Topic Research: Animals

When thinking about the direction I want to take my project for this class, I think I have narrowed it down to animals. Although in the first two stories I have wrote for this class, the main characters were dogs, I'm not really trying to focus on just one animal. I think it would be fun to tell stories about different types of animals and make them all vary in theme. Maybe have a love story with animals, maybe a great fight, or even just the story of how something came to be based off animals. I'll be honest, I'm the type of person who doesn't really plan stories but rather is inspired by something and just runs with it so the reading's I've picked hopefully serve me for purpose but if they don't I wouldn't be surprised.

Hanuman's Leap

I liked this story because one it deals with a monkey, and who doesn't enjoy a good story with monkeys? This story seems to have multiple directions I can see myself basing my own story on. I could see myself recreating a story about the monkey's famous past and how he got his powers. I could also lead into the attack of the rakshashi attacks him. I could use this story as a fable like story if I wanted to as well. I like the idea of using the confidence of Hanuman as he gets ready to make the jump over the water however. 

This is an image of Hanuman which I found on Wikipedia.

Hanuman and the Mountain

Keeping on the theme of Hauman, even though I said I wanted to do different animals, I had the idea of using this story to tell somewhat of a creation story. I was thinking about possibly intertwining why Monkeys enjoy the base of mountains. Obviously I don't think monkey's and mountains have any connection, but I like the idea of this story creating a friendship relationship beween something natural on earth and an animal. I was also thinking this could be a friendship between the monkey's of today and the Himalayas. I could even use this story to show a teamwork type message between bears and monkeys. 

Sampati and Jatayu

What I liked about this story was the immediate idea of using birds to tell the story of Icarus and how he got to close to the sky just as Sampati and Jatayu do in this one. I think it could be a great way to have each of the stories intertwine between characters since they all do interact between the stories. This also allows for birds to be the main characters rather than monkeys. The story I base off of this would more than likely deal with becoming too confident which could be a theme of my story book since Hanuman becomes too confident in the first story as well. 

I found all of these stories from this link.