For this week's topic, witches, I read the five volumes of Redlands. I found this series to have a contradictory storyline, leaving me not sure about my verdict of it as a whole. The story is about powerful women, but they are constantly faced with misogyny and terrible men. They take vengeance, but they kill many people by doing so. Because of this conflict, I think that the story in itself is about underlying morals and how we are able to challenge and even discard them for a good story. The main characters in this series are what I would consider archetypal powerful woman figures. The three main characters, all witches that hold special powers of some sort, seem to exist for the genuine betterment of their community. They are typically taking vengeance on men that have committed crimes or have treated people poorly. This gives a feeling of justice from these characters. The bad guys get what they deserve, and that really boils down to moral principles. The reader feels as though the characters are doing the right thing by enacting justice, even though they ultimately benefit from it, since they "feast" on their kills. They are not the perfect characters. They use these humans to sacrifice them on certain days of the year. Killing people, nonetheless sacrificing them, generally is seen as a bad thing to do, but it is justified in these stories. I also noticed the unapologetic misogynistic beliefs of the male characters in this series. This really moves the story along for the reasoning behind the vengeance of the witches, even though it is quite disturbing. Overall I really enjoyed reading this series, it was really interesting, particularly the storyline and the art style together.
For this week, I read the short story Come to Venus Melancholy by Thomas M. Disch. The story had quite a bit of dark tones to it, as well as taking some time to understand. I think the element of surprise was something that played a big part in this story. Something that appears to be so normal, so close to what we know, can be the complete opposite. In this story, in the beginning, I thought that the character was monologuing about their life. The element of surprise here is that the "her" is a cyborg of sorts, that used to be a human, but is now a computer in a house. The second surprise is that the environment of the swamp isn't from planet Earth, it's on planet Venus. The final surprise was the cyborg's confession of both love and craziness. This was quite a short read and an interesting perspective since it's told from the cyborg's point of view. I feel like in many of these stories there is often a hero, and the story is narrated from that hero's...
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