Humor

Flowchart Friday: Fox News Edition

Brenna Clarke Gray

Staff Writer

Part muppet and part college faculty member, Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian Literature while simultaneously holding two cats named Chaucer and Swift. It's a juggling act. Raised in small-town Ontario, Brenna has since been transported by school to the Atlantic provinces and by work to the Vancouver area, where she now lives with her stylish cyclist/webgeek husband and the aforementioned cats. When not posing by day as a forserious academic, she can be found painting her nails and watching Degrassi (through the critical lens of awesomeness). She posts about graphic narratives at Graphixia, and occasionally she remembers to update her own blog, Not That Kind of Doctor. Blog: Not That Kind of Doctor Twitter: @brennacgray

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Are you qualified to talk about books for Fox News?

I was reading this thoughtful and not at all ideologically-driven piece about The Hunger Games on Fox News today when I was struck by a thought: what does it take to qualify one to talk books at Fox News? In fairness, Dr. Keith Albow is really talking about the film — it’s not clear from the article that he knows there is a book, which might be one of the qualifications — but regardless, I was charmed by his thoughtful critique of the franchise:

Other than entertaining millions and millions of teenagers and making millions and millions of dollars, the net result of The Hunger Games is likely to be:

1) Females will be further distanced from their traditional feminine characteristics that (sadly, some wrongly insist) suggested they were not being real “girls” if they were extremely physically violent.

2) Young teens and many pre-teens will be awakened to the fact that they are capable of extreme violence, given the right set of circumstances.

3) A few psychologically vulnerable teens—who would have come to no good anyhow—may be inspired to replicate the film’s violence.

Can you write the same kind of shatteringly dynamic critique? There’s a flowchart for that.