Harry Potter!

I've been obsessed with Harry Potter for as long as I can remember. I was the first of my friends who got the first book, which my copy was from England and is titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. So I started with the series before Scholastic started publishing the books here in America. I've had HP themed birthdays (last one was last year when I turned 21), gone to HP World, stood in line at B+N for over five hours waiting for each book release, and now I'm waiting for Pottermore to get out of Beta testing.

Pottermore to me seems to be a way for the fans of the franchise to still enjoy new content from the series even though they've now ended. There are a lot of interactive reading experiences I've been told by friends, as well as being sorted into a house and playing small games. The website seems to be "The Leaky Cauldron" for HP fans. Many fans appraise the site, but critics who don't necessarily read the books or like the series are always saying negative things about it such as "it's just Rowling's e-book store." HP is not just about the content anymore, but the experience.

Take for instance HP World at Universal, I read an article the other day that there could be another HP theme park built in the United States and maybe more in Japan and Singapore. I believe they said the one in the US is planning to be an expansion of the Universal Studios in Los Angeles.



I've also decided that I need to start saving money every month to save up a trip to Leavesden Studios in the UK. In 2012 they're opening up the sets up HP for tours.




-----

I think HP is fascinating as a world-wide phenomena. Not many things become as widely-praised and enjoyed all around the globe, and by people of all ages. Lots of people compare HP to the Twilight franchise, but in my mind Twilight has NOTHING on HP. It's not as widely accepted outside of the age groups of 12-16 year old girls and lonely moms in their 40s. I believe Twilight is mocked MUCH more than it is praised, and you don't see theme parks modeled after the series... thank you God...

So for this week I read some HP fanfiction on fanfiction.net, which I've never really done before; I've always been satisfied with the books themselves. I found that HP is the most highly written about book series with almost 600,000 stories written (Twilight was next with almost 200,000). No other book series even breaks 50,000 stories.

I chose a couple that seems interesting and stayed FAR away from all the erotica and what I found they call "non-canon" pairings of characters who are romantically involved lol. It was interesting how some stories were really able to stay true to the original characters, while others create new personalities and lives for them. I think part of the reason why so many people write these fanfictions is to keep the characters that they love alive because there aren't anymore published works with them being present. A lot of the works were written after the 7th book came out. Some authors weren't happy with how the ending of the book turned out or who ended up married to whom, and so they wrote their own work about how they pictured the series coming to an end.

Some stories are insanely popular and have almost a cult following, creating fanfiction works of art for it, posting pictures of the characters' outfits in certain chapters, making fanfiction trailers using footage from the HP films, and even creating Wiki pages on the story. So, in a sense, fanfiction can even become a sort of franchise in itself.

Gaming Literature

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

- series’ main creed = “nothing is true, everything is permitted”

- "If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible."

- apply to everyday life

- franchise is historical science fiction

                  - historical figures appear in the games; Leonardo Da Vinci and Machiavelli

                  - historical side much more apparent in Assassin’s Creed 2 than the original

                  - historical events (eg. Pazzi Conspiracy, when the Pazzi family tried to replace the Medici family, 15^th century)

- Ubisoft literally captures theories and myths and make them parallel our reality

- Ubisoft wrote, published, and released novel (with the help of Penguin Group) based on the videogame characters and storyline

- Also based on the franchise; graphic novels, short films, and a movie in the works

- “We believe that these projects developed in tandem with the games themselves provide the player with a truly immersive experience into the Assassin’s Creed world.”

- gaming and literature are both about narrative storytelling

Dante’s Inferno

- Developed by EA

- Dante, author of The Divine Comedy

- not a slavish retelling

                  - avatar is a re-envisioned Dante all muscle and decked to the nines in armor

                  - have to battle your way through the Nine Circle of Hell to face off against Lucifer himself

                  - love-driven quest to free Beatrice

- if this videogame gets people to discover the original poem by Dante, then who cares if Dante is wielding Death’s scythe in service to this retelling?

**Storytelling is all about exploring the human condition, events, and their impact – interaction among individuals. Books for how to tell a story constantly try to pound in the point that “plot is a verb.” Well, verbs are action words, so why can’t an action-packed game deliver a kick-ass story?

                  - plot requires action

- not all games are an example of great literature, much like not every book has a great story

Can a video game offer the same depth of characters and insight into the human condition as a novel? Can a video game possess substantial literary merit?

- I suppose the first question we must ask is, "What gives a work literary merit?"

"Can a game be considered a work of literature?"
 

Writing methods from classics used in videogames

- Emily Bronte’s foreshadowing technique

- Tolstoy’s “zoom into action” strategy

- Dicken’s use of intersecting stories

Asterios Polyp.

The thing about this reading that I found most interesting was the style of the comic itself. I've never really been one to read comics or graphic novels religiously, but I do pick them up from time to time. That's mostly because I find most graphic novels too cluttered and hard to read/follow. This piece I didn't have any trouble reading, and the style fit the content of the story.

 

Even the font on the cover relates to the story, Futura Bold being a very fitting choice in font. Of all the pages in the book, I found page 33 to be my favorite; it's the one with the 16 different renderings of apples. I believe that apples are the most popular item to draw in a still-life, not to mention there's a biblical meaning behind apples being a symbol of knowledge and self-knowledge leading to shame. It's not just the apples themselves that are important to the piece, but the grid format that they're organized in allows Asterios to sort and classify them. I feel like this page is the guide to the book as a whole with the color schemes and the grid being used to organize the main characters.

I also really liked the colors used (cyan, magenta, yellow), which are all printer primary colors. That would have definitely made the book easy to print, and the use of negative space between the panels made it easy to follow. It was really cool how the author uses different drawing styles, colors, and even fonts for different characters. 

 

Even the text/word balloons have the characters "speaking" in different shaped balloons. The picture above is from page 91 and is a good example of the different shapes of the word balloons. You almost don't need the words in them because the shape itself gives you a sense of what the characters are feeling.