The Brother Grimm were linguists and they asked people to tell them stories because that is the best way to get people talking without them thinking about how they are talking. The were looking for different pronunciation, vocabulary, and anything else that had to do with the person's language. However, their collection became something different. It became a well of wonderful stories, and that is what they are known for.
Mack' Movie List
My story of change is a real story about me become like the Brothers Grimm. A few years ago I decided that I would start a list of all the movies that I have ever seen. I wrote down all the ones that I could remember and I added one every time I would watch one. I gave them scores our of a hundred so that I could have a list of the best movies of all time. When I got my big idea, how we treat our enemies, I turned to the list. I deleted my scoring and started to go through each movie and remembered the ending and labeled them according to what happened to the enemy. After hours of remembering adding labels I was complete with a list. For the over all what happens there is a chart with the numbers below.
Killed 167
The killing of an enemy is often the climax, and surprisingly it is almost never regretted and we are very glad to see them go. But something to consider, I suppose, is that most the enemies that are killed are vicious and refuse to stop hurting people.
Punished 196
This is almost always the police show up or the purpose of the antagonist is frustrated and he or she is humiliated. Which or course we love.
Befriended 192
There was a lot more of these then I supposed, however, most of the time this is not the main villain but a character that is destine to be friends in the end. Like in The Avengers, each super hero is an enemy to the others, but they quickly become friends.
The chart shows the comparison
In some ways this looks well balanced giving each category a almost even amount of movies. But if we where to combine the Kill and Punish categories we would see that there is twice as much defeating then befriending. I think that overall if we make movies this is something that we should consider when writing the enemy. We should also chose carefully watch we watch or at least understand what is happening to enemies in movies. Many of the time when an enemy is killed is when the main character is in a kill or be killed situation. I believe for most of us we are never in a kill or be killed situation, but we still relate to these characters.
Child Chart
I decided that it is very important to look at the child movies and found that they are not so evenly spread. I thought that this would actually have kill as the highest because I was traumatized as I re-watched some of the endings and was faced with some of the most gruesome deaths. Here are just a few images from children movies
But maybe it should be more concerning to us that to punish your enemies is so high. After reading two children books about bulling I found this.
Why are we telling kids that is someone is mean to you, you should be mean right back.
There were other interesting things to look at. For instance, I did not see much of a pattern when I looked at it by the year that it come out. It looks to me that movies have always punished, killed, and sometimes even befriended enemies. I also looked at genres and found that action movies often kill enemies, along with hero movies. Comedies often give people what we feel they deserve, and love stories often befriend because the one they fall in love with is often their enemy at first.
War of the Worlds radio show
The other Idea that I had, and still want to do, is have a recording that sounds like a radio program where aliens come to three towns in the country, Execution Town, Deservedit city, and Befrienderville, and each place would handle the aliens differently.
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