If I'm going to do a series on science and religion in media, I feel like I should talk about the type of media I like, the stories that I'm drawn to. It'll help you readers see where I'm coming from and understand why I wrote about this film instead of that because chances are, I haven't seen that film because I'm just not that into aliens.
Like most of humanity, I'm a sucker for a good hero's journey. Also a good Cinderella story. And a good underdog story. Listen, I like stories. I like a good tale. It's why The Winter's Tale is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. It's about telling stories, like The Tempest is. Also, I like meta things. Community is one of my favorite shows and I can't even pretend like The French Mistake isn't one of my favorite episodes of Supernatural.
Speaking of, I love supernatural stories. I love ghost stories, I love monster stories, I love all the tiny little ways we take horror or ideas about horror and twist them to talk about ourselves. I like what happens when you take humans and give them special abilities, or put them in binds. (I also enjoy dark humor-- I saw Sweeney Todd seven times in theaters.) In digging into Welcome to Night Vale, I got to dig into gothic literature and in reading that list, I realized that I love most things gothic. The meta-scare. That's my jam. Something that Buffy and Angel do really well as well.
Buffy and Angel brings me around to another thing that I love, which is the Whedonverse. It started with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and never really stopped. I just find that there's a lot of heart there amongst the campy and I think that's what draws me in. I love a good story with heart. And maybe some quips. And female empowerment. Which is why Much Ado About Nothing is my actual favorite Shakespeare play.
At the same time, many of the influences in my life that weren't produced by Disney (at the time) have star in the name somewhere: Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate. I have a fascination for the adventures you can have when Earth isn't the extent of your set. It changes the questions we can ask. It makes us dream bigger. I mean, superhero movies do that too, but in a different way. And let's be real, they all end up in space soon enough. Thor, anyone? The first Avengers movie? Guardians of the Galaxy, which had to use its soundtrack to tie us to the familiar? We have a curiosity about the things that could be out there in space. We like to dream bigger. It lets us examine our humanity. (This, I think, is the time to note that A Wrinkle In Time was extraordinarily formative in my life.)
And bringing it back around to that humanity, I'm a fan of two sets of stories that put different lenses on our view of humanity: Hooker with a Golden Heart stories and dystopias. Moulin Rouge and Pretty Woman are two of my absolute favorite movies. And in terms of dystopias, I really count anything that's a reality slightly off from our own. Hunger Games, Man in the High Castle, The Matrix, Wall-E, all that kind of stuff. I like it when we push our boundaries in fiction, just to see how we'd react. I like to be fascinated by the bigger questions.
So, in summary, Firefly was the best show to ever exist and it's a miracle that they didn't make it to a musical episode because then I would never need to watch anything again. Perfection would be obtained.
Also, Parks and Rec and The West Wing. Couldn't find a category for those.
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