The FedEx arrow and how to deal with it.

[innerbrat]

WARNING: The following post contains abuse of symbolism.

There's a arrow on the FedEx logoIf you don't see it, that's fine. Some people don't do negative space. But I see the damn arrow, I cannot unsee the damn arrow, and I would appreciate it if people didn't accuse me of being some kind of psychotic arrow fetishist, or accuse me of accusing them

Comments

[catalyst2]

I just couldn't spot the FedEx arrow, no matter how hard I looked and then there was that little outline of where it was. Then (and only then) I could see it. And I think I have universal arrow blindness or something because I never seem to see those other arrows, never until someone draws another one of those "little outlines" again.

It's not that I don't want to see the arrows because I really do but I just don't. One of the things I have really liked about reading your journal is that you are very good at arrow-seeing and that has helped me to see a very small number of what I suspect are very large and bloody obvious arrows, but at least I see a few before I get skewered by them.

When I first started watching BtVS, I would read all these posts about how this was a metaphor for that and how these symbols linked to produce this and I would miss every single one of them. It's frustrating because I know people who saw the Buffy arrows had a much richer (or at least different) reading of that episode than I did but matter how hard I looked, I just didn't see them.

This may seem tangential but bear with me - I saw Wolf Creek when it first came out. I think it was my first exposure to the torture porn sub-genre of horror movies. To this day, I am nauseated even to think of that movie and yet I've seen movies with far more violence, far more graphically portrayed and I could still watch them, even if I didn't necessarily like them. In the end, all I can put it down to is the celebration of sadism in that movie and that the movie glorifies the "art" of the antagonist. It's not a subtle arrow, I grant you, but I think I finally got it ..... I think!

All of which was an immensely long-winded way of saying that, though I don't reply frequently to your posts, it is sometimes because I just got an arrow in something I read/watched earlier. More often it is because I go to re-read/re-watch an earlier book/episode in search of some vague "arrowy" feeling I got the first time through. I still don't get those arrows often enough but at least I'm looking. Thank you because I feel like it does add depth to my reading/viewing experience and, whether I like the arrow or not, at least I become a little more aware of it.