[ SECRET POST #2624 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2624 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Outlander]


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03.
[The Walking Dead]


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04.
[How I Met Your Mother]


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05.
[Twitch Plays Pokemon]


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06.
[Batman, Kill La Kill, Borderlands]


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07.
[Overlord]


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08.
[Red Dwarf]


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09.
[Paranatural]


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10.
[Pitch Perfect]


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11.
[Insidious: Chapter 2]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 053 secrets from Secret Submission Post #375.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[feotakahari]

I once saw a writing student bring in a story about a girl being attacked by a monster. The teacher interpreted it as a rape narrative, and when the student said she hadn't written it as one, the teacher said it read like one. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to me.

[(Anonymous)]

...subconscious tropes?

Writing doesn't come straight from logic, so you gotta allow for the id and all the murky stuff and influences.

That said, I wasn't there and I don't know how the teacher handled it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the teacher really shouldn't have said anything about alternate ways for her story to be interpreted. He should be fired for being so disrespectful as to do his job.

[feotakahari]

It was specifically the rape that got to me. It's a subject that a lot of writers would prefer to avoid, and he was forcing it into the story over her objection. It almost felt like he was raping the story himself.

(I didn't talk to her about it, so I don't know exactly how she felt about it, but she definitely looked skeeved out.)

[(Anonymous)]

That's all the more reason for a teacher to tell their student about it. "This thing you wrote has under/overtones that could lead readers to interpret it this way." That is the teacher's job whether the student likes it or not. It's an issue if the teacher didn't handle it appropriately, but it is not an issue just because they told her that they interpreted her story a certain way.

[greenvelvetcake]

On the other hand, a lot of English teachers have certain... biases that lead them to seeing things that maybe wouldn't be interpreted that way to someone else. One of my old teachers was obsessed with Jesus figures in literature to the point where any character who sacrificed their life was automatically a Jesus figure.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I went to a catholic school and literally everything was Jesus imagery or related to religion. One of the books we were reading had a line where a girl opened the front door to her house and was silhoutted by the light of her kitchen and obviously that made her a metaphor for Mary with her halo of light. It was ridiculous.

[greenvelvetcake]

The weird part is, there's plenty of obvious Christian imagery and symbolism in books. Why dig for something so flimsy as that instead of analyzing an allegory with more depth and meaning?

[(Anonymous)]

I had one that had a thing for rivers. Rivers = life, always and forever. On the plus side, once the class figured it out, it was easy to pad our essay grades by incorporating "rivers = life" into your thesis.

[duaedesigns]

I had one where everything was sex. Everything. Like an entire lesson was how "This Is Just To Say" was him taking his wife's virginity.

I think there needs to be a bit where what you read into something being more a reflection on you, than on the author. Like how the Iliad was written before the color blue was a concept so instances of blue are written as red. Doesn't mean the sea and people's eyes were literally red.

[riddian]

This reminds me of my freshman English teacher who spent three days covering this one chapter in The Odyssey where Odysseus winds up naked on a beach. I'm pretty sure she just liked talking about naked guys.

[thistlechaser]

So much this. One of my college writing professors would not permit anyone to write a story containing suicide. Couldn't be mentioned, couldn't be hinted at, if he even suspected anything about it at all, automatic failing grade.

Rumor was one of his kids killed himself or herself, but I don't know if that was true or not. I understand, if it were true, that he wouldn't want to read stories about it, but he looked for suicide in every detail and shadow of every story. It made me so jumpy and worried that he might see something that wasn't there, it put me off writing for a long time.

[(Anonymous)]

This.

Even Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes people project stuff that isn't even there, then use a lot of justification for their bias.

[(Anonymous)]

I thought that was Groucho Marx in response to Freud?

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe it did read like rape. If the professor's mind went there, barring being totally obsessed with rape, it's a fair observation. Texts can read a certain way without being intentional. And that's the beauty of art.

I can see why it would be touchy to bring up rape when a student blatantly says no. But the professor isn't in the wrong, imo, to suggest that. If this is a college classroom setting, I don't even think it's wholly inappropriate unless the professor was being really insistent and creepy about the rape thing.

[forgottenjester]

Unless the teacher was skeevy I can see it. If the teacher was skeevy, ignore me. Then they're just icky.

But, uh, let me tell you a story where that type of critique is needed. In a writing class of mine a boy tried to write a poem about a complicated childbirth that kills the mother. Some of us had to point out to him that some word choices made it seem like she was having sex or being raped instead. He seemed horrified, because that was not in any way his intent, but it read like that. It's good to point those things out in the editing stage to make sure the author didn't intend it so that they can fix it up if they need to. It prevents embarrassment down the line when they have the final product.

[feotakahari]

I guess I don't really know how justified he was. I didn't see rape in it, and the author didn't, but maybe someone else reasonably would have? None of the other students talked much once he got onto the subject of rape.

(Though he was definitely skeevy once he started talking about how much he sympathized with the monster . . .)

[forgottenjester]

I guess we'll never know now.

Though he was definitely skeevy once he started talking about how much he sympathized with the monster . . .

D: Nooooo. No. No. Abort class.

[othellia]

Oh, God. No. D:

[(Anonymous)]

EW! No! It is bad! Do not force yourself to someone! Bad against teachers who can think that way!