1. What is your reaction to the text you just read?
After reading Bloodchild by Octavia Butler I felt confused, so much so that I ended googling to find out more about what I had just read. Once I had done that I felt like I could better understand the story and was less confused and more disturbed. Online this story is argued to be a love story, but I think the only way I could believe that is if it was familial love. Gan makes all of her decisions to help her family. She gets impregnated so her brother and sister do not have to carry that burden, not because she has fallen in love. Once I started thinking about it that way it wasn’t so much a love story as a coming of age story, which fits with the opening line “My last night of childhood began with a visit home.”
2. What connections did you make with the story? Discuss the elements of the story with which were able to connect.
Personally I did not feel as connected to this story as I could have been. I tried not to let the fact that it’s a short story sway me, but I’ve never been a fan of short stories. Past that this work has a lot of good in it, if only it had been written in an easier way. I had a hard time getting into the story and understanding just what was happening. Once I figured it out I realized it was just a twist on a modern day problem. Sex, family, and survival are all problems addressed in this work, but the entire time you are wondering which side is the good. The problem is, they both are. These creatures are just doing what is needed to stay alive, and harming the others as little as they can. It’s almost a paradise, but it is twisted and corrupted by the fears of a child.
3. What changes would you make to adapt this story into another medium? What medium would you use? What changes would you make?
I think this story would make an interesting mini series or tv show. I might just be biased because I believe most books should be turned into tv shows and not movies, but the story would unfold more natural with having an overarching plot like this story gives, and smaller subplots of other things that happen on this planet. We would be able to go deeper into the children’s backstories, the mothers past, how humans got to this planet, other people being impregnated on this world, how this world has developed a new type of family all without losing the main story of a young girl afraid to do what she must to protect her family. Right now with the boom in young strong heroins this story would be a hit. It would be dark and horrible like The Handmaids Tale but it would follow its traditional African roots giving it a new and refreshing take.
I find it interesting that you read this story picturing Gan as a female. Gan is actually male, which I think makes this story all the more horrifying because it explore male pregnancy. I wonder how I would have read this thinking Gan was a female, it definitely adds a twist to it! I know Butler is really big about giving female characters a strong personality, and in this story she switched that and gave the male (Gan) the female role and T'Gatoi this strong female one.
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