#johnny get called robert cause its pre war

[vince-linder]

Rockerboy origins

Just a lil bit of fluff for my own HC. The first meeting of Kerry and Johnny, in elementary school, back in rural Texas. Johnny still get called Robert, cause. Its his first name, and he probs changed how he want to get called after war.

It was a normal Monday morning in College Station, a usual warm summer day was about to start, the birds were chirping and the bees humming. "I don't wanna go back to this school, mum!", the small boy, may seven or eight years old looked up at his mother, hands on his hips and an angry look on his face. Brown eyes searching the gaze of his mother, but she was busy making breakfast. "You have to go, Robert. You are learning many important things for your later life." "Urghs. I am learning nothing important! They just keep us caged up. And I don't need all of this! I wanna be an artist when I am grown up!" "Stop with this stupid dream, Robert. You have to learn to get a proper job in the future."

"But I don't wanna have a 'proper' job. I wanna be free and do what I want!" "Robert John Linder!", her voice raised, not to an angry tone but enough to warn the young boy. "This talk is over. Get ready, I drove you over in ten."

"Yes Mum."

Half an hour later he was sitting in his classroom, in the last row and sitting direct next to the window. Robert was tilting his chair back and forth, playing around with it. He was bored. This whole building made him bored whenever he saw it. In the time he was caged up here, Robert dreamed of being outside, undergoing wild adventures, finding treasures and secret locations. Staring outside, seeing the sunrays dance through the green leaves of the nearby trees, just waiting for him to be climbed. To build a treehouse out of the dead branches and make it his fort. His private kingdom where everyone has to live according to his rules and decisions. If he would proclaim icecream for breakfast, it would be icecream for breakfast every day! He saw a squirrel running up the tree. This was of course one of the inhabitants of his kingdom. Sir Squeaky the First. A noble warrior, fighting for justice and nuts. "Robert! Sit straight!" The boy shifts his gaze to the front, a sigh escaping his lungs. As so often he didn't hear the bell, nor the teacher entering the class. Robert stops tilting his chair and scoots closer to his table with it. Playing around with his pencil was soothing, and far more fun than whatever the teacher was telling them to do or not to do. A pencil, the set square on the backside of it and it was nearly a plane. Ready to fight for the kingdom of the tree warriors. It would throw down nuts to every enemy of freedom. "You can sit next to Robert." This was the thing getting him out of his thoughts. Nobody ever should be next to him, he hated it. The other kids here were terrible. His gaze shifted, looking at the person who was seated next to him. Robert's face gets confused and he tilts his head. That kid was new.

"Who are you?" The new kid looks a bit shy, sitting down next to Robert and packing away his backpack. Robert openly stared at him. The new kid wasn't from here clearly. His taint was far too dark for this region, and his eyes looked... different. "Name's Kerry.", the boy looked at Robert, a small smile on his face, far too friendly.

"Kerry? That's a girl's name."

"NO! It's not!", Kerry looks totally offended, pouting slightly and crossing his arms. "Hangal."

Robert blinks, tilting his head again. This felt like an insult. But he never heard that word.

"What?!"

Kerry was still pouting, trying to ignore the bully next to him and follow the class. But Robert starts to flip little balls of paper at him, trying to get his attention back. When this 'boy' was sitting next to him, he had at least listened to him.

"Come on! What they tell is just boring. Tell me what you said!" "Called you a, uh. 'Hangal'.", Kerry looks up shortly, stopping his writing for a second. "A what now?"

"Someone incredibly dumb and stupid?" Kerry thinks for a moment, not finding the English word.

"You mean.. an idiot?" Robert tilts his head again, insults in another language. This was perfect. "Can you teach me more insults?"

"What?"

Kerry looks up, finally putting down his pencil. He looks up to Robert's face, brown eyes meeting, and sees the playfulness to his eyes. Kerry starts smiling. "Only if you teach me the English ones." "Cool. Yeah, I'll do. What language is that?" "Tagalog. I am from the philippines." "Never heard that." Robert smiled at the other boy. "But explain your look."

"And here everyone looks dumb?" Robert frowns, but starts giggling silently. "Uh-hu." They both try to contain their laughter, sitting next to each other and sharing lighthearted jokes. Until the teacher got enough of their shenanigans. "Be silent back there and follow the class! Robert, don't you dare to distract our new classmate!"

"Sorry, Mr. Johnson." both say in union. They lowered their voices, and kept on talking silently.

[thestorybehindthetale]

The Story Behind ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’

Wes Craven’s

A Nightmare on Elm Street

will celebrate its 30th anniversary on November 9… the day the original opened up in theaters and introduced sleepy teens to the terror that is, was and forever shall be Freddy Krueger. 

In preparation for the milestone, Craven has been sharing a ton of information about the creation – and impact – of his incredibly influential horror franchise, including how he came up with the idea in the first place.When he wasn’t busy sharing vital Nightmare on Elm Street information on Twitter, Wes Craven was taking part in a comprehensive oral history of Elm Street for Vulture. 

The primary players behind the film open up in great detail about what went in to the hiring of the cast, the creation of Freddy, and the landscape of horror in the early 1980s. With Craven coming off of Swamp Thing and The Hills Have Eyes Part II at the time, he needed to find something that was truly terrifying. And he found it in real life, so to speak.

The way Wes Craven describes it, he came up with the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street after reading an L.A. Times article about a family that had survived the Killing Fields in Cambodia. They made it to the United States, but a young boy in the family still found himself haunted by terrible nightmares while he slept. Craven says:

He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street."

The origin of Freddy Krueger? That’s awesome. And far more psychologically chilling than the parental vendetta that led to the birth of the on-screen Krueger – which also is explained in greater detail in the Vulture oral history. Burning the neighborhood child murderer in the boiler room of the local school? Vicious. The 1980s were a different time, man.

People forget how terrifying the original Nightmare on Elm Street actually was. Because over the years, Freddy became more of a huckster, or a punchline, and the Elm Street sequels went for laughs as much as they went for scares. Now’s a good time to go back and revisit Wes Craven’s film, to remember why it became a classic in the first place.

In the late 1970s to the mid 80s, more than 110 men died in their sleep. Until their quiet final moments, they were young and healthy. Their families were stunned. Investigators were bewildered. With the victims all being Asian, medical authorities named the sleep scourge “Asian Death Syndrome.” Witnesses and families called it the night terror.

The first case was reported in California’s Orange County in 1977. By the summer of 1981, 20 people had fallen victim to the night terror. Authorities and medical responders were powerless as men across the country went to sleep and never woke up. 

The exotic morbidity of the night terror caught the media’s attention, with the Los Angeles Times running a string of stories on the “medical mystery” in 1981. The New York Times and newspapers in Connecticut, Florida and elsewhere devoted column inches to the sleep deaths.

Freddy Krueger’s real-life victims weren't white, middle-class teens, as played by Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street. They didn’t talk in mall slang, excessively blow dry their hair or dress in early 80s-style pastels. They were mostly male and were uniformly Asian. They were refugees with poor English skills who had fled their homeland to escape a nearly genocidal conflict.

They were the Hmong, a largely pre-literate or non-literate nomadic people from the mountains of Southeast Asia. Originally from southern China, they fled what had been their homeland for thousands of years in the mid-19th century, when the Manchu dynasty labeled them barbarians. They escaped to neighboring countries, notably Vietnam and Laos.

For the Hmong who relocated to Laos, their struggle continued first under French Colonial rule before settling down for the decades of Laotian royal power. When the Vietnam War spread to Laos and Cambodia, the American supported Royal Lao government recruited the Hmong to fight the Communist Pathet Lao troops.

The Hmong gained a reputation as fierce fighters, but the war devastated their people. An estimated one-third of the Hmong population in Laos was wiped out in the conflict. Following the 1975 Communist takeover, about 100,000 Hmong fled Laos to seek asylum in Thailand. Of the Hmongs who remained in Laos, thousands were detained in reeducation camps.

Away from their home, the Hmong struggled to adapt. They were mountain farmers and warriors with a unique religion centered on animals and spirits. They farmed by growing opium and cleared fields with fire. Their written language only came into being in the 20th century; many couldn’t read it anyway.

Then they came to America and began dying in their sleep.

The first modern recorded victim of the so-called “Asian Death Syndrome" was Ly Houa, of Orange County. Before his sudden 1977 death, he had acclimated to American life and worked as a medic. An Orange County social worker who knew him told the L.A. Times said she was shocked to hear of his passing. Houa was in robust physical condition, she said, and health-conscious through his professional expertise.

By the summer of 1981, the L.A. Times reported, 20 Hmong men living in America died under the same circumstances. All were young and showed no signs of ill health until death took them in their sleep. Their families said most didn’t smoke or drink. Some witnesses said they heard troubled breathings and groans right before the death.

Only about 35,000 Hmong lived in America at the time. For the communities scattered throughout the states, the deaths were more than morbid curiosities. They were a seeming existential threat to their people. The ratio of victims to total Hmongs in the country equalled all five leading causes of death for other American men in their age group. Orange County Medical Examiner Tom Prendergast told a reporter that the mysterious incidents accounted for half of all deaths among the Hmong in America during that period.

The deaths prompted an inquiry by the Federal Center for Disease Control. They tried to contain the unexplained horror of the sleep death in the dry wording of “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome,” or SUNDS.

Officials suspected cardiac failure, but were otherwise baffled. Many blamed the stress of culture shock for refugees moving to the U.S. Minnesota Medical Examiner Dr. Michael McGee told the New York Times he thought Hmong victims in St. Paul may have been frightened to death. Hang Pao, a former Laotian general and a political leader for the Hmong, publically attributed the deaths to wartime gassing attacks. Pao, eager to turn public opinion against the Hmong’s old communists foes, said the nighttime seizures were delayed reactions to the chemical toxins the Pathet Lao used to poison villages.

No definite cause emerged. The mystery deaths peaked in 1981, when 26 men, mostly Hmong refugees from Laos, died in their sleep. A few victims of the seizures who were immediately treated by CPR survived.

While the sudden sleep death hit the American Hmong refugees the hardest, the mystery illness wasn’t limited to their people alone. The sleeping death was striking Asian men across the globe.

The disease had a long history in Asia, even in countries with no Hmong population. In 1983, the Associate Press reported that Japanese and Filipinos were dying from similar unexplained deaths. Researchers estimated that between 500 and 1,000 Japanese men, described in their 20s and 30s and healthy, died in their sleep of the condition known in Japan as “Pokkuri,” wordplay slang for death that occurs in a “snap.”

Recently uncovered research indicated it wasn’t new. CDC official Roy Baron and forensic pathologist Robert Kirscher published a report saying the attacks predated the Hmong arrival in America.

As researchers dug into the cultures with histories of SUNDS, they found something surprising. Freddy Krueger wasn’t the only killer stalking its victims through their dreams. According to Asian folklore, monsters had been preying on sleepers for years.

Hmong traditional beliefs revolve around nature spirits and ancestor worship. Among the most feared spirits is a nightmare monster known as the Dab Tsog. When Hmong fail to perform religious rituals properly, their ancestor and village spirits stop guarding them, leaving them vulnerable to the Tsog Tsuam, the crushing attack the Dab Tsog uses to press the life out of its victims.

Shelley Adler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, conducted dozens of field interviews among the Hmong population while researching her 2011 book Sleep Paralysis. She found people who survived SUNDS, who related tales of dream visitations from dark creatures. One interviewee said a large, hairy monster, which he likened to an American stuffed animal, accosted him in his dream. As the oversized creature set on him with claws and teeth, the dreamer was paralyzed but still able to hear voices in his home.

The Dab Tsog doesn’t haunt the dreams of Asian men alone. In the Philippines, where 43 people out of 100,000 die from SUNDS per year, the death was known as Bangungut, a Tagalog word meaning “to rise and moan during sleep.”

Filipino folklore holds that malevolent spirits called Batibat are behind Bangungut. The Batibat have the appearance of ugly, obese women and live in trees. They infest houses when the trees they live in are used to build a home. Enraged by their displacement, they wait until the homeowners are asleep they kill them in the style of the Tsog Tsaum, sitting on their victim’s chest and face to force out their life force like air from a balloon.

By the time A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, the Hmong SUNDS was slowing to a halt after its 1981 peak. It hadn’t been cured, but after taking the lives of 116 healthy young men, the night terror shuffled back into whatever dark dream it came from.

As Freddy Krueger grew increasingly cartoonish and prone to one-liners in his follow-up films, the real-life sleep deaths became less deadly. Officials like Kirschner took an optimistic assessment, postulating that stress from American culture shock caused the previous attacks. With the Hmong more used to life in the states, Kirschner said, the stress was reduced and the danger was over.

The same year, SUNDS researchers made a breakthrough. After studying the medical histories of three survivors of the attacks, medical examiners were able to identify ventricular arrhythmias as the cause of the fatal cardiac arrests. The cause of the arrhythmias wasn’t yet known, but medical authorities now knew what happened to the heart before the SUNDS deaths. In 1988, CDC pathologist Roy Gibson Parrish published a study proposing that SUNDS victims were likely carriers of hereditary defects that affected tissues that conduct electric signals. While in most cases the defects wouldn’t be a problem, they could become fatal in a body undergoing stress.

And while the Hmong were moving past their twin traumas of warfare and displacement, the night terror was attacking displaced Asian elsewhere in the globe. In 1990, two Thai men working construction in Singapore died in their sleep on the same night.

The coincidence of two SUNDS death in a single night was shocking. But they weren’t alone. About 200 Thai people living in Singapore are believed to have died in their sleep since 1983. In Sleep Paralysis, Adler quoted heart specialist Michael Brodsky attributing the deaths to stress, saying that the men were working 13-plus hour days while enduring slavery-like conditions.