[COPY] Footnote People In World History
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Tulpa
8 min read
Directly relevant to the central theme of animated characters discovering they're artificial creations who nevertheless have consciousness and agency. The Buddhist/Tibetan concept of thought-forms that gain independent existence parallels the article's exploration of fictional beings claiming autonomy from their creators.
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Irish Republican Army
8 min read
The article's 'Cartoon Republican Army' (CRA) is clearly modeled after the IRA, including paramilitary structure, acts labeled as 'terrorism,' and fighting for autonomy from oppressive control. Understanding the historical IRA provides essential context for the fictional organization's methods and ideology.
“Dude!”
Wendy caught me as I was trying to pry open the bottle of whiskey that I’d surreptitiously taken from the bar while everyone was partying, figuring that nobody would notice. I’d been sober most of that New Year’s Eve, like I promised her earlier, but temptation was bound to get me, I suppose.
Look. If you’re an attractive girl, it’s hard enough going through life actually being ignored. And if you’d the unfortunate experience that I had just had, alcohol serves as a panacea. Maybe not the only or the best one, but still a good one.
Anyway, there was Wendy, standing there in the doorway, with her checkerboard shirt and rakishly tilted faux-fur hat giving her the appearance of a hunter on the prowl. And I was her game.
“You told me that you’d given up the booze, Belle,” she said.
“No, I didn’t,” I corrected her. “I said I wasn’t drinking as much as I used to. I never said I was going to give it up entirely. Besides, the way things are, you need something to get through the days.”
“Amen to that. Here; let me get that for you.”
She went to the bottle, and opened it easily, as you’d expect the daughter of a northwestern lumberjack might be able to do. With glasses and ice from the mini-fridge, we started working on the bottle’s contents.
We’d only met recently, but we’d bonded in friendship quickly. We had a lot of stuff in common. We were both daughters of extremely masculine men who expected a lot of us, but couldn’t necessarily be there for us when we needed them to be. We were both in the late teens-early twenties age range, when girls become women seemingly overnight and are left to find their way through life without much of a biological road map. We’d both grown up without mothers to help us through trying times. We both had worked demanding and frustrating jobs for male bosses who didn’t always get us (doubly troubling for me, since mine was also my dad). We both had a lot of male admirers, even very young ones. We both came from small towns where weird crap was always happening, and we’d learned pretty quickly how to be self-sufficient against most types of threats because of that. We both had red hair: mine being long and orange tinted, hers being
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