Why Captain Marvel is Great

(For some of this blog I will be comparing DC’s first solo female superhero film (Wonder Woman) to that of Marvel’s first solo female superhero film (Captain Marvel)).

So I saw Captain Marvel at the cinema a couple of weeks ago and I absolutely loved it. I felt Brie Larson was perfect for the role, the CGI was great and it was an all round well put together film. But I also loked it because of how it was treated like any other male superhero film.In Captain Marvel, Carol Denvers (or ‘Vers’ as she was known at the time) was dressed in a suit. Not an overly sexualised one, but a fight suit like Captain America. She was also equipped with a helmet and some badass weapons which I thought was brilliant. In Wonder Woman, Diana was dressed in the classic Wonder Woman costume we all know and love, but was made out of metal-armour type stuff. While the outfit is iconic, it’s not really appropriate for fighting battles (although well done to Diana for fighting in that outfit). Carol was fighting in a fight suit whereas Diana was very much still fighting in her underwear. I am not just taking a dig at DC, as Marvel is also guilty of over sexualising costumes (cough cough, black widow, cough cough).Also, in Captain Marvel, there was no love interest. Carol was treated just like the other male superheroes where the film was revolving around them saving the world and being heroes without worrying about a love interest. In Wonder Woman, Diana had her love interest (Steve). While the film did have a lot of fighting and Diana being amazing, she still did have a love interest that was focused on in the film.

In the posters for both Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman, neither were smiling. O thought that this was very good as it was treated exactly the same if it was a male superhero’s film. As we know, the fact that Captain Marvel wasn’t smiling was met with a lot of unnecessary backlash, which I think is completely ridiculous as no one complained on any other superhero’s poster when they weren’t smiling.

I don’t want to be seen as a Marvel stan hating on Wonder Woman due to the studio it was made by. I love both studios, but I thought there was an interesting contrast as to the differences of each studio’s first solo female superhero film.

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How I handled one of the worst years of my life…

2018. A good year for some, not to good for others. And completely awful for me. In the space of two months I lost my uncle, my great auntie and my dog, all of whom I was close with. I had a lot of stress put on me by school. My friend and the time was treating me badly. It was an all round horrible experience. And, to be quite honest, I’m surprised I came out the other side. So, I’m going to talk through how I handled each of my (main) problems.

Grief

Greif is one of, if not the, worst thing you could possibly go through. Losing a loved one can be really hard, and even now sometimes the thought of not seeing them again sets me off. I tried to handle it in all the best ways the internet told me to; talk to someone about how you feel, write down your thoughts, blah blah blah. If anything, those things made it worse. So, I handled it in my own way.

I thought about all the good times we had together. Yes, this absolutely did set me off, but it helped in the long-run. I thought of every time we had laughed together, played together, had fun together, and it helped me massively. It may not help everyone, but it did help me certainly. I also reminded myself that they were happy now. No more pain, no more heartache, pure peace.

Stress

Ok, as this is a problem that affects my life massively, I will dedicate a whole post to this in the near future.

Stress is hard. It is horrible. No one is going to lie and say it’s not, but if you handle stress correctly, it can feel better.

Share your stress. Unlike greif, I do find that talking to people and sharing my stress helps me. Whether it be my mum, my friends or even my dog, it helps me with stress because even though it won’t affect them, it makes me feel like I’m not entirely alone. It allows me to have fun with others, instead of being weighted down by the stress on my chest. It halves the size of my problem, making me feel better and even though I still have the problem, it is not as big or as scary and is much more manageable.

Friends

Ugh. This is one that still gets to me. My (ex) friend began to be really rude to me for no apparent reason. She later admitted that she was jealous of the friendship I had with another friend. When I told her she was being really rude, she told me that’s how she deals with things. I didn’t believe her for a SECOND. She wanted everyone to dance around her, for our lives to revolve around HER, and they just weren’t going to.

Now, this person I see all the time as she is friends with my friends, so it is unavoidable. But what I did was made a list. I made a list of how she didn’t deserve anything the way she had been treating people, how she didn’t deserve my friendship or my attention. It made me feel so much happier, and over time, I am stopping caring about her and what she thinks. I hang out with my other friends more, and talk to them more than I do her. Yes, this annoys her because she isn’t getting attention, but she can stomp and tantrum all she wants. She is NOT going to control my life. And neither should your toxic friend.

I managed to get through the hardest year of my life so far with these techniques, so you should too.

CONCENTRATE!

The word I have shouted at myself many times while trying to study for exams, concentrate is (in my opinion) the word easiest to say but hardest to do.

Trying to cram in all the information can be stressful, and having a short attention span doesn’t help either. More than once I have shove a pillow into my face and screamed due to the fact that I lack the strength to concentrate for any longer than five minutes. So, I decided to take a break from my usual posts and write a post that can help you, the reader 🙂

Here are some common problems that affect ME while studying, and I hope you can relate:

• Electronic devices constantly going off
• Noises from the outside world
• Mess
• Sheer boredom
• Sensory Overload

Unplug/Take away any distractions:

There is absolutely no chance of a good studying session with messages from Snapchat breaking it every two minutes, or with emails from Pintrest telling you who saved your pin awakening your laptop. So, put your phone/laptop/tablet etc. in another room.

I know it’s hard to, I tend to struggle to do it myself (what a first-world problem, I know) but this will benefit you in so many ways. The constants noises and vibrations don’t take away your concentration and it allows you to be able to buckle down and study.

Noises from the outside world.

Despite my wishes, while I am revising the rest of the world keeps turning. This is especially irritating when your sister is running down the hall, the TV is blaring and there’s a drill running SOMEWHERE in the house. It affects my concentration greatly.

What I do is close my bedroom door and play some quiet meditation music. It calms me down and somewhat blocks out the outside sounds. It helps bring back my concentration to my studying and tests always seem to go better when I do this.

Mess

I cannot work when my desk is messy. Instead of concentrating on my work, I look at how disorganised my desk is and mentally organise it, paying not attention to the studying I need to do.

If your workspace is messy, the day before you’re due to start your studying, clean it. Put everything away, throw away what you don’t need, organise what you do need, and actually clean the workspace using a cloth. It immediately makes me feel better and more comfortable, and allows me to concentrate better on my studying.

Sheer boredom

Studying is boring. I absolutely hate it, especially for subjects I cannot stand. The sheer boredom of it makes me unable to concentrate as I think of everything I could do to procrastinate studying. But sometimes you need to suck it up and do it.

Use a method that you like; flashcards, spider diagrams etc. so it is less boring. Set breaks for yourself. For example, every half hour of revision you do, take a five-ten minute break. Also, give yourself rewards. If you revise for ten minutes, have a few crisps. This always makes the time go faster when I’m looking forward to doing something after a set amount of time, even if it is something small like that.

Sensory Overload

I often get sensory overload when studying. The person walking outside my room is too loud, the rain is too loud, the kettle is too load. It drives me to the point where I’m visibly crying and am about to pull my own hair out.

So, cover your ears, take a few deep breaths and calm down. Take a short break to wind yourself down, and when studying, start off easy. Don’t immediately jump into the harder stuff, start of simple. This will help you calm down and the noises become not so noisy.

These are my tips for studying. These are things I do that always seem to help for me, so u hope it can help you too.

The Flaws in Our School System.

On more than one occasion, school has left me too exhausted to do anything when I get home, whether that be my homework or my hobbies. This then leads to me having to complete the homework when the teacher is coming round collecting it at the beginning of the lesson because I have been to tired to complete it. The worry of not being able to complete the work then exhausts me, and it goes round in a vicious circle. As I am at the beginning of my GCSE years, a lot of pressure it being put on myself and my peers, which is in no way healthy.

It was found that in a recent study High Schoolers had the same levels of anxiety as Mental patients did in the 1950s. This is absolutely unacceptable as the students are having stress put on their shoulders by the school, and then expected to perform well while under that stress.

Recently, I went to a GCSE evening where parents/carers can find out more about how our next two years are going to run. Our deputy and assistant headteachers explained it all to us in agonising detail which did not calm us down at all, but increased any worries and anxiety we already had. One parent asked our teachers how to help reduce their son/daughter’s levels of stress, which was a very valid question, but the teachers acted as though it was a worthless question that didn’t mean anything to anyone. They did not answer the question properly (all they said was that we should try our best) and did not calm any of us down whatsoever.

If the school is going to try and help reduce anxiety levels before exams, they should learn what it is like to live with it. No, you cannot cure anxiety like they claim they can, but you can make it better by not putting pressure on us to do well in our exams (we all know the reason why so much pressure is put on us is to make the school look good. You’re not fooling anyone, Mr Headteacher.).

The flaw in our school system is that the teachers and governors of the schools are trying to hard to make the school look good and put grades before anything instead of making sure that the students in the school are happy and healthy. I know that they’ve all “been through it before” as they so often remind us as a reason why we should not be anxious and/or stressed, but exams are getting harder then ever, the content we are being forced to cram into our heads for our GCSEs would have been covered for A Levels five years ago, and we have been given less time to learn harder things.

If the Government really wants to help, they can help by giving us somewhat less content so we don’t need to cover a whole topic is one lesson, and stop giving us the content people two years older than us would only just be getting introduced to. Schools need to learn that our health is much more important than how they look. All you need to do to see if it is a good school is to look at the students inside. That will tell you more about the quality of a school than any results ever will.

Okay, I may have lied.

Hey there!

So it appears I lied in my very first post. There is absolutely no chance of me making a post everyday as one of my near and dear friends laughed in my face (thanks F). So, I am going to try to post every fortnight. This gives me plenty of time to think of a topic, procrastinate, then panic and write it.

That is all. Thanks for reading.

-georgia🖤

Love is Love

Due to the upcoming Valentine’s Day, I thought I would make a ‘Love is Love’ post because I think that is it important that society becomes more open minded to love and the different types. Gay, straight, lesbian, bi, pan, whatever, everyone should be able to love freely and without any negative consequences.

‘Love is Love’ 2018 Pride bandanna by ‘Bags of Love’

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 was passed by Parliament and decriminalised homosexuality for men over the age of 21. The latest country to decriminalise homosexuality was India in September 2018, but there are still 72 countries in the world where homosexuality is illegal and there are 8 countries where homosexuality is punishable by death, which boggles my mind. I do not understand why a relationship involving two of the opposite sex is legal, but two people of the same sex is illegal.

Many homophobic people are homophobic due to their religion and their teachings; Christians blame their homophobia on passages in the Bible from Genesis, Leviticus, Romans, Corinthians and Timothy. However, these same people seem to blatantly ignore the passages in the Bible with reads that they are not allowed to mix fabrics in their clothes (something which is, if not very near, impossible to do nowadays), wear heavy jewellery, eating pork, wearing ripped clothing, having tattoos, getting remarried after divorce (as the church believes that once you are married once, you will always be married in the eyes of God and marrying anyone else is adultery), and many more. In the Bible, Jesus taught to love everyone, and I am very sure that, if he was here now, he wouldn’t be prejudiced towards anyone. Homophobic people who use religion as an excuse for their hatred are not true Christians, in my belief.

There is no excuse for denying someone to love the person they love because of their gender and because of your hatred. Everyone should be able to spend Valentine’s Day with those they love, so let everyone love who they love, even if you don’t agree with it.

Is Feminism Needed Anymore?

“Is feminism needed anymore” is a question I have heard many times throughout the past year or so. The answer to it? Yes. Absolutely. While we have come a long way with equal rights between men and women, there is still a way to go, and I am not going to just sit back and give up on equal rights when they are still unequal; not when women’s groups, like the Suffragettes, faced horrible treatment and even death in their journey for equal rights, and girls worldwide still facing forced marriages and human trafficking.

Emily Davison was a Suffragette who died in Epsom, England on 8th June 1913. Four days prior, she was trampled by the King’s horse at a race after attempting to pin a ‘Votes For Women’ badge on its saddle. The fact over whether she meant to die or whether it was an accident is still controversial, but she is recognised as a martyr by most and an anarchist by few.

During my research for this blog, I discovered that women earn around 85 cents to a man’s dollar despite working the same job for the same length of time, with African-American women earning around 64 cents and Latina women earning around 56 cents to a man’s dollar. It is disgraceful for someone to be held back financially due to their sex and their race. We are all people, so why shouldn’t be be treated equally?

Another scary statistic is 4 out of 5 victims of human trafficking are girls, and American women serving in Afghanistan or Iraq are more likely to be raped by a male comrade that being killed due to the ongoing wars. Since the film The Invisible War had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance film festival, the #NotInvisible movement began. The movement is partnered with veterans’ groups and women’s advocacy organisations to target the American congress to face this problem head on. These female soldiers are fighting for the same cause as the male soldiers, so they should be at least treated with the same respect and decency as they are.

However, in the past few decades there have been many victories for feminism. In 2018, Saudi Arabia lifted the ban on female drivers and now, women can drive freely. The #metoo movement was one of the most trending hashtags on social media, and raised insane amounts of awareness to what some women face all the time. In 2017, 1,000 women’s marches over 92 different counties and all 50 states, around 5 million people took to the streets raising awareness for LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, immigration laws, climate change, health care and gender equality; all marches were different and separate, but all unified in their goals and the spirits of the marchers.

2017 Women’s March outside the United States Capitol.

While many steps have been taken to make tohe world a better place for women to live in, they are still steps we must take. So, in answer to the question, yes. Feminism is still needed, and will still be needed until all women and all men are treated equally.