#but this novel is Identifiably By A Redditor

[flintandpyrite]

Ok so I’m reading the mystery flesh pit novel and it is really fun but…oh god…the medical knowledge.

“I got hiv

And then I took the medication. (The one and only. You know, the hiv medication. The medication that treats hiv.) and I was allergic to it.”

“Guess I’ll die. Or go looking for a cure in the form of a mysterious cosmic horror buried in the earth’s crust? Idk maybe both ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

PSA: if you suspect you have HIV, please go to see a medical professional and get referred to a specialist. And if you suspect you are allergic to your medication please consult with said specialist before discontinuing the meds and haring off on a doomed suicidal journey into a cosmic horrorterror composed mainly of flesh. There are usually many options for treatment (in the case of HIV, upwards of 100 drugs) and even if you are somehow allergic to ALL of them, mitigating efforts can help you take them without dying.

[hometownrockstar]

pet peeve of mine is when redditors complain abt cormac mccarthy's writing style n call it bad just cause he doesnt use conventional punctuation like semicolons or quotation marks or (rarely used) commas like shut up and appreciate unconventional writing GOD, its literally not bad either and not confusing like i read the road at age 16 or 17 and that was when i hadnt really read anything other than warrior cats and ya novels and i got the hang of it like right away bc he writes in a very particular way to make the dialogue stand out Despite the lacking quotation marks. his writing style is a very smart use of minimalist prose and flow that get across the scenes perfectly and makes you identify characters with no names by their dialogue and actions alone, he writes in a storytelling folklore format and its very good and renowned for a REASON. like it or not you cant go and call it deliberately bad writing or intentionally confusing

[churchyardgrim]

HEART OF MIDNIGHT by J. Robert King

[intro post]

oh boy that is a cover innit. god.

Spirit Halloween wolfman in tights aside, this one gives me some mixed feelings. bit of good, bit of bad, averages out into something i enjoyed but that left a weird taste in my mouth

our tale begins in fair Kartakass. do you like wolves? is your ideal political system American Idol? do you like, really like wolves? then boy howdy have i got the dread domain for you!

yes this place appears to be 50% bards and 50% werewolves. or wolfweres. or other, wolf-shaped things, it's just all wolves all the time ok

also you become mayor by winning a singing contest. that's literally the first thing that happens, is our uhhhhhh sure let's call him a hero for now, Casimir, charisma-rolls his way into ousting the current reigning mayor, who is also his estranged dad, whomst he hates.

and who is also a werewolf! shocking, i know.

if you've got two brain cells to rub together here you can figure out the next twist; Casimir, as the child of a werewolf, is also a fuckmothering werewolf. so, naturally, he lures his ex-mayor dad out of the public eye and kills him in a nasty lil dogfight

the downside to all this, is that in order to pull it off Casimir had claimed to be the bardic protégé of Harkon Lukas, the meistersinger of the next largest city in Kartakass. Lukas tolerates this for unknown reasons, and isn't shy about using that leverage over his new pupil.

shame the kid turns out to be shit at governing! he wants to Fix Problems, which manifests in bandaid solutions that piss off the guild leaders and hereditary nobility, and also he bullies his friends :( it's very sad.

there's also a bizarre cousin romance played remarkably straight? not even a token "oh she's adopted" excuse, just full on "my estranged father's sister's grandkid is the hottest person i've ever seen actually" and it goes on for most of the book. granted, several US states have looser consanguinity laws than that, so i guess it's a matter of personal taste, but even putting that aside the romance is lackluster and typical of the genre, and also the plot physically recoils from the mere possibility that this lady might catch werwolfism from her beau, which obligates us to give it a failing grade

let women be great hairy beasts dammit! half the guys in this plot get to rampage around as furries, i think we deserve some feral wolfwomen! give us the monstrous feminine, the redditor's worst nightmare, hairy and bloodthirsty and all beast no maiden!

my consolation prize for this travesty is that the entry for Kartakass in the Doomsday Gazetteers (a campaign supplement published at around the same time, composed of in-character travelogs through each domain) delivers in full on my lady werewolf cravings with a handful of delightful npcs. the entry also references the events of the novel, through the perspective of the traveling scholar conscripted to research each domain, which is very interesting to read lemme tell u

but i digress; we have werewolf fuckery to get on with

so Lukas, to our considerable surprise, is not a werewolf! no, dear reader, he is a wolfwere. what the fuck is a wolfwere? why it's a werewolf in reverse, because of course it is. a trickster wolf that takes a human shape to fuck with ppl, untethered to moon phases and other such pedestrian things. silver does nothing to them, but they're really not fans of iron. some fae ancestry in there? maybe.

anyway Lukas says to our friend Casimir he says, "kid you're a shit politician and you're an even worse predator. maybe stop trying to be nice and start hunting your constituents for sport?"

Casimir, who is an asshole but is at least trying, says "fuck that actually" and spends a few chapters trying to be a human person while his teenage hormones lycanthropy continually throws wrenches in the works

eventually Casimir's human friends identify Lukas as a persistent saboteur, and Casimir himself as someone who is both a supernatural predator and also a selfish jerk, and there's some confused escape and/or assassination attempts, and this is where the plot goes in circles for a bit. there's betrayals, and double-crossings, and un-betrayals, and a lot of ppl acting on conflicting information, and it honestly goes on a bit long for me

the final climax is very fun though, with Casimir attempting to out Lukas as a monster without realizing that uh…. buddy his pack is everywhere. u are so outnumbered.

so it's a big fun wolfbrawl, and Casimir's clever enough not to get cornered, and also to poison Lukas so he can't actually change shape, so for a while you're not sure who's gonna come out on top here

but spoilers, it's Lukas. dude's just too wiley, and also too lucky; Casimir's the one what gets outed as a monster, and tho Lukas barely survives the mauling, he does survive while Casimir's ladyfriend tearfully puts him down

very tragic, very sad, but damn if it isn't a fun show to watch

overall i'm torn on this book. on the one hand it scratches my chronic itch for werewolves, not just Wolf Shifters; they're actual monsters here, wild animals, and the book does not shy away from the brutality of it. 

it's also something that one of my horror discussion podcasts touches on, which is that werewolves are different from possession or haunting stories, bc it's not some outside force taking control of you or invading your body; The Werewolf Is You. that's the core of the conflict here, is that as much as you are this human person with goals and family and a desire to accomplish good things in the world, you are also a base and feral animal that just wants to hunt and consume the things that attract you. and this book does that very well i think, even though i suspect it doesn't know that's what it's doing.

the downside is, well, the prose just doesn't live up to its subject matter. something's missing in a way that's hard to articulate, it comes across very bland. there's some very nice gory descriptions, and it makes a valiant effort to get the feral vibe right, but it falls short of what i really want it to be with the visceral focus and drive that i like best

the other downside is hoo boy is there a lot of suicidal ideation in this book. most of our characters die in genuinely tragic ways, it starts with a suicide and ends with a suicide, and in my opinion it crosses the line from Horror to Depressing. there's fun twisting the knife and then there's twisting the knife in a way that just leaves you unhappy about it, and this is the latter

so yeah, it's a mixed bag! worth a shot for the fun hairy bits, but be warned it doesn't pull punches in the mental health department

[him-e]

And the fact that LF saw all those “Palpatine had children wtf??” reactions and retconned Rey’s father to be Palpatine’s clone in the novelization, lmao. The very CONCEPT of what they’re trying to do sucks, no backstory or rationalization can justify a third-movie retcon like this. For professional storytellers they seem to really struggle grasping the basics

The very CONCEPT of what they’re trying to do sucks

I wish there was a concept that sucked here, at least I could criticize it. But there is no identifiable concept or idea behind this, there’s just senseless scrambling from one half-assed version of the story to the other, hoping that if you keep retconsplaining and dumping convoluted details in extra materials, at some point the story will start to make sense.

was TROS Palpatine the real deal, resurrected? Was he a clone? Did OT Palpatine have spare clones of himself like Bancroft in Altered Carbon? Did he have children or clone-children? If Rey’s father was Palpatine’s clone, why didn’t he look like Palpatine? If he was Palpatine’s clone (or even his natural child), why didn’t Original Palpatine go after HIM instead of Rey? Did his power skip a generation? Why?

All we know is that “somehow, Palpatine returned” and that he wants Rey. Who is, somehow, his descendant. He wants her dead, no wait, he wants her to be his heir, no wait, he wants her to kill Ben, no wait, he wants her to kill HIM so he can live in her or possess her or... something.

All of this because they crapped themselves so hard at the idea of an episode IX without an evil old raisin to make a big cgi fight against, and worse, of having to write Rey without relying on the mystery of her origins or where her powers come from. You know, like a real character rather than a puzzle for redditors to solve.

(was it SO difficult to go down the Dark Rey path by revealing she unintentionally destroyed her parents’ ship the way she did with the one where Chewie was supposedly on? And then she repressed her memories along with her powers until Ben forced her to face the truth? and she kept digging and digging through her memories until she finally figured out the whole thing, which also made her open the pandora’s box of her bottled up darkness, and put her on Palpatine’s radar? was it so hard to make Rey’s darkness organic with her known backstory and part of her journey to find her true identity, rather than a product of someone else’s genes? oh no, wait... Rey is supposed to be *innately good*, so they needed to make her the miracle good girl inexplicably born out of bad blood, just like ben was the cursed bad child inexplicably born out of good blood, right?)

[dear-wormwoods]

I’ve lost the mood for the supercut with Andy Muschietti saying reddie is one sided though. Like I don’t want to watch just Richie pine more or whatever with Eddie (in the movie) having no interest

Yeah like… no one wants to see that lmao. He SAID he wanted to leave everything ambiguous (by not giving them labels in-universe and not confirming or denying Eddie’s feelings) to allow for audience interpretation because Stephen King also used subtext to leave everything up to interpretation in the novel, and I really wish he just stuck with that.

This is why I’m personally a fan of the Author is Dead brand of media criticism and really dislike the Word of God approach. Author is Dead is what gives us so much freedom as readers and viewers to identify with characters, interpret symbolism, and expand on relationship dynamics in a way that tends to be ruined if creators start talking too much lol. If people start taking everything creators say as the final say, or the Word of God, it just ends up not being fun anymore and people just get upset and annoyed. Like… speculating about Harry Potter was all fun and games until JK Rowling started tweeting dumb crap, for example. It’s just better for everyone if creators let their work speak for itself.

The movie makes it clear that Richie loved Eddie and it’s reasonable to assume that Eddie returned the feelings through subtext. The book is full of bi and gay coding, which is why the ship has existed for 30+ years. I don’t need or want Andy, Gary, or Hader coming out after the fact and applying labels to things in order to shut down speculation because… it literally doesn’t matter what they say. What matters is that the work can be interpreted in a certain way, and the work belongs to the audience now.

Stephen King generally understands that Author is Dead is better - he gives thumbs up or thumbs down to various adaptations of his work, but he generally avoids talking about symbolism and subtext because he knows that the reader’s interpretation is what really matters. James Ransone gets it too, which is why he’s been skirting around questions about Eddie by saying that it’s not his place to confirm, deny, or label anything because then he’d be telling fans with emotional attachments to characters/pairings/ideas that they’re wrong and he’s not about that life (hoping he continues to do this, personally).

That all being said, if we do end up with a supercut, I’m still hoping for a flashback that shows Richie crushing on Eddie, but it better not involve Eddie rejecting him.

So my advice to anyone who is upset about what’s been said in interviews and to anyone who is using those interviews to tell other people their interpretations are wrong is this: Author is Dead. Art is subjective. Granted, some analyses are better than others (lookin at you, Redditors who think symbolism doesn’t exist), but it’s really up to you to find meaning in media and hold onto that. It’s okay to ignore interviews and stick with your own interpretation.

And don’t worry too much about the supercut.