Jaemin's Literature and Media Thought Bubble

My imaginary female superhero is called Athenia after the Greek goddess of war and wisdom. The main purpose for her outfit would be comfort: stretchy leggings, a cute skirt with shorts underneath, a hoodie with her personal icon, cleats, and hair tied in a ponytail. Her pockets would be endlessly deep and weightless and allow her to carry around snacks, water, and all her tools for fighting her enemies: both villainous and civilian sexual harassers of both women and men. Her weapon of choice (aside from hand-to-hand combat with her sick martial arts skills) is her magical staff that can change length and material at will, so it can be become iron for a good beating or rope to pull someone out of the deep hole. It can freeze and electrically shock Athenia’s enemies, and a special blast of it prompts the villain to turn themselves in to the police in situations during which one can’t wait for the police to come themselves. Her source of power is cream soda, and her staff is solar-...

Reading True Grit is my first time experiencing a novel that falls under the Western genre. My family immigrated from South Korea and I grew up in a pretty un-American household, so I didn’t read or watch stories about cowboys and the wild west. Along with that, I live in the Texas suburbs which is about as un-Western as it gets, but I’ve heard and made many jokes about the state being a desert where people ride horses to work and garden tumbleweed, so I’ve never been able to take those things seriously. I’m pretty sorry to say, but that wasn’t much different with this novel. I guess the biggest issue I had with True Grit was the amount of violence in it. I realize that guns were how people dealt with their problems back in their day, but I continually kept asking, “Did he HAVE to shoot and kill that character?” Their trigger-happiness was almost funny. Honestly, the way the characters behave in that aspect isn’t too much different from people in this modern day. ...