12th Musing--Characters I Admire (I)

Some posts, like this one, will be an analysis of characters I admire and why. It kinda segways into other topics to explore, but maybe not. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say...

Character One: Tohru Honda! from Fruits Basket (manga)
Here she is!

MBTI type: INFP

To be honest, most of my friends hate her because they think she's a pushover, too nice, unrealistic, etc. While I agree that she can be too nice/generous at times and a doormat, there are key traits that make me love her. She is extremely compassionate, forgiving, caring, and trusting. She's not even overly trusting despite what everyone thinks. She has a healthy dose of caution.
I also love that she's not naturally talented, but she is very, very hard-working and that takes her far. Whether in work or with the people she cares about, she never complains about a task and gets right to work.
I have read through the whole manga twice and each time, I believe I've grown by emulating her example. I value hard work and I am more caring and generous towards people. Additionally, I am more forgiving because I know that everyone makes mistakes and most people truly do have good intentions or they did and lost sight of how they originally were. Tohru has taught me to believe in the goodness of others, which I wrote about on...perhaps my second post? I can't remember.
I think a good example is with, for those of you who know the manga, Hatori. She was told not to be left alone with him because he couldn't be trusted, so I was also quite wary of him. As we both freaked out when he called her down to talk to her about the whole situation relating to the plot that I won't explain because it'll take too long, her friend who was living with him (they were related) told her a story about his life that opened her heart to him, though she never would have heard it Hatori himself.
Another example is when she helped to emotionally heal the character that everyone hated. But that character was so terrible because she was facing so many problems of her own that no one else knew about, but expressed them in all the wrong ways.

So Tohru and the rest of the manga has really taught me much. That is why I say artists are perhaps some of the greatest benefactors of this world because they can affect people where it matters.

10th Musing: About These So-Called Social Hierarchies

(random ultra special life note: I'm on the fifth season of 7th Heaven now. It's weird how a few months ago, I thought this one character was so young, but by now she's the same age as me...)

This is lengthy so my main point is under the next bold if you want to skip...
So on to the main topic...
Throughout my life I have had many experiences trying to define social hierarchies, wondering how one places themselves higher or lower, whether it exists or not, etc. The answer to the second question I've found is that it does...and it doesn't. Like I said, I've had many revelations on the subject, but the one I had today really clicked with me.

I won't give any names (and if you're one of these people and you happened to stumble upon this, the description of you will be objective, but not very flattering for either of you, so...sorry.), but I was with three other people ranging from friends to acquaintances grouping up to get work done. I'll call them H, Y, and F.

F talks to Y, but always talks about her behind her back. However, to her face, I wouldn't think that she particularly disliked Y. F also likes to feel superior to Y. I could be wrong, but it's what I'm gathering.
Y seems dependent on being accepted so she always talks to F because she's a familiar face even though she seems a little uncomfortable with the "friendly teasing" at times.
H also needs to be accepted, however F has nothing bad to say about her so this less-and-less wallflower type follows F with her teasing of Y.
I tell Y not to listen to either of them because they're being annoying (of course in their same joking manner, though I do think they are being a little rude to her).

The result is that now Y has someone of good company (me) while F is initiating little irritating remarks as H follows.

Lazy readers (just kidding) start here!
So I've finally gotten to my main point. I realize that the social hierarchy of our group went like this from most power to least, I guess we could say: Me (hear me out), F, H, Y. And no one assigned this except we, ourselves. By trying to get acceptance and not standing up for herself concerning both F and H... Y then put herself below them all on her own. By imitating F's actions against Y to get acceptance, H thought herself above Y and below F. By not caring one way or another and being a sort of leader?, F placed herself in her mind above both of them.
And why am I above them? Because I was willing to sort of help Y out and actually talk to her instead of making jibes and really not caring at all what the other two think, even though I love them as friends of course (you know how it goes) and knowing I don't need to copy others or change my behavior in general in order to gain acceptance from those worth it (and this last sentence was a general life lesson as opposed to concentrating purely on that situation, so as not to seem dramatic ;D)

So yes, there is my long rambly musing.
Thanks for reading!

9th Musing: Female Protagonists (especially in YA)

As I am an avid reader, I obviously come across many female characters (as that is our topic of today's midnight), but rarely are they ever satisfactory! Ironically I've noticed they're least annoying, which is to say, lovely, in the average middle grade book and only semi annoying in the average "adult" book. As for the YA (young adult) section, they are absolute book-ruiners. In teen books there are generally a select few personality types authors choose to use:

1. The melodramatic "I'm just so in love with him" type. Instead of giving you examples, I'll tell you to look at any romance, especially that of the paranormal subgenre. Bella Swann is our captain here.

2. The girl who tries to be tough and "badass" but just ends being a #1 (see above). I'll say that Tris Prior from Divergent is the poster child for this. (Though I admit I feel bad, as I couldn't decide whether I liked the book or not and I really liked the idea, it just seemed like it was written in the tone of every other teen book, and I wasn't a fan of Tris, though I really loved the guy that came in (go figure), and a few other characters as well, though I think she killed off too many people, run-on sentence, run-on sentence, run-on sentence....)

3. The girl who must be snarky at every moment and find some smart-ass comment at any given time. I mean, I love snarky/sassy!--but when it's done CORRECTLY! For example, Diana Ladris from the Gone series does it perfectly and she's a wonderful three-dimensional character. However, Sophie Mercer was great in the first book Hex Hall but in Demonglass, she was a little too much.

4. They're just meek and blend in with the wall paper. Usually they end up becoming brave and do stand up for themselves, but their personalities are still quite plain to me.

Now I feel a little bad because I did like those books (excluding Twilight--that one is a literary shame, which I probably will continue to reiterate when it comes up). In high fantasy, however, the women are all just sort of these boring, maternal blobs! We need more Hermiones and Diana Ladrises (as far as grey characters go) and Kate DeVrieses (oh what a brilliant character she is <3 ) and etc.
Does anyone agree with me? (As not many people read this I don't expect actual comments but mental concurrence is nice too).

8th Musing: Religion

(Hello, I'm back! Did my followers miss me? All two of you? Actually I'm back here because my friend reminded me to write, so I'm writing! I just lack good subject material in general lol)

On to the main topic...

For me, this whole subject of religion has become quite ironic recently. I was possibly as cynical as anyone could be about religion, especially Christianity (and I'm very sorry if that offends anyone reading this, but it's true). I tended to ridicule most religions, finding them stupid, irrelevant, wrong, a waste of time, the list could go on. However, as I watch 7th Heaven (middle of fourth season!) while I continue to work on an Aerith cosplay :3 I feel like I'm slowly being converted. It's really weird actually because my opinions are slowly shifting all the way to the other side. No matter what religion they talk about on that show (in the rare occasion they discuss one other than Christianity), it always sounds wonderful. Judaism, Buddhism, etc. (though I've always liked Buddhism even if I couldn't agree with it on some points). My views on Catholicism haven't changed a bit, but the show put everything else in a new light. I realize that it isn't the religion I couldn't stand, it was the corruption made by people willing to use it for war, amassing wealth, blaming others, etc. In its purest form, the reason for its creation, Christianity seemed far more loving and accepting than it does now. (And of course, good old Reverend Camden sticks to those ideals). I think about everyone I know will find it weird if I suddenly decide to join a church. I've been the furthest thing from atheistic, though I've also been the furthest from religious. I have a more spiritual mindset. Perhaps it is the spirituality I hold in my beliefs that first crafted the religions in their incorrupted form.

Just some thoughts that passed through my mind.

7th Musing: Proper Usage of Yaoi! My ranting--no flames allowed

So being an avid fan of manga, anime, video games, and the like, I come across a lot of yaoi in fanfiction and it annoys the heck out of me, to be honest. Usually when I complain, people agree with me, but then there are the "you're against homosexuality? You're a terrible person!" So clarifying things right away, I am definitely not against it, I support love in any shape or form as long as both partners are happy (I'll just keep it as that because, well, that's a whole other topic to delve into, which I probably won't unless I'm actually interested in pondering it).
I guess I'll zero-in on Kingdom Hearts, a video game. Two best friends (and that's it!). The main character all but declares his love for the girl in their little trio and she returns his feelings, which is one of the reasons why the other (heterosexual) character is jealous of the protagonist: because he's also in love with her. Now when I'm trying to find a good story on ff.net, it's all yaoi pairing the two guys together, which, honestly, ruins the whole story for me because, aside from thinking the protagonist and said love interest are quite cute together, these people are twisting the characters' actions and making the whole story about them secretly being in love with each other.
Now a few I wouldn't mind, but when there are hundreds of them and it's hard to just find a good old friendship story (and don't even get me started on two other main characters who are like brothers because they also fall in love with a girl, the third member of their group). I think yaoi can be good if it's canon like Magnus Bane and Alec, and I love Jakotsu---he's one of my favourite characters in the whole show, or Dekka and Brianna, though this one is sad because the latter is straight.
Basically, I'm just saying: use it properly, people! The author wrote it a certain way for a reason! Stop twisting their words and prior actions. Like I said, I can understand some yaoi when the author doesn't intend it, but it's inescapable now to the point where I can't find anything else for my favourite stories. *sigh*

6th Musing: School Systems

Random daily update: (Two of them actually. One, today I repeated something that sounded very familiar to my friends and then I realized it's because I wrote it, but it was quite true. The friend who reads this laughed at me, but I realized I should just have stock-phrases from here in my head now :/ )
(Second: I just finished an amazing (beautiful!) book called Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe).

So I guess since I haven't had many ideas, here's one that tends to circulate in my head sometimes, especially because one of my friends is really bent on changing it. And that would be the school systems of...well, more than one country. And this will be a shorter post too.
I'll be simple.
Here's what's wrong:

Standardized testing
Grades
Favoring memorization over free-thinking and opinions
Forcing students to learn certain subjects past certain grades.
Required reading (by board members, most of whom have never been educators) and have you read The Song of Solomon? Besides emotionally scarring its victims--readers--it teaches me nothing except that the author has mental issues. To be fair, the last two pages were quite good. And I will never forget the time we had to read 150 pages about a man in prison and it consisted of him talking about what he ate at his meals and how grueling and mind-numbing it was to lay bricks for hours. For a few pages he would talk about his family and how they thought he was a spy, but the rest discussed what I wrote a sentence ago.

There's more, but those are the biggest problems as far as purely education goes. So I think there should be a mass reform.
1. Once students know that they hate math or language or any other subject besides writing (because they'll have to do this their whole life anyways), those subjects should not be required because that time otherwise wasted could be devoted to refining their real skills.
2. There should be no grades. Tests are a terrible way to measure intelligence, which renders grades irrelevant to a person's skill. Einstein failed math.
3. A council of current teachers will decide what books to read and they're not all terribly boring, they know books that are both enjoyable to read and those which contain valuable teaching material.
4. Just get rid of standardized testing, it's a waste of time, energy, and really just to fuel America's place in the worldwide competition of "which country has the best students?"

Just some of my thoughts. Also...I lied about this being a short post.

5th Musing: Out of Musings (but somehow we get to sci-fi)

So I sorta skipped a day of musings and with my sincerest apologies, I must also say that I have no musings at the moment! But then I thought: Ah! What a paradox this is!
Because really, I am musing about the fact that I have no musings. If I had musings, I could muse, but if I had none then I could muse about how I could not muse.
And that is how this post has the word muse (or a word in its family) 9 times in 5 lines. That should be some sort of record.
But while we are on this topic of paradoxes, I must say they, especially those of the temporal sort, are some of my favorite things about which to theorize. It's because I watch things like Doctor Who and the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (you can't forget Final Fantasy VIII in addition to that).
I warn you there are spoilers ahead!!

With Doctor Who we could talk all day about paradoxes, so I'll just talk about MoHS. So in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (like I said: spoilers coming up). The main character's just minding his own business, trying to turn the world back to its original way and then the crazy girl who we thought disappeared like 15 episodes back randomly comes in and stabs him in the back (literally). So while he's writhing in pain and she's making sure he doesn't make it out alive, two saviours step in and save him. One of them is obviously the main character from the future with his friend, a time-traveler, though they only reveal his silhouette and voice. After the second time watching (and reading a couple of forum posts), I realized that he was only alive at the end because his future self saved him. But how did that future self get out alive?  Technically that future self shouldn't have existed.
Or what about that story where this man wanted to see how a building burned down so he went back in time into that building and knocked down the lantern that started the fire. So basically, he caused what he wanted to witness.
So I have to wonder: if time travel is possible (and I really do believe it is, we just haven't achieved the means yet), could these ever happen?
And what about time loops? How many times have you lived this day if it turns back so that you can't remember? In the Endless Eight (MoHS again), they all felt a strong sense of deja vu. Now whenever I feel that, I get creeped out because I think of time loops.
I'd like to find out how much of this is possible and how to achieve something like this because, really, I believe that manipulating time is a possibility, we're just not advanced enough.