A Storming Thought

         I think that it’s safe to say that the success and cultural position that the series, Naruto, has earned is undisputed. As the third highest-selling manga ever and with an incredibly popular anime, Naruto is well cemented within popular culture even outside of anime fandoms. References can be found all over the place. Despite the clear popularity and cultural importance, Naruto is often thought of as a long-winded series that abandoned its original themes and devolved into magic eyes, nonsensical power-ups, and overly sentimental speeches about friendship.            My goal in this essay is not to convince you that Naruto is the greatest anime or manga. Or that it’s a perfect story without flaws. My goal is to convince you that the series stuck to and fulfilled the themes that it laid out at the very beginning of its fifteen-year run. Naruto isn’t about an underdog kid using pure work ethic and dedication to overcome his disadvantages. It's not about using your natural

          I believe as a whole the series of The Last of Us is about trauma. It is about how we deal, cope, ignore, and ultimately heal from trauma and loss. In the first game, we saw how Joel suffered from the loss of his daughter and finally began the recovery process by the end. Now it’s time for Ellie’s turn. It’s extremely easy to just write Part 2 off as another revenge story that ends with the lesson that violence is bad. It is much deeper than that. It is a story about the importance of human life, the hate and rage we surround ourselves with, and the actual effects and costs of not addressing one’s trauma. Life is painful and the game is never shy of reminding us of that but it also reminds us that we do not have to hold on to that pain.  We Are The Same         Part 1 begins with a father forced to watch the death of his daughter so it's only fitting that Part 2 begins with a daughter forced to watch the death of her father. Part 2 does something that I think is very inte

     On first viewing “Pet Sematary” could be seen as a story about the damage that the grief of the death of a child can cause a family. But on a deeper reading, it becomes obvious that the film has much to say about gender and how different genders deal with the problems and struggles presented to them in life. The film does not present a universal message about grief applicable to any parent going through the loss of a child. The male gender of the protagonist is not coincidental or without greater meaning. The film presents the subject of grief as a very gendered experience that men and women go through differently. Even the responsibilities of a parent to the rest of the family are gendered. The things that a man is expected to do in order to protect and provide for his family are fundamentally different from what is expected from women. Those responsibilities and the connections to the family are seen as burdens that threaten Louis’s idealized version of masculinity. There is a c