Skip to main content

Bloodchild

Discuss how the text(s) you read for this week's assignment did or did not reflect the values and perspectives of majoritarian culture.

This piece did not reflect the values and perspective of majoritarian culture in the ways that it was portrayed as distinctly alien, and that humans were the invaders of another planet, and that in order to survive, humans had to have relationships with alien creatures that laid eggs inside of our intestines and organs. This storyline specifically is not something that people tend to think of on an everyday basis. The young main character of the story being chosen as the one to carry the alien babies, and going back and forth on whether to go through with it or not, is ultimately somehow a little bit closer to how we think. If there is any major decision we have to make as humans, it is often dragged out and thought over the possibilities many times before finalizing anything, let alone if other people's lives are at stake. This piece does reflect the values and perspectives of majoritarian culture in the way that it is obviously very human-centric. The characters are made out to be very humanoid and have similarities to human nature. This makes sense of course for a human audience. We always see it from our own perspective (the humans'.) I would be interested to see something of similar plot be from the opposite perspective, from what we consider to be the "alien" perspective. I am sure there are plenty of allegories and correlations to human nature and how specific things in this piece can be relevant to modern-day as we know it. Although if it is close enough to modern-day, I'm not sure what the exact moral of the story would be. Overall I really liked reading this piece for its interesting perspective into the human mind as well as speculation on how relationships with other species might procure.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Aquatic Uncle

This week we are attempting to distinguish between writing in genre and writing that may use elements of the genre but that is essentially literary. Discuss this question in relation to the work(s) you read for this week. Do you think this is an important or necessary distinction, or not? Is your experience of the text affected by these questions? This short story to say the least was, disturbing. However, I do not think that disturbing, in this case, is necessarily bad. In The Aquatic Uncle by Italo Calvino, there are many boundaries and limits being pushed and bent. While this piece can likely be considered science fiction or fantasy short story, there is a certain amount of glory and risk in that it doesn't try that hard to be either of these things. It has the elements in science fiction through the biological nature of the story, and how much of it is based on a singular scientific theory. How this information is applied and reused is a completely different story. The disti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Come to Venus Melancholy

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...
1 comment
Read more