In Persepolis there are many instances where Marjane is impacted by the revolution and she really reflects it but in a more toned down and child-like way. For example, she mimics torturing kids during her games and she gets jealous that other kid’s parents are heroes. These instances serve to show, that even though she’s growing up in a very dangerous time, she’s still a kid (something that I tend to forget because of the seriousness of her situation). Not only does her innocence give the reader a different viewpoint of this time, but I think it also exemplifies the violence to the reader because we’re not expecting a ten year old or six year old (or even 11 year old) to be exposed to it.
Marji’s depiction of violence shows us the effect that revolution and violence have on children. Her childhood is very different from anything we’ve ever experienced, yet we can still relate and see the child-like tendencies that she has. Children generally don’t come up with these violent thoughts or imagine cutting a person up into pieces, so the fact that Marji is already exposed to this, thinking about it, and using it in her games is pretty horrifying to me. Many of her depictions of this violence is just so similar to what we’re used to seeing (like in the playground scene on page 3), but it has a extremely dark twist.
However in the recent reading Marji said that she saw violence for the first time. That image was very different from her other depictions of violence. Even though it wasn’t exactly the most graphic image, it wasn’t at all like Marji deciding to torture her friends if they lost in a game or her images of torturing prisoners with an iron. The facial expression on page 76 was of true fear and pain which is so different from the cartoonish drawing of the man cut up into pieces and getting burned with an iron on page 52. I think that Marji having finally witnessed violence really changes the way she depicted violence. She no longer always sees violence as heroic actions, and she begins to see the protesting as it actually is.
