyed aliens and blaster-ray-guns.
Or not. Perhaps as time goes on they will continue to merge until the differences are picky, or they are only differentiated by their origins.
Or maybe we are tilting back the other way, developing new fantasies. Slenderman is an excellent example of this, as is, I think Avatar. With the modern technologies we have that make literally anything possible onscreen, perhaps we're only a turn away from a new era of fantasy creation.
Me: I do agree there's a lot of overlap there. Perhaps for me, sci fi is (often) simply a fresher, more inventive way of telling the same stories. Except for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is clearly fantasy, rather than sci fi, and does EVERYTHING PERFECTLY.
Oh, Slenderman is an interesting example. That IS a fantasy character who is only about a decade old, and I love him. I would be a big fan of a new era of fantasy creation. When that happens I'll start paying attention again.
And the discussion ended there. What do you guys think? Chime in with your comments!
Monday, February 10, 2014
Frozen's "Let It Go": Sad Isolation Song or Triumphant Anthem?
Last week I had a fascinating conversation with one of my good friends, Jennie, and wanted to share that conversation here.
It all revolved around the song "Let It Go" from Frozen. If you haven't seen the movie, there are definitely spoilers ahead, and this post also won't make much sense. If you have seen the movie, however, chime in in the comments -- I'd love to hear your take on it!
Jennie's comments are in bold and on the right. Mine are plain and on the left.
I just came across a thing that made me go "wait . . . What?" I saw a comment on someone else's Facebook post that "let it go" is becoming some kind of anthem for people who have left/are leaving the LDS faith, and . . . Is that supposed to be ironic? Did they not watch the movie?
No, it's not ironic at all. It's become kind of anthemic for a lot of things, specifically with the idea of breaking out of things/situations where they felt like they had to hide who they were or keep from showing true emotions, so it's become a leaving faith anthem, a coming out anthem, a leaving-abusive-relationship anthem... all that kind of thing.
I mean, I love the song, but IMO it shouldn't be an anthem for anybody, any more than, say, "on my own" should be. Yes, it sounds all triumphant and liberating, but it's actually so phenomenally sad!
That's interesting that you felt that. It doesn't feel like a sad song to me at all. It feels *very* triumphant to me. Because even though she may be in (self-imposed) isolation now, for the first time in YEARS she actually feels free to be herself, and that's a really positive thought for me.
Yeah, but . . . It's not until the end of the movie, when Elsa reconnects with the people who love her, that she learns she wasn't as restricted ad she thought and only then, back in that place she left, that she reaches her full potential. The sad part is she didn't NEED to be in isolation.
Huh. That's a really interesting reading. I guess to me... her isolation and self-expression is a definite step forward rather than a step backward, although it's not the end of the journey. She still needs to figure out how to express herself AND reconnect with people, but before she was doing neither, and then suddenly she gets to do one
The trolls said fear would be her enemy - and her parents fear is exactly what kept her isolated her whole life.
Exactly, and when she finds a way to live without that fear, it's exhilarating for her, at least short-term.
So she put herself in further isolation, which, yes, felt freeing at first, but she didn't actually heal yet, not until she went back.
I see it as her gladly trading the isolation of her stone castle for the isolation of her ice castle, because at least this way she won't hurt anybody.
Well, yeah - I guess the sad for me is that she has no idea how good she could have it.
That's the thing, I guess, "Let It Go" speaks deeply to me of the moment when you're like, "I JUST FIGURED OUT I DON'T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS ANYMORE" and even though there may be a downside to the new arrangement, even though you may not have healed yet, it's still an incredibly joyous moment to find freedom of any kind.
That's so interesting. It just honestly never occurred to me to see it as a sad song. It feels very... self-empowermenty.
From Elsa's point of view, yes, it's a song about freedom, but from an outside perspective it's a sad song about feeling like you have to leave whatever other good behind to try and find yourself. And you end up locking yourself away in an ice castle, alone.
I don't know how well you know "Defying Gravity" but that's the song it always gets compared to -- do you feel like that one is sad too?
Oh, definitely had the same feel. She's doing what she thinks she needs to do, but she ends up dying alone and unloved. (Haven't seen the whole musical, but nobody seems to mourn her in the original story.) So for me both songs are sad in the long-run context for me.
Huh. This is kinda mind blowing for me.
I mean, can you kind of see what I'm saying, though?
I guess... it just feels weird to me because I feel like that makes *everything* sad. Because if the movie ends happily for someone (like Frozen) the entire beginning is sad because they're not there yet, and if it ends somewhat badly for someone (like Wicked) it's sad because of where they end up. My brain isn't sure how to respond to that.
Oh, no, I made the whole world sad for Hannah, LOL
LOL! No, my emotions are responding to it just fine, it's just really befuddling to me.
OH, WAIT!
OK, so I think we're looking at it from opposite angles.
Likely.
You're looking at it from the ending and saying, "Elsa doesn't know how good things can/will get, and she's not there yet and she's sad," and I'm looking at it from the beginning, where she came from, and saying, "Elsa has finally found some semblance of happiness, that's awesome, I'm sure she'll figure the rest of it out eventually." (If she didn't, then I could be sad.)
I didn't say SHE was sad, I said the song was.
OK, well, wait, let me ask this question then: Do you think running away WAS a step forward? Or do you think it really was not a positive change at all?Because that makes a difference.
I figured she's not really any MORE isolated than she was in Arendell or whatever the town name is, and at least this way she gets to be free, even if she is lonely. But if it feels like a step... sideways or backward to you, that hugely changes things
(I'm so intrigued by all of this. It's just a POV on the movie I'd never have considered and I'm trying to wrap my brain around it.)
That's a complicated question, really. Imagine if she'd been up there alone and nobody had come to find her? What if it was years instead of only a couple days? What if she finally got lonely and bored of making beautiful ice things for herself, and she finally came back to see if her sister wanted to build a snowman - and found the ice age she'd created by leaving had left the land she grew up in desolate?
Now, maybe it was the step she personally needed to get past the fear her parents had instilled in her, but she never would have gotten over it alone, so was it a positive step in itself? I think I'd say no.
I think the only part that makes that hypothetical scenario any sadder than living isolated in Arendell her whole life is that she'd have desolated the town. If the town had found a way to survive and she had ever chosen to come back (which I doubt she would have), I feel like AT WORST she'd be no worse off than she was living in fear at Arendell. Because living *just* in loneliness seems better to me than living in loneliness *and* fear.
Sometimes loneliness IS fear.
But her fear was that she was going to hurt someone else, and she couldn't if she was alone.
Imagine instead if instead of suppressing her powers she'd used them carefully, learned how to control them better, and stayed close to her sister. Then maybe the ice age never would have happened, and she would never have felt the need to isolate herself
But the whole "I'm never going back, the past is in the past" - well, as Rafiki said, you can either run from it, or learn from it."
I agree she maybe shouldn't refuse to look back and learn from it.
Yes, exactly.
But the feeling of knowing you never HAVE to go back to something is immensely freeing. I feel like that's an emotional statement of joy more than anything else.
My argument isn't that it isn't freeing, or wouldn't be a necessary step. It's that it probably shouldn't necessarily be aspired to. Just like Elsa had no idea her full potential could be reached with her sister's help, I sometimes wonder if people understand what they are really giving up.
I don't know that the song is meant to be prescriptive, though. It's just an expression of excitement and joy of a burden being lifted off of you.
And you get in an "I'm free I'm free - dang it" situation.
But even "I'm free I'm free - dang it" is better than constant aching misery, and I don't feel that makes the initial freedom any less joyful and exciting just because she hasn't figured out the balance yet. At least for me.
Oh, not for me either. People learn things in their own time, and they need to make mistakes to do it.
But I think maybe for me that's because I feel like I've occasionally DONE this. Like, honestly, my decision to not go to church was like that. And my decision to be a crazy introvert hermit once I finally figured out it was OK to not want to be social all the time was like that.
I don't know if I've told you about that - when I finally started figuring out it was OK to want to be alone, I withdrew like CRAZY. Even though ultimately I was like, "Yeah, this isn't as fun anymore, I want to find a better balance," the initial feeling of "I NEVER HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN" was freaking. Amazing.
So I guess I connect to it on that level. There can be something so liberating about leaving certain things behind FOREVER -- even if it turns out later you can't leave them forever and you need them back in your life -- but at the time it feels like FOREVER and it feels awesome.
No, I get that, it's actually why I love the song. It isn't sad that Elsa needed to leave, and it isn't sad that Elsa potentially didn't need to leave, it's sad that she didn't know there might be other options. I love that Anna never stopped reaching out to her sister EVER. It's sad because Elsa was too afraid to try anything else BUT run away. Does that make it a bit clearer? I guess it's a very specific kind of sad for me. She had no idea how much she was loved and needed.
Hmm. OK. I guess I get that. I think it is sad that she didn't know there were other options, but I also think whatever she had to do to break through the fear was a positive thing and a triumphant thing, even if it couldn't last. There was no way she was going to just suddenly not be afraid and reach out to her sister, something big had to happen to push her to do that, something had to FORCE her to break through it. And so I guess that doesn't make me sad for her during Let It Go, because, hey, breaking through fear is a triumphant moment, but it definitely makes me HECKA sad for everything up until that point.
I think I see your point, it just feels weird for "Let It Go" to be included in the sadness because it feels like a positive high point for me, even though not THE positive high point.
Hehe. My brain works in strange ways, I guess.
But I think I understand it intellectually even if I can't grasp it emotionally.
Ok, cool.
I am really intrigued by that. Like I wonder what it says about our personalities that that's how we view it. It probably means I'm flighty and love to abandon things.
What do you guys think? Do you see both sides of this? Were you as taken aback as either one of us at hearing the other view?
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