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A trailer for the Minecraft movie makes waves, Gen Alpha’s favorite fantasy series is flying off the shelves, and young people say they like their online selves better than their offline personas. But first:

Resource of the Week

In the world of BookTok (TikTok’s corner for books) romance novelist Colleen Hoover is royalty, and a movie based on her wildly popular It Ends with Us novel has been out in the world for a few weeks now. In our latest video, we examine some of the good and some of the bad of Hoover’s novels, the drama around the film, and what parents should know about BookTok. We compare BookTok romance tropes to the Biblical vision of what love should look like, which—spoiler—is something deeper, richer, and much, much more beautiful.

Three Conversations

1. Impossible Creatures

What it is: The US edition of a fantasy book for middle-graders is expected to be one of the bestselling titles of the year.

What parents should know: Impossible Creatures, by British author (and Oxford fellow) Katherine Rundell, became an instant bestseller when it was published in the UK last year. The premise of the book is simple (and a bit Narnia-esque): a young man discovers a portal to a hidden world where creatures like griffins, sphinxes, and dragons exist. What follows is equal parts action and adventure in the vivid tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson. The book has some darker themes and violence, but reviews say it ultimately serves as a morality tale about duty, sacrifice, and doing what is right.
Continue the conversation: What is your favorite fantasy or sci-fi story?

2. Young Americans, Online

What it is: A newly-published survey showed that Gen Z and millennials say they feel more like “themselves” online than offline.

What it tells us about the rising generation: It is, perhaps, not all that surprising that a majority (45%) of Gen Z say they feel more like themselves online. This is a generation that has grown up expressing themselves in digital spaces. What is a bit of a surprise is that those that feel more themselves online beat out those that feel more at home offline by only 3%. Compare this to the millennial split in the statistics, where 47% said they feel more at home online than offline and 40% felt more fully themselves in person. Gen Z may see online life as indistinguishable from “real life,” but they may also be more likely to bring the same sort of caution to life online that previous generations brought to life offline.
Continue the conversation: Do you feel like you are more fully yourself online, or in person?

3. Blockheads

What it is: The trailer for the new Minecraft movie has been released, and neither Minecraft fans nor movie critics seem excited.

Why no one is happy: As one 10-year-old put it, “I think it looks pants.” (In other words, bad.) The Minecraft movie was originally announced in 2014, and has been through several rewrites and changes to the project’s leadership since then. Somehow, the finished film seems to have landed on overlaying live action humans onto an angular CGI landscape. Jack Black, capitalizing on his post-Bowser momentum, also makes an appearance as the game’s default character “Steve,” though many think he just looks like Jack Black wearing a blue shirt. Time will tell whether the fact that the movie has “Minecraft” in the title will still mean it makes a lot of money.

Let’s translate this one further…

Many Minecraft fans’ concerns with the trailer have to do with the fact that, as Metro puts it, “the game’s blocky charm [is] seemingly taking a backseat to fish-out-of-water comedy.” But another glaring issue is that the whole point of Minecraft was always to participate in creating something. This is why some teachers have even turned to Minecraft to help foster “creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and computational thinking skills” in the classroom. Since its release in 2011, the game has required and rewarded creativity in ways that remain pretty unique.

Turning a game like this into a movie takes viewers from being able to exercise creativity and help determine what happens, to just having to wait and see what someone else decided should happen. Some might even argue that movies are more likely to make spectators out of us, while games are more likely to make participants out of us—because those are the postures we have to adopt when we engage with these different forms of media.

In his book The Medium is the Massage, social critic Marshall MacLuhan argued that, “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” In other words, even apart from how well-designed a game is or how well-written a movie is, the fact that a game is a game and a movie is a movie can have a big impact on its own.

Human beings are wired for story, which might explain why most of Jesus’s teachings were in the form of stories. But we also have been made in the image of a Creator—so creating and cultivating is part of what it means to be human. The Minecraft franchise may not represent the best example of either of these truths—but it does provide an important opportunity to reflect on how different forms of media can impact us in different ways.

For a full “translation” of everything in this issue, check out our Monday Roundtable podcast on Spotify or Apple. In the meantime, here are three questions to spark conversation with your teens:

Continue the conversation:
  • What did you think about the Minecraft movie trailer?
  • Why do you think they’re releasing a Minecraft movie in 2025?
  • Do you think only ever playing games versus only ever watching movies could have different effects on how we see the world?

Parenting together,
The Axis Team
PS: This week we interviewed with Jason Woodruff (from The Pour Over) on how Christians can engage the news with discernment. Check it out here!