This week I will be discussing another favorite piece of mine, The Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom of the Opera is the story of Christine Daae and her battle of love with the enigma character of Eric, the Phantom, and Raoul, her childhood sweetheart. This story expressed compassion, betrayal, rejection, and fear, but overall an abundant amount of pulchritude. The Phantom expresses his pain through his magnificent creations of art, he is a misunderstood character suffering with a beautiful mind cursed in a horrifying body.

Recently this story has entered my life for the second time in the past few years, showing a great importance and a lesson I must learn. Only a month ago we watched this movie in my school's art class, we were told to create a piece of our choice from being inspired from that movie. I created a pair of shoes after discovering a pair based around the story of Alice in Wonderland online. I think only now have I truly begun to grasp the true fascination behind this tale as old as time story.

I find we all have phantoms in our own everyday life. Even our own person is truly a phantom of a sort. We all wear a facade believe it or not. We all can deny it as much as we want, however we all wish to be accepted in society by our fellow peers. Which is why often we do what others think is best for us. Hence facades. We mask our emotions as people but more importantly mast ourselves, we mask what we have to give to this world.

The phantom is the purest example of this, he is such a beautiful individual with so much to offer, however his hideous face makes him unaccepted to the world and he has to hide who he truly is. It's truly a depressing concept, people changing just to please others, however we do it on a daily basis.

The underlying message here is clearly acceptance and despite many stories similar to it, I don't believe there is such a story to capture it as well as this one. Even Disney's hit 1991 Beauty and the Beast, nearly the same story, does not capture this with the same intensity as TPOTO. It truly is amazing how much the two stories do have in common however. Both show the symbolism of the rose, a beautiful thing with unkindness hidden within, hence the quote "even the most beautiful roses have thorns" -unknown. They also both consist of the symbolism of the mirror, showing that we all see what we wish to see, the mirrors both being broken further expresses this as our warped identities of ourselves. If you do notice these tales both even going to the extreme of making their female leads have similar physical appearance, both with brown curls and a dress hanging loosely off their shoulders. I would much rather watch TPOTO over Beauty and the Beast any day. This story has taught me so much about who I am and my views on society. It really has shaped my teenage years in the most possative of manners.