Jackson Wedel's Media Blog

  Pokemon Sword and Shield are the latest entries in the wildly popular Pokemon video game series. While the series originally released only in Japan, the games have since attracted a large American fanbase. This American fanbase is overall highly critical of the new games for a variety of reasons. By far the most prominent, however, is a controversy dubbed "Dexit" (a reference to the Brexit controversy), in which many of the Pokemon characters that have appeared in the "Pokedex" featured in all the games would no longer return in certain installments. At first glance, this outrage might seem baffling. While it is understandable that fans would be disappointed that some of the characters they have grown attached for nearly 20 years would no longer make appearances in newer games, the sheer venom from the fanbase seems like a severe overreaction. However, one of the core causes of American fans' reaction is the series' marketing in America.   In the lead-up ...

  George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" described what he claimed to be the biggest threats to English as a form of writing. It argued that in an attempt to sound more dignified or intellectual, political writers would use overly complex language, which would unintentionally make the meaning of the work far less clear. In addition, those who read such writing typically tried to emulate it, ultimately leading to an endless cycle of a decline in meaning. Based on Orwell's claims, I expected the state of political writing today to be atrocious. However, I was pleasantly surprised about the overall quality of the writing I read.   The article I examined was "Why President Trump's Ukraine Scheme Matters" by the New York Times. The first thing I noticed when reading the article was how easy to understand it was. Compared to the examples of poor English presented by Orwell, it was to-the-point and simple. Instead of becoming a thicket of ob...

  When I first finished watching the movie Avatar , my first reaction was that while it was a good movie overall, I felt somewhat unsatisfied by it. It certainly excelled in some areas, like its visual effects, but at the end of the day, it did not resonate with me as much I expected it to. While I at first expected my cynical feelings toward it to decrease with time, I eventually figured out the real flaw I had subconsciously found in the movie. Avatar  is a movie that tries too hard to be an allegory for real-world issues without putting any thought or creativity into the way those issues were portrayed.   The overall message of Avatar  is that colonialism is harmful, and the symbolism throughout is nearly inescapable. For instance, the alien race being exploited for their resources takes clear inspiration from portrayals of Native Americans in both their design and overall ideology, and most of the villains' monologues sound like they are reading an excerpt from...

Overall, I would characterize my relationship with most media as fairly surface-level. While I enjoy doing things like watching movies, listening to music, and playing video games, I do not typically try to analyze my experience to determine what caused the feelings I had. However, if I experience media that I have a particularly strong negative or positive reaction to, I usually try to determine what about it made me react so strongly. Furthermore, I do not usually try to leave my comfort zone very much with the media I consume. For example, a vast majority of the movies I watch are sci-fi, fantasy, or action-oriented, so I have a narrower stream of messages I get from them than someone who watches a wider variety of genres. Over the course of this media blog, I will try to learn to further break down the experiences I get from media, and to apply the things I am learning in Critical Thinking to my everyday life. The vast majority of the media I consume is strictly for entertainment...