#i also kind of read cursed child in the aftermath of a drunken intimate conversation with my mother

[robotlesbianjavert]

*invasive asks, don't have to answer if you don't want* I keep wondering what is the appeal of slasher movies (nothing wrong with them, just not my thing)? I never read The Cursed Child, what's that about and what do you like about it?

these are good questions don’t worry xoxo

a) i can’t actually explain my penchant for slasher movies in a tumblr-wise moral manner, bc obviously slasher is a genre that tends to be filled with shit like fetishization and a demonization of mental illness and whatever else i can’t list it all right now it’s just a very flawed genre.  so i can’t really discuss it on that kind of intellectually moral level - they are very much a guilty pleasure that i feel i’m permitted.

the thing is that they are such a cheesy b-movie genre that it’s hard to be feel supremely guilty about it?  obviously they’ve gained some mainstream focus that necessitates serious discussion about various harmful shit going on, and i could go more into it if prompted and if i consider myself capable, but they are also SO DUMB.  not dumb some are smart-ish but you always know what to expect from them, you can always expect some dumb caricatures to get slaughtered, expect some final girl expy to limp their way to survival, you can expect the build up, and if there’s a surprise then that’s just an extra treat.  i guess it’s kind of cathartic, being able to exorcise some of my more serious anxieties through them, even when they get positively decadent in the blood and gore and sadism

i guess that while i also like horror as a general genre and am super happy to discuss horror films that take themselves more seriously (ie babadook, get out, that kind of stuff i sincerely believe that horror has great potential for commentary that often gets overlooked or underdeveloped), it’s a bit easier to latch onto singular slasher villains fandom-wise (your michael’s and jason’s and i guess the freddy’s altho freddy can go choke) than it is for more concept-based horrors, bc you don’t NECESSARILY have to take them seriously and you can just have some fun with them (altho they do have their place in a serious discussion, like how michael and jason are horrors that stalk otherwise safe environments, or how freddy is literally thematically about violation)

it’s hard to really explain in a justifiable way rather than a guilty-pleasure way, and i can’t really argue that i’m somehow a morally superior person for liking them and i don’t want to bc that’s dumb and exhausting.  they just tend to be fun i guess.

b) okay so what cursed child is about is essentially the relationship between harry and his son, albus severus, and how they are both essentially similar in ways that, coupled with harry’s complicated legacy and upbringing, drive them apart and eventually bring them back together, particularly in their opinions on hogwarts - this results in albus jr attempting to one-up his father via what albus understands as his first failure (cedric’s death) through time travel.  things escalate from there.

honestly i think that cursed child is a really important continuation of the themes and lessons from the main harry potter series in a more grown-up sense, and i really hate how it’s been spoiled on this site by a bunch of dumb spoilers that never fit well out of context.

like part of the problem i think is that a lot of ppl online tend to a) overidealize harry as some sassy angel child and b) try to freeze him at 11-17 years old rather than consider how his adolescent experiences might map onto who is is as an adult father.  so when he says “sometimes i wish you weren’t my son”, they decide to ignore the context leading up to that moment (albus essentially needling and baiting harry and accidentally touching upon triggers relating to his past abuse, and the two of them essentially having two different conversations) and then everything afterwards (harry’s horror and guilt over speaking in a moment of anger and spite, as he was prone to in the main series, and his desperation to protect and apologize to albus in a time where he’s triggered for a sustained period of time and afraid that his greatest enemy is somehow returning), and decide to declare that jkr must not know her own characters if she dares to write harry as a “bad dad”.  as much as ppl like to try and discuss how terrible it was for harry to suffer abuse at the dursley’s, they sure seem to want to underestimate how it affects him in the long run.  and by fuck does cursed child dig into what harry went through with the dursley’s, particularly petunia!  he’s having nightmares about her and this gets discussed and ppl still like to act like this play misrepresents how he suffered!  it’s so fucking stupid!

i guess i also can’t really lie - i initially bought into all the bad hype surrounding the play when spoilers were released, tho i hope in a more muted way than a lot of ppl i followed, and i only really got interested when i read a particularly moving think-piece about snape, and then i knew i had to have it bc i cannot stress enough how snape was One Of Those Characters that i latched onto in my childhood, and how it felt good to be a bit vindicated in the face of how this website trashes him.  also i cried a lot w snape bc it’s such good closure for his character, it helps you understand how his character potentially developed in the light of the main series, and also i got a better understanding of dumbledore too like you got the impression after the kings cross chapter in dh but when he admitted his insecurities re: how he only hurts the ppl he loves in cc?  it literally like blew his character wide open for me, it really helped me piece together a lot of the things i was unsure about with him.  so i also think it provides a lot of retroactive understanding and clarification of the characters that some ppl like to deliberately misinterpret for notes 

also ppl’s complaints about the time-travel plots are fucking stupid to be perfectly honest, esp in comparison to POA.  first off, poa did hint that it’s possible to change the timeline, cc established that we are working with very different time-travel tools than in poa, and thirdly in poa time-travel was a plot device and in cc it’s a thematic device so who even gives a fuck honestly.

basically: i think the play is a vital and important continuation and conclusion of the original series and its thematic elements, and if ppl don’t like then what the fuck ever but at least they can try to dislike it on legitimate grounds rather than things they heard secondhand or deliberately misinterpreted/decided didn’t fit with their headcanon

i can actually talk like.  a lot about this play bc there was a lot of what i liked and what i think tumblr should like if everyone could carefully remove their heads from their asses.  there are a few things i think could have been improved (while i don’t think it was necessarily baiting, i do believe scorpius/albus was a sorely missed opportunity), the play is more positive than it negative and i would kill to see it onstage.  i guess if ppl don’t like reading script it’s fine but honestly i loved the script, but i’m also fairly used to reading script so idk

also it justified my belief that hermione would be an awful teacher and i feel vindicated even tho i have not seen anyone talk about it tbh

also it made my mother cry (in a good way) and she loved it and that’s literally all the assurance anyone should need. my mom’s a good person and everyone should trust her.