Current Thoughts

  Why must the lead characters in a movie be aged to at least their mid-teens when they’re supposed to be preteens?  Seriously, why are almost all movies based on books with a preteen girl as the hero suddenly made into teenage rom-coms? Male characters tend to stay the same ages! Not all girls like that genre.  If you turn all film adaptations of stories featuring female protagonists into young adult romantic comedies, then people in the age group the books were actually written for won’t be interested. These books were written to get kids to read, if they don’t get the real story, they won’t want to read them. What’s the point? Also, I’d like to correct a few misconceptions. While I have no qualms about diversity, have you ever noticed that lately every traditionally white female character they recast as black is always the redhead? I’m not annoyed about the racial representation, more so about losing my own minority group’s representation, and I don’t mean white ...

Why can’t live-action adaptations ever stick to the material they’re based on?   For example, the reason the Netflix original, Fate: The Winx Saga, based on the internationally popular Winx Club actually has fan petitions to cancel it is because they got almost everything wrong. You can’t even tell it’s supposed to be the same show. They cut out half the main characters and made the entire plot resemble the Vampire Diaries films.  Note the original group's diversity  Just because it’s directed by the same person doesn’t mean it has to be exactly the same story. The reason the first season was in the Top Ten Most Watched list when it first aired was because fans, myself included, thought we were going to get to see our favorite episodes, (even though I swear I only watch it ironically, because I definitely wouldn't find being a fan of this kind of thing to be slightly embarrassing), adapted by popular actors. Instead, we got an edgy show about teenagers at a mag...

 I'd like to dedicate my first shout-out to my current place of business. The Curly Girl Candy Shop in Salem, MA. We pride ourselves on having the kind of candies you can't just get at CVS or Target.  I helped price the rainbow-colored rock candy for our Pride Month display! Yes, chocolate is included! We have an assortment of mix and match wrapped candy...

  Tangled was also pretty tangled to me. (No pun intended). Rapunzel’s reaction to the whole ordeal honestly surprised me. She’d just found out she’d literally been a prisoner for her entire life, that her “mother” wasn’t related to her by blood or legal adoption and that said woman had lied to her for her entire life because she’d wanted to use her for personal gain, not to mention watching Gothel, the woman who raised her die , and she’s totally fine to leave and picked up with her real parents like nothing happened. And Gothel didn’t even need to abduct her! She could’ve just taken a job as the princess’s nanny. She’d still have had access to her. On a related note, I’m honestly surprised how countless search parties couldn’t find a tower the height of a skyscraper built out in the middle of nowhere, so I actually did the math, and the tower was only 114.97097 miles from the kingdom. I don’t know why they couldn’t figure that out, it took me about ninety-five minutes of m...

  Even the most innocent stories raise these sorts of questions. Have we ever had a Disney princess with a normal childhood? You know, no curses, no magical abilities, no… surprises. Just a happy childhood spent with two loving parents enjoyed before her adventure. (Although I do think that Aurora’s parents at least got updates on their daughter from her “aunts”).  The Little Mermaid’s lesser-known sequels were only enjoyed because of the third film. The second was too repetitive of the first. We finally learned the fate of Queen Athena in the third. No wonder See what I mean? Triton was so overprotective of his youngest daughter. Not only does Ariel look almost exactly like her mother, but she also inherited her singing voice from her.  Since Triton witnessed the exact moment Athena was killed in an attack by pirates on their splash, (Fun Fact , I googled it. A group of mermaids is apparently called a “splash”.) losing Ariel to her fascination with the surface ...

I cannot be the only one curious about how the father in Peter Pan came to the realization that he was being too hard on his dog and his children, especially Wendy.  It’s probably a good thing that he reconsidered, because if they had decided to stay in Neverland with Peter, and the inevitable police search sent out when Mr. and Mrs. Darling returned home from their night out to a vacant nursery came up empty, then imagine how Mr. Darling would’ve felt if the last thing he’d ever said to his children was yell at them, take their beloved dog away and make his daughter cry? The story of Peter Pan would live on in his heart forever, alright. A constant reminder of the inescapable guilt of blaming himself for the loss of his children and likely his wife’s trauma about the disappearance. Not only that, but the family would’ve ended with him and his wife since Wendy was the only one of the three to give them any grandchildren. (You can Google that). Wendy and her husband, Edward have t...

  I’d like to credit Ann M. Martin, as The Babysitters’ Club series features a few other classic examples of a divided family reduced even further, but this time, by fear rather than blame.   Mary Anne’s relationship with her widowed father wasn’t all peaches and cream.  After the death of her mother, Mary Anne’s maternal grandparents sued for custody after having cared for their infant granddaughter for a year while her father dealt with his grief.  I guess even in a state of heartbreak, he realized that it’s unhealthy for children to have to cope with a parent’s emotional issues at a young age. They lost the case, but her father was determined to prove that he could raise his daughter on his own and not screw her up.  He picked out all her clothes, meaning Mary Anne dressed “preppy, yet casual”, and in her early teens, she was required to wear her hair in braids to school. Don’t ask me why , though it’s been speculated that it’s the only way her mo...