Eat Pray Love Trailer

When Harry Met Simba

When Harry Met Simba

                Now I know what you’re thinking. ‘Simba? As in The Lion King?’ Heck yeah! No, I’m not crazy. At least not this time. If you think about it, it starts to make sense. Here’s my logic.

                Let’s start from the beginning. Both Harry and Simba lose a parent (or in Harry’s case, both parents) which causes their journeys as characters. Both characters think that it’s their own fault, which again, it somewhat is, although it wasn’t directly caused by them. In both stories, the parent(s) die to save their child. The difference? Harry is a wizard, and Simba is a lion.

                Later on in the stories, the two characters have grown up. They’re both outcasts in their respective stories. Although Harry is stuck in a family of Muggles who hate him and ‘his kind,’ and Simba goes to live with Timone and Pumba, who love him like family, Simba ended up in that situation because he was tricked into thinking he was an outcast by his evil uncle, Scar.

                Speaking of Scars, let’s talk about Harry’s! Harry’s lightning-shaped scar on his forehead is his claim to fame at Hogwarts, the school for wizards. The minute he arrives, he’s practically worshiped because of this scar, but more importantly, how he got it. The minute Simba comes back, he too is instantly a hero. Everyone sees Harry and Simba as the light at the end of the tunnel—and I don’t mean the train.

                My final similarity is a small, and rather ironic, similarity, but I’d like to point out that when Harry’s sorted into his Hogwarts house, He’s put into Gryffindor. What is Gryffindor’s mascot? Oh! Look! A Lion!

I rest my case—Humans? Lions? Not so different after all, huh?

The Issue with Half-Truths

In my opinion, Books have to be totally, and I mean like a hundred percent, true for them to be considered non-fiction.

Half-truths are fine. BUT, they’re not non-fiction. They can be fictional novels ‘inspired by true events,’ but they are not non-fiction. I don’t think there’d be any issue with Frey bending the truth to tell his story, because his story didn’t (to my knowledge) affect anyone, other than Oprah, but that is a whole different story. Mortenson, on the other hand, I have a problem with. The reason for this is because he features a village in his ‘non-fiction’ stories. Sure, he did go to a village, but not at the time he claimed to in the book and he didn’t even go to the right place. The whole situation with his charity bothers me. Isn’t the point of a charity to help a person, or a group of people for whatever reason, not to boost your fame? He has besmirched (I’ve always wanted to say that) the name of charities!

                I think David Shields is partially right. I think we need some lines between genres, we don’t need all of the little teensy-tinsy sub-categories that we have now, but I do believe we need to have fiction and non-fiction differentiated. That’d be because I think fiction is so much more creative. I think it takes a very special person to be able to sit down and write a book that they magically pulled out of their head. This isn’t to say that non-fiction writers are not special, but I think fictional writers are much more impressive.

                David Shields is weird though, his works weren’t anything but a collection of plagiarized paragraphs and quotes from all kinds of different books. That’s a compilation, or a collection, and I don’t think it has the right to call it ‘his book’ or ‘his work,’ because it’s not.

                From random collections to half-truths, how can we ever know what’s the real deal? And for that reason, along with many other reasons, I’m going to continue to comfortably read my fiction books.