hooooogs

The aspect of Frozen that always irked me was the presentation of a binary set of stereotypes. Although traditional Disney-esque stereotypes are subverted, the subversion fails to consider many perspectives aside from the opposite. If Anna is not adhering to traditional stereotypes of the ‘princess’ type, then she’s presented as dramatically subverting such stereotype. Same with Elsa; the feminine is subverted by (masculine?) qualities that suggest a strong back-and-forth between identities without presenting much of a middle ground. It almost seems like Disney is trying too hard to appear progressive and empowering–Disney portrays the extremes of the feminine/masculine spectrum without portraying the multifaceted realities of the spectrum.

I find the best essays I write are those that seemingly emerge from the source material I’m working with. After identifying a topic from the source material, I do a broad literature scan (through JSTOR or a range of databases on EBSCOhost) to search for applicable secondary sources. The hardest part, I find, is separating my own thoughts and ideas from those presented by primary and secondary authors. However, this part requires time: ideas must be mulled over until they take form.

Fleshing a solid thesis is integral for any essay to succeed. Without your thesis, your essay will travel and tangle itself in ideas that might relate to each other, but do not present a comprehensible argument. Like you mention in your Pondering section, the global theme must be established before you can move forward with writing. Otherwise, you’re going to write without a clear purpose.

Unfortunately, I think YouTube and its culture of commodified experience will not change until Youtubers are granted sources of income that A) pay a living wage, and B) do not overly rely on 3rd party sponsors. A big thing that shifted YouTube’s average video was the monetization of videos over 10 minutes long. Although a video may warrant quality content for 3-4 minutes, creators seek to stretch their video to the lovely 10 minute mark for more advertisers, despite the ‘true’ quantity of material within the video. While some may argue this leads to more content within a video–more time to watch their favorite Youtuber–this effect, in my opinion, sacrifices video quality for video length. Remember a time when gaming channels seldom produced a video longer than 7 minutes? Now you’re hard-pressed to find any gameplay video shorter than 10, the minimum requirement for more significant monetization.

If YouTube wishes to churn more quality videos, they should adjust their monetization algorithm to be based on views, with some adjusting factor that considers the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. Through this, experience–while remaining a commodity–is presented as ‘good’, quality experience, rather than ‘experience’ itself.