Two Thirds Reflection

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Hi, this is Brianna, the creator of this website. In this video I’ll be talking about my thoughts on worldbuilding and some of the big themes connecting the ideas on this Digital Archive to others. As this quarter wraps up, we’ll be two thirds of the way through the school year (or 66.67% for you STEM majors), and there’s quite a lot that we’ve collected so far.

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We started out with Greek classics; the Odyssey and Plato’s Republic and whatnot. Around this time I was reading The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (highly recommend), which really went along with the era of the assigned readings, but also, seeing as it was written in this century, was a fun, accessible way to experience Ancient Greece. Anyways, Plato’s Republic was our first introduction to a worldbuilding project that was actually supposed to be carried out in the real world, but was never successful. Later in the second semester, this would connect with the communist worldbuilding Professor Robertson talked about in his lectures, and his claim that no true communist state has ever existed. Between Plato and communist texts, whether by Marx and Engels or even propaganda by communist China, there’s this desperation for utopia that’s almost painful, because as we found out, none of these worlds were ever able to become reality.

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The next best place to worldbuild was art, which we saw with the Decameron and Professor Cooks’ coverage of art by Black creators like Carrie Mae Weems, Noah Purifoy, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and Titus Kaphar. It was interesting to see how often worldbuilding in art came out of necessity. What I mean by this is that the stories in the Decameron told by the brigata were a coping mechanism to escape the dystopian world of the Black Death. And the quilts by the women of Gee’s Bend were also created out of necessity; albeit a very different, real life necessity for heat. We even saw that fictional teenager Lauren Olamina relied on the worldbuilding of her Earthseed religion in Parable of the Sower to believe in a future for her very dystopian world. 

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Anyways, speaking of worldbuilding by young people, it’s time to talk about my classmates’ digital archives. I like seeing the different names people have given them; some of my favorites are “Thoughts of a Stargazing Snail,” “The House of Wisdom,” and “Building Blocks of the World”, and the different kind of internet-slash-website genres you can see influenced the websites. Another student said this in their reflection, but one of our classmate’s websites is set up like the Notes app because its creator uses their Notes app for many of their freewrites, which is a pretty inventive personal spin to the digital archives. The next best example I could find of this creativity was a website article someone had formatted to look like a WikiHow page, including one of those kinds of bland illustrations that are a trademark of WikiHow, and the sage green that is almost everywhere on that website. 

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It’s also been fun to hear about some of the potential sources they might use for the research paper next semester, especially pop-culture ones that are personal favorites of mine. In one recording, a student discussed writing about the videogame-turned- TV-series The Last of Us, while another one proposed focusing on the Arc of a Scythe series, which is one of my favorites of all time, and connects almost perfectly with the speculative fiction we learned about in Fall Quarter.

As for the primary piece of my own research project next semester, well, let’s just say that I already have plenty of ideas, but that I’m still trying to come up with more. I really want to choose a piece of fictional world building from one of my favorite shows, movies, or books. I love a lot of cartoons like your normal teen, but I’ve been so happy with this wave of new LGBTQ+ inclusive cartoons in our generation, like Steven Universe, She-Ra, The Dragon Prince, and The Owl House, that I’d love to do justice to the art styles, storytelling, and how these shows have created magical safe spaces for young queer people to see themselves represented. 

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But sometimes I wonder if I should focus on something more historical, because there’s just as much to choose from there. I could go on about art by the Dutch masters in the Golden Age of the Netherlands, the literature of Oscar Wilde, the Golden Age of Piracy versus its modern portrayal, and a lot more. But before I take up too much more time, I want to discuss my third area of interest: graphic novels! I feel like writing about a graphic novel would be a great way to finish the academic year, seeing as we read Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers this semester and the Parable of the Sower graphic novel adaptation during the Fall. Again, I already have some in mind, some of which are historical and not, and others that are fictional and not. My personal favorite is a graphic novel romance by Tillie Walden called On a Sunbeam (Please go check it out online! It’s on a free website and the art has some of the best uses of color to convey emotion I’ve ever seen). 

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Anyways, I apologize if I’ve just used too much of this video to talk about some of my favorite pieces of media, but I have to say, I’m really about the research project for Spring semester. Though I have to say I’m already sad that I won’t be able to write about all of the different topics I just talked about. Well, I know that there’s going to be no shortage of papers in the quarter and three academic years ahead so hopefully I can explore all of these topics in the times to come. So, for you watchers (to be honest, probably just my TA; hey Anannya!), I hope your papers come along well, and that you write something you’re actually passionate about. Thanks for watching!