Three Wrongs Make a Right?

You always hear how two wrongs don’t make a right, but what about three? When approached with the opportunity to design a Venn Diagram involving pop culture I decided to do the pop culture I’m best at, Disney! I’ll pause for a second while you be surprised. You good? Okay. So I immediately had this idea to somehow make it so that way a villain would be associated with one of the good guys! This was so hard to do!

So the way that I started planning this was writing down different characters of interest (which I wrote on crayon in a napkin in IHOP). On the villains side I had characters like Ursula, Scar, the Shadow Man, Jafar, Evil Queen, Stepmother, and Malicifent. On the good guys side I had the fairy god mother, Timon and Pumba, Mushu, Mama Odie, Genie ans the 3 good fairies. I knew right away that this was going to be a challenge, but once I started I really wouldn’t stop. I haven’t dedicated too much blog posts to one of my favorite Disney movies, Mulan, so I decided to make Mushu be my character of interest. Brainstorming with my friends we start listing different things that happened to Mushu or qualities that he may have. One of the first things that we saw he had in common with two villains were that he changed his state of being. At the very beginning, Mushu is actually a metal statue where he then transforms to the dragon. Looking at our villains side, Ursula transforms from an octopus to a woman in order to throw off Prince Eric for falling for Ariel (nice try Ursula), and Jafar gets what is coming for him when he turns in a genie at the end of the movie and ultimately gets trapped (he also turns into a huge snake, but I hate those so it gets little recognition). So now that I had three of the four characters locked in, I had to start thinking about similarities and difference between them. Looking just at Mushu and Ursula I noticed that they both played a major role in the princess’s transformation throughout the movie. Mushu helped transform Mulan into acting more like a man (and even gave her a cover up name), and Ursula transformed Ariel from a mermaid to a human. So now I looked back at my list of villains and noticed that the Shadow Man is the one who transformed Prince Naveen into a frog, which was pretty major to the movie. Now I had all of my characters, so it was show time! All I had left to do was find a similarity between Jafar, Mushu, and the Shadow Man. Easy right? Nope. Any similarity that I could find seemed to include Ursula as well, which would make her belong to the middle category with Mushu. Until finally I found a trait that she did not have in common, she’s a girl! Yes that is right, Mushu, Jafar and the Shadow Man are all male figures, Ursula certainly is not. Therefore I had my last quality and was ready to design.
I made my design in Microsoft Word since I felt comfortable using those tools, I then print screened the end result and saved it to a jpeg file using GIMP. I based it off the example that was shown in the instructions because I really liked the way it looked. I played with the fonts a little bit to make certain things stand out more than others, but I was pleased with the end result.

VennDiagram

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa

Gliffy’s Venn diagrams: the perfect intersection of power and convenience

One of gliffy’s templates, an example showing the intersection of Pirates, Ninjas, and Zombies

Venn Pop Culture

venn diagram

I created this in paint.  I chose the categories funny, sports, and rich.  For frich, I chose Kevin Hart because he is my favorite comedian, and he’s obviously rich.  For forts, I chose Peyton Manning because he is one of my favorite football players, and I love his commercials, I think they’re hysterical.  For Srich, I chose Tiger Woods because hes always talked about and he’s the most wealthy athlete in the world.  For the blend of all of them, I chose Shaq, because he is a very famous athlete, hes clearly rich, and he is hilarious.

Venn Pop Culture

venn diagram

For this I used the paint program to create my venn pop culture. So in the Three big circles I had funny at the bottom circle, actor in the left circle, and brown in the right circle. Then in the middle of Actor and Funny I put in WILL FERREL. For the middle of Actor and Brown I put Aishwarya Rai (she is an Indian Actress in Bollywood). For the middle of Brown and Funny I put the stand up comedian RUSSEL PETERS. Lastly a person that I think is Funny, an Actor, and is Brown is AZIZ ANSARI.

Venn Pop Culture

Venn Diagram

Here we had to make a Venn Diagram, and chose characters that had things in common and put one together. I cam up with main subjects of Bad, Good, and Mischievous characters. The Minions from Despicalbe Me display both good characteristic but are also mischievous. Angelica from Rugrats is both Good when she is around her parents but bad when left with the other kids to play. The Grinch, although becomes good at the very end, he is bad at first and mischievous. Lastly, I chose Jerry from Tom and Jerry because he is a good character, however can be bad and mischievous to Tom. I created this in the program Paint.

Bart Simpson

For the assignment Venn Pop Culture,

“Design a Venn diagram of three circles, each representing an attribute, where each overlap defines a figure from popular culture.”

I created a Venn Diagram of Bart Simpson’s characteristics:

When I saw this assignment I was still in the mindset of cartoons from the light switch assignment. The cartoon I grew up watching (to my mothers dismay) and still watch today is the Simpsons. Therefore, my main character in this Venn Diagram is Bart  Simpsons. THe first three characteristics I could think of for Bart are that he’s obviously a cartoon, going on my theme, he’s yellow and he’s male. Then I was about thinking, Who’s another yellow cartoon? I was blanking so I googled “Yellow Cartoon” and the first thing I saw was Spongebob Squarepants! How didn’t I think of that! The yellow male was easy after the presidential debate this week and the uproar about Romney cutting PBS funding, Save Big Bird! So the last combination I thought about was a male cartoon, I could have done Homer or Peter Griffin, I those didn’t really involve any extra thought though, I wanted a character outside that genre, so I came up with a childhood favorite, Barney Flintstone.

I made this visual the same way I’ve made most this week, by drawing it and scanning it in.

Mary Sue and the Anti-Mary Sue

I recently read the infamous essay “Mary Sue, what are you?” from the Tumblr Adventures of Comic Book Girl (the site is no longer up, but she has a blog here). This made the rounds on the interwebs a year ago, giving rise to a lot of debate, though the argument that Batman, or any other wish-fulfillment hero, would be  highly criticized if cast as a woman has a ring of truth to it.

Of course, even heroines (or sheroes if you will) that are decidedly not Mary Sues, who have flaws and struggle with real problems, are often criticized for these facets of their characterization. Buffy the Vampire Slayer experienced a lot of fan backlash during season 6 when Buffy suffered from depression and engaged in self-destructive behaviors.

This also occassionally happens with male characters. Prior to the publication of Deathly Hallows, I knew many Harry Potter fans who said that Order of the Phoenix was their least favorite book because of Harry’s angst. Nevermind the fact that the boy clearly has PTSD and most teenagers go through a moody period even when they aren’t orphans being stalked by a sinister dark lord and recently witnessed the brutal death of a classmate. Moody Harry is annoying.

I decided to create two Venn Diagrams, one of Batman and one of Buffy, to demonstrate the difference in characterization:

As a clarification, “people” refers to other characters in the series, though it also parallels viewer/reader reactions with the exception of Han Solo. Viewers love it when Han Solo is douchy. Just think of the Han shot first debate.

Venn Pop Diagram

Of course as soon as I finished this I looked an saw that someone else had done Batman. However, mine I think is in a different vein. With this Venn I was trying to show that the idea of Batman is very archetypal. I mean come on, Zorro is like the Mexican Batman. Also I based the color scheme of the diagram on the early Batman suits when he used to have a giant yellow emblem. Which as Frank Miller explained it was to act as a target to concentrate fire at Batman’s kevlar vest (The Dark Knight Returns).

Venn in the DC Universe?

After struggling, for hours, to create a venn diagram in Word, Excel, and GIMP. I went and found http://www.gliffy.com/, an online diagram making software. It was simple and easy to use. You drag out the shapes, shift them into position and then add the text.

At first, I had no idea what to put into a Venn Diagram. I looked at others to find my inspiration but nothing was coming. Then I started thinking, what do I want to put in the middle? Who deserves to be in the middle? Who beats out everyone else? Batman! Duh. It took me a while to come up with attributes that would put him in the middle, while having other heroes in the diagram as well.

I subscribe to the DC Universe. DC has all of the big boys and girls, including my favorite hero of all, Batman. A human who fights psychotic villains, bosses around heroes with superpowers, and manages to run a successful business. You can’t do much better than that!

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/venn-pop-culture/

Venn? Now!

I got this thing for information graphics. It’s a Zazzy thing — can’t explain it. At any rate, Alan’s assignment was just what I was looking for to express my lifelong fascination with old movies, aging TV series, and the inscrutable weirdness of the bible. Dig it: