Juhyoung Lee 12/21/22 PD7

 Literacy & Learning

• Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or nonfiction covered in class.

• Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception.

• How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

From this class, I learned to see the ties between stories across different cultures. One notable instance was when my group and I were assigned two stories from Norse mythology and tasked to create a transformed account based on one of the two stories. The two stories we were assigned were Loki’s children and Thor’s wedding. After reading the stories, we decided to go with Loki’s children because we thought there were more directions to take that story. Reading the story we noticed many gaps in time between the children's initial kidnapping and when they have matured and are given a role or prison. The serpent’s tale ended after it was tossed into the ocean and said to be growing in size. Hel’s story started and ended when she was declared the ruler of Helheim. However, Fenrir’s story is told more in-depth. The wolf was said to have had a friendly relationship with the god Tyr. Although this relationship was not delved into deeply, it was the only case where a child of Loki had befriended the ones who they were destined to kill. The line that most stuck out to me in the story was at the end, when Fenrir told Odin that if they had not tricked an betrayed him then at Ragnarok, Fenrir would have fought side by side with the gods. I feel that this story had a lot of overlap with many greek mythology stories. because it seems to be saying that Odin himself brought Ragnorak on the gods by looking into the future and trying to prevent prophecies. In the Greek story of Percius, The king of Argos, Acrisius, was given a prophecy that he would be killed by his own grandson. To prevent this, he locked up his daughter to stop her from ever conceiving. But by doing this it created much contempt for Acrisius by both daughter and grandson, causing him to flee. This caused a chain reaction of events that lead to the former king of Argos dying from a discus through terribly by Perseus. Just like Acrisius caused the prophecy to come true by trying to prevent it, Odin brings the downfall of the gods by trying to see too much and prevent too much. What I learned from these stories is that the more you try to get control of your own fate, the more you end up causing your own demise. As humans, we try to control things that are beyond our control and get frustrated when results don’t churn out the way we want them to. After reading these stories, the main takeaway I got was to just try your best and don’t stress the rest. (take a chill pill)