The Four Color Media Monitor

Nunatsiaq News spoke with a Canadian woman of Iqaluit descent who's a teacher and a comics artist, and the projects she works on in the latter profession. But her influences are most peculiar:

When Olivia Chislett watches a horror film, she often finds herself identifying with the monster.

“Growing up, I identified with a lot of the villains of the movie or the creatures for being different, whether it was they acted different or they looked different,” she said.

Seriously? Because that's a most troubling side one could identify with, horror thrillers or not. It's practically embarrassing, and another sign of what's wrong with society today.

During the day, Chislett, 24, works as a substitute teacher, foundations skills assessment teacher and as a throat-singing instructor at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit, where she herself was once a student.

But when she’s not teaching, Chislett is a burgeoning comic book artist.

She is the illustrator and writer of Stopping by Woods, an original 12-page comic set to be released in June. The title is derived from the famous Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. [...]

Chislett, who is also a throat singer and designer of fur garments and who describes herself as being of mixed Inuit and white heritage, said the story revolves around two First Nations characters travelling through the woods when one of them gets hurt.

“To save his friend, the [other] character has to reveal a secret and change his friend’s life completely for his friend to live,” Chislett said.

“It’s a little bit supernatural, a little bit suspenseful.”

The story may be short, but Chislett said it draws on her affinity for darker characters.

“I’ve always loved body horror and monsters and supernatural things and scary things in general,” she said.

“There are some stories where these creatures sound overly malicious, but some of them sound fairly benign or even helpful to the people that they interact with, or maybe they have a different sense of morality.

“I always found that really interesting — what we saw from their point of view, instead of just being scared right away.”

If that's meant to imply a potentially violent creature should be excused simply because their view of morality's different, I honestly don't think that's a good idea. At worst, it's exactly what's wrong with the far-left, amounting to desensitization to barbarism.

Chislett said she often tries to interpret a story from the supposed villain’s perspective, like Inuit tales of the Qallupilluit (or Qalupalik), creatures that live under the ice and take children.

“They were scary, but I always thought that there was always a possibility that they were lonely and they wanted kids. They wanted to raise a family,” Chislett said.

I still think this is in extremely questionable taste, considering that it's as morally offensive as it's criminal to abduct children, and even for otherworldly creatures, that's wrong to do. I vaguely remember an episode on Star Trek: The Next Generation's 1st or 2nd season ("When the Bough Breaks") where something like that happened, and was that a morally acceptable act? Of course not. Just because the humanoids running the planet had low fertility is no excuse for kidnapping other people's children to suit their supposed desire to build their own community back up. Besides, did the people who wrote those old Inuit tales actually intend to depict the monsters as sympathetic, based on their actions? Obviously not.

The artist/teacher was also interviewed by CBC, and the following is revealed more clearly about her lifestyle:

The story was inspired by Chislett's love of monsters and how they are portrayed in media — a portrayal she identified with growing up as a girl, a queer person and an Indigenous person in Canada.

People tend to hide parts of themselves that are different, she said, so they won't be shunned.

"A lot of times, monsters within media are things that people just don't understand," she said.

"I think when we learn to embrace differences in media and monsters in media, and stuff like that, we can start to embrace differences in real life. That's not to say that different people are monsters, but a lot of people have the same reaction to them as if they were."

Ahem. If an entity commits violence and other such crimes, doesn't that nullify the ability to be "misunderstood"? Also, are we obligated to accept "alternative" lifestyles that could be considered distasteful? That's not saying we consider the practitioners monsters automatically, but if they act like extremists and indoctrinators, and believe their ideologies are something children should literally be taught, as Disney's been doing lately, that's why sane people must frown.

And if this indie comic is intended to push that propaganda angle, that's why this news is such a dismay. Why, the news sources who reported about this sure are making quite a fuss over something that's little more than 12 pages at most. Apparently, if the comic builds on bizarre propaganda, that makes it throughly worthwhile for news coverage, no matter how short it really is.

Labels: golden calf of LGBT, indie publishers, msm propaganda, politics