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So his intention was to play this scene of assault, with no warning, in the public space of a classroom. Now, this is a class that also teaches Irreversible and Demonlover and other films that involve pretty graphic scenes of rape and assault, but I think there's a difference between being told to watch Irreversible on your own at home, and coming into class, sitting around with a bunch of half-strangers, and being surprised by an out-of-context rape scene.

One thing that I really like about fandom is that we're different from the publishing world, from the academic world, from the world of boyfans even, in that we try really hard to take into consideration the needs and squicks and concerns of the reader.

Professional publishing is about getting people to buy books, and professional publishing is about the rights of the author - so, in the first place, we're often lied to about what a novel will contain, and even when we're not, we're not warned, because the rights of the author to surprise the reader - the rights of his inviolable artistic vision - are more important than the rights of the reader to tailor her reading to her own desires.

As helpful as labels and categories can be, I kind of wish we had better ones. The pairing label is often overly simplistic, it gets slapped on things that don't really deserve it, or need it, and it creates expectations that may not always be in the writer's best interest (or the reader's). And the gen label carries such a huffy, prudish connotation that it might as well be a warning.

Something that I don't think anyone raised is the difference between being squicked because of something happening to a fictional character and being squicked because of something happening to a real person. I find the latter enormously worse than the former, and I'm much less likely to be squicked by a fictional character's misfortunes if they're depicted in a cartoony, unrealistic way.

a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age

some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

"Our old enemy 'poverty' somehow disappeared, and we can no longer find an enemy to fight against" (Miyazaki, 1988). In other words, after Japan's industrial success since the Meiji restoration in 1890s and recovery from WWII cast out poverty from the nation, people still remain possessed by an illusion of gaining a wealthy everyday life and continue living with a gap between their ideal and real life. As a result, an endless and unsatisfying cycle of production and consumption has begun destroying harmony among family and community (Harootunian, 2000).

Zizek (1989) points out that people of late capitalism are well aware that money is not magical. To obtain it, it has to be replaced through labor, and after you use it, it will just disappear, as will as any other material. Allison (1996) adds to this point: "They know money is no more than an image and yet engage in its economy where use-value has been increasingly replaced and displaced by images (one of the primary definitions of post-modernism) all the same” (p. xvi).

Related to its presentation of the loss of spiritual values, the film elaborates an extensive critique of another contemporary global issue: identity confusion. A symptom of identity loss is seen in the way that cultures today encourage people to constantly refashion their self-image, so that individuals construct their identity based on ideals presented in popular media.