What do your favorites say about you?

As my semester is coming to an end, I had to submit my final paper for my Media and Culture class. The paper was simply called favorites.

We had to choose three favorite media artifacts from different mediums and analyze similarities between them to see how they connected, if at all. I choose a book, a movie and a show, to make it as easy on myself as possible in finding articles speaking on them.

After going through this process all for a paper, it really started to speak to me and how my favorites not only entertained me but how they had influenced my outlook on life and how I see myself.

The three different artifacts that I looked at were Serenity the movie sequel to the TV series Firefly, the TV show Veronica Mars and the book the Season.

If you don’t know anything about them, I will simply say that all are extremely different in the story they are telling.

Serenity, is a Sci-fi that involves space cowboys in the future with a dictatorship style government

Veronica Mars is about a teen detective and the trouble she gets into

The Season is a novel based in the 1800s aristocratic London, where the main protagonist doesn’t understand society norms.

All three of this don’t typically go together. I wanted my classmates and professor to see the different facets of who I really was, that I didn’t fall into one particular category.

However, I realized there were more similarities between the three stories than I originally believed.

All three of these stories had incredibly strong, intelligent and independent women at the forefront. I began to see what I was getting out of these stories the entire time, that I thought I was simply being entertained.

The women showed me that It was okay to be the most intelligent person in the room, it was okay to hold a leadership role even if I got called bossy or even a bitch. It was perfectly acceptable for me to want to wear dresses and love makeup while also being into comic books and anime. I was okay to be whatever kind of woman I wanted to be.

I continue to go back to these characters all the time, it was never a one and done situation for me.

After finally stepping back and seeing the lessons these characters had taught me, I was able to look at other media artifacts I was consuming and understand why I loved some and hated others. It was simple as I wanted to see women represented as they truly are in reality.

I was proud of what I saw …. And its okay to be proud of yourself even for things as small as the media you are consuming.

I don’t only consume feminist pieces that push a type of thought, I prefer to consume media that shows true women, 3-dimensional characters who represent my reality.

These artifacts and many others taught me that I could be whatever I wanted to be, my gender was not a hurdle for me to have to jump over.

If you were to look at the media you consume, or just a few of your favorites what would you see?

What would it say about you?

Have you ever even thought about this? You may have to look deep…. Your favorites may span many genres but there is always that connection.