The Rite is a short film about ceremonial rites of passage. Through a comedic and surreal lens, it tackles the nature of adolescence, what it means to come of age and how the house party has become this ritual ground in contemporary American culture; all through the eyes of a 9th grader named Carl.
Seriously, and this is coming from someone who was extremely skeptical before giving it a watch. I assumed the show would be painfully boring, but one of the show's strongest qualities is you needn't know anything about the lore to get invested in it.
In order to learn why an arguably outdated fanfic trope was resurfacing in the contact zone of popular culture, I dove into a vibrant trough of character development.
There’s enough evidence to insinuate that What We Do in the Shadows is intentionally queer-coded.
After the untimely death of his brother by way of an ambush in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the protagonist, ‘81’(Alan Ritchson) unsuccessfully makes several attempts to become an Army Ranger. On his last mission to complete the Ranger selection process he and his squad encounter an otherworldly ‘soldier’.
There's no hiding the horrors of war in this inspiring story of survival
An aspect of She-Ra that I find refreshing is even though a large portion of the cast is on the LGBTQ+ Spectrum, being gay is never mentioned. While this might initially sound like a negative thing, in the show’s land of Etheria being on the gay spectrum is shown to be so common and normalized that straight isn’t the default. As much as there is to appreciate about narratives revolving around the obstacles that may come from being non-heteronormative, it’s nice to get immersed in a world where no one bats an eye at all to any sort of differing identity.
