Talk:Emily Kennedy
Good description on problems with unique facial features and hair color and style. I like the neutral description in frustrations with the eyes, eyebrows, lips, and mouth. The transition in reasoning for the change in process between real and fantasy avatars is very nice too. The overly critical opinion of self is developed well in pointing out progressive features of your self that were unavailable on evolver.
Explaining how identity consists of more than just physical appearance also provides a good transition to explaining why you drew on your perceived true identity in creating your fantasy avatar. There was a very descriptive process in a step-by-step creation of the fantasy avatar which was rooted in personality traits of family members.
The use of the movie Avatar (not the shitty one), is a good foundation for her qualms about her real avatar and the reasoning for creating her fantasy avatar. However, I would like to point out that Jake Sully had no input in creating his avatar like choosing the best parts of their family and personality. His avatar was made in his twin brother's image.
Other than that point, the rest of the reflection based on Avatar rounds out the essay very well. Avatars can be whatever you want them to be and however you wish others to perceive them.
S. Dickerson
Emily used the movie Avatar to anchor her avatar reflection to exemplify that physical characteristics don't necessarily translate into personal characteristics. I found the movie choice rather intriguing because the avatars in the movie Avatar aren't exactly human. Regardless, the analogy does make for a good inspiration and the movie does make for a solid reference because so many people have watched it. I think Emily did a decent job addressing the issues she faced when creating the avatar; I could sympathize with many of her problems as I experienced them too. Evolver is very limiting in the Avatar creation process and I couldn't find many of the features that matched mine either - like the hair. Although i don't have curly hair like Emily's, the selections were very limited and like Emily said - small details can be attributed to big changes in how we perceive ourselves. I found it distinctly interesting how Emily modelled her avatar after who she thought her "true self" was. Although the real self and true self are similar in many ways, there's still a couple of questions that I have yet to answer. Just because we want to perceive ourselves in a certain way, does it mean that we would actually prefer our projection to our real self? After being ourselves for so many years, I think it would be very difficult to part with our true identities no matter how aesthetically pleasing or meaningful our "true identities" are.
E. Kaufman
