Feelings and Facts
Throughout television, books, movies, and more, we are inevitably drawn to different characters or storylines that drive our opinions of pieces. When we become fond of a specific character, things they do in the plot, good or bad, become irrelevant as we will be on their side in the story regardless of what they do. We all have characters that come to mind that have done bad things in the plot but, we still want them to end up winning in the end. This idea is called a conspiracy theory and can be defined as when feelings about a character can greatly impact what we want to and what we don’t want to believe. Overall, it is evident that people grow emotional connections with characters and stories that can become more influential than facts.
When first choosing the topic of Feelings and Facts for this project, we decided to take a different approach on how to relay the idea of how characters can affect our opinions and beliefs. When creating our graphic organizer, we chose to highlight different characters that come to mind when we think of people that influenced our opinions of movies. These characters came in forms of villains, protagonists, and more in many different types of genres. We decided this would be the best way to truly exemplify what characters changed our minds on a plot and give a concrete example of this occurring and why. We added a picture to give a visual piece to this graphic organizer as well as a brief description of why we chose this character. For example, one character we chose was Regina George, an antagonist from the comedy movie, Mean Girls. Despite being the obvious villain in this film, we felt that you still want to root for Regina and is arguably a favorite character from the movie. Throughout the film, she does extremely mean things to her friends and the people around her including stealing their boyfriend, spreading rumors, and speaking to them in a demeaning manner. Typically, if a character would do this you would tend to dislike them but, we did not want to see her downfall in the movie. Through the use of the web design graphic organizer we were able to show the main idea and the different examples of this.
The collaborative process of this assignment was definitely new for both of us, as we have yet to do group work in an online class at URI. That being said, it was not challenging to complete the tasks at hand. After deciding which topic we would like to focus on, which was feelings and facts, we thought it would be a good idea to create an infographic to go along with it. Within this graphic, there are eight characters from popular TV shows or movies that highly influenced the way we wanted the plots to unfold. These characters are all pretty different from each other, but each of them possessed qualities that made us feel connected to them emotionally even if they do bad things within the show or movie. We each chose 4 characters to add to the graphic. This allowed for our characters to really differ from each other, due to our different tastes and feelings. We think that is a huge positive because it makes our graphic include many different points of view, and it also makes it applicable to a larger group of people than it would if we did this assignment independently. For the essay, we decided to break it up into different parts and each complete the parts assigned to each other. This allowed for the essay part of the assignment to feel less daunting and be a lot easier on both of us. All in all, the collaborative process was a positive one.
When it came to researching for this project, we read through all the information on our topic that was given to us from Courageousri. This is what led to us choosing what to put into our graphic. We thought it would be a good idea to include characters that are popular to a lot of people, and to pick ones that we liked despite having negative facts about them. This goes hand in hand with the idea of conspiracy theories. People like the characters that they like, because of emotional ties with them, rather than the facts present in the plot. This is similar to people believing in conspiracy theories that may have factual evidence to negate the theories. We had a calculated approach in the idea of picking recognizable characters that apply to a lot of people, within our own personal tastes.
In the end, it is clear that different connections we make with characters in a movie, book, or television show can cause us to have different beliefs or opinions on the plot. Through the idea of conspiracy theory, how feelings can immensely impact what we believe or do not believe about a character. Our graphic organizer shows that this idea can apply to both antagonists and protagonists as well as different personalities of characters and more. Things a character does in the plot, even if they are bad, stops influencing our opinions on the outcome of the plot and how we want the story to end becomes completely based on our feelings and wants for the characters we have emotional connections with.
