Friday, May 14, 2010

All Blogs Go to Heaven

Every once in a while, we here at Exfanding Your Horizons like to do a "theme week" where we coordinate on the topic or style of our posts. In the past, we've had Gifts for Geeks, going back to The Basics, and an ill-fated Monkey Week that never got off the ground. Without even realizing it, we've picked out this week's somber theme: death.

It all started with Alex's Waiting for Wednesday last week, which touched on the topic of character death in comics. I started thinking up ideas for a post in response to Alex's comments, and the movie trailer I saw before Iron Man 2 prompted me to adjust my post to address character death in relation to the work of J.J. Abrams. That's why I felt really weird when one of my favorite post titles in recent memory, "J.J. Abrams, Please Stop Killing People," came the day before Alex's post about the death of artist Frank Frazetta.

Alex had a bit more to say about Frank Frazetta in his Waiting for Wednesday post the following day, along with news of yet another power outage--in a sense, a different kind of death. I was glad to bring a little cheer to the blog with my review of the Mega Man fan film...except that, too, involves death. It's not a tremendous plot point, but a good deal of the circumstances of the story were shaped by someone's death. Furthermore, Mega Man struggles throughout the film with the fact that he's forced to destroy innocent robots because they've been reprogrammed against their will.

Don't get me wrong--the movie was still a blast. But death inadvertently persists as a theme on this blog. I think it's important to address the topic when it becomes relevant, but I think it's also healthy to be able to let go, or to let someone's passing be a time to celebrate how they've impacted your life, and to not let your joyful spirit perish with the deceased. This isn't a criticism of what we've written; rather, it's an observation of an unexpected trend.

Here's to an uplifting, irreverant weekend.

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