When I talk about something bad I've experienced, Baked In to my experience as A Woman, I am not "making my little cousins feel like shit for being women", because I am talking in a space with, allegedly, adults. I am not bringing my problems to children in the first place.
That said, I don't HAVE to make my baby cousin feel bad, because she's already experienced sexual harassment in her life, and she's only 8, and doesn't even understand what any of it means yet.
And everyone in her family can try to instill confidence in her, and never talk about our bodies in a negative way. But she can still feel like she's too chubby, because she still goes to school, and talks to other kids and their parents, and still sees ads, and still watches tv. We can be positive, but we can't fix the root of the problem.
And I don't HAVE to tell trans women that "pain is a rite of passage", because that's not a Rule being enforced (by me), because I've already sat and listened to my friend complain about constantly shaving as a Baseline necessity and how it hurts her skin and she has to put makeup onto fresh cuts on her face because going out without a full face of properly feminine makeup would make her life worse, and being anything less than thin and lithe makes her "less feminine", and ALL the things that can make her "more feminine" are behind a paywall. And I can try to make her feel better, and I can hear her experiencing the tenfold version of problems I relate to, but I can't fix the root cause of her problems by just telling her not to complain.
Forcing happiness as a core personality trait for women is not the Girlboss Feminist move that you think it is, and no amount of gender euphoria in the world will make you immune to systemic oppression.
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When Burgess summoned Dream, instead of Dream being completely cut off from the Dreaming, instead the magic pulled all of Fawney Rig into the soft places at the edge of the Dreaming, so like Dream still can't get out of the circle and his subjects can't get in but the Dreaming suffers much less and crucially, he still has access to some tiny fraction of his power
So now the whole house and everyone in it is sort of tied to the Dreaming and there's just oodles of magic coming off it, and the house in the Waking and the house in the Dreaming exist sort of superimposed over each other. Like you can be in one and sort of be aware of the other but you can't really flip between the two
And I want the whole thing to operate on a sort of combo between Aladdin in the cave of wonders/Orpheus leaving with Eurydice rules where it's said that if you enter the house in the Dreaming side and manage to find the Dream king, he'll grant you the thing you've been dreaming of, but the catch is you have to believe you have it. You have to leave the house without checking. So Burgess asks for Randall, but he turns to look almost before they're out of the basement because if he were Dream then he would pull a trick (TBF it wasn't actually Randall, just a dream of him, but Burgess couldn't tell the difference anyway because he was a terrible father and you can't change my mind). After that, he never managed to find the basement again. Never even manages to find the dream house again, only the waking one, although he goes mad looking for it
But like. Someone else asks for riches and the Dream king says they can be found the guy's pocket or whatever, but he can't feel anything? There's no weight there, no shape, his pocket seems empty (it isn't when he checks, but as soon as he gets out of the house, yelling about his triumph, it's gone and the house is mundane again)
Alex, who doesn't ask for anything until after the death of his father (and after he murdered Jessamy) asks for peace. For safety. The Dream king says nothing, and Alex lives the rest of his life in the Dreaming version of the house, too scared to step outside in case whatever peace he's found in his personal prison vanishes
Ethel never makes it to the house in the Dreaming . She takes what she wants from the waking, and when she leaves she doesn't look back once
Time passes, and more and more people find their way to Fawney Rig, but as Dream himself said, the great stories always return to their original forms, so no one succeeds because that's how it goes
And then. And then Hob. Hob who finds his way to the house just looking for an answer. Looking for something he can do to make sure his Stranger is there in 2089, because otherwise he might lose his mind with the what-ifs. So he finds the house, and he meets Alex, who hasn't set foot outside the front door in over 80 years except it's a little hard to feel sorry for him when Hob realises why. He meets Paul, who lives solidly in the waking, and hasn't been able to convince Alex that it would be worth it to leave with him. He finds his way down to the basement, finally, and there he finds his Stranger
And at first he thinks? It's a trick? Because isn't that sort of what this place does, it tricks you? But he speaks to Dream, and he gets the rest of the story from him, and the only thing Hob wants to take from this place is Dream. And he's like I want to get you out of here, but I can't because you're trapped in that circle (which for reasons unknown to the author right now but probably has something to do with the nature of dreams and stories can't just be broken like a regular spell circle) and I can't do anything about it and Dream is all you know the story, Hob Gadling. It is a more powerful magic than the binding. Leave, and don't look back, and trust that I am following
(Dream knows the story. He's sure he knows how it ends. But he also knows that it has to be played out, that he has to give Hob this chance - he finds himself, as he follows, weeping silently for his son and Eurydice)
So then there would be the agonising climb and return through the maze of the house where Hob almost looks back a bunch of times, and eventually he makes it to the door and steps out into the bright sun of the waking, and -
End title
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