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Musings on Fiction and Tropes

Who wants to live forever?

Clementine Fraser

child questioning immortality

My son has just started listening to Queen, and the other day I heard one of the songs they did for the soundtrack to Highlander: ‘Who wants to live forever’. Got me thinking. Would we really want to live forever? What would it do to us to live forever?

Okay for starters, there are quite a few people about whom I shudder at the thought of them living forever. I’m not just talking about the really evil people… .Does that make me a bad person? That does make me a bad person. Geoff from accounting is fine. Really.  But it’s a valid thought – If we lived forever, would we want to be around the same people forever? Would they start to really bore us? In fantasy fiction you often have elves or other immortals who have all lived for well over 1000 years and they all know each other. You’d surely get super tired of the same stories, again and again: Continue reading “Who wants to live forever?” →

history, teaching

History and Identity and how we shape both of them.

Clementine Fraser

Something that comes up in my history classes quite regularly is the concept of identity – national identity, personal identity, and how history shapes both of those things. We talk about the significance of events relative to individuals – who is affected? Who is left out? Why is it a significant event for some and not for others?

Our past shapes us. Even the most historically unsavvy person likely agrees with this to an extent. What is less clear to most is how current social narratives shape the history we tell ourselves, and how that reflects our identities back to us – warped, slightly twisted, or our best sides, filtered through the best Insta-ready looks. Continue reading “History and Identity and how we shape both of them.” →

life, Personal, self care

On Forgiveness

Clementine Fraser
forgiveness hug

I have often thought about forgiveness.

It’s something we teach children from a young age – how to say sorry, and how to accept an apology. But we also teach children, or I do anyway, that saying sorry doesn’t fix things. The analogy of the broken pot is a good one. You can glue it together after you’ve smashed it, and apologise to it, but it’s still damaged and scarred. Accepting apologies is hard sometimes. Have you watched children being made to accept the apology of someone who hurt them? And they hang on to that hurt, bring it up again. My mother used to call it flogging dead horses. When you’re young it is hard to learn to let the dead horses lie, to truly forgive someone and accept their apology, I’d argue that as adults it’s important that we do this. Even to learn to forgive someone who never apologises.

Continue reading “On Forgiveness” →
Musings on Fiction and Tropes

The Monster under the Bed – Why do people like scaring themselves?

Clementine Fraser

I’m going to get this out of the way at the start – I hate scary movies. To be more accurate – I’ve tried to like scary movies but I’m the kind of person who screams at jump scares, and creepy stuff leaves me awake and alert and catastrophising all night. 

 

The first horror movie I saw was House. I was 11, at a friend’s house, and she’d assured me it was a comedy horror. Now I think back and I can see some of the comedy, but at the time it was deeply traumatising. It took a long while for me to be able to open my wardrobe door at night. Or even during the day… I made my little sister do it – in the classic ‘little siblings are indestructible” way that older siblings have. Scream (another light horror) was the nail in the coffin (so to speak) of me ever wanting to live in an isolated house out in the country. I like having neighbours I can run to when the scary baddies arrive. And the bit at the beginning of Scream where Drew Barrymore’s character is trying to call out to her parents, who are so close to being able to save her, and her voice doesn’t work? Oh that’s only my recurring nightmare. I really wanted to watch Supernatural recently but made the mistake of watching the first one while I was at home alone and decided maybe I need to wait until my kids are at home with me (they somehow take on the indestructibility of siblings; when they are in their rooms asleep I feel a whole lot braver than if it is just me by myself). Continue reading “The Monster under the Bed – Why do people like scaring themselves?” →