#anti stephen king

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

This ask is a bingo card free space to talk about Stephen King stuff, cuz your last ask makes it seem like you have interesting stuff to say.

I don't know about interesting, and these are more personal opinions than anything else rather than meta of any kind, but I guess I can give it an answer.

Stephen King is a great novelist. I will start off with that immediately. The Dark Tower Series, while I have my gripes, remains one of my favorite fantasy series to this date (the first four books at least, after that is... for the second half of this post). Carrie, despite being his first novel, is iconic and memorable for a reason and packs a hard punch even when you know the Prom is coming.

This isn't really King so much but while there are many shitty film adaptations of his work there are several unbelievably good film adaptations to include The Green Mile, Stand by Me, the reboot IT Part 1 (Part 2 was... alright but not nearly as good), The Shining, and I'm sure others I either haven't seen yet or am momentarily forgetting about.

He's not one of my favorite novelists, but he is very good, and he's written some great works.

That said, he has his hang-ups and weirdness that he will almost always dump into a story.

What I was referencing in this post was that Stephen King has certain... I guess we'll call them Stephen King tropes. These are things that will pop up more often than not in Stephen King novels. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but you get an idea what to expect if you read enough of his work.

Rape/Sexual Abuse

There's a lot of rape in Stephen King novels and a lot of the time it's fucking weird.

IT, infamously, in the book has a gang bang scene where all the twelve your old boys have sex with the girl to save the universe. (No, seriously, this happens in the book. Funny that no film adaptation kept that one).

In The Dark Tower series we have the incubus/succubus that shows up more than once, and yes, part of it is that the story is based on Arthurian lore where there is canonically rape that's very important (Morganna's seduction of/sleeping with Arthur under false pretenses) but it's also just... really really uncomfortable and weird.

It's not every novel, but sometimes you see it and you just want to ask King, "Why?"

"Why, Stephen King, am I reading this scene which I'm not sure needed to be in this book? Did you really have to put this in here?"

The Stephen King Villains

Stephen King has a few types of villains, there's your primordial inhuman evil that takes advantage of human weakness (see the hotel in The Shining, the cemetery in Pet Semetary, IT in IT, etc.) and then there's your human cast of villains.

These vary too, but there's a certain flavor of them that I don't see anywhere else, and that's his teenage villains.

Usually, they themselves turn out to be victims of domestic abuse, which informs their violence in turn as they're caught in a tragic cycle, but you get these hyperviolent/vindictive kids who are just going to fuck up your life for little reason.

(The closest non Stephen King counterpart I can think of is Harry Potter's Marauders and specifically Sirius Black whose goading Severus Snape into nearly getting eaten by a werewolf is exactly the kind of shit that would happen in Carrie.)

I actually do like his villains, both his eldritch evil and the human pawns, and I like that the humans do tend to show depth in that they have reasons to become what they do and that usually a choice involved to become worse for some reason.

That said, they are a trope of his, and you know them when you see them.

Other Tropes

There are other things that come up, but as I haven't read most of Stephen King's works, or even most of his famous works, I don't feel comfortable extrapolating in the case that there really are counterexamples out there.

I've just come to expect that when I read Stephen King I'll get great stuff but I may also get fucking bonkers things as well. Sometimes the bonkers aids the story and sometimes I could do without it.

[icedsodapop]

Good god he annoys me so much

[scroofy-was-here]

i just took a trip to the dark side and found out that milkvans call us bylosers (how did I not know this???), honestly i've never felt so complimented in my entire life, I CAN NOW REFERENCE BYLER SHIPPERS AS A BIG LOSERS CLUB AND THAT MAKES ME SOO HAPPY

bylosers

bylovers <333

thank you veryy much milkvans!! :D /srs

[lunalovegood2]

Today's a good day.

[ID: a tweet from Stephen King reading "Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up! I've been waiting 7 years to say that. Karma sucks, doesn't it, Donald?"]

[demiaroacejadeharley]

Finding out that Stephen King is openly defending The Marvels movie on Twitter is the best thing I've seen on the internet. Even though he doesn't care about MCU movies, he agrees that the hate the movie got is from misogynistic and racist adolescent (and definitely grow ass adult men) fan boys who are appalled by anything that doesn't center around white, cishet, Christian men. These pathetic ass men who are shitting on the movie and Brie Larson need to get off the internet and need to go scrub their armpits, wash their asscracks, and put on deodorant.

[unitedfrontvarietyhour]

Yes, Stephen King is hella libbed up. Always has been.

[crafantale]

The website Prosecraft has been nabbing popular and indie creators work for generative ai

The website has been deleted

But not the data

It's still being used for shaxpir software where they still get money

Thread

[azelmaandeponine]

"Drayton is an abusive friend and an all around shit person"

LMAOOO Kieran Stans are on a WHOLE DIFFERENT LEVEL of reality. Like what are they on.

[caintooth]

Carrie 1976 / “I support women who start fires” shirt

[richierambles]

Being serious here.

If anyone who reads this simps for the bowers gang, or likes them, or wants to be their friend, or feels sorry for them, or whatever-the-fuck, get the fuck out of my blog<3

This is me being serious rn, no matter how good of a person you are, if you like those assholes in my eyes that automatically makes you a fucking ass. And before you say sum shit like "but they're fictional characters who cares", I do. I care. 😘

[impulsivesuperrobin]

reddie song this reddie song that

friends don’t keep secrets by stephen dawes is a childhood benverly song if you even care

[kittykaspbrak]

It’s actually kind of embarrassing how many people I just blocked on tiktok cause they said they hated Eddie Kaspbrak….

Like wdym HATE? What did he do? Like my brain doesn’t understand how you can hate him. I know it’s childish af but I will actually have a mental breakdown if i see Eddie Kaspbrak slander he means the absolute fucking world to me like i can’t even explain it

[pitchannawarmsourblackhearts]

Rise of the Guardians (2012) // "Shawshank Redemption", Stephen King // Frozen 2 (2019) // "“hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it”, Lana del Rey

[tentaclecats]

just started a new shifting account on tiktok!

if you're interested in that kinda thing, the user is @avi4n.fru1t, theres also a hashtag for my posts #avianfruit, AND ill include a link:D here https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTNWeunw6/

(aka i posted my first tiktok, and immediately got shadowbanned. and its been 17 hours and it has 10 views. i spent 4 hours on this😭)

[emtozier21]

[emblazons]

“But the GA” babygirl...I'm sorry, but giving a damn about how well the general audience understands this particular show would be like a graduate student at MIT walking into a remedial 10th chemistry class and asking them for their opinions on rocket propulsion.

The lack of understanding and experience they have with good stories and how narratives are told matters, especially when you consider that every person making stranger things has experience with telling good stories. They have spent decades critically consuming stories and learning about who makes them.

The Duffers are not over there worrying about what TruckDriver012 is saying about their story because he grew up in the Bible Belt and thinks they deserve more cishet white male rep because they like Mike, or about MlvnLvrMills saying “but byler would come out of left field because I think the monologue was romantic." Stop letting this anti-intellectual streak define who you go to for opinions. I'm BEGGING.