Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "fiction"

Hey everybody, my name is Chris Fritz and this is the inaugural post on my writers blog. I guess I'll start out with how I became a writer. It all really started in college, I majored in filmmaking and one class really stood out to me was a class I took on script writing. In this class our big assignment for the semester was to write a full length screenplay. Once I wrote that one screenplay I quite enjoyed it. I ended up writing two more full length screenplays and several short ones. So it was shortly after I graduated college and I wanted to write another screenplay. I started brainstorming up one idea for my next story and the more I thought about it the more I realized that this one Idea was too big to be a screenplay but it might just work as a novel. Quite a long time later I published this idea into my first epic fantasy novel entitled the Universe Key. The Universe Key now available on Amazon. Ever since I published that first book independently I thought I might as well give this a legitimate shot at becoming a writer. I'm going to write this first novel into a series of epic fantasy novels so stay tuned for that. I'm currently working on the second instalment. I'm hoping this blog will help me build a fanbase and ultimately this will be a place where I can post short fiction that I work on and post updates on how my projects are going. So stay tuned and we'll see where the story takes us together.

I recently asked myself what inspired me to become a writer and tell fantasy stories. I remember growing up with the classics, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, all these were immensely popular when I was growing up. I can say this was the first era of inspirational stories that brought me into the world of story telling. Also there's one thing that has probably been my biggest inspiration for most of my life and that's the show Avatar: the Last Airbender. I could write for days about everything I love about this show but I think what really made me fall in love with it was how deep it was. How it combined a lot of different sources of inspiration to create a whole series that worked on almost every single level. It's bursting at the seems with eastern philosophy, social politics, and unique psychology. If you look deep enough there's even meta commentaries. I'll definitely talk about this show more on this blog in the future. I also grew up reading comic books from Marvel and DC. I recently heard someone describe the Marvel fandom as a religion and I could do nothing but agree with that statement. I think I was indoctrinated into that Marvel cult at a young age and now I couldn't get out if I wanted to. An important moment in my life was when the first avengers movie came out. I probably saw that movie 26 times in the theatres. I thought it was so good that I just wanted to watch it over and over again until I memorized every line of dialogue and every camera shot. Like I just went crazy for a while. At the time I thought that telling a story with that many main characters interacting with each other was impossible for super hero movies. Impossible until someone did it. Eventually I put it together that someone gets paid to make these movies and that's when I decided to go to school for filmmaking. I needed a career somehow. It put me on the path to now. As some more modern sources of inspiration I like the show Game of Thrones even though I became a fan of it after the show ended. I just bought DVDS and binged watched all the episodes. I also like the Netflix show the Witcher, a show called Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, as well as the reboot of Voltron legendary defender. As for what inspired me to write the Emilaba stories that I'm currently working on I had a million little pieces of inspiration that I latched on to and it take too long to go over them now. But this post has been a good place to start.

Recently Netflix released an independent film from France on their platform called Cuties. It’s been very controversial on the internet and that’s what we’ll be discussing. Let’s start with an overview of the film. It’s about an eleven year old Muslim girl named Amy living in France with her strict religious family. Feeling quite repressed by her conservative mother eventually she meets a group of girls her own age who are part of a twerking dance team. Amy befriends them and they enter a twerking dance contest.

The film has been heavily criticized for it’s sexualization of children. Now when I read all the internet backlash against this movie I couldn’t help but think back to 2019 when everybody talked about the controversy surrounding Joker. While they thought Joker would normalize radical violence this movie would normalize the sexualization of children and pedophilia. There are several schools of thought about how society should relate to movies like these. One is that art is a reflection of society and can be used to reflect the values of the society. That it can teach us things and can have direct impacts on society. In this framework a movie like this would be condemned for its sexualization and it’s through this framework that most of the critics make their criticism. Another school of thought is that art exists outside of society and doesn’t have any impact on it what so ever. We do not get our values and our societal norms from art and instead we get them from the people around us. In this framework cuties is not controversial it’s just a movie that exists. There’s probably a synthesis between these two ideas that can work in real harmony. On a personal level I’m close to that second philosophy where not all art has to instill values or reflect societal norms. I believe art can be offensive and be filled with things that society would hate. I also hold a belief that if there is something that offends you you should look directly at it and understand it more that’s why I watched this movie. Yes I did I watched the whole thing so now I’m probably on an FBI watch list but I have to tell you I hate this movie. Earlier this year I saw the controversy just surrounding the movies poster and I admit that did paint this movie in a bad light for me. The worst part is that in the movie they make that poster move. Even if I hadn’t read all that backlash early on I still think I would have heated this thing. The sexualization is way too explicit and any theme it tries to convey gets drowned in this sexualization. While I think this movie is bad I don’t think it’s dumb. I actually like the end of it where Amy rejects both her twerking dance crew and her religion is probably the best possible ending for this film.

I also watched some interviews with the director and she says that this film is semi autobiographical. It’s definitely drawn from growing up as a Muslim woman in France and that’s a big part of the film. The other part comes from real life instances when she watched young girls doing twerking dance routines and I guess this is supposed to comment on how girls have to grow up in a hyper sexualized society. In the interview she talks about different roles of femininity in society and how they clash with each other. She does create a strict divide between her conservative religious role of femininity and a western sexual ideas of femininity. In the end both ideas are really systems of oppression and control so this movie does have something deep to say unfortunately. To criticize her there were ways to get this point across with a movie where every one of the main characters is over the age of eighteen. I would probably want to watch a movie about a repressed religious eighteen year old Muslim girl grappling with her own sexuality by dancing. That leads me to believe that the director made these characters eleven years old so the movie could be more offensive and that she could create internet backlash getting herself free advertising. So we all fell for it. We’ve been tricked and bamboozled. The only thing we can do now is donate money to organizations that combat human trafficking. That’ll show em all.

Now I don’t want to be all pessimistic here. As far as I can tell this film has two main messages. Society has a corrupting obsession with sex and women’s sexuality and the innocence of children is eroded as the adult world encroaches in on it. Now two good films that tackle these subjects individually they are Showgirls and the Florida Project.

In Showgirls a Las Vegas stripper named Naomi Malone gains fame and fortune but along the way she turns to violence and sleeping with her boss to get to the top. In the film there is gratuitous amounts of full frontal female nudity and all the actors are over the age of eighteen. The film rubs our faces in over the top sex. This satirizes America’s obsession with sex and pornography. It’s completely over the top and campy at times but everyone in the movie is an adult and not a child. In the Florida project a six year old girl named Moonee who lives in Orlando and is extremely poor. She gets into juvenile mischief with her friends culminating in her friends accidentally burning down an abandoned house. In the film Moonee is exposed to several adult activities. At one point she and her friends are solicited by an elderly pedophile. The creepy old man is stopped by Willem Dafoe’s character before anything bad happens. She’s also exposed to adult themes by her mother who takes her with her as she scams random people on the street. They constantly move from motel to motel and at one point her mother brings a random man to their home to prostitute herself while Moonee hides in the bathroom. The child’s innocence is fully destroyed when child protective services shows up and takes her away from her mother. As she’s exposed to more and more adult themes her childhood innocence is eroded and eroded away into nothing. I’d also like to point out that in this movie there are no little girl’s twerking anywhere. So these subjects can be addressed in more subtle and artistic ways. Stuff like this just makes me hate cuties even more.

Also when I think about it more I get kind of pissed that the director would exploit the young girls staring in this movie by sexualizing them. How hypocritical can you be when you try to say that society sexualizes young girls while you are the one really sexualizing young girls? In the end this whole thing is a fucking mess that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If Cuties is remembered for anything it will probably be all the times it made us cringe whether we saw the movie or not. Netflix might take a big hit for this one but I don’t think it’s the end for them. Goodbye everybody and remember, pedophilia is wrong.

As most of you know I’m a big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I was really excited when I heard they were making a sequel series called the Legend of Korra. Unfortunately the sequel series didn’t live up to some fans expectations and didn’t get the same critical praise that the first show got. So with the series long wrapped up let’s ask ourselves what went wrong. How could a show that tackled such complex topics such as racism, communism, police brutality, the societal repercussions of advancing technology, religious extremism, civil war, war profiteering, propaganda, anarchism, monarchy, fascism, and PTSD possibly miss the mark this badly. There are little things that happened that I could just pass off as the root of the problem like Nickelodeon cutting their budget, or not having enough episodes to flush out their stories or being generally disrespected by their network. But I think the problem goes deeper than that.
I think it’s this the Legend of Korra punishes the fans of the first show for liking the first show. It all started in the first season. The villain Amon uses a technique to take away a person’s bending. A technique that the audience had seen in the previous show by Aang in the final episode of the series. He used it for good and to save the world but Amon used it for evil. It was twisted for nefarious purposes. The first time I watched Amon use it on the show I was devastated that something so sacred could turn into something evil. The audience was being punished for connecting to that technique from the original show. The next part of this comes in season three. The next thing that gets inverted is the nation of Airbenders.
Going back to the original show we actually learned very little about the air nomads. We were told that they were a nation of monks who loved meditation, spirituality and pacifism. They had vegetarian diets and great senses of humor. Their genocide was a tragedy but we learned about them through Aang. What little we learned we could deduce that the air nomads where nice people. Fast forward to season three of Legend of Korra and we are introduced to Zaheer. A villain who was given the power of air bending and he was well versed in the philosophy of the air nomads. This villain takes the philosophy and goes off the edges with it. He turned the Airbender philosophy of freedom and turned it into anarchy. He imposed this anarchy onto the world by assassinating world leaders and trying to kill Korra. Everything the audience loved about the airbenders and subsequently about Aang was twisted by this villain and turned rotten. Once again the show is punishing the audience for liking what happened in the original show.
My last piece of evidence is the biggest. It has to do with something that Niche would call the death of god. On the original show Aang traveled all over the world. Almost everywhere he went he could tell people that he was the avatar and people would love him. They would respect his authority and help him in any way they could. Even though they hadn’t seen the avatar in over 100 years they loved him and he gave people hope. Needless to say the audience parroted this sentiment and favored the avatar. Knowing the avatar is a special savior whose authority is respected. Now all throughout the legend of Korra this belief in the avatar is slowly eroded away. With every villain Korra faces her authority as the avatar is dwindled slowly but surely. Amon came in the beginning and convinced a large portion of the population that benders are evil and the avatar is the ultimate evil. When President Reiko takes power in republic city he doesn’t do anything to help Korra at all. He doesn’t recognize her authority. Unaloc tries to replace her and turn himself into the dark avatar. This true death of god metaphor is ilustated when Unavaatu tears down that giant statue of Aang in the bay of republic city. When the spirit vines take over republic city the entire city blames the avatar and her approval ratings go down to single digits. At this point the entire city hates her and Rieko kicks her out. Later on the earth queen puts a bounty on her head just for doing the right thing. Essentially the entire earth kingdom hates her.
When she goes away for three years the world essentially moves on from her. The average world citizen doesn’t think the world needs the avatar and Kuvira convinced all of her followers of the same. So watching this series is like slowly watching the god and savior of the fandom die. Even Korras duties to the world fade away. The avatar is supposed to be the bridge between the physical world and the spirit world but when she opened the spirit portals she doesn’t need to bridge them anymore. She combined them into one world. The avatar is supposed to have connections to their previous incarnations to access the wisdom of the past. But when she went through harmonic convergence she lost her connections to her previous lives. She’s supposed to be able to bend all the elements but by the end of the series the military has mech suits that can spit out fire and lightning bolts. It starts to become possible that even non benders can gain the powers of the avatar using enough of their advanced technology. By the end of the whole thing the audience could question what being the avatar even means. With all this it does kind of alienate the audience that fell in love with the last Airbender and maybe it had a hard time gaining a new audience at the same time. But what do you guys think? Is the legend of Korra a misunderstood masterpiece or did it fail to live up to the expectations of the last Airbender?

I’ve written a lot about Star Wars. I admire how it’s been around for so long and how many lives it’s touched throughout the generations. A series that has been going on for so many years has had to change in so many ways. Now there’s one way it has changed that evolves one of the ideas that is at the stories very core and that transformation comes in the form of the Mandalorian. Now the basic story of the Mandalorian follows a bounty hunter named Din Djarin who has taken it upon himself to to care for a small child that the fans have affectionately named baby yoda. I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that this Mandalorian bounty hunter has adopted this little baby and acts as a father to the child. This is contextually significant to the over all story of Star Wars. Now let’s go back to the original trilogy. The plot of the first three movies can boiled down to the relationship between our main character Luke sky walker and his father Darth Vader. The audience can live through and relate to the story through Luke as he grapples with his father. He specifically has to grapple with the sins of his father how Darth Vader committed evils acts the son doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of the father and go down a righteous path.
The father also tries to corrupt the son as if it were destiny that they were meant to walk the same path. The son ends up redeeming the father and proves that even the most corrupted people can choose to come to the good side. A story as old as time and a good lesson learned by all. Now lets fast forward fourth years in our time but five years in their time and we are given the story of the Mandalorian bounty hunter and his child. The audience is made to relate to Din Djarin as he goes on his adventures and raises his baby. We love to watch the bounty hunter make his way in the world trying to make good choices and mold the child into a good adult. Now on an essential level the relationship between Luke and Darth Vader is the same relationship between Mando and baby yoda. A relationship between father and son but here’s where the evolution is. The viewpoint character has changed from son to father. Luke portrays the son as a protagonist and Mando portrays the father in his own story. In the old days the Star Wars audience was mostly made up of children who could relate to Luke. Identify with this young man and his troubles with his father. They relate to the son.
But time passed and those fans grew up. The fans became more mature and maybe even some of them became parents themselves. So they are in a prime situation to relate to a character that goes through parental drama. So star wars was in a prime position to oblige. Now a perfect character to through into the show is Boba Fett. From what little we’ve seen Boba’s relationship to his father is very vital to him. He follows his father’s path becoming a mandalorian bounty hunter. He wears his fathers armor, flies his fathers ship and does his fathers job. There are even points when he tries to avenge his father’s death. The relationship between Boba and his father is very static and stagnant. Boba tries to be exactly like his father not doing better or taking a different path. Boba and Jango take the same path and their path even ends the same way. They both die fighting. This relationship acts as a foil to the main father son relationships in Star Wars. Boba is not like Luke because he doesn’t feel conflict to change his path. Jango isn’t like Din Djarin because he doesn’t want to radically change his ways for the betterment of his son. One could even say that relationship is the worst case scenario of what a father son relationship can be. Patterns of behavior are repeated throughout the generations. The cycle of violence that encapsulated them both keeps turning and swallowing them up. The end result is degradation and stagnation. Luke and Din Djarin break the cycle of violence that has tried to swallow them up and do damage to their family members. Luke succeeded in this and maybe as the show goes on the Mandalorian will succeed and save baby yoda. This story tells as that a relationship between a father and a son is important. This is the way.

Just as an addition I thought I'd give you guys an update. I've just started my third book in the magic metal war saga. I'm really excited to write this third instalment but some things might get in the way. The Covid 19 pandemic is coming to an end as more people get vaccinated. Things are opening up and getting better. Also my day job has me going back into the office full time so that is definitely going to put a damper on my writing. I'm also getting more opportunities to do stand up so that's also going to take a big chunk of my time. With all this starting up I do have some concerns about being able to finish writing my third book. I'll try to keep you guys updated on how it's going but as many of us have learned the hard way recently the future is impossible to predict.

Looking back at all the movies I saw in 2021 I made an extraordinary discovery that my notion of storytelling to its very core. To demonstrate this notion I’m going to have to write about my favorite movie that came out in 2021 and my least favorite movie that came out in 2021. So let’s follow along and see if we can learn something.

The worst movie I saw in 2021 was Marvel’s the Eternals. Going into the movie I knew it had a bad rotten tomatoes score but I still wanted to see it. Right now I’m going to have to agree with the critics and say this movie was a swing and a miss. It feels strange because I am deep into the marvel cult and I know very little about the Eternals. I hoped for the best but I was disappointed. Maybe studying this movie for a little bit can teach us an important lesson. Here’s what I really believe. The Eternals is the complete antithesis of everything that makes marvel movies good. It takes everything that gives marvel success and runs in the complete opposite direction. Let’s start at the beginning with the characters. One staple of the MCU is making movies with big casts of unique characters. Some of the best examples would be the first Avengers movie and Infinity War. One of the reasons those movies are so good is that they don’t introduce us to new characters. They take almost all the characters from previously established movies and focus on the characters just interacting with each other. In Eternals they introduce us to ten new main characters, and this is the first time the audience is seeing any of them. So, this movie has to spend a good chunk of its run time introducing all these characters. It just fails to keep all these characters unique and interesting. Now right now you might be saying to yourself that there’s an exception to this rule. Guardians of the galaxy introduces us to an ensemble of new characters and it’s one of marvels greatest movies. That’s because that movie has a very strong plot which is the next thing I want to talk about, the plot. Now the plot of guardians of the galaxy is pretty straight forward. Here’s a powerful McGuffin all these characters have to play keep away with it for two hours. The plot of Eternals has so much deep lore, mysteries, magic, and plot twists that it’s enough to make anybodies head spin. There’s so many layers to this plot that it all just gets lost in the sauce. My final point is the probably the most important criticism I can levy against the movie and that is this movie doesn’t have good themes. To understand the themes of this movie you just need to understand the bad guys plan. A celestial god wants to destroy the earth and give birth to a new celestial who will in tern create new worlds across the galaxy giving life to trillions of sentient beings. (Spoiler alert) They want to trade the lives of everyone on earth for the lives of all these potential beings. If that sounds familiar to you it’s because that’s the theme of Avengers infinity war. Thanos wanted to trade the lives of half the universe so the other half could flourish. The Eternals just recycled that theme and the characters spend a good chunk of the film debating weather or not they should even save humanity. I moral dilemma that has already been solved by the previous avengers movies. So Eternals is really a bitter tasting mess that does not belong in the MCU and would probably feel more at home in the DCEU.

Now to review a film that I thought was one of the best from 2021 and that is a movie called Don’t Look Up. For those of you who haven’t seen it it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists who discover a meteor that will collide with earth and destroy all life on the planet and they have to convince people to do something about it. Now for several years I’ve debated with myself about whether or not satire is a dead art form. Is it possible to satirize society and make jokes about our culture? Ever since the election of Donald Trump I think it’s become harder to do that. Mostly because with him we’ve ushered in the post truth era I think a side effect of this is a fracturing of culture into several different sub cultures that hold different beliefs and recognize different truths. So with all these fractured sub cultures how can someone truly satirize culture? The answer is Don’t Look Up. Let me explain. In the film the giant meteor that is headed to earth is an obvious comparison to climate change. So the audience can spend the entire movie comparing the disaster in the real world to the disaster of the fake world. The only thing that is consistent between the two is how humanity responds to the disaster. One major lynch pin of this movie is the fact that it does criticize the responses towards the meteor. But it doesn’t criticize the actions of everyday individuals. Instead it criticizes systems of production and consumption that envelop those individuals. Systems that envelop entire cultures and sometimes entire communities. So how does all of this relate to satire? Earlier this year Dave Chappelle released a stand up special called the closer and was immediately criticized for transphobic jokes. Now some people might argue that the jokes he told weren’t transphobic but here’s why I think a lot of people thought they were. In Dave’s jokes about the LGBTQ community he probably thought he was commenting on society in some way. And in a way he was but in a much bigger way he’s criticizing one subculture from the perspective of a different subculture. Subconsciously putting the African American culture up against the LGBTQ subculture. He also acts like these are two completely different factions that don’t have any way to cross over to each other. So I guess that’s why I think Dave Chappelle was thrown into the grinder this year. The guy is the greatest comic but maybe that means we should hold him to high standards. So my question still stands. Is it possible to satirize society? After all of this time I have to say the answer is yes but satire is going to look a lot different from now on. Now I guess the biggest thesis of Don’t Look Up is stated in the beginning minutes of the movie. When it just displays the text of a joke that reads like this. When I die I want to die like my grandpa peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like his passengers. This movie criticizes a lot of real world events and people. From politicians like Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So I guess in this framing this satire is trying to tell us that these billionaires are the grandpa that died in his sleep and the entire earth are the passengers. In the end I think this movie is a good example of a great story. It’s a fantasy that can tell us more about ourselves than real stories ever could. Now my one criticism of the movie is that comparing climate change to a giant earth shattering comet doesn’t line up completely. Climate change is of course slow and manmade while a comet is a sudden cosmic anomaly. But it’s still a decent movie if you want to watch excellent acting get a few chuckles and also have a slow anxiety attack.

Now there’s something very amazing that happens when you compare Eternals and Don’t Look Up and that is this. They are the exact same movie but they go in completely opposite directions. Both movies are about a small group of people trying to save the world from total destruction. They both contemplate humanity, society, and nature and they both encounter god like beings that want to wipe out humanity. Both of these narratives question if humanity is worth saving and they come up with different answers. In Eternals they save the world in Don’t Look Up they don’t save the world. So let’s go over the process by which each movie comes to their own conclusion. In Eternals it runs the gamut of all human history and focuses on all the deadly weapons mankind has created. All the death and destruction of entire cultures and civilizations. But it does ground itself in a romantic humanism that always wins out in superhero movies. While Don’t Look Up does a deep dive into contemporary culture and forces us to look at our everyday contradictions. Just little things that we think or believe that are ultimately harmful to us. Things we’ve normalized that might harm us down the road. It could be the way we communicate, the way we produce, the way we consume, or even the way we reproduce. We can find harmful contradictions in all of them. Just maybe all of those contradictions add up to a point where we can’t help ourselves anymore. That leads me to something that I have believed for most of my life and that is this. Inside of every bad movie there is a good movie just trying to get out. So think of this when you’re reading, writing or creating. Sometime the difference between something good and something bad is just a few decisions.

I did find it interesting that two movies can be released in the same year and be about the same thing even though they’re different genres and styles. I’m very interested about stories that are apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic so I might write more about those in the future. But what do you guys think? Am I on to something here or am I completely out in left field. Let me know in the comments.