Date of Award
5-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Primary Advisor
Dorothy Andreas
Secondary Advisor
Lynette Sharp Penya
Committee Reader
Lauren Lemley
Abstract
Story has a strong power to influence, and in America’s current polarized climate, it is important to understand how it can influence politics. In Arrow S5E13, there are characters representing every side of the gun control debate in the wake of a mass shooting at city hall. This study uses interpretive communities theory to analyze two focus groups’ responses to this episode. The focus groups were composed solely of nine college students, six female and three male in total. The results determine that (1) political moderates appreciate the fair fictional representation of multiple political perspectives in fiction, (2) members of this interpretive community use humor to lessen tension and make points succinctly, (3) the feminist members of this interpretive community want a diversity of female perspectives in fiction, (4) this community pays close attention to the political arguments that narratives make, and (5) this generation has been desensitized to violence.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Kandt, Eastin, "The Impact of Fictional Characters on Political Beliefs: A Reception Analysis of Arrow S5E13" (2022). Honors College. 69.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/honors/69