- [<] Status Log - created:: 2023-11-08 - status-updated:: - status:: seedling - type:: review - [S] Marketing - purpose:: - desc:: - connections: I learned to love Shakespeare at my local Renaissance Festival. There's a fantastic troupe - [ ] Marc Antony performance. I often say that performances of The Hunger Games and The Book of Mormon sometimes me with an unsettled, surreal feeling. Both stories explore challenging themes by incorporating the audience's reaction as a meta-layer that reinforces the core message. Like Shakespeare, changing the medium changes the message. When I saw The Hunger Games in theaters, hearing the audience cheer when tribute children died proved the dystopian premise about how people are desensitized by spectacle. I felt like I was viewing the film through the lens of the Capitol citizens, proving Katniss' point. Similarly, when I saw The Book of Mormon, the audience laughed at different jokes than I expected. To me, the over-the-top portrayal of the African village was clearly satire. But some reactions suggested people thought it was humorously offensive, rather than offensively humorous. For me, this disconnect was intellectually jarring, like we were watching two different shows. Realizing others interpret things so differently made me feel like an outsider. This drives home the surreal premise that our cultural lenses shape our realities. Both stories cleverly used the audience experience itself to highlight unsettling truths in a thought-provoking way. I left each show with a disorienting sense that my perspective was not universally shared. This meta-layer made the core message about social conditioning even more impactful. The Dresden Files is easier to appreciate thru the lens of the TTRPG and board game, because playing the game makes it clearer how the author thinks and plots his stories, and giving everything numbers and metrics changed how I engage with the books in terms of the protagonist leveling up.