By Robbie Bullis | City of Dewey, Walker County

Fiction is something powerfully human. It serves to convey the very soul of the great human endeavor — metaphor wrapped in characters, settings, and concepts that range from the close to home to the incredibly alien.

Fiction serves as an excellent lens to hold over our own reality, revealing stark and deeply rooted parts of our existence and the way we interact with it. All of this potential for storytelling and creation is perhaps the purest form of humanity’s capability for creation. Unbound by the limits of the physical world, the creator’s mind can run free and slipping into realms separate from our preconceived notions.

In my mind, fantasy, and in a more general sense the written word, both serve to educate the young, give wisdom to the growing and give context and confirmation to the old.

Think about some of the first pieces of media you may have experienced. Think about the shows, like The Teletubbies, Dora the Explorer or even the imaginative worlds of Pixar and Disney, all of which helped to shape your sense of self, in one way or another. And those examples are just visual media, neglecting completely the fantastic written tales that shaped our current selves.

I remember as a kid, when my imagination would grow from the pages of The Magic Treehouse, The Wizard of Oz and all sorts of other imaginative stories and films. Realities formed in the back of my mind, fantastic imaginations wrought from the raw materials of a growing imagination and the works of storytelling I consumed. Whether you’re aware of it or not, the way you consume media is quite telling of your ability to process information, and even the way you may think about the world.

On our modern earth, where information is more accessible than it’s ever been, the power of fiction has only grown more and more present in the minds of the growing. Whether it’s the newest Marvel or Star Wars movies, generic sappy romantic comedies, the spookiest modern CGI-jump-scare laden horror flicks or even the admittedly dull action of some of the schlockiest thrillers, all of the media we consume, fuels our reality in one way or another.

Something I find people saying quite often is, “It’s just a movie; stop thinking about it.”

This strange form of reasoning, asserts that lacking critical thinking towards the movies and stories you consume, somehow improves the experience. Perhaps this has developed as some sort of societal push-back against the ever growing industry of low quality mass-produced films, but I digress.

In a world where media is surrounding and permeating our collective consciousness on a nearly total level, I find that critical thinking seems to be at its lowest. Go out there and find the talent and critical thinking it takes to acknowledge when something is good or when it’s bad. Of course, much of critical thinking, regarding media, is subjective.

But please, for the love of God, treat it seriously. So much of the way we exist and interact as a society, with our popular culture and group interests, relates to the media we consume. Be smart, know why you like one thing over another, and please be able to recognize the depth to which our enjoyment of fiction drives our development.

And, boys! Go watch some movies, read some books. Go to your library and pick something up; it’s all free there. Find what you enjoy, and find what makes you feel genuinely happy. Watch it with a critical eye and learn to appreciate both the good and bad. Just be smart enough to watch everything with a critical eye.