Creativity Corner

Calling all creative writers! This is a column run by Liv Akers and Mariah Lumsden to inspire readers to write. The column includes writing prompts, pieces by the coordinators, and occasional submissions from readers.

Calling all creative writers!

Welcome to Creativity Corner, a space for readers to write in The Scroll without having to be journalists! The deadline is August 29th; you have all summer to come up with a piece! We will be giving a $10 Dutch Bros gift card to the author of our favorite submission, so we hope to see you participate soon!

This month, our winner was Hailey Woods! Congrats, Hailey :). Scroll below to read their piece!

How to participate:

Below are a set of prompts for different styles of writing beyond journalism. The idea is that you can create some kind of creative writing piece inspired by one of the prompts, but it doesn't have to be. You can submit any piece of writing you'd like to share! All submissions should be school-appropriate.

Send in your submissions to gphsthescroll@gmail.com to be featured in the column! You are more than welcome to send in anonymously or put your name on your piece. Please just specify when emailing us. Thanks!

Prompts:

Here are some prompts to inspire your writing this month! If you try one, let us know how it goes. :)

Write a letter to someone you admired or were close with as a child (a teacher, mentor, or coach) that you haven’t heard a word of in a while. It can be anonymous or otherwise.
Write a story inspired by your favorite color(s). The color(s) can be as broad or specific as you’d like. Some things to include could be sounds, people, or places the color or colors remind you of, but what you include is completely up to you.
Write an acrostic poem. For those who don’t know, an acrostic poem takes a word and writes a phrase/sentence for each letter of the word.
For my essay writers out there, write a persuasive essay about why your favorite song, movie, or show, etc. is the best. Convince me!
Do you have a random draft sitting and rotting in your Docs somewhere? Submit it! Drop it in our email and run! Don’t look back! If you’re proud of your work, we’re proud of you, too, and we want to see it!

Life in Quarantine

Hailey Woods

When you hear the word “quarantine”, what do you think of?

Well, before the entire Coronavirus pandemic happened, I honestly thought that it had something to do with fish. Anyway, as everything happens, it started out small. All the way across the world, not a big deal to us, right? Well, that fantasy lasted shorter than I thought it would. One day, my friends and I are joking about one of us getting the Coronavirus; the next day, it has spread everywhere. The entire world has cases of COVID, and nobody knows how it happened.

Things only went downhill from there. Soon, I had to leave school, and instead did online learning. My mom told me that it would only be for a month. I look around myself and wondered, Where has all that time gone? What has happened to us? What is going to happen to us? I never imagined that my life would take a huge turn in my 8th grade year. My life was perfect, or as perfect as I could possibly hope for it to be. I got to hang out with friends, see my teachers, go into town and get shopping done (which is more fun for me than you think it is), do fun things, see friendly faces, and now, I don’t see any friends. Now, I see my teachers through a screen, and when in person, only the top half of their face. Now I have to wear a mask in town, there are no fun things to do, and all of those friendly faces I used to see, all of those smiles, they are all covered up. All I see is a wave of people trying to cope with this new way of life, a wave of miserable, frustrated people who just want to be happy again. Who want to see the world happy again.

The pandemic was hard on my family from the start. The prices for certain foods, like beef, rose a lot, and it’s already hard enough to try to support a family of seven, let alone during a pandemic. Of course prices lowered again, but it took months for that to happen. Usually I absolutely love school, but when summer came, it was a huge relief for me. I could not stand doing online school, because for me it just made everything three times harder than it originally was, since there were no live lessons in my eighth grade year. There were only assignments that we had to get done, and no teachers to help with them. Summer was good, nice and warm, but we couldn't go anywhere or do anything, and I was bored out of my mind. I almost went insane from having to stay home all day every day, and I was so excited to start school again. Who wouldn’t be? After a summer of being bored and seeing no one, anyone would have been excited. Then we got the news. Online learning would continue, but instead would have online classes that made everything ten times more complicated.

Of course, school wasn’t any easier than it had been before, because there were internet problems, and technology issues to deal with now. I went day to day, basically doing the same things over and over and over again. My daily routine? Wake up, do my chores, eat breakfast, get on my computer and start school, either clean up the house during my breaks, or work on the missing assignments I had. Trust me, I had a lot of them.

After almost the whole year of being online, we finally, finally got to walk school hallways again, hearing the voices of students going from class to class. Seeing our amazing teachers face to face. But of course, like with everything, there was a catch. We have to wear masks at all times (except when eating), we have to social distance, we have to have temperatures taken, we have to do a million things all day long, just to stay safe. Be perfectly honest when answering this; have you ever, ever tried to do P.E. class with a mask on? Let me tell you first hand, it’s not the best thing in the world. In fact, in terms of greatness, it falls just above sharks. For me, a person who absolutely hates sharks, that’s pretty low on the greatness wall.

This pandemic was a huge burden for everyone, everywhere. Everyone was going through the same thing, but we eventually got through it and when we did, when we got out of that hole that society had fallen in, there was one good thing that rose above all of the bad ones; we did this together. We got through it together, and after all that time, we finally, finally, got to take off our masks.

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My sister Lizzie was the person I ran to and she was my favorite sister. When my parents were doing badly, she was with me through the whole thing. She was the person I felt protected and safe by. She protected me and hid me away from all the bad things that would happen. It was always just me and her.

We would do so many things together; we would go flower picking, berry picking, she would dress me up in all these different ways, like as a nerd and as Tim Burton characters. She was a very keep-to-herself person and so was I, and we would always hang out together when we were out places.

She got this boyfriend and ever since then she has ignored my family and me. She has never ignored me. Now she is. It hurts so much. I'm still able to text her, but all she does is look at it and not respond.

People would think, “Oh, you should hate her,” but I don't at all. I actually do the exact opposite. I wish I could figure out why she ignores me or what I did that was so bad that she ignores me. It just really hurts, so if there is anyone I could ever talk to again, it would be my sister Lizzie.

Screaming about nothing: the miraculous edition

Liv Akers

Welcome back, my lovely Scroll readers, to Liv’s previously-unnamed series in this column called “Screaming About Nothing”, in which I rant about things that do not matter at all and stick it in here under the guise of “creative writing.” This month’s edition features a spectacular tangent on the recently-popular children’s TV show, Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. Being an avid cartoon fan (as you may have noticed from previous installments of the series, as well as actual articles I’ve published here on the Scroll), I simply had to know what the hype was about, but rather than doing the in-depth analysis I typically would do of a cartoon, I’m going to just spend several pages going absolutely feral over the romantic subplot (and then, of course, give my opinion). You’ve heard of love triangles, now get ready for a love hexagon. Consider this your formal spoiler warning.

So, first thing’s first; what is the show actually about? Ladybug and Cat Noir (sometimes spelled “Chat”, as it is a French show) are two superheroes with the task of defending Paris against a villain calling himself Hawkmoth. Both heroes and their villain carry objects called Miraculouses that grant them powers themed around a specific animal. Hawkmoth’s goal is to steal Ladybug and Cat Noir’s Miraculouses, because they are the two most powerful of the many in existence, and, when combined, grant the holder any one thing they wish for. For the most part, each episode follows a strict format. Hawkmoth has the ability to “evilize” (also referred to as “Akumatize,” because the creatures he uses to do so are called Akumas) a civilian in Paris by taking advantage of their negative emotions, and Ladybug and Cat Noir save the day. This sounds fairly simple, but, of course, there’s a twist. Hawkmoth cannot know the heroes’ secret identities, lest he put their friends and families in danger, so as an additional precaution, the heroes don’t know each other’s identities, either. Their identities, Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Adrien Agreste, not only know each other in real life, but have a relationship. Unfortunately, this relationship is where things get complicated.

Cat Noir is completely, undeniably, head-over-heels in love with Ladybug. The majority of his dialogue consists of sly pickup lines and witty takes on “I love you,” but Ladybug turns him down every time, because Marinette is obsessively in love with Adrien… who is Cat Noir. The show makes absolutely no effort to hide the irony in their dynamic, so for all three agonizing seasons (with four more confirmed to be released over the next few years), viewers are forced to watch them dance around each other obliviously. Many fans online blame Adrien, who has yet to notice that not only has Marinette been pining over him since they met, but also that the love of his life and one of his closest friends look identical to each other. Others critique Ladybug’s quick-to-refuse attitude, often shutting Cat down without a second consideration. Cat wants nothing more than to reveal his identity to her and run away together, and Marinette spends every day fantasizing about the beautiful romance she dreams of with Adrien, but all the viewer wants is for the both of them to just open their eyes for two seconds and realize that everything they want is right in front of them.

The show goes so far as to include a couple of episodes where Ladybug/Marinette and Cat/Adrien are together, but they both end in disaster. In season three’s “Oblivio,” the episode opens with the both of them having amnesia (caused by the evilized citizen of the episode), and they spend the episode not only struggling to save Paris with no memory of how to do so, but also falling in love. At the end, they share a lovely kiss scene, and their memories are reset to how they were before the episode started, having completely forgotten that they’d fallen in love. In “Chat Blanc” (easily the most heart-wrenching episode in the series), we see Adrien accidentally discover her identity, leading to a confession of love to Marinette, in which she discovers his identity and they live happily ever after. Unfortunately, she time travels to the future, in which his love for her is used against him by Hawkmoth, and Paris is ultimately destroyed. The episode ends with Ladybug defeating an evilized Cat Noir and their memories being altered once again.

Not only is their dynamic--often called the “love square” by fans--unusual, that’s not even the whole romantic subplot. As the show goes on, there are several other characters that get in the way of their relationship, most notably their friends Kagami and Luka, who combine with the square and make up what is often referred to as the “love hexagon.” Kagami is a close friend of Adrien’s who falls in love with him, sparking jealousy in Marinette. Upon nearing the end of the most recent season, Kagami realizes that, while her love for Adrien is real, he doesn’t feel the same about her, and befriends Marinette. Luka is a second love interest of Marinette’s, who confesses to her and has her debating if Adrien is really the one for her after all. Marinette ends up breaking up with Luka after a short relationship, because she just can’t move on from Adrien. At no point does the oblivious Adrien feel any sort of dislike for or jealousy of Luka.

I’ll be honest, the rollercoaster that was this love story was the majority of the reason I stuck with the show as long as I did. I watched the first episode without the context of the fact that it was French (which doesn’t sound like it really matters, but for some reason this was important to me), and couldn’t make it through ten minutes. I’m a big fan of 2-D animation, and this hyperrealistic 3-D style took a lot of getting used to. It gave me some kind of creepy uncanny valley-type feeling that I never entirely adjusted to. The voice acting wasn’t the best I’d heard (except for in “Chat Blanc” for some reason? The emotion, I tell you!), but I rewatched it in the original French for a little bit and that was so much worse that I was willing to stick with the English dub, which is how I made it through the first episode. Viewers are introduced to the initially-confusing love square within the first episode, so even though the show itself wasn’t really doing it for me, I wanted to know how that turned out, so I stuck with it. I thought I would grow to like it, which I did not, but I became emotionally dependent on seeing this love square to the end (and also Cat Noir, who is so attractive for absolutely no reason), so here we are in this essay.

I have mixed feelings on the repetitive episode structure, because on the one hand, routine is nice, but it was so obviously built that way for the seven-and-below target audience that it got annoying pretty quickly. A lot of the other cartoons I enjoy have philosophical undertones and/or queer-coded characters that make the show worth watching for older viewers, but Miraculous doesn’t touch on that quite as much. Every episode opens with some kind of interaction between some minor characters, usually at the school, and often involving at least one of our protagonists. This somehow generates negative feelings for Hawkmoth to latch onto, which leads to our villain of the episode being evilized. This is followed by the heroes’ transformation sequences, which is one of my biggest cartoon pet peeves. I literally cannot stand transformation sequences. They just drive me insane. Then, when Ladybug uses her special power and captures the Akuma at the end of the episode, she has two more montages in every single episode, plus another one when Cat Noir uses his power. There is also certain dialogue that repeats itself every episode that I caught myself mocking after the first season or so (except the “Pound it!” and the shared fistbump at the end of every episode, that’s iconic). Ladybug holding her lucky charm of the episode and saying, “What am I supposed to do with this?” has the same energy as Dora staring blankly through the fourth wall and saying, “Do you see the yellow bridge?”

So, overall, from an objective standpoint, I’d give the show a solid three or four out of ten. I have so many little problems with it that I almost can’t even stand it, but since I’m literally addicted to the love story, I make do. Do I plan to watch the new seasons when they come out? Sure. But am I excited for that day to come? Absolutely not. Please free me from this prison within my mind. I can’t stand another transformation sequence. That said, honestly, I would recommend the show to people who are just starting out with cartoons, because if you start at the bottom, you will never be disappointed with another show.

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