#I wrote that analysis at the beginning and didn’t really fully utilize it for the visual design I’m a clown but don’t look at me

[thread-theocracy]

Satan Demon Form Redesign 💚🔥

[More Info Below / Demon Form Redesigns ]

Preliminary Thoughts / Word Salad

DISCLAIMER: NO CHARACTER DESIGN IS PERFECT! I designed these with my tastes in mind (these are purely subjective). I did not make these to insult the developers and their hard work. I also didn’t make these to fight with other people in the fandom (let me be a freak in peace)!

While I’m a fan of Satan, I personally dislike his demon form. A lot. His canon form seems… rushed? An afterthought? There are parts that I like (the weird rib cage ribbon is interesting to me), but most of it is… eh??? Anyways I think he deserved better, at least in some aspects of visual design. While most of Beel’s redesign were additions to his existing form, most of Satan’s are changes.

Satan’s visual design centers around opposing Lucifer in every possible way. Be it bright color palettes or asymmetry, he dresses in a way to visually solidify a unique identity for himself. Also, asymmetry, at least in my perspective, plays a lot into concepts of ‘imperfection’ and ‘incompletion’ and I think it works in showing his perception of self / forming an identity outside of Lucifer (later lessons hint that Satan feels like an inadequate copy of him). Anyway, those are the main focuses of this design. I’m grasping at straws and I feel like I’m going insane. <3

[ I’m monologuing too much. Onto the actual redesign.]

Redesign Info

With this redesign, there are two components.

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The first form is a dormant one, with black gradients covering the limbs of the body (soot-like) and smoke coming out of arms and hooves legs.

Summary Info / HCs

Smoke erupting from limbs (can also emerge from eyes and mouth)

Black gradients on arms + legs

Detached / Suspended hooves feet (Wanted to make him seem ‘incomplete’)

Black sclera + Greener eyes

Cracks in horns

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The second form is an ignited version of the first, with flames replacing the smoke.

He usually reaches this form when he’s pushed to a certain edge. The first form is a warning and the second form is the final outcome to most scenarios / gags.

Summary Info / HCs

Fire erupting from limbs (can also emerge from eyes and mouth)

Glowing veins + Transparent skin (parts of the bone can be also seen underneath)

Glowing Eyes + Mouth

Flames crack through the skin like molten lava on dark rock (Shows in cracks in horns as well)

The stronger / longer he burns, the more parts of his body turn to ash / detach. If it’s too much, all that’s left is a crooked black skeleton on fire :D

He’ll slowly recover overtime if he goes over the line

Will his outfit burn off when he ignites??? (only when I want it to)

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Outfit

Portions are mostly mish-mashed from his different canon outfits: Outfit cropping like his butler outfit, Satan (™) coat draping like his casual / human world, button-up from his TSL, etc.

Lots of the implementations of the outfit take inspiration directly from his canon demon form. Gold patterning is taken from his belt, metal harness? taken from his ribcage bow concept, etc

Tried to implement the boa / fluff / feathers into the coat. I could never form an outfit and keep the boa. It drives me nuts

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Additional Undrawn Concepts

More detached / suspended portions of his body

The smoke that comes out of his body can materialize into weapons? Hazardous objects?

If he blows himself up too much he just turns to ashes. Slowly reforms over time.

Transparent skin goes a bit farther and you can maybe see his rib cage / organs? Maybe take it a step further and instead of the ribcage ribbon it’s an open top with a distorted rib cage popping out?

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Credits

R02-obey-me: Satan tail brush. Used as base -> rendered over / cleaned.

[traincat]

I’ve been trying to piece together a few things from your Twitter and Tumblr posts alike and still can’t make heads or tales of things, so would you mind helping out a FF & spideytorch noob? 1) what is currently happening with Johnny in the comics? (I’ve fallen head over heels for this guy, largely all your doing) 2) when’s the last time he and Peter have interacted, canon wise? (And do you think upcoming interactions are likely?) 3) your thoughts on if they’ll have him come out in the near future? (has that ‘biggest change to the fantastic four’ teaser come to pass yet?) Love all your content, thank you!

I'd say no problem but then I started thinking about this current run again and got a headache. But yes, I can do that to save you from reading it, because it is very largely not good.

So I don't think it's unfair to just flat out say the current Fantastic Four run is not very good, largely due to writer Dan Slott's efforts. Slott was previously on Amazing Spider-Man for 10 years, to mixed opinions, but a large portion of Spider-Man fandom, myself included, blames him near singlehandedly for the decline in quality of Spider-Man books over those ten years. I will say, in the interest of fairness, that Slott as a writer has an incredible fondness for the Spider-Man/Human Torch relationship, and that a lot of the recent teamups and interactions between them have been written or co-written by him. So it's all not all negative here. But in general, I personally find Slott's more recent comics (the last seven-ish years especially) to be badly plotted out, messily characterized disasters that feature characters written with all the emotion of a cardboard cutout. That's me putting it nicely.

To explain this fully, you have to understand the position Fantastic Four comics were in from the years 2015 through 2018, both in the fictional 616 universe and in the real publishing world. Following the 2015 Secret Wars event (great if you want some Johnny angst in the background of your plot), the Fantastic Four were disbanded -- Reed, Sue, and their many biological and found family children were presumed dead but in reality were remaking the multiverse, unable, for a reason that was never clearly defined, to reach home. Ben and Johnny were left on Earth. They had an unspecified falling out, likely due to Reed and Sue's absence, and went their separate ways -- Ben joined the Guardians of the Galaxy and went to space. Johnny was featured on both Inhumans and Avengers books. What's notable about this period is that it's the first time since 1961 that there was no Fantastic Four book being published by Marvel. Now the real world reason behind this is both complicated and extremely petty: Marvel really wanted the Fantastic Four film rights. Marvel denied this explanation at the time, stating that the reason was sales motivated, but it was a thoroughly flimsy excuse and Jonathan Hickman, writer of 2015's Secret Wars and overseer of the current X-Men plot, gave an interview saying the decision was film rights motivated. This decision kept the Fantastic Four books off the shelves for three years, up until the Disney-Fox merger, which secured the X-Men and Fantastic Four rights for Disney's Marvel Studios. Marvel then announced that the Fantastic Four book would be returning. So that's a little bit of background as to the precarious place the Fantastic Four currently occupy in the Marvel universe -- it's worth noting that this year is their 60th anniversary, and Marvel has done very little for it. Compare this to the X-Men, whose film rights Marvel also obtained during the Disney-Fox merger, and whose books are currently dominating the publishing lineup. The Fantastic Four definitely occupy an unpopular position, one Marvel themselves is at least partially responsible for forcing them into.

But to move back into the actual content of the book -- the readjustment period Slott wrote reintroducing the Fantastic Four into the Marvel universe can be described as clumsy, at best. It's never fully explained why Reed, Sue, and the kids couldn't return to Earth, something that was explored in Chip Zdarsky's 2017 Marvel Two-in-One, which featured Ben, Johnny, and Doom on a multiversal roadtrip to try and find their family and which I on the whole recommend, despite it having an awkward ending due to being cut short by Slott's announced Fantastic Four main title.

(Marvel Two-in-One 2017 #4)

Instead, the Fantastic Four return to a Marvel universe a little different than how they left it, with the Baxter Building -- formerly the offices of Parker Industries, the company Doc Ock started in Peter's body during Superior Spider-Man that Peter inherited after his defeat and then lost spectacularly when he trashed his own company to fight nazis (good for him) -- occupied by a different fantastic foursome in a plot that goes nowhere and does nothing. This is somewhat emblematic of the early days of Slott's run -- he introduces ideas that fail to go anywhere, including Johnny's rekindled relationship with his other best friend and former college roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot, who he was seen being very cuddly with in the early issues.

(FF 2018 #1) A small group of Fantastic Four fans have argued for a while that if Marvel was to have Johnny come out, a relationship with Wyatt would feel very natural -- they're already close, with Wyatt being an important Fantastic Four supporting character since the '60s. I have some further analysis here on the conspiracy theory that Johnny and Wyatt were supposed to be in relationship at the beginning of this run but that that plot was, for whatever reason, nixed. I don't know that I entirely believe this theory, for the record -- but I do think the pieces line up remarkably well.

Anyway, that didn't/hasn't yet happened, obviously. Slott instead for the most part put Johnny on the back burner for the beginning of his run, up until the Spyre arc, which I have reason to believe is the main story he pitched that he credits with securing him the Fantastic Four title. The Spyre arc suggests that the Fantastic Four's failed space exploration during which they got their powers wasn't just to beat the commies to the moon, as Lee and Kirby envisioned (simpler days), but to reach a specific planet outside of our galaxy. When the team sets out to conquer this mission, they arrive at the planet, but are quickly captured. The planet, they find out, operates like a soulmate AU -- everyone has a fated person that they are matched to via a gold armband. Reed and Sue are soulmates (and Ben is confined to an underground subterranean with the other monsters, because this is a Fantastic Four comic) while it's discovered! Shocker! That Johnny is actually the soulmate of the one the planet's inhabitants, a winged woman named Sky, with the suggestion that this is both why Johnny's previous relationships have never worked and why he loves space exploration -- he was just trying to get to his Soulmate TM.

(FF 2018 #15) "What's going on here? Where are my clothes?" As you can see, this didn't start off super great, with Johnny being separated from his family, stripped naked, and put in Sky's bed with a soulmate armband slapped on him. Did I mention they're only removable if your soulmate takes it off for you? And that Sky has consistently refused despite Johnny asking her to? Yeah. It's bad. (I think it's important to note Johnny's long history as a victim of assault plays into this narrative, whether or not Slott is personally holding that in mind while writing, which I don't believe he is. cw in the linked post for discussions of sexual assault.) There's an additional issue here in that Slott has a history of problematic writing regarding women of color, featuring characters he's created to act as love interests being oversexualized, infantilized, villainized, or some mix of all three, with two examples of this phenomena being Cindy Moon and Lian Tang, both of whom he introduced in quick succession in Amazing Spider-Man. Slott certainly didn't have to write Sky as manipulative or controlling towards Johnny, but that's what he chose to do, and that factors into the bigger picture of unfortunate themes in his writing.

Sky returns to Earth with the Fantastic Four despite Johnny appearing unenthused about the idea and initially generally reluctant to interact with her. Apparently they went on a few dates after this and kind of made up. I don't know because I stopped reading for about ten issues in there but I feel confident I missed very little. It's hard to talk about the Sky plot without referencing Johnny's previous interactions with a character named Lyja, a Skrull whose relationship to Johnny I have a long breakdown of here. It's doubly hard, because Lyja actually showed back up in Fantastic Four during this plot. Lyja's modus operandi has remained consistent throughout almost all of her appearances, which I guess makes sense, because she literally has no storylines that do not involve her being obsessed with Johnny, and this recent story isn't any different: Lyja shows up, Lyja disguises herself as another woman in Johnny's life to get close to Johnny, Lyja gets caught and claims it was all fine because she did it for love. This time she disguised herself as Sky.

(FF 2018 #32) Not gonna lie, kind of proud of him for this one. That's one of my problems with Slott -- very occasionally, he busts out good moments, only to undermine them with the rest of his narrative.

In the same issue, Alicia Masters, the first woman Lyja impersonated in order to get close to Johnny, uses her supervillain stepfather's radioactive clay to control Lyja's mind and send her back to space, and I do think she utilized girl power when she did this. Johnny, left reeling after Lyja's latest attempts to trick him into a relationship, ends this issue by sleeping with Victorious, Dr. Doom's right hand woman.

I know she pegged him. I know it. This scene was a little controversial in Johnny fandom, because a lot of people viewed it as Johnny cheating on Sky and thought that that action was out of character for Johnny. I'm personally of a little different opinion, which is that regardless of whether or not you view Johnny and Sky in a committed enough relationship that Johnny's tryst would count as infidelity when all Johnny and Sky are bound by are magic plot soulmate bracelets, I think Lyja's involvement changes things significantly when it comes to Johnny's characterization. All of Johnny's "playboy" periods, if we can call them that, coincide directly with Lyja having been in and then left his life again, which I think makes a certain amount of sense -- it's Johnny trying to wrest control back after a situation where he had none. None of this is explicitly canon, I have to note, but sometimes in comics you have to do the work yourself. So I think this is a case of something being accidentally extremely in character that Slott accidentally stumbled into because he had these love triangles in mind, not because he put a lot of thought into it.

Speaking of love triangles! Johnny sleeping with Victorious gets more complicated when Dr. Doom announces his intent to marry Victorious -- not because he has any romantic interest in her (this engagement caused a lot of uproar in Fantastic Four because Victorious had been previously referred to as being like Doom's adopted daughter) but in order to install her as Latverian regent in his absence. I'm not going to lie, I love a political wedding. Victorious, for some reason, thinks Doom will be deeply upset that she slept with some closeted blond twink and the member of the Fantastic Four he views least as an enemy and more as an annoyance. Johnny, who Sky is currently not talking to because she "felt" him sleeping with Victorious through their magic plot soulmate bracelets, also feels nervous about Doom finding out about this, which I guess is slightly more valid. Anyway, for some completely ridiculous reason, Victorious decides the best time to tell Doom about this little indiscretion is when they're standing at the altar, which coincidentally the Fantastic Four are also standing at, because Doom asked Reed to be his best man in a not at all homoerotic little setup involving midnight swordfighting and Reed slipping Doom's emerald ring onto his own finger. Sorry to sidetrack into DoomReed territory here but it's just like. It's just a lot.

(FF 2018 #33) Also, Ben walked the bride down the aisle. :,) Look at his gigantic hand.

Anyway then Doom decides he's going to kill everyone in a completely reasonable and not at all overblown reaction to Johnny and Zora having what was most likely both disappointing for Zora and weepy for Johnny sex. And that brings us up to where Fantastic Four comics left us yesterday -- in answer to your "big change" question, that's most likely coming up in the next issue, so it hasn't come to pass yet.

Having gotten all that out of the way -- the last time Johnny and Peter interacted canon-wise was in the recent Empyre Fallout Fantastic Four, at the end of the Empyre event:

It was cute! Slott does right good interactions between them. This is possibly the Stockholm Syndrome talking. I don't know if more interactions are likely imminent -- the Empyre event was fairly recent. On the other hand, Slott does like writing interactions between them. So I'd give it about a 50/50 shot. I was skimming the letter page in the latest issue and someone wrote in asking if Peter was likely to appear in the pages of Fantastic Four again any time soon, so there is definitely a demand.

As for Johnny coming out -- I don't know. It's not a call I feel comfortable making at this moment, which I guess means I wouldn't bet money on it. I'd like to say yes, especially because I think Slott set up, whether that was his intention or more likely not, several good places in his run where Johnny could have come out. The beginning, when he's implied to be living with Wyatt again and where he and Wyatt are paralleled against Ben and Alicia. Ben's bachelor party, where Johnny laments not finding the right person -- specifically person and not woman -- and where Ben tells him to "be brave, Johnny Storm." And the soulmate planet plot, where I think could have had a very different and much better ending if Johnny had told Sky that she couldn't be his romantic soulmate, because he knows he wants to be with a man. But those are just places that I think would have made good opportunities for a coming out story. Instead, Johnny's been involved (dubiously) with three different women over the space of the last 10 issues, which is more heterosexuality at one time than he's been confronted with in the last 60 years. So my thoughts are still that it's going to happen eventually, but quite possibly not anytime soon.

Hope that helps! And that my incredibly long answer about what's currently going on with Johnny in comics sheds some light on things!

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

In a way, the trail for bio-fabricated animal fabrics is already at least somewhat blazed for Modern Meadow. Unlike with clean meat, some people are already beginning to buy lab-grown animal-based garments, many of which utilize comparable technologies to those employed by some of the companies discussed in this book. For example, California-based Bolt Threads is growing in vitro spider silk (what their webs are made of), starting with yeast cells that have been engineered to spit out the proteins naturally found in the extremely durable arachnid product. Unlike the more common silk from worms-who’ve been domesticated and bred for silk production over the course of many centuries-spider silk is far stronger, some types being even sturdier than Kevlar, all the while being as soft as, well, silk. The problem with trying to produce it commercially is that spiders don’t do so well when we try to farm them, typically eating one another in the crowded conditions needed for insect farming to work. Cannibalism just doesn’t lend itself to profitability. (A team in Madagascar did succeed in producing a farmed spider silk garment in 2009, but only after four years offering a lot of spiders.)

With $90 million in venture capital raised, in 2017 Bolt Threads announced its first commercial product-a necktie that retails for $314, and were only made available to fifty lucky individuals who won a lottery to buy them. The company also inked a deal with Patagonia for its arachnid-free spider silk garments. A Japanese competitor named Spiber (as in "spider fiber") is doing the same thing and in 2015 partnered with North Face to produce the so-called Moon Parka, a durable winter coat containing their lab-grown silk that is, at the time of this writing, available for sale in Japan and retails for $1,000. And shoemaker Adidas is already starting to use lab-produced spider silk, called Biosteel, manufactured by a German competitor of Spiber named AMSilk. The company boasts that “a spiderweb made of pencil-thick spider silk fibers can catch a fully loaded Jumbo Jet Boeing 747, with a weight of 380 tons.” […] 

Second, as GFI’s Bruce Friedrich points out in a blog on the topic, clean meat at scale won’t happen In a laboratory-all processed food started in a food lab, even Corn Flakes and peanut butter, for example. But no one asks, "Would you eat lab-produced Corn Flakes?” Rather than being produced in a lab, clean meat would be produced in a factory (or call It a brewery if you prefer), where the majority of food sold In supermarkets Is produced. Food companies, of course, have R-and-D teams laboring away in labs, but once they get their recipe down, the actual food production moves to a factory. Similarly, clean meat factories will be a far cry from a laboratory; they’ll have massive tanks in which the meat will be cultured on a huge scale. [...]

Not everyone will convert, needless to say, but enough will likely do so to make a difference, and, presumably, a profit. As well, even if only twenty percent of meat-eaters were willing to switch, that would still make clean meat a multibillion-dollar industry. […] 

Hansen is right that predictions have been made for years about cultured meat coming to fruition, and yet the meat industry largely hasn’t felt that threatened. But things do seem to be changing in the wake of high-profile product unveilings by the likes of Post and Valeti, and certainly the investment from Cargill. Gone are the days of clean meat being purely a theoretical daydream of environmentalists who want a more sustainable way to produce meat. With commercialization looking increasingly likely, we won’t need to rely on pollsters to tell us how consumers may react when clean meat is available to them. People like Hansen and Nestle may not want to eat meat if it didn’t come from a slaughtered animal, but how many others will share their repugnance at such a thought?

Kristopher Gasteratos, founder of the Cellular Agriculture Society (created in 2016), is more optimistic. He believes animal agriculture is so inefficient that humanity will be forced to abandon it, at least for the bulk of our protein production, or we’ll pay the price. His analysis of the situation doesn’t pull any punches: “Factory farming of animals will end one way or the other. The real question is this: if we don’t find an alternative to factory farming soon, will we as a civilization end with it?”

Gasteratos is convinced that the public will come to accept clean meat because there’s such an existential necessity for it. But his view is also informed by a study he conducted over the course of 2016 with the assistance of both New Harvest and the Good Food Institute. In the study, Gasteratos led a team of researchers who asked thousands of survey respondents their views on the topic. Based at Florida Atlantic University, the project ultimately surveyed more than thirty-two hundred undergraduate students and about fifteen hundred adults both in the United States and Australia (the two nations with the highest rates of meat consumption on a per capita basis). Unlike the aforementioned surveys, which largely asked if people would eat "meat grown in a lab:’ Gasteratos took a deeper dive, wording his key question in a way that provided respondents with more context: “Scientists are working towards producing meat by using animal cells instead of living animals. This new method of harvesting meat is called “cultured meat” and will likely be available to the public within the next decade. It is important to note that cultured meat is real animal meat, so it should not be confused with current meat substitutes which are made from plants. If cultured meat is proven safe by long-term research, tastes the same as current/conventional meat and is priced affordably, would you eat cultured meat?”

Upon simply being asked this question, without any discussion of clean meat’s benefits, 61 percent of the university students claimed they’d either “probably” or “definitely” eat it. After being told some of the benefits, either ethical, health, or ecological, that number spiked to 77 percent. Among the fifteen hundred adults, the numbers were similar: 62 percent were willing to eat it without knowing its benefits, while 72 percent were willing once they knew of those benefits.

Other interesting findings from Gasteratos’s work include some pretty fascinating results about just who is most interested in eating this meat. “People still seem to be generally unaware of this topic, but what really shocked me was our finding about how higher self reported meat consumption correlated with higher cultured meat acceptance. Basically, the people who say they eat the most conventional meat tend to be the most receptive toward a cultured alternative, while people who say they eat little meat, and especially vegetarians and vegans, are the least interested.

In other words, clean meat probably isn’t for the people shopping at the farmers’ market or their local co-op, It holds far less appeal with the natural-foods crowd than the crowd going to KFC. But that's okay. In fact, it may even be for the best considering that the number of people who eat conventional meat is far, far larger than those who frequent their local farmers’ markets.

Comments left by respondents offered some good qualitative insights into the general perception. "I don’t care where the meat came from so long as it’s safe and tastes right;’ explained one respondent, echoing a widely held sentiment among participants. Others expressed some qualms about meat-eating but thought cultured meat could be the answer to their concerns: "I heard meat is really bad for global warming;’ one respondent wrote. "this would sort of absolve me of that guilt.”

- Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, Paul Shapiro

[maddys-writing-portfolio-blog]

Relating Text to an Initiating Text

Assignment 1: Final Project ( May 2018)

AP Language and Composition

Prompt: “A common psychological debate is whether individuals are more controlled by “nature” (the inherited traits over which we have no control such as eye color, disease, etc.) or “nurture” (the upbringing by our parents and family members). Discuss nature and nurture as it relates to either Dick or Perry and draws a conclusion in which you support which is more important.

*A 400-500 word paragraph *Must incorporate at least two direct citations from the novel *Must incorporate at least two direct citations from your Outside Research”

“Argument Disputes over nature’s predispositions and nurturing influences, and of which held the greatest contribution to the development of the human psyche, has been an argument that has served perennial throughout the decades.”

“Perry Smith wasn’t necessarily a witness to these behaviors either, he was a victim.”

“ Essentially, it is the nurturing care that shapes an individual, and natural genetics that express to what possible extent.”

Analysis:

The genre of this assignment was very specific– An academic argument, in the form of a paragraph. In this argument, we were to apply the knowledge we obtained from the novel, obtain outside research, and utilize both as evidence for our claim. When I first saw this assignment, I felt a sense of dread. The whole year, we had focused on the persuasive, synthesis, and rhetorical analysis based timed writes. This prompt was essentially the same as any other persuasive argument– except we were able to conduct outside research and had a longer time frame to complete the task. That, to some extent, made me relieved. I do believe though, that due to the intimidation, I wrote with the most sophisticated diction possible. Because I was required to write two citations for each, that was what I did. However, I feel as though I would have benefited more if I also included a number of indirect citations to bolster my claims even further. I do believe though, due to how intimidated I was, my writing was sincerely restrained. Near the beginning of my argument, I explained how “Argument Disputes over nature’s predispositions and nurturing influences, and of which held the greatest contribution to the development of the human psyche, has been an argument that has served perennial throughout the decades.” In this explanation, I believe that I wrote with the intention to please my primary audience-- which was my teacher. I feel this may have inhibited me because I kept my diction, tone, and overall argument academic, refrained, and distant. Since this is a topic that can become quite an emotional one-- I feel that I have fallen short in this aspect. In answering the exigence of this assignment, I had the perfect opportunity to fully adress the underlying topic that comes with the prompt-- child abuse, child neglect, and how it may affect kids. I touched base on it, by supplying commentary such as “Perry Smith wasn’t necessarily a witness to these behaviors either, he was a victim,” and “Essentially, it is the nurturing care that shapes an individual, and natural genetics that express to what possible extent,” but I never quite hit home. If I was to readdress this assignment, I would have employed heavy appeals to pathos, in order to answer to the prompt and its underlying topics completely. 

Assignment 2: This I Believe Essay (October 2018)

Honors 198

Tell a story about you: Be specific. Take your belief out of the ether and ground it in the events that have shaped your core values. Consider moments when belief was formed or tested or changed. Think of your own experience, work, and family, and tell of the things you know that no one else does. Your story need not be heart-warming or gut-wrenching—it can even be funny—but it should be real. Make sure your story ties to the essence of your daily life philosophy and the shaping of your beliefs.

Be brief: Your statement should be under 500 words.

“Diamonds are one of the hardest materials in our world, yet most are littered imperfections. Despite their nicks and scratches, these lustrous rocks still shine bright. This naturally occurring concept is one that I apply to my view on the world—  and more specifically, on people.”

“At first glance it seems that I was a girl in denial of her childhood bully. However, I know that wasn’t the case”

Analysis:

While this prompt had a similar word constraint as the previous, the genre is almost entirely different. This I Believe Essays have a genre of their own--  they are written by people all over the world, and often published and broadcasted. Therefore, this assignment was an informative essay on one of my own individual beliefs. Initially, when I viewed the prompt, I had no idea where I could begin. In all honesty, at that moment, I wasn’t aware of any strong beliefs that I had. For this assignment, I really had to dig deep to uncover the backbone of my morals. Because this essay was centered around my own beliefs, I decided to take on a more personal diction. I felt a bit more relaxed and less rigid with my writing. As a writer, I truly do favor a narrative style, so for this assignment, I felt that I was really truly able to embrace that side to my writing. I was telling a story. My story. In addressing the prompt, felt that in order to best answer the exigence, which was an invitation to express one of my own core beliefs,  I needed to pour my heart out. So, I aimed towards heavily appealing to pathos all throughout my writing. This is evident when I explained that “At first glance, it seems that I was a girl in denial of her childhood bully. However, I know that wasn’t the case”. By utilizing italics, I wanted to express the stress I would have vocally placed on the word “know” if I was telling this story physically. I wanted my audience to pick up on my deep connotation of the word. I wanted them to feel it. I feel like this, paired with the story of my childhood bully, was the best way to stir up emotions in my audience at this time-- which were adults and fellow students. In an effort to perpetuate my appeal to pathos, I wanted to really focus on a narrative style. This is something I started from the very beginning, by employing a metaphor that would remain consistent throughout my piece. At the beginning of my paper, I explained how “Diamonds are one of the hardest materials in our world, yet most are littered imperfections. Despite their nicks and scratches, these lustrous rocks still shine brightly. This naturally occurring concept is one that I apply to my view of the world—  and more specifically, on people.” This diamond metaphor carried on throughout my paper, till the very end. If I was to rewrite this assignment, I feel that I would have liked to utilize italics more, and continuously refer back to it throughout my piece. Upon re-reading it, I feel that I touched on it in the beginning, and didn't refer back to it until the very end. I could have been more effective If I would have made the metaphor more apparent.