#all i can ever think about right now is reanimator its a genuine problem

[koalbent]

Most effort ive put into any traditional art ever ⬆️

Mostly stupid bonus doodles ⬇️

(the hug one is technically a WIP but i cannot ever remember what dans sleeves look like enough to finish it when i am able to. also those first two pictures r from the same day��)

[wallflowerimagines]

Hello! Um... I don’t really know how to start this but say I love your hc! I think you do a fantastic job on them, there all very sweet but being the s.o.b I am I’m here to ask for some angst. How would you think the lords act if their S/O died?

...I'm feeling mean. 😈

Warnings: Angst, Death, Horror Game villains making bad decisions/not coping with tragedy, suicide.

Alcina Dimitrescu

Denial, Denial, Denial

You can't be dead. There has to be something, anything that she can do to save you. Alcina scrambles for a solution, attacking the problem from all sides, despite the reality of the situation staring her in the face.

Immediately injects your body with Cadou in a desperate hope to save you. Any possible chance that he has to save you she's going to take it.

It's not likely that your corpse reanimates, but it does mutate. At the end of the process, what's left of your body hardly even looks like you anymore, and she can't bring herself to look at it.

She builds a gilded crypt for your body-- it's stunning. It's inspired by you, all your favorite colors, styles and hobbies are incorporate to make the room feel full of your spirit. Alcina is an artistic woman, and she throws herself into the project like she's possessed.

It might take years, even decades to complete. It has to be perfect. When it's done she feels accomplished, but twice as empty. It might be one of the most beautiful dedications she's ever made, but it can't replace you. She has the room sealed off with no way to get to it, so she can't be tempted to visit. She just needs a piece of of you still in her home, or she can't get through the day.

...If your corpse does reanimate, it's actually worse for Alcina. Whatever she brought back was a shambling, horrifying mess of mold wearing your face. It couldn't think for itself, or even follow commands--it just wanders in circles and attacks anything that gets too close.

She keeps your reanimated corpse in a cell, unable to bring herself to destroy it completely. Sometimes, she'll go down to the basement and talk to the thing like it is you, telling it about her day, having one-sided conversations and thinking of all the wonderful memories the two of you shared.

When its dead eyes meet hers, her lungs seize in her chest and tears gather in her eyes. Alcina doesn't cry often, but when your corpse meets her gaze she starts to sob. Those eyes used to look at her with life and love and now...

Still, she can't stop herself from visiting it. It's a compulsion she can't stop, and it tears open the wound every time, but some irrational part of her deep, deep down thinks that one day, she'll descend those steps and you'll be there to greet her with a warm smile.

In either scenario, she will never have another partner. You're impossible to replace, and she feels truly, genuinely empty without you. Rest well, Darling. You'll never be forgotten.

Donna Beneviento

There is such a thing as a last straw, and this is it for Donna.

Please remember: this is a woman who has lost everything. Mother Miranda might have given her a new "family", but Donna is not nearly as attached to these new members as she is to her original family. And the loss of her original family has shaped her in such a way that if you died? She would be absolutely devastated.

It's not fair to put this kind of pressure on you, but in a very real way you were her last hope for normalcy. She had all these plans to fix her family with you. You were so instrumental to her hopes for the future that now that you're gone, it feels like she has no hope at all. You were her missing link, her one true love, and now that you're dead...

Donna screams until her throat is raw when she finds out you're gone. Angie can't help her, nothing can. She just can't cope with reality anymore.

She'll build a life sized Doll of you to try to help herself cope, but the minute she tries to implant of piece of her Cadou in it, she is filled with such a vehement hatred of the thing that she starts scream-crying before she takes an axe to it's face and hacks it to pieces. How dare it pretend to be you?!! It's not even close to the real thing, she shouldn't even have tried--

She might try to induce a hallucination of you to help her get through the day to day, but it's not the same. She can't perfectly mimic your laugh, or your smile, or the way you tuck her hair away from her face. It's so obviously not you, and Donna is... alone.

I do hate to say it, but she will absolutely try to kill herself if you died. You were the one person who understood her, empathized with her, and you were her best friend. You were her support system, the one person who could carry her through the worst times in her life, but you're gone. Donna can't believe that anyone else could be there for her like you were.

Salvatore Moreau

Absolutely, irreparably broken.

When the two of you were in a relationship, you busied yourself not only with smothering Salvatore in all of the love and affection that you could, but you also did a lot to help his self-esteem and mental health.

You made sure he knew that he was loved, that you could never hate him, and even on your death bed you make him promise never to forget how wonderful he is.

Once you're gone, though, Salvatore cracks.

He clings to every bit of you felt behind. All of your jewelry, clothing, pictures and sentimental items are preserved to the best of his ability. Your living space is transformed into a shrine dedicated to you.

It's not healthy, but he also deifies you in his memory. Mother Miranda is no longer the only person that he worships-- the memory of you is now sacred to him. You become something holy and perfect in his mind's eye. It doesn't matter how many flaws you had in reality, your death has turned even your worst flaws into traits to be admired and praised. His perception of you is totally twisted.

Speaking of Mother Miranda, he regresses a lot. His adoration of Mother Miranda was something you were helping him work through, but now he's right back at square one, and even worse off than before.

Moreau can't make a decision on his own anymore--from what to say, to what to do, and sometimes even what to eat. After all, it's his fault that you died, isn't it? You were his partner and he used to be is a doctor. How could he possibly trust himself with anything when he couldn't manage to save the most important thing in his life?

To the rest of his family, he's more pathetic than before. His obsession with his Mother was usually limited to when she was in the room, but now it's constant.

If he ever hears the quote "It's better to have loved and lost, then never loved at all," he gets supremely, violently angry. No. No, that's not true, it's bullshit, how dare you even say that to his face.

If he hadn't loved you, you would be alive. He would be alone, but you would be safe. You would be happy.

Now he's alone, and all you are is dead. He can't ever come back from it.

Karl Heisenberg

Rage. Unending, earth shattering Rage.

Whatever killed you better start to fucking pray, because Karl Heisenberg will not quit until it's suffering.

He doesn't kill who or whatever it was. He let's it sit there, mangled beyond belief, and uses his knowledge of mechanics and biology to keep it alive in constant, unending pain.

It's cathartic for him, but not in a healthy way. The more he hurts it, the better he feels, but at the end of the day, you're still gone, and he's still alone.

He's... lost.

Heisenberg should be angry, fuck he wants to be angry more than anything, but the longer he keeps the thing alive... emotions seem like they're too far away anymore. He wants to scream, he wants to cry, he wants... you.

He keeps something of yours in his pocket at all times, just to run his fingers over it and remember you. Your eyes, your laugh, your smile... It's almost like a stress ball, and these days sticking his hand into his pocket to wrap his fingers around the thing is the only way he can calm down.

Sometimes he turns to ask your opinion on something, or tell you a joke with a big smile on his face because this one is going to make you laugh for sure-- and then he freezes when the reality sets in once again. You're not here.

Remember, Heisenberg has idealized the two of you as this perfect partnership. You were the first person who looked at him and loved everything that you saw. You weren't just his first real relationship, the first person that he implicitly trusted, but you were also his very first real friend.

He wasn't the most friendly person to begin with, but he did get better because of you. He was still spoiled, a little socially awkward, and maybe his dark sense of humor would slip and get a little too much, but he grew as a person.

Now that you're gone, he can't even remember what it's like not being a cruel, empty shell of rage. All he has left is his hatred of Mother Miranda.

After a while, it doesn't matter if he's ready to take her on or not. He's going to face that bitch head on and kill her, or die trying.

If he wins, he's finally free. If he doesn't... that's not so bad either. Karl doesn't really believe in an afterlife, but there's something appealing about joining you wherever you might be.

[panharmonium]

stranger things 3, a visual summary:

more coherent thoughts under the cut, because wow.

......okay.  that was a Trainwreck.  an absolute mess.

i remember when my coworkers were watching S3 (and still urging me to start season 1) and they were saying how amazing the latest season was, and honestly i think there must just be a difference in people who watch tv just to be entertained and people who watch tv and automatically evaluate the story (aka fandom veterans and English majors, lol - cue Me twice), because WHO could watch this critically and praise it that way?

it's honestly hard to know where to even begin; i've been sending frustrated notes to @brambleberrycottage ever since episode three and now that i'm done with episode 8 there's just......so much more to say

first, good things:

erica is a great character.  she's what max should have been (aka, uh.......interesting!)  i liked the realization moment where dustin was like "you're a NERD!"

that entire sequence where will is so upset with lucas and mike for not being engaged with the dnd game was very well done, especially the conversation he has with mike out in the rain.  i loved that moment where mike asked him "did you think we were just going to hang out in my basement playing games forever?" and will said, "yeah.  yeah, i guess i did."  i really felt that.  [edit, now that i've finished: this was never resolved.  will giving away his dnd books at the end was not an actual resolution to this conflict.]

steve is still a good dude, and robin was pretty cool.  i'm down for them being super friends.  but i'm still mourning the steve+nancy+jonathan trio that was a thing for like 5 seconds and then never returned.

i loved how genuinely excited steve was to see dustin when dustin came back from camp.  that was adorable.  "HENDERSON!!!!"  "how many children are you friends with?"

and uh. yeah.  i had more problems with this season than praise-bestowing moments, so.  here goes that bit.

OVERARCHING PROBLEMS:

1. keep it simple, stupid

remember in the office when dwight quoted the above advice to ryan as michael's rule for making a sale?  the same advice applies to storytelling.

season 1 of stranger things is so simple.  there is One Monster.  that is the danger.  and somehow, that single monster manages to be a thousand times more terrifying than all of these new "bigger, scarier, more epic" threats crammed into the second two seasons.

how goofy is the stranger things season 3 plot, seriously?  russians are blackmailing a small-town mayor so they can buy up land to steal power from the town while operating a secret lab under the mall to open a gate to the Upside Down (WHY?), while simultaneously a remnant of the malevolent force that was "defeated" last season has reanimated itself and is making people scarf chemicals (WHY?), and then it possesses one of them and uses that person to possess a bunch of other people in order to build itself a body made out of melted people, in order to kill el, whose only story this season is breaking up with her boyfriend, and we have to infiltrate this russian base in order to close the gate (same endgame as last season - BIG NO-NO) to kill the goo monster, except last time the "mindflayer” survived the gate being closed, so why would this even WORK, and -

the fact that there are so many "round-up/info dump" scenes where characters summarize what's going on and make implausibly accurate connections/guesses about what it all must mean is a red flag.  the characters shouldn’t have to tell your story to the audience.  if it's too complicated for us to keep straight on our own, it's too complicated.  

the amount of energy that goes into trying to lash together a Chaos Plot with too many shaky legs leaves nothing left over for nuanced character development or mood establishment.  you're constantly running to catch up to your own flimsy story before it collapses on top of itself.

2. the horror!

S1 of stranger things was the scariest thing i'd ever seen.

granted, i don't watch a lot of horror, because i don't like it.  i get scared too easily and then i legitimately can't sleep.  i watched a horror movie five years ago that i still think about every time the lights are off in my house.  but still, ST1 was something i had never experienced before.

it wasn't creature horror, and it wasn't just suspense.  it was the UNSETTLINGNESS of it all.  it wasn't really about the monster.  it was about the Upside Down.

the reason ST1 is so successful is because of how much we don’t know.  it's the horror of not understanding what is happening, and the terror of knowing that nobody thinks it’s real.  feeling like you're going crazy and being cut off from all assistance.  the conspiracy and the cover-up.  and the sheer unsettlingness of the whole parallel worlds things just tipped me over the edge - the idea that you can take one wrong step and then be suddenly and without warning completely off the map, simultaneously right next to the people you want to get to and also utterly beyond their reach.  that was fucking scary!!!!  

and they do it all with so little.  i have literally never been more scared in my life than when i would see those christmas lights start flickering.  and they're just LIGHTS!  yes, we see the monster later, but it's the uncertainty that's most frightening.  we don't understand how it arrives in our world, and we don’t know where it will show up next.  it could be right next to you - on the other side.  you could be standing on top of it.  you just don't know.  it’s like what jonathan says to nancy in her bedroom - “it can’t get us in here.”  and she says, “we don’t know that.”

the later seasons of stranger things, by comparison, did not scare me at all.  season two was like a zombie movie - hordes of weak enemies that you can just shoot with a gun.  and season 3 was even less frightening - upping the ante and making things gorier, more explosive, and bigger just isn't the vibe they set in S1.  i'm not scared of that giant goop monster.  it's like godzilla.  it's not horror; it's just a lot of noise.

the unsettling, "creep" factor that made season 1 so effective was gone.  it just turned into a regular old monster movie, and i didn't find that particularly interesting.

3. illogical, captain

a while ago there was a wave of pushback against people complaining about plot holes, but you know what?  there is, in fact, an appropriate place for us to talk about plausibility, as well as the point at which our suspension of disbelief collapses.

ST3 is a bona fide plausibility disaster.  i did not believe half of the story, because it was not unfolding in a believable way.

half of the plot points in this season would not have happened if the characters had been behaving with any kind of sense.  it is absolutely impossible for me to believe that none of these children IMMEDIATELY went to joyce or hopper the minute they knew something weird was going on.  it makes no sense.  after the shit they've seen?  it makes sense in season 1, because the kids are still so young that they have that kind of magical thinking that makes all of this seem kind of like an adventure.  but they're teenagers now, and developmentally, they’re past that stage.  they know the evil creature is back and they're pretty sure it's possessing billy?  for some unfathomable reason, they don't go to an adult, but try to trap billy in the sauna and just see what happens.  the other group has actual proof that russian soldiers are up to something shady in the mall?  they don't tell an adult; they send a TEN YEAR-OLD in through the AIR DUCTS to investigate the secret room guarded by MEN WITH GUNS.

this is ridiculous.  none of this should have happened.  none of this WOULD have happened.  it breaks the boundaries of disbelief.  it completely sabotages the audience’s engagement with the story - joyce and hopper's whole detour with alexei and murray is so dull, because its entire purpose is to bring hop and joyce up to speed on something that we, the audience, already know.  the other characters already found out this stuff, but did not communicate it - the gate is being opened again in a russian lab underground.  there's no suspense for us.  nothing new is revealed.  we're just waiting for them to hurry up and finish finding out so we can move on to the next thing.

moreover: there are so many other problems besides just "these characters would have talked to each other."  why on earth would murray, whose sole characteristic is extreme paranoia, take alexei wandering around the festival for hot dogs and carnival games.  why would hopper be so virulently against the possibility that weird shit might be happening again?  does he remember the past year or what?  how on earth would the kids be able to fight off that massive monster with an ax and a hunting rifle?  it's made out of dead guts and bones; why does it care if they shoot it?!  how in the WORLD is this russian facility so penetrable?  i'm sorry, it's just - beyond believable.  it doesn't have cameras?  the russians guards really can't tell that murray isn't a native speaker?  they don't check his id when they don't recognize him?  joyce and hopper really just got that lucky, to be asked a question and have “smile and nod” be the right answer?  nobody ever got shot?  it's silly.  it's just silly.  so many things - erica uses the "Open" button to open the elevator door in order to let steve and robin and dustin inside, but once the elevator is at the bottom of the shaft, robin explains the door's inexplicable non-opening because......you apparently need a keycard to use the buttons????  THAT MAKES NO SENSE; ERICA JUST USED THE BUTTONS A SECOND AGO.

even the entire endgame of this season is a contradiction!  if the mind-flayer survived el closing the gate last time, it doesn't make sense that closing the gate this time would kill it.  literally the entire plot of last season was "we need to get this thing out of will, because the creature will die once the gate is closed, and we want to make sure will doesn't die with it."  but apparently the creature didn't die upon closing the gate; it just got trapped in our dimension.  but now apparently it WILL die upon closing the gate.  for whatever fucking reason.

i'm sorry, but that’s a mess.  that’s a bona fide mess.

4. watch your tone

i honestly think the tonal change is the thing that made me the most frustrated about this season.  it's possible to have a terrible plot and still stay relatively true to your characters - you'll still have a bad season, but at least you didn't bastardize your characters in the process.

i had issues with S2 and i definitely was not as impressed with it as i was with S1, but at least in S2 joyce and hopper were recognizable.  in S3, i felt like i was watching strangers.  the tonal shift was bizarre and off-putting, more so with hopper than joyce, but it affected both of them.  

even as early as the very beginning of this season, i was feeling weird about how often hopper was being used for comedy.  and as the season progressed, this trend only became more pronounced.  almost every scene we had of him felt silly - and not like there was just something funny in the scene for me to laugh at, but like the audience was almost being asked to laugh AT him.  like he was constantly the butt of the joke.  

this really bothered me.  from that incredibly sincere and heart-wrenching portrayal of him in season 1, when they kept him rooted in the trauma of losing his daughter and the breakdown of his marriage, and then how that same trauma made him so driven to save will and protect the kids - what a change.  even in season 2 i was frustrated how the throughline of his daughter wasn’t touched again until the very last episode, and now in season 3 we’ve left that part of him so far behind that he's just there for us to laugh at.  we're supposed to laugh at scenes of him being drunk and a mess.  every scene he's in is either him arguing with joyce for comedic relief or being way over the top with alexei or the mayor.  he was like a caricature of himself, and i didn't recognize him.  

joyce suffered from the same thing, just by virtue of proximity.  she spent almost all of her time in this season with hopper, and virtually all of that time was taken up with silly shenanigans or comically overblown arguing.  what a departure from the desperate mother of season 1, who was maligned by everyone in town and only taken seriously by the audience.  now it’s the audience who are supposed to be chuckling at her.  

i dunno.  the tone shift was very dramatic, very obvious, and it impacted the entire season.  are we supposed to be taking this seriously or is it supposed to be a joke?  a little bit of humor to break tension can be a good thing, but when it's constant, it confuses the mood.  

and i personally don't think it was appropriate or respectful to either of these characters, in this case.

SMALLER THINGS THAT BOTHERED ME:

this show has 100% hit maximum character saturation.  by the end of this season there were 13 core characters onscreen at the same time, in the same scene!  it’s too many people!  they cannot reasonably develop that many people in the space allotted.

i still am not interested in max.  i don't feel anything for her.  she doesn't feel real.  i don't hate her, but she's just an empty vessel, and i really do think she's superfluous to this show.  i think you could remove her with very little reworking and the show would be stronger for it.  (they TRIED to do something interesting with billy, and i might have cared if we had been given literally any reason to care about him previously, but there was no investment earned there.  they didn't do the front-end work to make him somebody we were interested in.)

weird relationship sunderings from previous seasons.  i felt very strange about jonathan barely even seeing will this entire season.  i felt very strange about steve having almost zero contact with nancy.  i felt very strange about joyce hardly ever interacting with her kids.  all of these were core relationships - the characters were BUILT on those relationships, and they don't feel real outside of them.  not seeing these characters devote time to these relationships makes it feel like i'm watching a slightly different show.

the VIOLENCE.  apparently this is a beat-em-up now???  i really felt like every other scene somebody was getting beaten to a bloody pulp.  there was SO much smashing and bashing and throwing people into walls and fistfights and head trauma like - first of all, i find that stuff pretty boring, and second of all, all of these people should be in the hospital.  

the GORE.  other people’s mileage may vary, obviously; i just didn't like that.  i looked away at the scene with the rat, and all this...goopy dissolving human shit, and the stabbings, and just...general grossness level - season 1 managed to be bloodcurdlingly terrifying without any of this stuff.

i know this borders on nitpicky, but yet more medical malfeasance - another example of someone receiving an injection via the mysterious 90 degree angle neck route, plus - was anyone else losing it at the fact that steve and robin “puked up” a drug they received……..via injection??????  IT’S NOT IN THEIR STOMACHS, FOLKS!  THEY CAN’T PUKE IT UP!  IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT!

the complete lack of follow-up to last season.  the whole S3 plotline (such as it is) feels like a weird side quest.  last season seemed to be furthering the mythos and setting us up for "there are other children like el/brenner is alive" - but this season, that fact appears to have been forgotten by everyone (even el!!!) and has nothing to do with the story that we're given, which is a goofy and redundant story about russians opening a secret lab under the mall which requires us to solve the exact same problem as last season (closing the gate).

this show's inability to keep certain throughlines in its headlights/keep things visible on the periphery instead of dropping them completely and then bringing them back whenever they feel like they need it again.   i already talked about hopper’s daughter as an example of this (done well in S1 and poorly in S2 and S3).  another example is that scene with nancy and her mom - it’s such a good scene, and yet it misses out on so much resonance, because they completely dropped the plotline of karen feeling locked out of her kids’ lives and desperately wanting to connect with them.  if they had continued to reference that throughout season 2, then this scene would have been so much more powerful.   as a third example, season 3 starts with a clear context/premise, and it’s INTERESTING - the town landscape changing because of the mall, business slow to non-existent, small town discontent over big corporations moving in, hopper pressured to break up the protest against mayor kline when he should have let it proceed - and then the show just drops that entire context.  you expect season 3 to stay rooted in the "our small town is being strangled by this mall" and then to eventually deal with the revitalization of hawkins, but nah.  it's never mentioned again.

LASTLY:

i'm not really gonna get into hopper "dying," because he's, like...clearly not dead.  but the whole situation was stupid and contrived (i was so sick of that arnold schwarzenegger lookalike by the last episode, god that whole thing was so dumb) and it's even cheaper knowing that he'll obviously be back.

what i AM gonna say is that i was livid that they brought back that peter gabriel cover of "heroes" to end this season.  their use of that song in S1 blew my mind - it had me stunned with how GORGEOUS it was and just, the way it worked in that particular scene - absolutely incredible.  floored me.  gave me chills.  to recycle it at the end of such a poorly constructed season made me so mad.  yOU CAN'T MAKE ME FEEL THINGS JUST BY REUSING THIS SONG.  I REFUSE TO HAVE EMOTIONS JUST BECAUSE YOU PULL OUT THIS BEAUTIFUL TRACK THAT YOU ONCE USED TO GREAT EFFECT; YOUR STORY WAS STILL TERRIBLE THIS TIME AROUND; DO NOT TRY TO TRICK FEELINGS OUT OF US THAT HAVEN’T BEEN EARNED.  

and that's it.  i’m sure later i’ll think of other things i neglected to mention here, but...yeah.  i was not impressed.  

[hilarymp]

PET SEMATARY (2019) REVIEW

SPOILER WARNING! This review contains spoilers for Pet Sematary (2019), Pet Sematary (1989) and the novel.

    I’ll admit straight out of the gate that I went into Pet Sematary (2019) with a negative attitude. For whatever reason (one that I am still struggling to comprehend) the studio decided not only to make a rather large divergence from the source material’s plot, but to also spoil this “twist” in the trailer and promotional material. That alone was enough to convince me that this remake/reboot/reimagining/whatever the fuck you want to call it probably wasn’t going to win me over. So let’s discuss that first and foremost.

    I am not at all opposed to film adaptations making changes. Case in point, 2017’s new IT. IT and it’s miniseries predecessor are among some of my favorite horror films of all time, despite the fact that they were not 100% faithful to the novel, especially the more recent installment. For me changes are totally fine as long as they a.) maintain the spirit, themes, and tone of the original story and b.) make the film more frightening.

    With those rules in mind the change prominently displayed in the trailer for 2019’s Pet Sematary, the fact the Creed’s eldest child Ellie is the one who is killed and brought back from the dead instead of toddler Gage, already failed at rule b. Don’t get me wrong, any reanimated evil corpse is going to be scary, but why on earth would you deny us an evil murderous baby just to give us yet another creepy little girl. The ‘creepy little girl’ trope in horror is so tired and overused it makes my head hurt. The Ring, Orphan, The Exorcist, Silent Hill, The Shining, Alice Sweet Alice, The Bad Seed, Let the Right One In, Hereditary, Sinister, I could go on and on and on. The use of the trope isn’t inherently terrible, but why would you go out of your way to use it when something less used and much scarier (a straight up homicidal TODDLER) is an option? The simplest and most likely reason, in my opinion, was for convenience. Is directing a 2 year old more difficult to direct than an 11 year old? Yes, of course, obviously. But it’s definitely possible, as Mary Lambert proved while directing Miko Hughes as Gage in 1989. (Honestly, to this day I can not believe the performance she got out of that little boy.) So to me the change is not only a disservice to the film, but also an indication that the filmmakers were unabashedly lazy.

    So now that you know why I had set myself up for disappointment to begin with, let’s break down what the film succeeded at and how it failed.

    Whatever problems I have with the film, at least I can say that I loved the cast. John Lithgow was extremely endearing and likable. His performance as Jud was a refreshingly grounded and heartfelt departure from Fred Gwynne’s high camp in ‘89. Jason Clarke was as engrossing as ever. I always enjoy Clarke’s performances, and he often brings extra depth to characters that would have otherwise fallen flat (Dr. Price in ‘Winchester’ being a prime example). And Jete Laurance was nothing short of incredible. You would never expect that this little girl could transform into something to sinister so effortlessly. Her performance in the first half of the film is filled with such sweet sincerity, that her turn into undead Ellie is all the more frightening. Not as frightening as being terrorized by a little ankle biting toddler, mind you, but enjoyable nonetheless. ESPECIALLY compared to Ellie in the 89 film. Do you remember her? My God, she was so annoying. 

    Speaking of annoying, Amy Seimetz as Rachel was the only weak link in the cast. Instead of being deeply troubled and complex as Stephen King wrote her, Seimetz’s Rachel is so one dimensional that by the third or fourth time we see her crying, I wasn’t just unmoved, I was borderline irritated. ‘The weepy mother’ role in horror films are never especially fulfilling, but in this instance Rachel was meant to be much more than that. And the cheapening of the Zelda subplot doesn’t help matters either. 

    To me Zelda, Rachel’s late sister who suffered from spinal meningitis, was hands down the scariest part of the book and original film, so I was extra disappointed here. I’m fully aware that the character of Zelda is extremely problematic and portraying her as a monster is ableist as fuck. (Let’s be real, 99% of all Stephen King’s works are problematic but if we pull on that thread we’ll be here all day.) But the in the new film she is completely under utilized. Her appearances have been shrunk down to generic Conjuring-like jumpscares. Like most horror movies these days, the film relies on quick cuts, loud bangs, and obnoxious music cues to startle us instead of showing us anything particularly alarming. There is one prolonged sequence of incredible suspense, as Louis slowly walks through his basement in search of his daughters reanimated corpse, that filled me with so much dread that I was finally genuinely scared. Alas, *sad trombone*, it was undercut with a cheap jumpscare just like all the rest.

    On top of uninspired jumpscares, the filmmaking as a whole was ‘meh’ at best, especially the production design. The houses nearly hidden among the picturesque dense woods are definitely more visually interesting than the ones presented to us in ‘89. It also makes the danger of the nearby highway much more palpable, with the road being both closer to the house and more believably prone to accidents, with the thick foliage hindering the drivers’ ability to see. And the ‘pet sematary’ itself is serviceable enough, not much different from what we’ve seen before. But once we are taken beyond the dead fall to the cursed burial ground, the scope of the film shrinks drastically, making everything feel cramped and cheap like a paper mache Haunted house, even with cheap smoke machine effects to match.

    There are a lot of loose ends in the film as well, though it’s hard to tell if they were caused by the script or the editing. For instance, when Jud is explaining the burial ground to Louis, he mentions the wendigo that is suspected to be the source of the land’s power. But… that’s all he says about it. He doesn’t explain what a Wendigo is, what it does, or why it does it. If you’ve never read the book, or have never heard of a wendigo before, the word means nothing. Why bring up the Wendigo at all if you’re not even going to tie it into the lore properly. They could just have easily just said ‘cursed Indian burial ground’ (it in and of itself a tired trope, but still) and we would have just went with it. Another example is when undead Ellie is terrorizing Jud, she turns herself into Jud’s dead wife, and mentions that says something along the lines of “Your wife is “n hell for what you did to her before she died”. What? What the hell did he do? Why the fuck would you even put that out there with zero follow up?!

    Oh and let’s talk about Pascow. His role in the film is minimized so much, they might as well have left him out entirely. If I’m remembering correctly, late in the novel Pascow appears to Rachel urging her to come home. In the first film he appears to Rachel instead, who tells Rachel they need to come home. But in this film he appears to Gage. A toddler. Who can barely speak. Now as disturbing of a notion it is to have a very small child being haunted by such a gruesome image (and you all know how much I love disturbing shit), it’s also kind of pointless and dumb. If Pascow wanted to get Rachel to come home, why would he appear to Gage who, again, can’t talk, instead of just appearing to Rachel? One could argue that Gage’s crying and saying the name Pascow freaks Rachel out so much that it makes her want to go back, but you could just as easily say she left to get away from her memories of Zelda in her parents house, or the fact that Louis wouldn’t answer his goddamn phone

    We’re also missing out on some crucial motivations to explain Louis’ terrible decision making. No scene of Louis and the grandfather fighting at the funeral, no Louis being blamed for his child’s death, no knocking over of the casket. I might be biased since, for me, that sequence is one of the most upsetting moments of the 89 film. But on top of a missed opportunity to shock, it also takes away the debilitating guilt that motivates Louis to resurrect his child, despite knowing it won’t go well. The guilt is still vaguely implicit, but sometimes horror films need to explicitly illustrate cause and effect, if for no other reason than to keep the audience from screaming “Why the fuck would you do that!?” at the screen for 2 hours.

    Speaking of motivations, what are Ellie’s? What even is Ellie for that matter? The film can’t seem to make up its mind. Undead Ellie has Ellie’s memories, remembers how she died, and holds grudges against her parents for both her death and her resurrection. So there must be some part of the real Ellie in there, right? But when Rachel says “You’re not my daughter” undead Ellie agrees with her! So if it’s not really Ellie why does she keep trying to guilt and punish her parents? If she’s just an evil demon or spirit possessing Ellie’s corpse, you’d think it’d be glad that Louis was stupid enough to bury her up there. Free meat suit, hurray! The spirit clearly wants more bodies buried up there, seeing as it takes out the entire family just to bring them back like she was. Surely she just wanted to kill them all for funsies, right? Who the fuck knows. The screenwriter sure doesn’t appear to.

    Another super obnoxious thing about this film is it’s cheap fake-outs. It’s one thing to change iconic moments from the first adaptation, but constantly calling attention to it is another. Like the ominous close ups of Jud’s heel and him kicking the bed before Ellie gets him on the stairs. Yeah we get it. ‘The old movie had Gage under the bed, but watch out, we’re mixing stuff up in this one!’ Yup. Got it. Thanks for the reminder. Or the whole ‘Gage almost being hit by the truck’ fake out before Ellie is actually hit. This one is especially stupid since you already fucking showed us in the trailer that Gage isn’t going to die. Why even try to fake us out like that when we already know you’ve changed that too? You have successfully irritated and underwhelmed me, movie, no reason to draw more attention to it.

Here’s a quick list of some other petty little things that bugged me. These aren’t even necessarily the movie’s fault, some just come from the book itself.

If Rachel is so traumatized and adverse to talking about death, why the fuck did she marry an ER doctor?

You expect me to believe that Louis, pragmatic Louis who doesn’t even believe in an afterlife, would just follow Jud over the deadfall, through the woods, across a swamp and up a bunch of mysterious stone stairs, with zero explanation? No questions asked? I’d be asking “What the fuck are we doing?” about every couple of yards.

Why in god’s name would Rachel’s parents not only still live in the house where their daughter suffered and died, but also KEEP THE DUMB WAITER SHE DIED IN?

Why don’t movies ever address the fact that when you’re buried your eyes and lips are sewn or glued shut beforehand? And the scene where Louis is bathing Ellie and he sees the staples in her head and is all freaked out - wouldn’t she have huge fucking staples all across her chest and down her abdomen from the funeral home too??

    Despite my complaints, Pet Sematary isn’t completely devoid of entertainment value, not by a long shot. It’s not bad, it just could have been so so much better. Pet Sematary is riddled with missed opportunities,  and if you‘re an overly analytical jaded horror fan with a devotion to Stephen King like I am, they are much more obvious. I’m not mad, Pet Sematary, I’m just disappointed. To quote Tyra Banks, we were rooting for you, we were all rooting for you! You had so much potential, you just dropped the ball. Just like losing a loved one, there’s a mourning period that must be observed. Time to cope with the loss of what could have been. But rest assured, by the time you come out on blu-ray, I’ll be ready to try again.

[agalarianzigzagoon]

Resurgence

based off of a prompt from @writing-prompt-s​: “The zombie outbreak started 2 years ago now you find yourself cornered by a decaying zombie when you do the unthinkable and bite it first when it falls to the floor and grows its skin back and sits up and asks what is going on“

It’s September 26th, 2033.

I’ve been totally on my own for the last ten months- we were attacked on Christmas and my companion sacrificed herself to allow me to get away and survive, saying that I was a more viable survivor than she was, and that she’d only survived that long because of sheer dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time. I couldn’t bring myself to have to hear her pained screams as they tore into her. I ran.

I ran until my legs wouldn’t let me move anymore, and I collapsed behind a pharmacy in the more middle-class part of the city. I could hear shuffling, accompanied by various gurgles and groans, and just before I’d found some semblance of comfort, I yanked myself up and through the back door, closing it and shoving a cabinet in front of it. Once inside, I allowed myself to collapse again, head between my knees, and tried to breathe through the burning pain in my lungs.

If you asked me how this all started, I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell you. There’s been a lot of speculation, though. Some think that it was the stereotypical way that apocalypses happen in the books or movies- some virus spreads that ends up reanimating the people it kills. Some think it was a direct result of the government’s incompetency. However it happened, it’s been going on for at least two years and doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of stopping.

I’m not sure when I decided, but I ended up falling asleep and waking up a few hours later as the sun peeked in through a crack in one of the boarded up windows. I assumed that I had fallen asleep while attempted to catch my breath, because I woke up feeling like I’d slept for a good eight or nine hours and I had fallen asleep not too long after it had gotten dark.

I rummaged through what was left in the pharmacy, only ending up with a single roll of gauze. ‘It’s better than nothing,’ I thought as I stuffed it in my backpack and ducked out through the door I had blocked the night before.

Seeing what was left of this part of the city in the daylight was more than a little depressing. Most of the buildings had fallen into total disrepair, with a good portion of them barely able to even be considered buildings anymore. The air was stagnant, and although it was, for the most part, a clear day, there was still a sort-of haze that hung over the streets. Whether it was dust, smoke, or something else, I didn’t know.

The next few days were uneventful- I didn’t run into anyone, living or otherwise. At this point, I was uncertain if there was even anyone else left alive. I raided a few buildings, finding a few medical supplies and nonperishable food cans. For the most part, it was uneventful and relatively safe.

It’s October 7th, 2033.

Walking through the suburbs made me realize that if I thought things were bad in the city, they were much worse here. While the city’s air was stagnant, the air here smelled like straight up death. I couldn’t count how many times it made me sick.

It’s October 8th, 2033.

The night had been going smoothly until I was awoken by the sound of groaning and gurgling outside the abandoned house I called my sleeping quarters. In an instant, I was on my feet, grabbing my pack and supplies and preparing to make a run for it. However, the moment I managed to sneak outside, I was face to face with a half-rotted face and tattered clothes. It lurched at me, falling off balance and landing on the porch, gurgling again. I backed up towards the door, yelping as, unbeknownst to me, the thing had grabbed my foot. I fell back against the door frame, cracking my back on the wood.

‘This is is, this is where I’m going to die.’ No one ever wants to think it, but that was literally where I was at that point in time. The zombie had managed to get back to its knees and was crawling towards me, not giving me an inch of space to stand or get away. The stench was nearly unbearable, and I had to fight to keep down the peaches I had eaten earlier. ‘If you’re going to go down…’

‘Go down fighting.’

It lunged at me, jaw hanging open, and I lunged as well.

My teeth sunk into the leathery, rotting flesh of its leg and my mouth was instantly full of the taste of dirt and what I can imagine a skunk’s spray would taste like. I felt the zombie lurch and let out a groan, swiping at my head. The palm connected, knocking me down to my stomach. In a final attempt at fighting for my life, I pushed up onto my hands and knees and yanked my head back, ripping out the chunk I had latched on to and spitting it out, going for another one.

Except I lost my balance and landed on my stomach again, on the edge of vomiting. I shut my eyes and braced myself, preparing for the zombie to latch onto me and doom me to a short, meaningless existence as another member of the undead. I remembered all of my companions, my family, friends. I remembered my girlfriend, and how we got weird looks at school. Anything besides straight relationships were seen as taboo.

The bite never came.

After a bit, I chanced a glance up, to see that the bite mark had sealed up and was now a light brown color- and that color was starting to slowly spread. I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees again, promptly losing the battle with not keeping the peaches down. My back hurt, my arms hurt, everything hurt. I shuffled away from the pile and the chunk of meat, and ended up on my side watching the zombie.

The best way I could describe it was a reverse zombification. Skin knitted back together, slightly patchy in some areas. As it healed, the groans sounded less and less animalistic and feral and more human. At this point, I grew too tired to keep watch, and fell into a fitful sleep.

It’s October 9th, 2033.

“Hey, are you alright?”

I jolted awake, my head connecting with a hand, and sat up quickly, eyes wide.

In front of me stood a short, chubby girl with patchy skin, hazel eyes, and curly black hair. Her clothes were tattered and torn, and an approximately mouth-sized hole had been closed up and scarred over on her leg. She stepped back quickly, eyes wide as she cradled her hand.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Her voice was soft as she seemed to avoid eye contact with me. “But… Do you know what’s going on? I went to sleep one night and now… I’m here.” She seemed genuinely scared, like I was going to attack her right there.

“I… think I cured you,” I replied, sitting up. “You were a zombie- er, well, that’s the best thing to describe you as. And you lunged at me and I lunged back. And… I guess me biting you cured you.” I patted the ground in front of me, inviting her to sit down. “So… that scar on your leg is probably from me. Sorry.”

“I… well…” She stammered and seemed a bit lost for words. “Th-thank you.” She sat in front of me, sitting cross-legged despite the obvious pain in her leg. She put her head in her hands, breathing shakily for a moment. “I don’t know what to do, though. I can’t go anywhere. I don’t know if anyone is still alive or…”

“I haven’t seen too many other survivors.” I put my hand on her shoulder, smiling softly. “But I’m not going to just leave you out here alone. You can stick with me. What’s your name?”

“Brianne. But my friends always called me Patches.” She chuckled. “It wasn’t meant maliciously- honestly, I think I may have started it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to use your actual name in these times. Patches will do. My real name is… “ I paused, having to actually think about it. I hadn’t used my real name in so long that even saying it sounded foreign. “… I’m Melissa, but I’ve been going by Badger for a long time.”

“Badger, got it. And I guess I’m Patches.” She put her hand on top of mine, and for a moment, I tensed. It didn’t occur to me that this girl had been a zombie less than twelve hours ago. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” I nodded and stood, holding my hand out for her to pull herself up. She popped up next to me and pointed towards the west, past some trees, towards a small cluster of houses. “Wanna head there?”

“Yeah.”

It’s October 9th, 2033. The apocalypse has been going on for at least two years.

And I’ve figured out that I may be able to help in reversing it.

[lizhly-writes]

the waking world

prompt: “I don’t even like coffee.”

Notes: This was supposed to be 500 words.  I went five times over that and I think I ended up world-building enough to make a novel.  Fun times.

The smell of fresh coffee wafts through the air.  This is odd, because Chris is pretty sure that it’s too dark for Naomi to be awake enough to be physically capable of making coffee.  Ha, maybe Naomi felt like getting up early for once and — 

What’s she even thinking, it’s not like Naomi lives here anymore or anything like that.

Chris cracks an eye open.  Shuts it.  Opens it again.   But no matter how many times she blinks, Mike is still standing there in front of her bed, a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.  

Chris doesn’t even need to get out of bed to smell the unreality coming off it.  It’s not just coffee, it’s Waking coffee, and that’s enough for her to shove her head under her pillow and pretend that Mike doesn’t exist.

“Chris,” says Mike with his typical mom-voice. 

“Nghhh,” says Chris.

“C’mon.  Don’t be like that.”

“Do you have any fucking idea what time it is,” Chris says into her sheets.  “That’s a genuine question, because I don’t know, I just know that it’s still fucking dark out which means sane people are asleep.”

“Christina.”

“Don’t Christina me, I don’t even want to be awake, why the fuck would I want to be Awake.”

“Boss’s calling for you.”

“Tell Boss-man to suck it.  It’s too early to be Awake.”

“Yeah,” Mike says, something heavy in his tone that Chris doesn’t like.  “But Boss is calling for everyone.”

“…Everyone, huh?”

Now that is something just weird enough to pay attention to.  Calling for everyone is just something that Boss doesn’t do, not without a good reason.

Chris pushes herself up to a sitting position, eying Mike warily.  In the end, Mike says exactly what she expects him to: “Emergency.  All hands on deck, apparently.”

She totally called it.

Chris sighs, swings her legs over her bed, and makes a wild grab for her stuff, hugging it to her chest.  “Okay.  Yeah.  What about it?”

“Does ‘Devourer’ ring a bell?”

Chris frowns. “A Devou—” 

And then it hits her.  

A Devourer.  Yeah, it fucking rings a bell. 

“Holy shit, gimme,” Chris snarls, snatching the coffee out of his hands.  The scent of it turns her stomach, worse than regular coffee does, but she pushes past it and chugs.  It burns her senses and her throat on the way down.  

Fuck, does it burn.

“Yeah, see, this is why Boss wanted you specifically,” Mike says, watching her drink like a creep.  “You should probably slow down, you’re going to injure yourself.”

Chris slams her cup down on her nightstand.  “Not fucking likely.”  If he was worried about that, he would’ve gotten her an energy drink from the Waking World instead.  Works just as well without the heat and lingering PTSD, but noooo.  

One thing she can say about the coffee is that it does its job quick.  She can already see the realities overlapping, colors getting brighter, world sharpening around the edges.  She shuts her eyes, makes use of the transition moment to swing on her pack, snap her goggles in place, tie her bandanna around her nose and mouth.

By the time she opens her eyes, she’s Awake.  

They’re in the Boss-man’s shop.  There are some Insomniacs already there, all with their faces covered.  It’s a necessity — for someone from the Sleeping World, the Waking World is sensory overload, everything too bright, too loud, too intense.  Back in the Sleeping World, Chris’s blurry, tinted goggles would’ve blinded her; her thick bandanna would’ve meant if she could smell anything at all, it’d have been a figment of her imagination.

Here?  It’s barely enough.  She’s already got the beginnings of a headache from the harsh lights, and the smell — it’s all coffee.  From the other Insomniacs who had to down a cup to Wake up, from the pungent taste lingering in the back of her own throat, from the fact that the Boss’s shop is a coffee shop. 

Chris doesn’t even like coffee normally.  It is so much worse here.

Just when she thinks she’s about to throw up, there is a voice.  “Thank you for coming at such a late hour,” it says.  “We have a bit of a problem on our hands.”

Chris whirls around.  The owner of voice is the Boss, who’s popped up behind the register, placidly pouring a cup of coffee.  He works right in his own shop, does the prettiest latte art with the foamed milk even with his shaky hands.  You’d never think an old man like him would be in charge of a bunch of bandanna-wearing misfits like them.

And yet.  

“We’ve noticed some disappearances over the week,” he continues.  “Ten total around our territory.  We believed it to be a highly unfortunate but thoroughly mundane series of events, until one of our own went missing.”

He exhales hard.  “Andrea Zhao.  She was investigating the disappearances, and detected Nightmare activity at every last reported sighting of the victims.  She was looking at the tenth when she became a victim of a Nightmare herself, just an hour ago.  Ethan Yu —” he jerks his head to a tired, tight-lipped man at the counter — “reports the culprit to be a Devourer.”  

Chris reflexively cringes — a Devourer is not a pretty way to go — before she… pauses.  Furrows her brows. “Hang on.  An hour ago?”

Here, in this part of the Waking World, it’s late afternon.  An hour ago would’ve made it dangerously close to high noon, which is flat-out too bright for most Insomniacs to even walk around in, let alone do their job.  And considering her partner isn’t masked at all —

That meant Andrea Zhao had to have been native to the Waking World.

“It’s too bright even now, what do you mean an hour ago—”

“How does that even—”

“Are you saying she could walk around in this kind of light—”

The Boss inclines his head.  “Yes.  Andrea Zhao lived in this world.”

“That’s not even possible.”

Nightmares are from the Dreaming World, and as such, they can only infect things that belong to the Dreaming World — intangibles, like memories, dreams, emotions, Insomniacs.  Flat-out eating an Awake? 

It should be impossible.

“Yes,” says the Boss.  “I thought so as well.  And yet.”  He waves his hand over to Ethan Yu.  “Andrea Zhao.”

Andrea Zhao should have been safe.  

There is a moment of silence.  

“Your task will be to take it down, before it can terrorize more of the Awake.  We’ll give you an hour or so before we start sending in some of the Awake.  Prevent collateral and observe — any information we can get on it should be useful.” 

“Where is it?” Chris cuts in.

The Boss glances over at her.  It’s Ethan Yu who says, “Corner of Devian and Arcord.”

“Right,” says Chris, and that’s all the information she needs to fucking vanish.

When you’re in the World of the Awake and you’re from the Sleeping World, you get some neat perks.  For example, you’re only real as you think you are.  If you’re not real, you’re imaginary, and if you’re imaginary, you can be anywhere.

One moment she’s in the Boss’s coffeeshop.  The next, she isn’t, and she’s right at the corner of Devian and Arcord, just like Ethan said, and she hooks a finger under her bandana and drags it down. 

Most Insomniacs have their senses deadened after too much exposure to the sensory overload that is the Waking World.  Chris?  Chris is good at compartmentalization and contradiction and fine-tuning bits of her head she wants to be real and which she doesn’t.

A good whiff of the air — she can ignore the overload if she isn’t real enough to feel overload — and under the sharp scents of the Awake is something distinctly of the Dreaming World.  Too strong for it to be any of her fellow Insomniacs, who contaminated themselves with a little something of the Waking World to even get there.  It’s got to be the Nightmare.

Another flicker out of existence, and there it is.

The Devourer, a Nightmare that eats and eats and never stops eating, with the special ability to hold on to what its meals used to be and replicate them.  It’s a mess of the faces and heads of fellow Insomniacs, filling the space with the whispers and memories and emotions of things that it’s devoured.  This one’s turned the alleyway, nosing around like there’s something tasty to be found in the dumpster.

Chris sees this kind of Nightmare in her own nightmares. Nothing like the grotesquely reanimated bits and pieces of your old friends and comrades to keep the fear alive.  Andrea Zhao is a fresh victim — her head’s probably somewhere on top.

Chris is so glad she never knew Andrea Zhao.  

What’s important to remember when dealing with Nightmares is that they shouldn’t be real.  Therefore, neither should you.  If you’re fearless enough, good enough at straddling the boundary between reality and unreality, you can dive through the Nightmare and wake the Dreamer who spawned it.  Wake the Dreamer, end the Dream.  The best way to do things, if you’re careful enough to avoid getting eaten yourself.

Chris doesn’t have that kind of fearlessness.  What she does have is a sword, and all she needs to do is pull from over her back.  

She’d had it even before Waking was ever a concept, because how cool is it to own your own sword?  It’s a beautiful thing of shining steel that she keeps religiously oiled and sharpened.  It’s remained unbroken for far longer than it should have.  Not that Chris is complaining.  

“C’mon, motherfucker,” Chris mutters, eyes on the prize as its faces tilt up and catch her own scent.  “Come at me.”

If you can’t do finesse?  Brute force is your best friend.  

It’s easy, really.  Step to the left, step to the right, make sure the adrenaline in her veins is just real enough to give her a boost without making her shaky, remember that all those memories and emotions aren’t —

You’re sleep-deprived and trying so hard to finish your paper, you’ve had so many cups of coffee you’ve lost count, and great, now you’re hallucinating, this is the worst caffeine trip you’ve ever had, what is that thing that’s —

Stab.

Where are you, you knew you shouldn’t have gone out for a smoke when you were this tired, you get lost in your head and now — ha, wow, what the fuck is that —

Stab.

You found it, and maybe you’re a little tired from all this searching and connecting the dots, but you was right, it was a Nightmare all along, but that’s Ethan’s horrified face as you tell him you’re fine, there’s no need to — 

Stab.

The taste of coffee, cinnamon, whipped cream.  It’s the best thing you’ve ever had, and you want to down the cup in one go, but you’re a nice person so you offer a sip to your best friend, who wrinkles her nose and says, “Naomi, I told you I don’t even like coffee” and you whine, “But Chris —”

Wait.

Chris stills and actually looks up for once.  There’s a face staring back at her, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed and screaming, and Chris knows that face.

Your head is spinning and maybe you shouldn’t have had the coffee all in one go?  But caffeine isn’t supposed to do anything to you but the colors are going sharp and when Chris dryly offers you a shoulder to lean on, you take it, she’s such a good friend, rea —

That’s Naomi, which means that’s Naomi’s coffee in her mouth and Naomi’s voice that Chris is hearing in her head and —

“What the hell is that?” you scream and Chris yanks at your hand and says who the fuck cares, how about we run the fuck away — 

“So you’re the bastard that did it.”

That’s the absolute bastard that pulled her into the whole Waking-Dreaming business to begin with.

“C’mon, take a sip,” Naomi’d said, so Chris did, but the coffee had been contaminated with Waking somehow, and gotten them both pulled to the Waking World where this thing was waiting and —

You’re fucking terrified, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, and at least you have Chris but Chris is vanishing in your hands, her eyes wide as she fades away and she’s screaming your name —

Later, Chris had looked into it.  Turns out, Chris had gotten a small enough dose that she’d been snapped back to the Dreaming World within minutes, perfectly safe.  

Naomi?  Not so much.

“I’m going to fucking end you,” Chris says brightly.