I think I just gotta start writing the thing, so I'm gonna try to write a bit a day and we'll see how it goes:
Alice wakes up and looks out the window, and... That's weird, it's so much emptier.
Where's the port town facing the sea with their little red roofs and white walls that she can usually see in the distance?
Where are the smoking chimneys of big cargo boats out in the port, made small by the distance?
Where are the cranes, seemingly still ever time she looks, but somehow always hard at work, loading and unloading?
Where is the touch of modernisation?
Out in the distance, all she sees are trees that should not be there and rolling green hills with no roads with people and cars and trucks cutting through them, ever busy.
She opens the window, and the breeze blows in, but it's crisper, fresher, not carrying the smoky tang of vehicles and boats alike, something she never thought of, never noticed until now.
It's quieter too.
There isn't the sound of people and cars and boats in the distance, only the call of birds and the rustling of leaves, so much closer than before.
BANG!
The door startles her and she turns to see Marcus there, panting, anxious, his mouth gaping open, mouthing words he cannot find or voice.
She knows before he speaks what he's going to say.
They aren't in their world anymore.
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If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)
At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.
Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.
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I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.
And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.
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The reason Animorphs works as a deconstruction of the kid hero archetype is that it comes at it from a place of respect for the genre, and for the children reading it.
It never denies the kids agency, because it is a book for children, who want to read about children being given agency. Animorphs doesn't treat its child soldiers as victims the way a story aimed at adults would. They are full agents within the story who make moral choices. The fact that they are children is treated as a tragedy, but it's not treated as something that absolves them of any responsibility.
It plays by the rules. These kids are the only people who can save the world. They cannot trust the adults in their lives. It just takes that story—the story it's telling—seriously.
The message of animorphs isn't actually of "isn't it fucked up that this book I read when I was a kid sent a twelve year old on an adventure" it just uses its take on the kid hero genre to get across the actual message, which is War Is Hell
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Imo the best ending to Supernatural would have been to just stop with them alive on a random hunt or them finding jobs and living the life they just wanted or whatever.
And then the story just fucking STOP, because Chuck is not here anymore, so they are no longer part of a story they are finally free. And we could still write and read fanfic about how they live after they won.
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I do find it facinating how Dracula Daily has turned Dracula into a different kind of myth now that we're in its third year running. I've seen a few people compare it to Hadestown, or a timeloop. The enjoyment isn't JUST from engaging with the story now, it's engaging with the experience, and while the emails are still the same as previous years, we've been through this before.
The way we as an audience interact with this story and this way of telling the story changes the genre. Its no longer a gothic horror, classic lit story. It's become a mythology, a tragedy, a repeating loop. Jonathan Harker returns to the castle every year. Every year it happens again. And that changes it, builds up new mythos around it, even if the words stay exactly the same.
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