Last Lit Blog-Haroun

Judging from the title of this unit, “Relevance”, and how simple a read Haroun and the Sea of Stories was, I can make two acceptable assumptions. The first is that this book contained a plethora of hero and heroism aspects which we have studied thus far. This being the fact that Haroun has many call to actions, trials, and other journey steps. In addition, this book contained, at least, mentioned a female hero, a heroine. This was Blabbermouth, who said that a woman cannot have power unless they pretend to be a man. This book contained a lot of concepts that were ‘relevant’ to the Hero Unit as a whole, which is my second assumption of why we saved this book for last. It was a clear read, and almost every idea or hero-type connection was easy to notice. It’s a good book to wrap up any loose ends or questions we may have about Heros, because this book contains the answers to those questions. Though simple and fairly easy to read, Haroun and the Sea of Stories contained a lot we can learn from.

If everything I have said so far is in fact not any of the reasons why we should end with a story like this, then I do not have a clue as to why things happened this way.

The Female Hero

Blabbermouth says that women cannot be heros because of the stereotypes that people give them. For the most part, this is true. People do stereo type the typical female hero, especially in recent movies such as Elektra and Watchmen.

In both representations of the original comics, the female heroes are sexy and wear revealing outfits. Elektra wears a skin tight red leather suit, and both Silk Spectres from Watchmen, again, wear skin tight leather. These and most of other movies portray the female heros as these women who kick ass and look good while they do it. From all the advertising that these hero movies pay for, it seems that the main attraction is not the fact that their heroine has might and all other heroic values. They seem to value the fact that their representation of a certain heroine is a sexy woman.

Where I think Blabbermouth is wrong is when she says that girls cannot be strong or heroic because of stereotypes. The stereotypes they have is just an added quality that goes along with being heroic. Elektra and the Silk Spectres, as they were represented in the movies, were not any less mighty or heroic than any other male heros. The directors now just have to add in the sexy factor.