Final Project

OBJECTIVE:

Compose your own hero/villain narrative, using various ideas about heroism and villainy from this semester. By now, you have read Zimbardo’s ideas about heroism/villainy, read about the Hero’s Journey, read the section in the textbook about different conceptions of morality, seen examples in “Brownies,” Black Panther, the poems from Week 4, “The Egg” and ”Re-Entry,” Brooklyn 99, Daredevil, and then Hamilton for this week as well. So for this final project, you should come up with your own hero and villain, defining them in relationship to some or all of these texts and write a story featuring these characters. This hero and villain can be entirely fictional, they can be realistic humans or can have superpowers; or, alternatively, they could be real people, either from your personal life or historical figures or current public figures. I hope this is a project you can get into in the final weeks of the semester and hopefully even have some fun with. 

In order to accomplish this, you should first figure out whether you want to create fictional characters or write about real characters, since that will greatly impact the work that follows. This final project should then consist of two parts, explained below.

1) First, you should have a solid description of who your heroand villain are and what makes them heroic/villainous. This part should refer to texts we have read/watched this semester, explaining how your chosen hero and villain fit within the concepts we have seen in readings, and/or how they compare or differ from heroes and villains in the stories, shows, movies, etc. from this term.2) Secondly, you should then place these characters in a narrative. There are a lot of ways you can approach this. For instance, you can write a short story, approach it more as a screenplay, storyboard out a comic book, or outline a novel, etc. You could tell each character’s origin story, orfeature them in roles of protagonist/antagonist in some sort of struggle. There is a lot of freedom here, which can be overwhelming, but that is why you will first submit a proposal, where you can run your initial ideas and/or concerns by me, and I will provide you with feedback.

I would prefer for both of these parts to be turned in as a single document, with the two parts clearly labeled as Description and Narrative, but I won’t count it against you if you forget and submit two separate documents. The page requirement for each section is highly variable, but the Description should be at least one full page double-spaced (though longer is encouraged), and the Narrative should be at least two full pages double-spaced (longer is also totally fine).