#but he's not just an addict. he had likes and dislikes and aspirations and ambitions

[elytrafemme]

i mightve sent smth like this already. can't remember tbh. but like. cough syrup is prolly the first fic i've read with a psychotic character who isn't just. written weirdly? like. idk how to explain it. cs!ranboo just seems. so human?? which was and still is really comforting. bc i read cough syrup a bit after i kinda. started coming to terms with the fact that i'm prolly. psychotic to some extent. and like. i'm just some lanky dude who shops off the hot topic clearance rack. and cs!ranboo's like that too. and. idk. where i was going with this. but yeah. thank u for cough syrup it makes me feel human

it was around chapter 8 or 9, i think, when i had talked to my therapist about some issues i was having and she told me it could have been stress induced illusions. that later snow-balled rapidly into depression-linked psychosis, and then into just psychosis, since y'know, i started writing cough syrup in the tail-end of my psychotic break early 2021. took me a lot longer to realize that's what that had been, though.

and y'know i had intended to make cs!ranboo struggle with psychosis at some capacity, since that just fit c!ranboo's character, but it became a lot more personal to me at that point. cs!ranboo was the only place i felt i could talk about these delusions and all this shit i was dealing with, and in all the times i was sobbing because i had lost so much to this perceived failure of my mind, i thought that maybe i could write this character who has the same issues as me, getting a chance to be happy. to find people that love him, who will stay by him, who he could find some kind of stabilizing and lasting peace with.

in a lot of ways, though i bitch now about having to write his chapters, cs!ranboo was my way of coping with a lot of things i was going through. and you know i was actually scared of posting it at a certain point, because it feels so fucking vulnerable. you don't really see a lot of psychotic characters in media that aren't stereotyped, oftentimes written by non psychotic people following a checklist and inevitably messing up somewhere because they're being careless and then find themselves creating this caricature. i don't ever claim that my writing is perfect or good or without flaws, but at the very least my portrayals are genuine in some sense, that i'm using experience and research and both combined to guide it.

i think one of the best things to ever come out of cough syrup is people finding comfort in the characters. so many people found solidarity with cs!tubbo from the beginning, and that grew into projecting things onto him that i'm happy to accept because hell they're not just my characters, they're characters i'm sharing with you all. but what gets me is how many people find comfort in cs!ranboo, like you, because i was so worried about casting that light on everything and am so glad now that i did it.

it's incredibly fucking important to me that the characters i write feel like people. cs!tubbo isn't just an addict, he's a teen who likes checking on NASA's annual halloween-themed posters and who only gets extremely competitive when playing Wii sports games and creates all these associations in his head and fucking sucks at making paper cranes but does them anyway as a love language. cs!tommy isn't just an abuse victim, he's a teen who's favorite color is red and half his clothes are like that and he knows all the cool parks and shops in town and he loves walking around and finding more places and he likes superheroes and animal crossing.

and cs!ranboo isn't just his psychosis, he's a teen that likes baking but hates having to bake cupcakes and will complain about that, and he likes taking photos of other people and hanging onto them for a while, and he likes the idea of falling in love but is a little clumsy with it, and he has a questionable fashion sense but it makes him feel comfortable, and he likes english class but hates chemistry

and all i hope to do is show that (1) these characters' lives are affected by their struggles, but it's not all they are as people (2) you are deserving of love and WILL be loved no matter what you struggle through (3) if you connect to any of the cast, hi i love you you're going to make it you're going to be happy.

sorry for the long tangent. i just - this ask made me feel really happy. because hearing this, that people can find some connection with cough syrup? it's all i've ever wanted. if i hear that then i have a reason to keep writing it, i have a reason to fight through annoying ass chapters and the whole lot of it.

wishing you the best anon. thank you for sharing this with me.

[thevividgreenmoss]

Many reviewers took the fictional Elena at her word, that she was simply trying to understand her friend and that, in the end, the writing of her novel and Elena’s own professional successes redeem the tragedy of Lila’s fate. Sure, Lila’s genius is trampled to inconsequentiality by a harsh life. Sure, Lila’s efforts to grow her family’s shoe business are co-opted by the local Camorra crime syndicate, whom Lila hates.  Sure, her daughter is killed or kidnapped as a young child, her brother dies of a drug overdose, and her son becomes an addict. Sure, Lila is cast aside or ignored by their grade-school teacher (she is a “pleb” whom Elena should avoid), by her bosses, by her doctors, by Elena herself. Sure, Lila literally disappears without a trace.

But don’t worry, these reviewers comfort us, Elena won’t let Lila be forgotten. Because Elena has written a book about her.

Here is the New York Times’ take on Elena in its review of the final novel:

Elena lives on to make her plodding progress from vulnerability to education to self-realization. She becomes, in short, normal — and this, Ferrante suggests, is where the female drive toward autonomy, with all its racking, successive waves, will ultimately deliver us: into a ­reality that is, if not transformed, at least better adjusted. Elena and Lila may both suspect that Lila possesses the greater, more radical brilliance. But the achievement of these novels belongs solely to ­Elena.

Why would we want “radical brilliance” when we can simply be “better adjusted” to the injustices of the world, to the decimation of our friends and communities?

The New York Review of Books echoed this contrast: Elena is the subject, the actor, and doer, and Lila serves as little more than her “inspiration”:

Elena has the discipline to channel her gifts, as she shows in the writing of her story. But she could not have done so without the inspiration of Lila, who is the more brilliant but too mercurial to fulfill her promise, whether as an author (the story she wrote as a child, The Blue Fairy, mesmerizes Elena), shoe designer, or entrepreneur.

This reviewer’s explanation of Lila’s creative and business failures is…interesting. Lila is “mercurial.” Forget that Lila was a ten-year-old child reliant on her father to pay for schooling he couldn’t afford and didn’t value for her, a father who responded to her relentless requests to attend middle school by throwing her through their apartment window; forget that Lila returned from her honeymoon so bruised from beatings (related to her arguments with her husband about his handling of her family’s shoe business) that she was too ashamed to be seen by Elena; forget that Lila is later brutalized as a worker in a sausage factory, forget that her romantic and business partner is wrongfully imprisoned, forget about the drugs, forget about the kidnapping of her child. Forget about Lila’s lack of access, her lack of options, her material vulnerability even as she fights for dignity and autonomy. Forget that every expression of her dazzling brilliance has been met at best by indifference and at worst by outright violence. Lila’s just got a bad case of the “mercurials”!

The New Yorker followed suit, casting Elena’s artistic effort as an admirable expression of the suffering, disenfranchisement, and collapse of Lila and the rest of their community:

To Lila’s oppressive disorder…[Elena] will oppose her own, once-despised instinct for order. Dispersal will meet containment; dialect, Italian. This is an old literary trick, or at least as old as Proust: to tell a story of pain and defeat and then, at the end, say that it will all be redeemed by art, by a book—indeed, the book you are reading. Lena will write for months and months, for as long as it takes, she says, to give Lila “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve.” She will thus calm her friend, and herself—and, to reach beneath the metaphor, rescue life from grief, clarity from chaos, without denying the existence of grief and chaos. She pulls her chair up to her desk. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she says. Art wins. We win.

Who is the “we” here? The New Yorker can admit—and does not seem bothered by—the fact that the winning “we” does not include Lila. (In fact, I would argue that no one “wins,” least of all we as readers and Elena as a writer.) It is troubling that this reviewer sees Elena as a success, and it is troubling that she shares Elena’s resentment against Lila, who has done little more than suffer and fail the entire length of four novels.

Lila’s disposability is again articulated in an Atlantic review in which the reviewer describes Lila cutting herself out of her family pictures, one of her attempts to make herself disappear. “But Lila’s ambition backfires—she’s more present in those butchered snapshots with their glaring voids than she was in photographic form.” Again, the reviewer does not seem bothered by the fact that the most accurate and poetic representation of Lila is absence. Nor does the reviewer consider that Lila herself may be exercising some artistic agency in this act.

In these reviews, Lila’s unrelenting suffering is not taken seriously in part because Lila is not seen as a real person. The Slate reviewer states this unequivocally:

In truth, Lila is a character so extreme, so unadulterated in all her qualities—fierceness, courage, defiance, honesty, resourcefulness, determination, self-reliance, and, eventually, pessimism—that she never seems persuasively real. Actual human beings relent every now and then. They doubt. Instead, Lila is a personification, the distillation of everything admirable, if also often harsh, in the neighborhood that Elena has tried to leave.

In this reviewer’s world, bright, creative people like Lila who survive in poverty and aspire to a better world simply cannot be real. There are no people who suffer and fight as Lila suffers and fights. I will grant that the version of Lila we get through Elena’s eyes is purposefully incomplete. We don’t know how Lila relents, we don’t know Lila’s doubts, because we never intimately know Lila’s point of view. This is key.

But how do you read about this captivating woman battling for her existence around the edges of Elena’s life and not want to know more about her, to hear her story from her directly? To say Lila does not seem real betrays a lack of empathy that feels insurmountable. Lila embodies the forgotten, the misunderstood, the lost, the losers of what feels like a social and economic lottery. Under global capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, that is a lot of people. The blindness of these reviewers to Lila matches the political blindnesses of the class of people who benefit from these structures.

...The turmoil in Elena about her limitations in understanding her origins is important but unaddressed in these reviews: why can’t Elena as an adult understand the place where she grew up and where she currently lives? Why does she remain stubbornly ignorant about the political realities of this world and, by extension, about her oldest and closest friend? This is not the good-faith effort of a writer or a person trying to capture Lila and their shared community.

Even when Elena’s willful blindness was acknowledged by the reviewers, it was to unsatisfying ends. The Guardian grapples with Elena’s decision to throw her friend’s childhood journals into the river at the beginning of Book II. Lila, worried her new husband will read them, entrusts the journals to Elena; Elena pores over them and, feeling “exasperated,” disliking “feeling Lila on me and in me,” drops the journals into the river. The Guardian review rationalizes this callous act: while Elena “minds her language, Lila says what she likes, but nothing that can be published. That’s why Elena throws Lila’s notes away: though hope remains in the box, what Lila had to say must have been unbearable.” The underlying premise that we should not be writing or reading things that are “unbearable” goes unexamined, along with the contradiction between Elena’s stated purpose—keeping her friend from disappearing—and her actions—tossing her friend’s journals into a river. This level of cognitive dissonance takes a lot of practice.

The logic of these reviews is trapped in a worldview in which Elena the self-realized class-climber deserves to exist, while Lila—because she is too radically brilliant, because she describes a reality that is unbearable and disordered, because she is too “mercurial”—does not. Materially, the great difference in Elena’s and Lila’s lives is that, when they are ten and their teacher recommends they both continue their schooling, only Elena’s family pays for her to attend middle school and beyond. Lila’s does not. Everything else flows from this: Elena plods steadily up the economic and social ladder, taking on the language, behavior, and values of the elite to join their class; Lila drifts in ways bewildering to Elena, carried by waves of poverty, abuse, and what Elena perceives as self-destruction.

...What does Lila mean when she says she’s been wrong about everything since the dolls? Is she wrong then or is she wrong now, and about what? What is Lila’s purpose?

Elena doesn’t know. This is how the series ends: not with the triumph of Elena’s art but with its failure. Not with order and clarity but with Elena and the reader scrambling after Lila for answers. The loss is tragic, and we feel it acutely at this unresolved ending. The triumph here is absolutely not Elena’s, who cannot understand her friend, who cannot understand the story of her own life. If anything, the triumph of these novels belongs to Lila, who was able to poke through this medium that was not constructed for her, this book she was not able to write and publish herself, to communicate the harrowing story of her disappearance.