Week 12: Bloodchild by Octavia Butler (5? Because of the length of writing maybe?)

 1. What is your reaction to the text you just read?:

Well that's a very good question indeed. I guess I'm partly confused, partly curious. The thing with short stories are that they need to build the world in the shortest amount of time possible. You are thrown into the world and expected to understand it right away. In that sense, you concentrate on every chosen word and try to create an image in your mind of what the character is seeing and feeling. Since the story was so short, I'm not entirely sure I understood everything about the world, and I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to say. A lot of it seemed to discuss the effect of upbringing and how it affects one's view of the world, as the main character struggles with two perspectives concerning her world. Should she resent those egg creatures due to the cruel reproduction cycle they put Terrans through, or be thankful for their magical eggs, calming venom and mother-like nature? 

2. What connections did you make with the story? Discuss what elements of the story with which you were able to connect?

The first obvious thing I thought of when reading this is the inspiration for the creatures. A lot of it seems to be directly taken from wasps like the Cicada killer, which essentially impregnates cicadas with their eggs, which use their bodies as nourishment to grow. Other species affect caterpillars, and it changes their DNA so much that the caterpillars even develop mother instincts, and begin taking care of the larvae after they pierce their skin and fall off their bodies. They will cover them in silk and watch them until the caterpillar starves to death. 

Other than that, I was trying to connect it to colonial influences of Europeans on foreign populations, but couldn't quite get to a convincing argument. I was looking at it with the idea that the conflict the protagonist goes through might be similar to how natives were seeing colonials. They can be a great source of trade, knowledge and other such benefits, but at the same time, they've led to genocide and forced natives to erase their culture by assimilating them to European ideals.

3. What changes would you make to adapt this story into another medium? What medium would you choose; what changes would you make?

I don't have much to say on this point, quite frankly, a lot of it is pretty graphic and can translate quite well to most visual based mediums. A lot of it would mainly come down to technical feasibility. If aiming for a film production, the whole scene with the larva and the cutting up of humans is already done quite a lot with vfx. However, the creature seems to be described with a LOT of limbs, it almost sounds like it's a mash-up between a centipede and a wasp. That would be pretty difficult to render out accurately as it requires a LOT of joints and a LOT of time to animate correctly.

4. Are there elements of this work that you would consider afro-futurist?

Are there? Obviously on the surface, you could say the cast of characters seems to be dominated by people of color and that white influences were not present. However, their whole world being built around cages and being governed by gigantic, egg laying, powerful drug-lords screams white supremacy to me. Frankly, I might not know enough about Afro-Futurism, but that did not seem like an example of it.