Skip to main content

Cartoon Heroes

I was looking back on the old days on youtube with different opening themes of cartoons in the days of yore. I realized that cartoons back then were a lot different than cartoons nowadays. Most of the stuff I watched, at least, are made up of ensembles of superheroes.


Thundercats

well, that's because I liked Eduardo

Before there was CGI and megan fox, there was THIS! 

and of couse, them



Yeah, I grew up with all those. There are a lot more which I couldn't be bothered to list down or to find images off google for, I'd assure you, based on my cartoon database, I have a lot of those on them. I can safely claim that I watch most, if not all of the cartoons in the 1990's to early 2000's. And when I watch those cartoons, I've always aligned myself with the protagonist. I was the hero. Even if the hero were male, I'd easily identify myself with him, or her. 


There came a point in my life, when in kindergarten they'd ask me what my ambition was, and I'd told them that I'd wanted to be Sailormoon. Of course, I got laughed at by the whole classroom. Everybody else at that age, supposedly already know what "real" jobs are and have actually set out to at least say that they'd wanted to aspire to be something, like a lawyer, or a doctor or an engineer. It's ironic that when I got to highschool, not even half of the class know what they'd wanted to be later in life.

I guess growing up with all these superheroes kind of influenced my "wanting to make a change in the world", "wanting to save the world", or "doing something to contribute to the world".

Idealistic much ?

Even in high school, I still had that conviction, right up to my time in Taylor's. I've always thought that the world needed fixing, but when I was in high school, I found that I was smothered in pessimism. Nobody believed in "changing the world". It was either you're with the system or you're against it, and even if you're against it, you can't do anything to change the system. Going out of high school, I became more individualistic. The world is not my responsibility. All I should really be caring about is just myself. How good my grades are to ensure at least I alone have a good life. And if I can't even manage that I shouldn't even be thinking about the rest of the world. At this moment in time, with all the challenges in finding your place in the world and getting a job and settling down, all I could ever think about is how sucky my grades and how does it measure up to the rest of the group and how that measurement places me in getting opportunities.

It sucks. It's like all the idealism is being sucked right out of me. Well, in the first place, to be realistic, it is not anywhere near possible for me alone to achieve "changing the world", but not thinking about those things anymore kinds of leaves me in an empty state, devoid of any feeling to defend or uphold anything, and I'm reduced to defending and upholding petty personal judgments in the face of criticism on a social media stage instead of doing something constructive to get concrete results.

That's me going off on the tangent whining about personal life again, so. Yes, indeed, I'm actually really glad I was brought up where cartoons actually have proper story lines and proper characters. And I guess the stuff you watch kinda influence how you perceive the world at a young age. I wonder if kids nowadays actually still watch cartoons or are they more hung up on youtube or playing with tablets. Then again, there aren't many good cartoons nowadays. 

But as I grew older, I guess with a more jaded outlook on life, I realized that heroes are ideals. They don't exist in the real world. And I guess I kind of got fed up being the good guy all the time. I switched sides to the villain or the anti-hero. My reasoning was that, "it's unfair that the story line always ends up with the villain getting beaten. Why is he branded evil till the end of time? Why not give him a chance, he's actually a lot cooler than the heroes themselves."

The landmark indication of my change of camps from heroes to villains is when I abandoned Harry Potter for Artemis Fowl and for Nathaniel in the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. I've enjoyed being dark, brooding, mysterious and intelligent.

And since then, I've never thought of myself being noble. I've always thought of myself as being a destructive entity (which I am most of the time always am when it comes to words and material things), but I can't bring myself to destroy life.

I never gave it a second thought when my mom asked me when I was little if had I the chance to be Albert Einstein or Cindy Crawford, who would I be, I'd answered with confidence that I'd be Albert Einstein, perhaps at that age, I'd answered it that way because I'd wanted to be a scientist who made an important discovery that revolutionized science for the benefit of humanity or I'd explore something to the ends of the Earth to find the ultimate truth to everything, well I guess, later on it evolved into being something like I'd wanted to be the smartest person in the world so nobody would be able to fool me, or I'd use my intelligence to be a mad scientist of some sort.

Of course, that again, went through a change. As I look back, I've had a lot of dynamic changes in the way I see myself and the world and the way I think. I don't even know where to start to describe all of those changes.

I don't really know how to end this blog post because I'm having inconsistent trains of thoughts and I really should be getting on with my work.

Till then. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Unintended

I'm going back today =( My class is seemingly doing a drama on inter-species romance. An alien princess with a homo sapien teenager. It's gonna be fun. The props are gonna be out-of-this-world and maybe, kind of complex to make, but all the same, marvelous if we can pull it off. For the setting, we might be doing a space backdrop. Costumes, perhaps a blend of futuristic, contemporary and medievel and a little touch of Goth as it will be in a modern-day Halloween setting. We haven't discussed the storyline yet, but it's going to be a fusion of comedy, action and the lot.. Inspirations come from an array of popular sci-fi characters from Star Wars, Star Trek and a Malay short story Anyss Sophillea. I just can't wait.

My Fair Lady

This is an old issue, I know. What has brought my attention to the topic of women rights was when I watched one of the episodes of Commander In Chief on Hallmark. In that series, the president of the United States was supposedly a woman. Interesting, and she plans to take the stand for women rights to the next level despite the controversies arousing her brave statement. The debate was whether or not it was relevant to debate on an old issue, in respect of the state of today's society. Women of today have a better status than they did way back in the days of history old. Women emancipation has been heatedly debated especially in the West throughout the time, and perhaps, the most memorable one was of the Suffragettes, fighting for the right of women to vote. Some places in Africa, in history, do not even recognize rape of women, as a crime, however, all of that has changed, thankfully. The question now is, are women actually 'emancipated' as we are all made to belief? well,...

Stuff To Think About

Reformation of Islam? Last I've heard of it was during sejarah lessons about Islah movements by Syeikh (?) Muhammad Abduh and the lot of it. After Infidel, there poses a question of whether or not there is a need to reform Islam. Is it the reformation of Islam, or the reformation of Muslims? In due course of this reformation, there is a debate regarding the reinterpretation of the Quran. I've been watching some of these videos and I find them quite enlightening. I do wish there are more discussions such as these in my own classroom. The questions were also thought-provoking. I just wished that the questions or subject matter of religious discussions in classrooms were less politics oriented, which you may or may not have deep knowledge of what is going on. Why not take it to a more personal level on how you yourself evaluate your own interpretation of your religion? Truth be told, I had wanted to become a devout Muslim, and once, my means of achieving that is follow...