Start of Final Major Project

When coming up with a starting point for this project, I asked myself the question 'what parts of life interest me?' One of my main interests revolve around people's attractions to each other and how I've found out from my experiences that there is so much more than a typical power couple out of a cheesy Disney or Hollywood rom-com film. 

For one thing, there is the LGBTQUA movement fighting for the improvement of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Undefined and Asexual people's rights thus making their place in the media, and therefore to many people around the world, more visible and accepted.

But even in heterosexual relationships, who are basically the default for many western cultured romance stories, they usually match in relation to their conventional, visual attractiveness (slim/muscular, white and a pleasant but fairly usual personality).

This is quite worrying when we take in to account the self esteem of the audience, who pays most attention to the mainstream media. Teenagers. Although this group gets a lot of media focus already and it could be argued that they don't need to be kept in mind constantly due to older adults being flung out of a story and replaced with more youthful characters, to some extent they are the group who use the media not only for entertainment (and more than we've ever used it in history) but also for learning about the world we're growing in to. A film about an older generation that doesn't apply to a more youthful audience is still something they can learn from. They can learn that they are people too, with life experiences that can still apply to us and that goes for other groups of different people who are usually ignored too.

That's when representation comes in. By not representing a group of people/situation, it's almost like throwing them/it aside in the idea that they/it's has no interesting subjects or entertaining elements for us. Learning isn't necessarily the priority when it comes to people trying to make money out of their shows, however I feel like it should be treated as such when it definitely has this impact on people.

When it comes to attraction, the spark of puberty and hormone activity makes teenagehood the start of allowing us to see people as more than just friends. So how do we deal with it? What makes us feel certain feelings, to what extent do we enjoy it, obsess over it and feel uncomfortable by it? More importantly, are we accepted when it comes to what we feel attracted to? Us as humans usually look for some kind of order in life so it is only expected that we try following some system that points out what is what, when in some cases it's really a construct of society. 

There is a lot of themes and sub-themes within this idea which I hope to look in to and, more importantly, narrow down. Perhaps at some point I can start specifying or maybe even look in to a section that I find more important to me. Either way, I feel like I will work very hard with the following ideas I've already come up with.