Image of a grizzly bear sourced from Pixabay
This one caught my eye immediately because of its title. How could I just pass up a story about a bear officer? I was also curious to see how "bear" the character was going to be. The characters introduced in the first story were all anthropomorphic bears, which was interesting in and of itself. But in particular, I found the inclusion of a Kodiak bear quite interesting, since I hadn't heard of that before. I had actually researched bears recently to assist in a story project I'm working on, where I have a set of three sisters with bear traits, so I actually got some potential inspiration for the worldbuilding of that world from this story, albeit indirectly. (And for anyone curious, Kodiak bears are a subspecies of brown bear, so they're a lot like grizzly bears, except much bigger, being similar in size to polar bears!)
Battle of Camlann card art from the game Fate/Grand Order, which was used as the banner for The Fall of Britain
The name of this one caught my eye, since I was curious about what the context behind it was. And the other thing that grabbed my eye about it was the banner image, which was from the multimedia series, Fate, which I am at least somewhat familiar with, hence being able to recognize it. The usage of that image actually had to do with the simple fact that the Fate series stars a lot of the same mythological stories that the author of this blog was working with, which revolved around King Arthur and Mordred. While I may not personally have a close attachment to Arthurian lore, one of my close friends is working on a world heavily inspired by Arthurian lore, with a variant of Mordred as the main antagonist of his series, so I was familiar with the story through that, and thus found it rather interesting.
Firstly, I absolutely adore Gothic anything: clothes, monsters, architecture, fonts, you name it. So this one was a must-click for me. And I also really liked the way the main page of the site was set up, and how the story was framed. The main page shows a picture of a foggy graveyard, with a hyperlink set up on the phrase "Enter the Graveyard..." It set up a very nice tone for the whole storybook, which was very nice. I'd love to do something like that for mine if I come up with something along those lines that works for my particular storybook. And then I also loved that they framed the different segments of the story under the context that each of these stories was the one told by one of the teenagers camping in the woods. A really cool and fun little detail that adds some nice flavor to the overall story and ties them all together nicely despite each story having a different subject matter.
Those were my storybook favorites, and a little bit of what made each of them interesting to me. I'm very much looking forward to coming up with my own storybook as we move on with this course!
Oh, this sounds great, CJ: I am especially intrigued by your interest in all things Gothic. That is a powerful approach to take with this class because you can take a Gothic fiction approach to ANY story... in fact, I just saw a book while poking around at AbeBooks the other night that was African folktales that someone had retold in Gothic style (which I can definitely imagine since there is plenty of supernatural otherworldly horror in some of the genres of African folktales). And that particular Storybook you looked at had a really gruesome surprise ending that I remember vividly (and that particular Storybook is MANY years old... but very memorable!): some of the class projects are portfolios or anthologies without an overarching plot, but coming up with some kind of overarching frametale into which you insert the individual stories can be really cool! Anyway, lots to explore, and I am so glad to hear about your interest in Gothic fiction! :-)
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