What doesn’t kill you gives you EXP

Table of Contents I: Introduction and Exit West II: Czechoslovakia and the Hyphen War III: Saving Sourdi and Hetalia Part I What makes us different? This is a question we’ve all asked ourselves in one way or another. Whether it’s appearance, personality, or beliefs, the differences between us are hard not to notice. These differences are clear from the beginning in Exit West, a book by Mohamed Hasin about two people in a city going through civil war. The two people in question are Nadia and Saeed, who are contrasted from their first appearance together. When Saeed first tries to talk to her, asking her to have coffee together, Nadia coldly rejects him, ignoring his attempts to be friendly and start a conversation.  As well as differences between their personalities, Nadia and Saeed differ in their belief systems as well. Saeed is religious, but Nadia isn't, and because of this, their beliefs about love and relationships are different. He wants to get married, but she isn't sure...

A few months ago, thanks to TV Tropes, I discovered Hetalia, a webcomic that has been adapted into an anime and manga that can best be described as "a comic about anthropomorphic countries that, despite being immortal and centuries or millennia old, are still dumb and bad at everything."  The comic uses these country personifications to deliver humorous accounts of history as well as discussions of culture and international relations. Although it can be a bit...weird at times, it's usually a lighthearted comedy. As part of our work on character analysis, I would like to talk about one of the characters in this comic: Prussia.  The defining character trait of Prussia is that he is a loud and passionate person who loves to talk about how awesome he is, shown most clearly in the 2009 April Fools blog, literally called "The Site of My Awesomeness:" Source This contrasts him with the other Germanic nations like Germany and Austria, who are much more reserved and seri...

Hello everyone, and welcome to my English blog. Today, we are talking about... Fan fiction. Now that's a sentence I never thought I'd write. First, let’s define fan fiction. Every piece of fiction could be thought of as a fan fiction of real life, so for this blog post, I'm defining fan fiction as unofficial works derived from pre-existing published pieces of fictional media. Some people think of this as copyright infringement, but others welcome it. In general, however, it doesn't have the best reputation. It often conjures images of bored fangirls who have nothing better to do than write slash fics  of their favorite male characters. However, this view is overly reductive and disregards the real potential fan fiction has. Some people think of fan fiction negatively because it's not original.  Well, nothing is original. Every story ever written is derivative- Not that kind of derivative, fortunately (or maybe unfortunately if you love calculus). In this case, deriv...