Political Film Review: Promises

The first seeds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were sown so long ago that very few know when it actually started. Everybody has different opinions on who started the fighting, who's fault it is, and when things took a turn for the worse. 100 different turning points, and two clear sides. Two nations promised a homeland, each with their own rightful claim, wishing for freedom and safety and peace. The film Promises follows seven children born and raised in the center of this conflict. Moishe, Shlomo, and the twins Daniel and Yarko are Jews living in Israel. Mahmoud is an Arab Israeli living in the Palestinian quarter of Jerusalem. Sanabel and Faraj both live in the occupied Palestinian territories. They are all less than twenty minutes away from each other. Director BZ Goldberg interviewed the children about their lives, and how the conflict affected them and their families personally. They told stories of fear, pain, and hatred all beyond their years, but also of joy and hope for a peaceful future. B.Z. got the kids to meet, and they learned important lessons about how they really weren't all that different from each other after all. 

Promises is a wonderful movie that shows that even in the most desperate of situations, human emotions survive, and perhaps there is still a chance to prevail if only more people from all viewpoints would sit down and get to know their neighbors.

soooo sick of essays

This morning to work on my essay I printed it all out, got a pair of scissors and tape. The scissors were extra difficult to use because they were gummied up by old glue between the blades, and thus the lines i cut were very poor. However, I managed to snip the pages up like a puzzle and rearrange them in a different order, making an entirely new image. My new paper seems a lot more fur-positive, and is a lot more interesting. I'm so proud of myself, and so ready to be done.

Tentative introduction to my paper.

Here is where I’m going to write some type of compelling introduction about the fandom.

My favorite film is The Lion King. When I was younger, I could have watched it over and over again, completely mesmerized by the artistry of the animation, the sheer breadth of time over which such an epic tale took place, the full-symphony orchestral musical numbers. And the characters, something about the lions in particular got to me. I found them just as believable as any human character, and twice as interesting.  As fervently as my peers would have insisted they were princesses, dressing up like Cinderella or Princess Jasmine, I would play pretend too, in my own way. While I would on occasion dress in my mother’s shiny sequined disco dress from decades before and play at being Esmerelda, Princess of the Gypsies, in my favorite games of pretend I was a lion. Prowling the Savannah with my family, we would go on countless adventures. But as with any child, my fantasies of grandeur were soon replaced with the reality of school, and forgotten about for a time. We all forget our dreams, but only a few learn to gain them back.

Several years later, I found again my childhood interest. Surfing the internet one day, I came upon a website dedicated to displaying art by fans of The Lion King. Most of the drawings were mediocre at best, but a few truly good artists did post on the site. Many of the pictures were of characters I didn’t know going on adventures that weren’t in the movies. A pale brown lion with a black streak in her fur was depicted many times in many different situations including hunting gazelle, climbing Pride Rock, and grooming a friend. Through a little digging, I discovered that she was an original creation of the artist, used to represent her as if she were an animal, to be a sort of alternate animal persona, or as the artist referred to it, a fursona. As I soon discovered, a majority of the characters displayed were the fursonas of some artist or another. Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon an internet lair of a group of social pariahs known as furries, a people who express themselves through anthropomorphic animal avatars. My knowledge of their society and customs would be limited for many years to come, but this interaction was a mere foreshadowing of my later interactions with the furry community, a community I would someday discover myself to have more in common with then I once expected.

Preparing for a scholarly discussion of fandom

Schoolwork's really been getting to me lately. I couldn't decide on a good topic for my research paper, until it occured to me that furries would be a good topic to research. It's going to be difficult though. Scanning through magazine articles on fursuit construction, and scholarly interpretations of anthropomorphism and social impacts of an internet-based society, looking for visuals to analyze, sifting through forums, and listening to furcast for a primary source, it's a hard life! The tentative title as to be presented to my writing professor is "Cultural revitalization through zoomorphic self expression in internet subcultures, an analysis."
Of course, I'll also have to interview furries, now where could I find some of those?
My only concern about writing this paper is attracting the wrath of those in the fandom who don't approve of any analysis of the fandom that isn't exactly how they want to be represented. And I plan on writing an honest one, not discussing fandom sexuality in detail, but acknowledging its existance. If I cared what the burned furs or other judgemental groups said, I would be screwed.