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rollercoasterwords · 1 year

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i was just rereading the last chapter of the hand that feeds - as i often do when i need to feel like a knife is digging in my chest and i need to some absolutely scrumptious gut-wrenching angst - and OH MY GODDD!!! i forget how fucking good that ending is and then i reread it and im telling you - literal goosebumps!!! the first section ending with 'This is a story about war.' i literally get chills everytime i read that!!! and the final few lines:

'A butterfly lands in the palm of her hand. She watches it flap its wings once, twice—and then it flies away.

Here is a secret.

Are you listening?

This is a story, and a story is not its end.'

my god reading this part after the emotional turmoil of the previous chapters is literally an out-of-body metaphysical experience. i feel like im dying!!! i love it!!!! :)))))

anyway it just sums up the fic so well and feels like such a thematic like thesis?? it just so perfectly presents such a compelling outlook on life and what defines its meaning and true value. like what makes a tragedy isn't its violent ends or its hateful and tense moments!! its the love and the family and the joy that truly make their lives a tragedy!!! and i love how you so beautifully execute that!!

anyway im getting serious brainrot right now, so i really just had to rant!!! now i have to reread!! kicking my feet and giggling for the angst!!!! <3

AHHHHH screaming u literally Get It. like...YES the ending to thtf is truly so special to me and one of my favorite things i've ever written. gonna use ur brainrot as license to ramble lol SPOILERS obviously

ok so the thing about the ending of thtf is that it is not at all what i originally had planned! like, i don't think it was until i was maybe...halfway? or like two thirds done with the fic that i just sort of had a moment where i was like NO i cannot end it this way it doesn't feel correct...and then i had like a eureka moment where everything fell into place and that last line appeared fully formed in my mind TRULY it was spine-shattering

so like. ok. when i started writing the fic i KNEW that i was not going to do any kind of afterlife epilogue, just because...well personally i was raised to believe in heaven and hell and center my life around that, and i lost that faith as i grew older, and now the idea of an afterlife just. is not something joyful or happy to me. like i know many people believe in some form of afterlife, but personally try as i might i have never been able to, and so i have had to seek meaning in life while believing that like. death is just it. i think ur brain dies and ur done and gone like i don't believe in souls or ghosts or anything lol. but even aside from like whether or not u believe anything happens or exists after death to me personally it's just been so much more meaningful to seek meaning in life absent any conception of an afterlife.

so i knew there wasn't going to be an afterlife. but i also knew i wanted to kill both dorcas + marlene in these very tragic and abrupt ways. like i specifically did not want to give them peaceful deaths. marlene dies afraid and alone and begging a god she doesn't believe in not to kill her here and now with so many things unfinished. dorcas dies consumed by rage and revenge and violence without ever getting a chance to heal from any of it, leaving behind friends and family who love her. and i wanted that partly because i love tragedy, yes, but also because...that is so often what death is. and that is so often what is terrifying about death. like most of us don't get any control over how or when we go, and it could be today or tomorrow and it could be peaceful or violent or painful. and that's so scary!

but i didn't want to end on that note, obviously. because the point of the story i was writing was not just to go "death is terrifying and the End and we don't get to choose when or how it happens!!" what i wanted to say was--death is terrifying and lonely and we can't control it, but life is beautiful and worth living anyway, perhaps even moreso because death is so out of our control. all the painful and scary and beautiful and joyful moments we experience are life, they are living, and there's no one experience that is objectively Better or Worse. like...grief and pain and sorrow are part of the experience of human life, just as much as joy and love and happiness.

anyway, so originally i was going to end with a little epilogue chapter from mary's point of view, sort of her and emmeline after the end of the first war like reflecting a little bit on their friends' lives and moving on. but honestly...that didn't quite fit with what i was saying, because again, what i wanted to say was that life doesn't need to be like...this endless continuing thing to have meaning. like you don't need to be remembered or leave A Mark on the world in order for your life to matter. i didn't want to make it seem like marlene and dorcas's lives were meaningful because of the people who would continue to live after them (although i do think that can be meaningful!! it just. wasn't what i wanted to say).

so what the final chapter ended up becoming is really this synthesis of like. my own worldview regarding life and death--and i feel like writing this story honestly helped me to like pin down that worldview which was a little more nebulous and difficult to articulate before. but like--last chapter. i wanted to take all these moments, both good and bad, from marlene and dorcas's lives--again, to emphasize that the "good moments" are not somehow inherently more important or meaningful than the "bad," that all life is experience and humanity and just...worth it. even the painful moments have meaning. and i also wanted to chop those moments up in time, to show that--hey! time doesn't matter.

like, we're so bound to this very linear view of timelines where life is like...i dunno. a straight line or a road or something. something you start and then you follow through to its end, and it's supposed to be like...a journey with a Final Destination. and we get scared of the End of that linear journey and we try to find ways to prolong it or tell ourselves that it doesn't have to ever end, that it can just keep marching forward in time.

and i mean, i'm still young. maybe my views will change. but as much as we are bound by linear time, i don't think that we need to measure life by those standards. all the moments of your life, good and bad and beautiful, they all exist somewhere in the fabric of the universe, forever. maybe that's a little optimistic streak of the spirituality i was raised with, but...yeah. all moments in life are meaningful, and they all exist somewhere in time, and so why does it matter what the "last" moment is? maybe death will be peaceful, or maybe it won't, but it's okay, because your death isn't your life. and that's what i'm trying to get at with the very last line--literally, a story is not its end. you can go back to any moment of a story and experience it again, you can skip around and read your favorite parts, and a story wouldn't be a story without every word and page in the book, y'know? so why should we fear the very last page? and why should we despair over the conflicts and the bits of the story that make us cry? it's all part of the story! it's beautiful! i love life and i love being human! and dorcas and marlene's lives were beautiful and tragic and wonderful and that's what being human is, and they died alone but they didn't live alone, and just....yeah! this ending is so so special to me <3

#thtf #the hand that feeds spoilers #ask

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