Love

Why a DP movie is my favorite part 2

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In part one, I had just said that I felt cursed, as a child, with fear. The troll tells Elsa “Fear will be your enemy.”

When this happens, Elsa is at most 8 years old. I was younger than that when I realized fear was a problem. But like Elsa, I did not start off that way. I was a kid who liked to feel tough. I wasn’t afraid of trying things. I had my first debate about Christianity when I was four, people, I kid you not, (Four or five.) I knew my stuff too. How did Fear enter the equation?

Like with Elsa, except mine took more steps. When I was little, the idea that fear could control me, could make me feel ill and ruin my day, that was introduced through a seemingly insignificant incident, but it lasted. But the experience more akin to Elsa’s traumatic one came when I was 11. Basically it happened to me in reverse order. But what followed was the same. Except, my parents did not tell me to hide, and they did not die (thankfully.) Elsa has that to herself.

But I digress, I spent years learning how to hide, like Elsa; I became an expert at it. Like her, I developed tricks to keep my mind occupied, to cover up. She used gloves, I used books. If I were a different person, the similarities between us would have been scary. As I watched Elsa’s behavior more carefully, I saw the same looks in her eyes I used to feel in my own. Her hands shook under tension, and I used to become shaky whenever I had to sit through an experience that terrified me, which I had to do nearly every week. But after it was over I could act relatively calm, as Elsa does at the party, up until Anna pushes her, And if anyone pushed me, I would have the same kind of meltdown.

I can’t say for sure with Elsa, but I would always feel very sick, I’d go warm and cold, I’d tremble, I would want to curl into a corner and not be seen or talked to. If I couldn’t do that outside, I’d do it inside.

I can remember it all now, though it was awful, it got worse.

Elsa’s story really starts when she runs away, she is not running from her duties, as many have said, but from her fears. Seriously, how did that responsibility idea ever get started? You can see the fear in her eyes; in her ice and snow; she yells “Stay away from me!” Duh. She’s running from herself. But, as that Switchfoot song says, “Where can you run to escape from yourself?”

This of course, was my life. My whole life was trying to run from myself. Every waking moment. You think I exaggerate, I don’t.

But like Elsa, I had moment or two of peace along the way. It never lasted longer than a day. And come to think of it, her time of peace after her song lasts a day total. She begins at dawn, Anna shows up at dusk. The monster of fear can lose its grip for a short time. But the same thing that triggers Elsa back into it was what would trigger me.

I only needed to be reminded of it. this could be something someone said, or it could just hit me out of nowhere. In Elsa’s case, Anna shows up and Elsa holds out for like two seconds against fear, then it grabs her again.

I am now going to hurry through the rest of the movie until the climax. Anna and Elsa argue, as you know, Elsa accidentally hurts Anna deeply, though Anna tries to convince herself it was nothing. Elsa drives them away, (even the terms are symbolic.) They find out Anna is dying, and go back to Hans. He turns out to be a total jerk. And unbeknownst to them, he has already captured Elsa and thrown her in the dungeon. As the villains will do.

A word on Hans. There are two villains in this story, Fear, and the people who help it along. Hans and the Duke of Weasletown are really two sides of the same coin, the difference being Hans is obviously the head and the Duke the tail. So everything Hans does plays off people’s fears. Anna is afraid of not being loved, Elsa is afraid of herself, the people are afraid of, well, freezing to death.  The Duke also plays off the people’s fear, or at least feeds it. He and Hans both want Elsa dead. The Duke is still the lesser villain, being selfish but not intentionally evil. Hans is knowingly the villain.

I had my Hans too, but I always knew it was Fear itself. The spirit of it.

So, the climax. I have told this so many times, I am not sure what the best way is. But you have probably all seen or heard of it, so I’ll keep it short.

Even though True Love has been mentioned a few times, mainly by Anna, and Kristoff, and Granpabby, no one has actually defined it… until Olaf does. This is one of the many reasons I love the movie, it took the comic relief, and without changing his character at all, it made him on of the heroes. Just by knowing what love was. Olaf’s character it so in line with that message that it seems only fitting he would explain it.

I believe in my earliest posts “The Quest” series, part seven dealt with Love, and I talked about Anna’s journey with it. So I’ll just briefly recap: she didn’t know what love was, Olaf told her, but she only got it when she had to make the choice herself.

Anna saves Elsa. “In every way a person can be saved.” She saves her life, she saves her from being sentenced to death unjustly, she saves her from fear.

When I watched this, I was already saved. Honestly, if I hadn’t been, I couldn’t have understood what happened in the space of thirty seconds. The movie itself doesn’t try to explain it, either you understand the miracle, or you don’t. Most of us don’t.

Truthfully, it is not the people’s fault that they don’t get it. I considered myself fortunate to get a peek into the real meaning of what happened. But it has to have happened to you, or you have to be told by someone who had the experience.

Once I realized this, I could forgive the haters. I can even forgive the people who like this movie for the wrong reasons. They just don’t know. They don’t know that I lived that story. And I continue to live it.

Frozen doesn’t end where the movie ends. As the months of hype over it have clearly shown. I think my tone must show how entirely serious I am about this. I relive the story every time I encounter a new challenge in my life.  I call it my movie, because it is, in almost every sense, mine.

This is long enough.  I think I have explained it thoroughly. If you read this far, thank you, I appreciate it. Until next time–Natasha.

Why a DP movie is my favorite.

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So, I mentioned doing a post about Frozen a few articles back. Though I am still not sure anyone but me is interested, I still wanted to do it because, frankly, I’ve wanted to do it since starting this blog.

With that pity plea out of the way, I shall begin. (Seriously, don’t keep reading if you really don’t want to, I get it.)

As everyone already knows the movie was a huge hit and after the first six months or so, people really started laying on the hate. Some of them were frustrated parents, most of the ones I knew were boys who hadn’t ever actually sat through the movie, a few were girls who hated the Disney princess image in general, or else just didn’t get Frozen and were tired of hearing how awesome it was.

I cannot change any of this with a post that will reach only a few people, comparatively, but I do have an interesting story to tell.

When I first saw posters and advertisements for the movie, I rolled my eyes, like many others. I thought “Here we go, another cliché Disney Princess movie with stupid jokes and a story I’ve heard a dozen times.” At this point in my life, I had not been often watching said Disney Princess movies. I will say, Frozen was the most poorly advertised DP movie I’ve seen up to date. But my sister checked it out, and practically forced me to listen to the song “Let it Go.” I almost didn’t bite, but when I heard the line “The cold never bothered me anyway.” And saw the ending with the castle, I was hooked. Even at this point, I only gave this song a B+ and possibly the movie. But I started watching clips, then more clips, and more, and basically, I saw the whole thing in clips multiple times before I ever saw it as a movie.

Though I liked Elsa, the movie didn’t really grab me until I saw the scene that made it iconic. My other sister and I remember this differently, but according to her, once Anna got frozen solid, I went upstairs in a huff. I think I probably just didn’t know what clip to watch to find out what happened next, but my sister found it in no time and I saw what happened. I was hooked before, now I was really in deep.

I became obsessed (see my post “Good Obsession” for how this happens to me.) When this happened I had just been reading a book about finding oneself (for lack of a better term for it. Captivating was the title.) and I soon saw the Frozen could have been made as a dramatization of the book’s message, but even more than that, Frozen was my life.

I am not kidding. Frozen was a movie version of my life story. In fiction form, which is my favorite, so it only gained points there. now, it rarely goes well when I tell people this, I suppose they don’t know how to react to someone claiming to be the subject of this film. Plus, a lot of girls felt that way, so what is my special claim?

Well, I’ve never met anyone yet who had quite the experience I had with Frozen. I have shared before how I used to be a very fear-bound person. Right off the bat, Elsa and I had that in common. But it was more.

Elsa had no common fear of being herself, she had the fear of herself. It is the crucial point that most  people missed when they watched it, and it changes how you perceive everything in the movie.

Fear is portrayed not as Elsa’s gift, but as the corruption of it, a very important distinction. Every time she is afraid, her ice and snow darken, and twist into ugly shapes, or else sharp spikes. But something I noticed at length was how, as the story progresses, the fear becomes less and less subtle. The spikes start to point at Elsa herself, they try to trap Anna inside the castle even when Elsa is no longer in it herself and would personally have no reason to trap anyone, and her storm starts to blind her as well as everyone else.

Fear is the monster in this film. But what does Elsa think? That the monster is her.

I think of what Mrs. Valiant says in “Hinds Feet on High Places.” “She is a Fearing herself, and has Fearing in the blood, and when the enemy is in you that is a very hard thing.” There is a difference from a having fear inside you and being the thing to be afraid of, but it is not a difference people know by instinct.

C. S. Lewis called the fear of oneself the worst fear of all. He was right. I used to have it, I was afraid, literally, to look in the mirror. There is only one point in the movie that Elsa looks at her own reflection, it is when she and Anna are arguing about whether or not she can fix the Winter. Do you know what Elsa says as she looks at herself? “There’s so much fear.”

Mirroring plays a huge role in that story. When we see Anna’s reflection, Anna is always singing or talking about love and being there for Elsa. When we see Hans’es reflection, he reveals his true colors. Hans himself is a mirror for everyone’s worst fears or most vulnerable emotions. (I have to give SuperCarlinBrothers the credit for clueing me into this, they are a YouTube Channel.)

Elsa is never once unaware of her problem. from her childhood she is told “Fear will be your enemy.” And I was, I felt, cursed with the same thing as a child. No one told me it had to be that way, but I kept being told I was worrying too much. I was being a worrier. I was shy.

I am going to continue this in the next post, this is long enough. Until next time–Natasha.

Legacy

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Ever wonder what your impact will be on the world? When you’re gone what will be different because of you? There’s a name for what you leave behind you; it’s called Legacy.

Good old Girl Meets World has an episode devoted to this that I recommend checking out if you can. I don’t want to spend too much time explaining it but I might use the show itself as an example here.

Girl Meets World made its share of mistakes, but it was always clear that their intention was good. You could tell they really wanted to make you think, and they wanted to help you.

It’s a connection that the creator of a movie, show, or book makes with their audience. It’s a way that we know they care, and if we watch or read it, they in turn know we care. Some of us are moved to tears just by realizing that someone out there wants to do right by us, others of us less emotional people just give it respect.

We actually feel betrayed when a show like this gets cancelled, and a book series suddenly takes a different turn and stops being about promoting the good things we liked it for.

Then, bitter or disappointed or just sad, we talk about what that thing meant to us. Other people think we’re nutty for caring so much. We try to explain.

This is why: Someone cared. Someone tried. Someone actually succeeded.

It didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to be good.

I felt understood, or I felt respected. Like the writers actually cared what they were introducing to my mind.

There are those of us who like dirty movies, or horror, but let’s be honest, even if we do, do we truly like the people who put that stuff out there. We let them screw us, figuratively speaking, but do we give them an ounce of respect for it? We may not regard out own minds, but do we really appreciate that they don’t regard us either?

In my limited experience, the people who like horror and sexually charged material are also the ones with low self respect. You expose yourself to garbage when you feel like garbage, it’s just true. (Not that you have to, but that’s why.)

The people who loved Girl Meets World loved it because it respected them. They respected themselves enough to accept it. The kids who got helped by it’s messages about bullying, being yourself, choosing rightly, they all got helped because they had it in them to be helped.

Half the time, the show just reminded us of what we already knew.

But that was okay, goodness knows we need that.

Girl Meets World wanted to make people’s lives better, makes their relationships better, and thereby make the world better. Hence the title Girl (you, boy can be substituted as we all know) Meets (relationships) World (it says itself.)

At the end of both Girl Meets World and its predecessor Boy Meets World, Riley and Cory both realize the meaning of meeting the world. and while I still hope for something more, because of my faith, I won’t deny it’s a good message. Meet the world. Know you aren’t alone in it. Then change it.

That’s a legacy worth leaving. That’s what legacy is. Who you are, who you meet, what you impact. That’s what you leave behind you. Material legacy just represents the unseen legacy.

Those are my thoughts, and this is also my thank you to this show and to every book and movie I’ve ever liked and learned from. Until next time–Natasha.

I feel all right like I could take on the world. Light up the stars I got some pages to turn. I’m singing o-o-oh, o-o-oh. I’ve got a  ticket to the top of the sky. I’m coming up I’m on the ride of my life. O-o-oh, o-o-oh. Take on the world. Take on the world. Take on the world.

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Reach higher.

Redefining.

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I think the biggest part of the Rebelution is redefining.

We redefine what people are capable of. Teens especially.

We redefine what we need to be interested in.

We redefine how we spend our time.

We redefine our acceptable standards.

On that note, I’ve spent two posts trying to redefine what it is to be lady and a gentleman. But I know if enough people read those posts, someone is going to read it who has questions.

Like: what exactly do I mean when I say that ladies demonstrate kindness and gentleness, or gentlemen demonstrate chivalry.

Let’s talk about it:

Like I said in Ladylike, I think any girl can be lady, no matter what her personality or tastes happen to be. Likewise, any man can be a gentleman.

Often when I watch a movie and say “Now there’s a real man.” I’ll be saying it at a different moment than my dad will. My dad likes it when guys actually act like real guys. That is, they drink, and have contests of strength, and act like flawed human beings, who still have good hearts. He says that’s how guys are around each other. I wouldn’t know. But personally, I watch how these men treat the female characters of the movie.

It’s not just that I’m a romantic, it’s that I know that a lot of boys really don’t talk about girls like they’re even human beings; not just when they’re talking bout who’s hottest or whatever, I mean even when they talk about how girls act with other girls, or with guys, or what girls like, etc. (To be fair, girls do the same thing.)

What impresses me about a man? He doesn’t have to be soft spoken or really gentle outwardly, (though that is always nice) it’s his attitude. When a man, off  screen or on, actually treats a woman, even if it’s his mother, like he cares about how she feels and thinks, and like she’s something to be protected and not taken advantage of, that makes an impression.

Whether this is  romantic relationship, a platonic one, or a family one, it really makes no difference. A man who really cares and shows it by being there, and being there in the right way, that’s the real deal. I like how Gianna Jessen defines men, either as weasels (men who don’t come through) or as uncommon. Which is self explanatory.

Now, I have no hate or anger toward guys who simply don’t come through. I’ve known a lot of them. I’m used to them. But that’s just it, the Uncommon man is uncommon.

I don’t want the girls to think I’m neglecting us, so here’s the straight scoop. The man who comes through may be uncommon, but so it the girl or woman who will let him. Ouch. I don’t intend to come down on us ladies, often there’s a lot of reasons we are the way we are.

To be honest, the Uncommon man and woman are uncommon really because we aren’t training them anymore. We aren’t encouraging them to come out of hiding and astonish us.

What does it look like to do that? It depends.

There’s an example I wanted to use here. On the show Kim Possible, there’s a really stupid episode (The Cupid Effect) that I watched with some amazement the first time. I won’t go into the whole plot, but there is one memorable line that Ron Stoppable utters to Junior, who had used an evil device to cause girls to rave over him. Junior has just laughed at Ron for being in disguise as a girl. (In order to get close enough to stop him.) Ron retorts “Well, you are no gentlemen.”

As stupid as the situation was, and I don’t recommend the episode, I think Ron made a good point. In his usual, unintentional way. It’s not the clothes, it’s why you wear them. Cross dressing really has nothing to do with the plot here, but if someone were to object, I’d point out that Ron was doing it in order to rescue a lot of girls, including his own girlfriend; whilst Junior, who is a muscular sort of man-boy, was using a hypnotic device to control all these girls. Ron may not look the part, but at least he’s acting it.

That sums it up,( in a weird way.) Anything a guy does, if it’s in an effort to respect a girl, or even his own father, can be honorable. Do I think they get it right every time? No. But I do think they get it right more when they are trying to.

As for us girls, well, we have  our share of respect issues. I’ve listened to other girls diss guys while I’m around, and I always get really uncomfortable listening. Look, I know it’s frustrating when guys don’t know how to be manly about things like break ups, or dates, or whatever; but can I just level with you and say:  “If you don’t want to deal with that, stop agreeing to date guys who aren’t ready for relationship.”

It’s not always the guy’s fault. We need to have their backs as much as they need to have ours. I don’t want to have to spell this out, but girls, set standards.

Back to what I mentioned earlier. Guys and girls alike need to understand this, we are all human.

There’s actually a pretty good movie for this subject, called “The Swap.” It shows how, though we express it in different ways, guys and girls are having the same feelings of loss, and anxiety.

It’s actually not that hard to empathize with each other if we’re willing to try.                         In the end, we all want a lot of the same things. We want people to be considerate of us; to treat us like equals; not to make fun of us; and so on. It’s just our definitions of those things happen to be different. But that’s good. It varies from person to person anyway.

To at bottom, being a lady or gentleman really is about treating everyone with respect.005leonidafremov

The Indefensible.

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I’ve been thinking about how my political views effect my writing here. I’ve been reading about how this country got started, so politics are on the brain. I never want to use this blog as an attempt to get followers who agree with me, so I hestitate to bring up the subject too often, but because this is an ideas blog, I also think it’s only fair to let people  know where I stand.

Le tme also say that I don’t judge people’s worth as people by their political views, and I wouldn’t want to be judged by it either.

I only care about politics as it relates to my faith, many Christians don’t believe we should be concerned or involved in politics. And in countries where the system doesn’t allow Christianity in its government, that might be a fair view. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care. Everyone should care. But there is the trap, as C. S. Lewis describes in The Screwtape Letters, of coming to use your faith as a support for political views, instead of seeing your views as a  direct result of your faith. In other words, you make your faith match your politics, or any other mode of thinking you might have. Obviously this is wrong.

I am a  conservative, but that is because I found those principles to be in line with what the Bible teaches, if I was convinced Liberalism was more in line, I would be that. I know plenty of Christians who are liberals, and that’s up to them. I actually don’t think God cares about that first and foremost.

The problem is we often care about it a little too much, I’m sure if you had a dime for every time you’ve heard someone put the opposing side in a box (or basket) you’d be rich. Or at least you’d have a lot of dimes.

The situation we have now is pretty sad, almost no one can see the other side as full human beings. We don’t talk about them like that, and we don’t treat them like that, often enough. They are indefensible.

Like Trump and Hillary, whichever side you are on, one of them is indefensible. I do think that sometimes, there is no just way to defend someone’s actions. But we have carried it a little too far when I can, on two different occasions, get shocked and somewhat hostile reactions from kids in my own family when I say I support Trump. It’s an immediate guilt by association. Would I feel the same if it had been over Hillary? Well, that’s tricky.

I would not ever condone voting for her, but do I condone the things people say about her? No, not all of them. I would defend Hillary Clinton as I would defend another human being, but not as a politician. All this means is that I believe people deserve some measure of respect, whether I like them or not.

I know I will have people who don’t agree with me reading this, and that is okay. They can even hate me if they wish. I won’t return it. It is not that I have never been tempted to hate people who believe things I find horrible or ridiculous. (And, let’s face it, we all know I can’t help feeling that way whichever side I’m on.) My whole reason for not holding a grudge is simply that I don’t believe it is right to do so. Grudges are stupid.

Even the Clintons (pardon my phrasing) need to be forgiven and loved, and that may never look like what the people who support them would call love, but calling it hate to not support them is ridiculous. It just is. I would not say anyone who does not support one of the politicians I favor hates anyone, let alone the politician themselves. I may be giving myself as an example too often here, but I’ve been reading about Thomas Jefferson, and this was his  belief. He never even defended himself to the press of his day because he didn’t think it was necessary. And he remained friends with one of his opponents (more than one actually) to his dying day. He stated that politics were no reason to end a friendship. (Though there may be reasons within that general category to end one, but that’s another discussion.)

At the end of the day, though I care about my country and my people, I recognize that no country lasts forever; and no political party does either. It would be foolish to stake all one’s beliefs on those things. I believe more strongly in love, justice, and God’s will.

A really good, and short, book that covers this is The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis, particularly the chapter on Affections, (if I’m not mistaken in my locations.) He’ll say it better than I.  I hope though, I said what I was trying to communicate.

So, there, that’s my piece for now. Until next time–Natasha.

Rules don’t apply–part 2

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Picking up where I left off:

I was just talking about rules and love and “The hiding place.” You know, just a typical organized post from Natasha. 🙂

All joking aside, I’ve thought a lot about Mercy lately. I was just talking to my sister about another show we used to watch that loved to break its characters.

[Okay, this is Natasha lingo. When I say “break” or “killed” a character, I mean they either took a potentially great storyline and didn’t finish it; or they made the character do something that they would never  do and so proved they didn’t even know what their own character stood for. That ruins it for me every time.] I digress:

They broke this one character, and though they could have repaired her with some really smart writing, they didn’t. They left her broken. Eventually my sisters and I realized the show just didn’t know how to explain it’s own content.

What has puzzled me is that, though these characters aren’t even real, they can make mistakes that really bother people; and people will not forgive them. Although, sorry fans, but it didn’t actually happen. I will be the first to deny that just because it’s a show that means it didn’t matter, it does matter. I just wonder, if this can be our attitude towards a sin that is made up, what is our attitude towards a sin that actually affects us?

That does tie in to Mercy; and rules; and everything I was talking about in part one. The biggest question both in my fan fiction story and in real life was “How do you treat sin?” Many of us don’t even use the word anymore, (at least seriously.) Sin is just a Christian myth right? It’s not real. Well, often on this blog I just use the words wrong, evil, or bad to avoid confusion. But Sin is just simpler, it means all those things. And believe it nor not, whether we use the word or don’t, all of us still believe in it.

We just might call it intolerance, being a bigot, extremism; and a bunch of other fancy words that really just mean THIS-IS-BAD.

You can say Right and Wrong don’t exist and I can debate that; but right now I’m pointing out that we all deal with Sin. Other people do things to us that are bad, because they hurt, or they make us afraid, or they just make us angry because it’s so not fair.

And that’s where deciding what we live by really comes into play. In my fan fiction world of judging people by their backgrounds, the few people who finally say “This is stupid” get treated like the criminals. You rocked the boat, you questioned the system, how dare you!

But the reason I wrote my version at all was because the original story refused to pick sides. It never said what was actually true, though it hinted. It was leaning one way, then abruptly it started to lean the other way. It turned into a story more about defining right and wrong yourself than actually seeking truth. The sad thing is that the creators of this story never realized it was popular because it said something different to people than the standard “be yourself” message that most of us are sick of.

Look; things have come to a pretty pass if I need the world to tell me what the Bible already has told me many times; but I do worry about other people. Ideally, I want Christianity to spread, I can’t help it. But if not I at least want Goodness to spread. Thomas Jefferson said that if doctrine is good it will produce good men, if not, then it won’t. He is right. Jesus said the same thing, in a different way. But no one needs to say it, it’s just common sense. Good begets good, evil begets evil. Duh.

The greatest good of all is love. As my character said in her speech, love is what gives us a reason to do anything. It saddens me when people are looking around and wondering why they do anything; because they realize there’s no love in what they are doing.

But, what if the antagonist had a point, Love is sappy. What will it really fix?

Now this brings me to Mercy. (Didn’t think I could tie all this together? Well, I wasn’t sure either, but I knew it was connected.)

In the end, you can decide that the rules really are wrong. Like judging people by their background, that’s just stupid. You can even decide to rebel against those rules.(#TheRebelution.) But, just rebelling isn’t enough. A lot of hate goes around because people are fed up with the way things are, but that hate is turned on other people.

I am a full fledged conservative, but I don’t hate liberals. I am a radical Christian, but I don’t hate atheists. I am a Trump supporter, but I do not hate Hillary Clinton. I am surrounded by imperfect people, but I do not hate them.

To me, hate is the last thing a Christian should be doling out. WE get plenty of opportunities, but we are told to love, even when it makes no sense. I hate evil, but  do not hate people. People are not the problem. Evil is the problem.

I am also not perfect, don’t take me as the best example of what it means to be Christian. All I am saying is it is about love. Love is what makes Christianity right; not vice versa. That’s something even Christians do not understand a lot of the time.

If love was easy to understand and to do, more people would do it. That’s the plain truth. I still fail at love, but I’m hooked. Once you start pursuing it, you really can’t stop.

In the end, love is what tells us what is right. When we become focused on what’s best for everyone, we will make better choices. That is what ties into rules, politics, and faith. There, told you they were connected.

So, nothing sappy about it. Until next time–Natasha.cropped-welcome-scan.jpg