Actually I can think of quite a few examples of âthe qualities which made the character and outcast are the qualities that make them special.â Belle is a bookworm and the only girl in town who isnât impressed with Gaston, Arielâs unnatural obsession with humans ends in a (presumably) happy marriage, Merida opts for a life of unladylike solitude instead of marrying a prince, etc.
Yeah I donât get it. What the hell is wrong with taking responsibility for acting out of rage? I thought the movie was nice. And she doesnât âfit inâ insomuch as recover from trauma, regain her identity, and stop hurting others. Oh how awful⌠because we sure donât have enough movies that basically glorify psychopaths!
I didnât find Stephan that shallow or evil, just really pathetic and sad. She was able to move on and he wasnât⌠there 'ya go.
Whatever⌠I liked it. Haters gonna hate.
I have an 4 year-old watching every Disney flick on repeat, so Iâm extremely up to date 
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A vicious cycle is the plot of the Third Policeman.
I havenât seen the movie yet, but I like this version of the story from the evil fairyâs perspective:
This is my new favourite Disney conspiracy theory (really?), and we must surely trace its roots to:
How can it be cultural when the drive crosses cultures, times, etc. as I mentioned above? I think the problem is we have a difficult time grasping that education/cultural indoctrination are not as influential as weâd like to believe. We like to over-think and under-feel, and thus we forget that we have primal needs that override all the rest and telling stories is on the top of the list. I have heard two years old tell stories. I have heard people who lived isolated lives tell them. I have heard people with profound intellectual constraints tell them as well as people who grew up in poverty, war, and they told them in prisons, at cocktail parties and as they lay dying in the hospital. I know people who changed religions, countries, political affiliations and just about anything else still tell them regardless of the major shifts in their life.
It is the way we pass the time and connect to one another. You do not even need to be literate to appreciate a story or tell it.
Cultures have stories in common and they span centuries.
Political, social, educational and economic systems come and go â tomorrow someone can come up with a system where money and elections become obsolete and we can forget those systems exist very quickly. On the other hand, the emotions that drive us â greed, fear, love, hate, compassion still exist and will merely manifest themselves in a different form regardless of social outlets.
As an author, over-thinkers annoy me because they refuse to feel and when I started writing short stories I vowed to make certain the over-thinkers feel the value of primal emotions and face them because they do not go away and are stronger than all of your university degrees put together. No, itâs not about a left-right divide because tomorrow can decimate everything people spent hundreds of years constructing â it is about being a human being because thatâs what you are if you are rich, poor, young old, educated, uneducated and so on in times of war and peace.
Look, sorry if Iâm âover thinkingâ this, but hey, itâs what I do - what with my fancy degrees from my fancy university and all.
All Iâm going to say is that while the drive to make meaning out of life is universal, the expressionâwhich is cultureâis specific and I think it matters, most especially in a modern, globalized world where it appears as if the whole world is on the same page - which I donât think we are as a global society (if such a thing even exists). If we have some overarching themes that crosses boundaries, thatâs likely because similar questions have arisen in different contexts but how they are understood or what the solutions to these problems are tend to be specific to a culture. Culture is a human creation, I think we can agree on that point. I just think that particular context matters. You donât. Fair enough.
When we read a story, we bring with it all of our own emotional, social, and cultural baggage. Iâm an American, Iâm a woman, Iâm white, I live in the south, grew up working class and am now middle class, with a college education - all of this shapes how I understand the culture I encounter in my life. I may share a drive to make meaning and to understand and to be understood, but my point of view is not yours and vice versa and Iâll understand something in a different way from you. Art and the understanding of art is subjective in that way. If it wasnât, we would all agree on what makes good culture. But we clearly donât - not across households, much less across cultures or between cultures. Similar tropes in story telling are not the same thing as the same stories, and stories from different cultures likely have different meanings - both across time and space. I doubt the stories that Maleficent or Sleeping Beauty were based on were understood in the same way as we understand Maleficent or Sleeping Beauty. Itâs a different time and a different context, even if some of the emotional resonances are the same.
And I donât think that trying to understand the context around a piece of art or literature makes it any less powerful or emotionally fulfilling actually. Understanding the context for me makes it even more enlightening as a piece of culture, but again, thatâs just me. YMMV!
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But culture is a man-made constructâŚbased on our emotions and primal/basic needs. We can justify actions with logic and excuse it with culture, but we are just people. Stories resonate precisely because we have those universal emotions and drives.
When vastly different people I know read the same story I wrote and tell me I wrote about them or based the same character on them in some way, it does start to click in that individuality and âdifferent-nessâ is largely a mythâŚ
Sure, culture is a man-made construct - thatâs kind of my point. That doesnât mean culture are any less real or powerful in how it organizes the world. Iâm not arguing that those things canât be transcended, because they can. But that doesnât mean itâs not something to be dealt with and understood, something that shapes us and our responses to our own internal drives and to the world at large. Again, we can make emotional connections and still understand the context. I donât think itâs either/or. Culture is what gives our universal drives and emotions meaning and thatâs what Iâm arguing here. Not that we arenât all emotional creatures, but that our emotions have meaning through culture.
I think if people make connections to your work thatâs great and you should be proud of that. That doesnât mean that you arenât writing from your own particular context or that people arenât understanding it from their own particular context. Plus, we do live in a world that is more globalized and connected, and that has an impact. If someone is finding your work online, then likely they have a similiar context to you, no matter where they live. Despite the mythology built up around the internet, it really is connecting only certain people who have access to it and they are more likely to have something in common with you than someone who isnât connected. Itâs also likely that no matter where they are, if they are coming across your work, they are in a similar cultural bubble online, because that is how the architecture of the internet is now working. We all get the joy of having our own various world views constantly reinforced because our internet drives us that way.
Apparently, io9 was disappointed in the film too:
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