Week 3 in Style

Topic

My Storybook will be an anthology centering around Aesop animal characters on shows like Jerry Springer and Dr. Phil, and on twitter. 

Stories I will be using for Jerry Springer Show will be two or three of these (I haven't narrowed it down yet): The Dog, The Cock, and the Fox, The Farmer and the Stork, The Travelers and the Purse, The Wolf and the Lion, and The Wolf and the Lean Dog.  Maybe one episode could be “What to Do When a Friend Is In Need” and use the characters from The Dog, The Cock, and the Fox, The Travelers and the Purse, and The Wolf and the Lean Dog.

(Note: while the characters will continue to go by their animal names, I still think of them looking human - so perhaps it's a universe where some people have second forms and, if they do, they go by the name of that form.  That second form won't give them any special powers beyond transformation or influencing their human forms just a little.)

Shea Weber (#6) and Seth Jones (#3) as Big Dog and Lean Dog respectively. [x]

Stories I will be using for Dr. Phil are The Boy and the Filberts and The Mice and the Weasels.  The boy’s mother from The Boy and the Filberts is trying to get help for her son, who won’t take his hand out of the filbert jar; meanwhile, the mice from The Mice and the Weasels come on to talk about their PTSD and try to rally the rest of animal kind to their defense.

The social media outlet I was thinking about using was twitter and the stories I will use are The Lion and the Ass and The Wolf and his Shadow.  In both of these cases I’ll be working along the theme of animal A calling out animal B, or A bragging and B calling them out, and, say, if either of them were famous, what kind of reaction there would be from various news outlets or gossip columns.  Will the boxer, Wolf, who keeps boasting about how big and tough he is, finally be successful in getting a fight with renowned heavy weight champ Lion?  Will Ass, who keeps sending vaguely threatening tweets to Lion, finally get a response?  There’s a lot that can happen on Twitter…

Bibliography

1. The Aesop for Children, with illustrations by Milo Winter (1919).

Styles

Interview.  I believe this style will fit wonderfully with either of the talk shows, especially Dr. Phil because there is much more of an interview – a lot of give and take – going on during his show.  Certainly more than there is with Jerry Springer.

Story told in a bar and Outsider POV.  For this style, I was going to tell it from the third person point of view of an audience member during the taping of Jerry Springer.  The story I want to use is The Wolf and the Lean Dog, so this audience member, Jackdaw, is talking about how he was SO SURPRISED when the Lean Dog brought out his friend, Big Dog, and how Big Dog wasted no time in tackling Wolf and beating him up. 

Now since Jackdaw isn’t in this story himself, and is looking in on the plight of the three main characters, he has the outsider’s point of view which lends a new perspective to the overall feel of the story.  Does Jackdaw pity Wolf for not getting his meal?  Does he think Lean Dog is cunning for how he tricks Wolf?  Does he marvel at Big Dog’s strength and loyalty?

Video Note: Edward Kenway, the guy in the white hood, is a character from Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, and if you're curious as to why I chose him as Jackdaw, read this reading diary and this storytelling post.  (I put up this video because I couldn't choose which screencap to use.)

Social Media.  I’ve written fictionalized twitter interactions before and it was a lot of fun – especially trying to stick to the 140 character limit.  So I think it will be a great challenge to see if I can nail down the characterizations of Aesop’s animals within such a limited space.  Which animal would be most likely to post Instagram photos to their account?  Do they use Twitlonger to go on rants about social injustices?  How is their grammar?  How often do they change their avatar and name or do they ever change either?