The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

YAKOB: Don’t envy the animated

Sometimes the serendipities in life make you think about just how uncontrollable and inconclusive our world really is. It’s not just imperfectly perfect, but it’s also perfectly imperfect.

That’s a difficult dual-concept, but I think you can Google it. If that doesn’t help, just Google harder. That always works.

Anyway, the world is erratic enough for us to find it blessedly funny when things turn out the way we had hoped. Sometimes, though, we wonder what it would be like to be in a different one.

I think we’re all familiar with the idea of a cartoon world as an alternate reality, or at least enough to understand where I’m going. (No, I did not just watch Space Jam, but that’s a good starting point.)

I don’t want to focus on one specific cartoon world, but the cartoon universe as a whole. The possibilities are almost boundless.

Imagine getting seriously hurt but being all right five seconds later. Imagine eating nothing but cheesecake for the rest of your life and staying unhealthily skinny. Don’t have any friends? Find a Martian. Never get what you deserve? Surprise, you’ve now got fairy godparents.

Every possibility in a cartoon world is stretchable by simply challenging the imagination.

But here’s my question: Why would Michael Jordan, Bill Murray and Larry Bird come back to this world instead of bringing everyone else to the Space Jam Looney Tunes one?

And here’s my answer: The cartoon world is not all it’s cracked up to be. And we can tell just by looking at how we react to it.

Instead of taking pleasure when things turn out well like we do in our world, the anything-is-possible nature of cartoons leaves us amused when we observe the misfortunes of those who don’t get what they want.

Pepé Le Pew’s love is never requited. Yet that’s how it must always be. It would be boring if things worked out right away in cartoons, so they often never work out at all. It has to be a constant chase.

That’s why the events in cartoons are done over and over — oh, and then they’re done some more. That way, the failure allows everything to stay the same.

But then progress is impossible.

The hopeless romantic who never gets the girl really is hopeless. Some people relentlessly get shot in the face. Every day: “Duck season, fire!” And boom, headshot.

There’s no challenge to a cartoon world. You’re either given what you want right away, or you’ll never be able to obtain it. Have you ever wanted to sit down in front of the TV with a ton of food and compete against the guy from “Man v. Food”? Me neither, but it’d be so easy in a cartoon world, there’d be no point.

Having a point is important to us. In the same way that we would stop watching if Wile E. Coyote ever actually caught the Road Runner, we would be just as unsatisfied if accomplishing things wouldn’t get us anywhere in our lives.

So instead of going back to the beginning, we thrive on that extra time and space of unpredictable fortune. Otherwise, we wouldn’t age at all in a cartoon world. Seniors might prefer that now though, since they’ve just fallen below 200 days in the countdown until graduation. That’s a Facebook status to dislike if I’ve ever seen one.

But truly, getting older will always be a good thing. The unexpected things in our lives, whether good or bad, create our character. Cartoons don’t have that luxury, so it’s no wonder the subjects in them are called “characters” in the first place. We get to discover our character, but theirs are assigned to them.

The entropic beauty of the real world is that it makes us believe it has a pattern. We might not know what reality is, but we grab onto it. It makes us think everything happens for a reason. That’s not true, but the thing is, everything can happen for a reason — if we decide it to be so.

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