A comparison of sorts.

During the lecture about science fiction the most interesting point made, atleast for me, was that a lot of science fiction stories are about control and people freeing from it and so on. It really rings true to me- the hi-tech future that is most often seen in sci-fi media is the result of people wanting to control the enviroment, and very, very often that control is seen going over the hedge, or representing the antagonists of the story.

Essentially, fantasy seems to follow a similar path, except in technology's place we see magic. While I am definetly a bigger fan of sci-fi than of fantasy, I think I have a grasp of the most basic fantasy elements. And I often find that fantasy has a more strict framework: the classic fantasy story has to have elves, dwarves, dragons, magicians, a medieval setting and so on, while sci-fi doesn't have any specific types of aliens it should have or anything like that. Actually, a 'typical' sci-fi story can even do without any aliens at all, unlike fantasy.

The way these different creatures are classified and how they act in relation to each other also seems to differ to me- in sci-fi, more often than not, all or most alien races are regarded as citizens of one big space society or whatever and mix among themselves a lot, while in fantasy creatures seem to be a lot more divided, caring about their own territories, often having some negative historical baggage among themselves whitch is often brought up. Also, in sci-fi, the space, the territory all these creatures spread out to is the outer space, whitch we all know to be a BIG, BIG place with multiple planets the aliens can live in and strive without bothering anyone else (unless the story commands it so). In fantasy we get one planet at the most, so these creatures have to share a lot less space in comparison, resulting in much more bitterness when wars for territory happen etc.

Also, in many classical fantasy stories (meaning, the ones that are heavily based on LOTR) the need of all or most of the races in the story to come together against the evil forces is highlighted. That is often made hard, because of prejudice and even some sort of passive racism can be felt in the air of the classical fantasy story. In sci-fi, while the 'we must work together' bit is also quite clear, it is not directed towards the specific races working together- actually, sci-fi seems to have a lot less general racism going on, with most societies featured in sci-fi being quite advanced and beyond racism (unless, of course, the story commands it so).

As I mentioned before, fantasy relies on magic the way sci-fi relies on future technology. Both of these factors allow impossible things to happen in the stories, even know their sources are at tottaly differrent ends of the spectrum- magic is nature based and technology is... well, technology and is based on the knowledge of people. Yet in both cases they are still surprisingly similar- both are often the driving force of the societies presented in these stories in some way, often the sole reason for the plot to happen. The presence of these factors is the main reason these two genres are brought together so often, even know both these genres, while sometimes mixing together a lot, still deviate from each other a LOT.

Which leads to a myriad of questions on how we really should and should not classify something as abstract and uncountable as a story.

Is Not Black Or White

A young artist, Tessa Stone has achieved what many other comic obsessed cartoon watching/drawing young folks often dream about: her webcomic, 'Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name', has become a big hit with a big fan following, with printed versions selling like mad and cosplayers of the characters running around in many cons. As a fan myself, I must say that this is well deserved- the comic is very well written, the characters are very likable and the artwork is really beautiful and eye-catching.
All of these factors are the reasons of the comic's success, and yet, I started thinking that there might be also another reason for this, but that might be because I was thinking about binary opposites too much because of the theme I chose for my essay...
Anyway, during the lecture, Ivan pointed out that the characters that fall into the 'anomalous zone' between the various binary opposites  are often found interesting by the public. And, looking at the characters of HiNaBN (even the abbreviation is a mouthful) and even at the story itself I start to think that I'm looking at a living (well, figuratively speaking) example of that. The setting and the plot of the comic is that this young guy called Hanna (whitch is not a boy's name, apparently) calls himself a 'paranormal detective' and apparently can do some magic by drawing runes and stuff. He's also usually escorted by a nameless but wise zombie and we are introduced a crew of other characters among whitch is an irratable vampire 'artfag', a werewolf girl and a shark-like son of a selkie.
Many of these characters fall into the anomalous zone and fit there perfectly, and actually do it in a somehow different way than I've personally seen before.

The zombie or {...} is probably the most obvious case of being in the anomalous zone, since he kinda resembles the Frankenstein monster Ivan was presenting as an example. He is between life and death, past and present, concrete and obscure, memory and oblivion, taking many roles in the story among which is of a narrator. While being nameless and seeing no value in names and not being too bothered by anything, including his obscure origin, he is still an important character with... well, character, who seems to develop more feelings for what is going on around him and what happened to him in the past as the story progresses. In terms of just about everyting about this character, he sits in the anomalous zone very comfortably.

Another interesting case is Conrad Achenleck, a shy, reserved, yet quite irritable and a with a bit of a temper who, after some unfortunante and a bit humorous events gone horribly wrong becomes a vampire. Sure, we have millions of other stories of 'your everyday guys' being vampires, and in most of them, they seem to be perfect prettyboys, especially in the infamous 'Twilight' series. And in those cases we have the prettyboys presented as something both of this world and the other, but that doesn't really convince anyone anymore. Yet Conrad is a person who a lot of people are painfully familliar with, and his ordeal of becoming a vampire isn't presented overly dramatically, yet is sad and obviously painful to the character, and little bits afterwards point to that the fact that he's a (weak fresher) vampire is still not entirely alright with him. While all of this was not explored more in depth after the first chapter, many things point to the story coming back to focusing on him hopefully. So, Conrad is an everyday guy turned vampire that is done right in my opinion and represents the weird limbo of a situation like that quite well, also putting him in the *~magical~* anomalous zone.

Besides them two, a few other characters also fit in the anomalous zone,  mostly because of their supernatural origins, yet they feel natural in the everyday enviroments of the comic. Hanna, the main character himself seems to have some intriguing baggage readers are not yet allowed to know about and in most recent pages, there have been interesting revealations concerning a new, but already popular character. But I digress.

All in all, the whole story seems anomalous-zoney to me atleast of what understand about such things. The author herself calls it 'sugar-coated horror' whitch explains the essence of the comic pretty well. It has a perfect balance between opposing poles- horror and suspense and lighthearted comedy - it's not overly dramatic and grim (though it has dramatic moments and is REALLY QUITE dark and grim at some parts of the story) and isn't a total comedy to the point of becoming parody or satire.
So, it seems that balance is one of the keys of creating succesful stories.
And that the anomalous zone contains quite fascinating things.

That weird Powerpuff Girls episode

Now that's intertextuality overload for ya- a whole Powerpuff Girls episode packed full (and I DO mean FULL- it's practically overflowing) of references to the Beatles. Well, it's unsurprising to see some Beatles references in cartoons as a whole, them having the title of the greatest band in the world, and all... But a whole episode?? Wow, Craig McCracken, you really love these guys, huh... Well, to his defense, most other PPG stuff is usually not too hard to understand for the children's public, and this is a pretty cool episode. I think I would love it too if there was a cartoon episode dedicated to MY favourite band, but that's just wishful thinking.
Also, it's interesting to see people play around with such concepts and trying them out to their fullest- doing the sort of 'what if' experiments, a thing not many would do. I'm glad to see that PPG had enough popularity and McCracken had enough courage to do this, a thing he and his crew, and the more mature (and the younger Beatles fans) viewers really enjoyed.