#earth cannot be flat because of the fact my life is going constantly downhill like. L. that kinda mood

[theogony]

going insane. will not be back shortly

[tartareus]

the way fiona is painfully touch starved and it not only shows but also affects her dynamics with the people in her life is just </3 i’m cry, here’s a little something that has been on my mind for a while....

for starters, in all her independence and selfishness, fiona is - deep ( and when i say deep i’m talking about centre of the earth kind of deep here folks), deep down - lonely and scared. now, different people react in different ways when in fear - some cower, others run; fiona is like a wounded beast, baring her teeth to anyone who gets too close when she’s licking her wounds.

her fear ( of aging, of dying, of losing cordelia, of losing her title, of never being respected nor loved again, it’s a long list even though she will never admit it ) does not incapacitate her, quite the opposite really. fiona's fear propels her to do something, forces to move forward even when against the tide.

i have yet to finish off my hcs about her parents but one thing i can point out now is that fiona did not get enough love growing up, much less displays of affection from her parents. while her mother was never an ounce as horrible as fiona herself was to cordelia, she certainly lacked at comforting fiona and making her feel safe. as to her father, always too busy at the hawthorne school to spare much of his attention on her, spoiled her rotten with gifts.

the family’s calico cat was probably the only companion for a long while - that is, in her early childhood before joining the academy - it’s not surprising that she grew up to be an individual who has one hell of a hard time showing affections; after her death of her mother, when she was taken to the academy to start her training and pretty much ever since that the only one she could truly trust and count on was herself and in her growing powers.

this is one of the many reasons why she does not like to be seen or touched ( no matter how kindly ) as if she were weak. it’s a big deal of pride mixed with uncertainty - of not being able to put her own safety at the hands of another, even if the other ( and, in this case, marie - who is pretty much the only one who even offers her any form of comfort/steady safe embrace even if only to keep her from collapsing ) is trying to help her.

she grew so used to using her looks, and touches as a way to seduce people to get what she wants that, when it comes to something  honest fiona finds herself at loss of how to go from there. take for instance the touches she exchanges with the axeman. they are sexual because obviously she is in a sexual relationship with him for a time.

while it is nothing rooted in love or genuinely romantic ( she fell in love with the idea of being in love and being, truly, loved in return; she likes the axeman, but she loves how he makes her feel more than she could ever care for him. it’s the adoration he gave her when she was at her lowest, the distraction from all the troubles and fears and, of course, the orgasms, she loved those too but we’re not going to hold that against her - considering she might have had those with only few of her partners in life, specially when one notes that she has majoritarily been with men. ) she still clinges to him, 

as she clinges to all others she tries to connect with - regardless the way she wants to do it, if it’s friendly, familial or romantic - in a way betraying her own mask of indiference to the ones around her for she doesn’t want them to leave her, dreads at the thought of being alone, even when she treats them badly - and she does, awfully a lot.

the fact that she constantly has a secret agenda alligned to touching is also something to note, it blurs even more the lines and ends up making whatever attempt to do so honestly fall flat. amongst other things, frustration comes to her often and then, of course, there’s aggresion ( not only in her own self destructive path of booze and drugs, even when she’s ill and fragile) also turned to others.

worst of all when it’s turned to her daughter, who shares a complicated bond with her. she loves her child, truly does so, but hates being a mother - always has. it never sat right with her and it never felt like these shoes belonged to her, like she deserved this. not to mention that, after delia’s birth it felt as if a part of fiona had just died, which pushed her even closed to the postpartum depression phase she went through, perhaps there was a plausible reason to why supremes usually never had kids, or perhaps it’s fiona’s fucked up ways that drove her to be such awful mother, whatever it is has left a mark not only on cordelia but on herself too.

when cordelia comes back from the hospital - after she and fiona had been trying to reconnect over drinks - fiona is seen clutching one of cordelia’s clothes, visibly anguished and, to her own surprise, in pain. it’s a similar pain she felt in the hospital, hours after hours in that uncomfortable chair waiting for delia return. it’s not just the physical pain of her disease eating her away that drives her to steal some painkillers, it’s the emotional pain of almost losing a child, part of herself in a way, that she never thought she loved that much - her mental state is alluded by the erratic flickering lights and her encounter with the young mother whose baby died shortly after the birth.

the pain she feels for her daughter is something secretive and reserved to moments of weakness where nobody is around to witness and she can convince herself that they were nothing but her illness making her soft. a passing thing. still, she tries approaching her daughter - even more so after the truth about hank’s cheating  is revealed - only to find out that by doing so she just might get her ass on the line. she recoils slightly, frowning and instantly regretting her moment of weakness and decides to avoid touching cordelia for her own self preservation within the coven.

fiona eventually leaves her, gingerly saying she’ll get delphine to help her daughter. her own words about cordelia ring on her ears: delia is a survivor.  we later see that fiona does not seem to be able to detach herself from the situation as much as she wanted to - if anything, the way she brought back that baby to life in the hospital and how she aids marie to keep the baby that was meant to papa ( of course with her own hidden agenda of wanting to offer a soul to him to get on his good side ), fiona’s own lack of touch when it comes to maternal matters does not stop her from wanting to avoid other kids from being abandoned. in both cases, by giving the change to keep the kids, fiona is giving another shot a motherhood - not directly, obviously, but it’s as close as it will ever get.

we eventually see that fiona begins to wear gloves to avoid unnecessary drama ( aka delia finding out even more of the dark shit she's been up to both lately and in the past ) and is visibly relieved once she finds cordelia’s sight restored - even if it had been myrtle, back from the stake no less, who had done it. in that fickle moment we can see the softness in her eyes and demeanour, as if she can breath again.

obviously, realising that she truly does care for her own child is nothing that redeems fiona, but it’s an interesting layer to her character - how conflicted she is with her own feelings. we get a slight glimpse that perhaps things were not so different with fiona and her own mother. later, when fiona finds out in horror what cordelia has done to herself to get her second sight back, the two share another heart to heart moment, but that obviously ends up going downhill (and fiona does note how odd her daughter acts at the time) when the sight is not only restored but shows glimpses of a possible future, one where fiona has killed them all.

including cordelia.

now, i do think part of the vision was reflecting cordelia’s own fear of her mother manifesting itself - zoe did end up dying in the very same way she did in the vision, but fiona had little to do with it. queenie herself, after fiona had just killed madison and beheaded the bastien/the minotaur, had her life saved by fiona.

even though fiona was under the impression that the next supreme was gone, using the vitalum vitalis to get queenie's soul back before it went to the afterlife was a risky move, considering that this wonder, unlike resurgence, uses the witch's very own life force. normally a supreme would not faint afterwards, but being with her own health and powers beginning wane, fiona feels the harsh effect of it a couple of minutes later, when she’s in her room and sends delphine away. she held herself against the wall to get there when she could have asked cordelia to help her or even delphine, and the way i see it that she didn’t ask for help for the very same reason why she declined marie’s steady embrace at first some time later:  fiona hates to be weak, to feel useless and powerless and, worst of all, to be seen in a weakened, fragile state. she wants to keep the image she has painted of herself ever since she rose to the throne: of being invincible and in control of everything and everyone. 

by being the biggest source of danger they have to worry about, she finds a way to protect them, or at least distract them, from the real danger that lies just outside their doors, a danger that only few of them would be able to handle: witch hunters.  because, let’s be honest even though fiona was a hazard in high heels to the coven, they were slightly safer with her on their side than against her.

while i honestly don’t think fiona was really up to kill all of them witches when she sent the axeman there to be killed there, i cannot claim she did it with pure intentions. sure, she did it to find the next supreme while she gathered strength to face her, whoever she might have been, but having a secret agenda doesn’t exclude the real thing here. she wanted out. out of the coven’s responsability of finding her replacement ( to her, it felt as if they were burying her before she had even died ) and out of the potentially dangerous relationship she had with the man.

which eventually proved to be a smart move (well, not for long though lmao) considering how the touches they exchanged were either sexual or violent, even though the little spit trick she did on him was nothing but false memories, there’s no denying that she knew his violent nature could get to her one day. she knew he was just as awful as she was.

perhaps worse than fiona, if that little hint of her knotty pine hell was anything to go by, she was going to spend the rest of eternity not in hellfire and damnation but with a former lover’s hands on her as she’s at the mercy of all his violence and lechery. while there’s something incredibly ironic about this awful situation. her hell seems, at first, his paradise but, the longer they stay like this, with her forgetting the previous days and only having him and dull aches on her body to warn her of whatever the hell has happened in the previous day, the faster he will realise she never loved him, and never will. he will be stuck with someone he loves but that could not love him back for the life of her. 

before all that happens though, we get to see fiona and cordelia meet one last time. even though it would never explain how awful she was, we get to see that to a big extent what fiona had wanted was to protect cordelia, keep her safe but, above anything else she wanted cordelia to be strong enough to stand on her own, to survive and bite back. which cordelia did, on her own and beautifully so. when she does grow a backbone, as she ascends as supreme that is, is when fiona feels at ease, as if her job ( the most important one, and the one she has forsaken for years ) is complete. cordelia no longer needs her, or myrtle or whatever maternal figure she can find. this time she hugs cordelia, clutches to her not as if her lie depended on it, but as if cordelia’s did. with her out of the picture, her daughter’s powers would fully bloom into what they should be once for all && fiona’s sorry for whoever dares to touch this coven again.

she’s not longer the scared little girl fiona dropped off at the academy decades ago, she’s the fucking supreme now. 

she can handle it.

[stina-is-a-punk-rocker]

stephen king’s ‘it’: a rant-review

Alternatively titled: an almost verbatim account of the 12-page rant I wrote in my diary after being driven to a catatonic rage by the 1100+ page monstrosity that was IT.

WARNINGS: spoilers, blood and gore, violence and general icky stuff, death, suicide, demeaning descriptions of women, both adults and underage, mentions of child pornography, my two brain cells trying to make me sense of this damn book

I fell in hate with IT the way you fall asleep; slowly, then all at once. The beginning reeled me in- it was great, that perfect first sentence all writers strive for- it’s got a compelling start, and it gradually gathers momentum onwards. The writing’s good, nice diction, nice use of words, a bit too much exposition, but what’s a few hundred more pages of ultimately worthless crap if it keeps you engaged?

And then it starts to go downhill.

The book’s too long. I got really, really bored by around page 800, because the book was dragging on for way too long and there was no sign of it ending anytime soon. There’s so much extra crap you could’ve straight up cut out from the story and it wouldn’t’ve made any difference to the final outcome.

The back-and-forth between the past (1957) and the present (1985) was pretty interesting- I much preferred the past accounts to the present ones, admittedly.

There’s a fuckload of characters the book could’ve done without. Way too many people my lizard brain couldn’t keep track of; yeah, sure, you can include the people Pennywise made a meal of by name- but you could easily lop off a few pages’ worth descriptions of characters that don’t play a bigger role than becoming clown chow in the course of the story.

The Losers are pretty much your everyday group of misfits: you’ve got the ringleader William ‘Stuttering Bill’ Denbrough, Stan Uris, Richie Tozier, Ben Hanscom, Eddie Kaspbrak, Beverly Marsh and Mike Hanlon- alias the self-insert, the Jew, the guy who makes offensive jokes but gets away with it because ‘that’s just the way he is!’, one of the few characters in this entire book that I don’t want to punch the living daylights out of, the hypochondriac, the tiddies and the black guy.

It’s painfully obvious that Bill’s a self-insert. Everyone and their grandma know that the moment there’s a character in a book who’s an author, they’re going to be the self-insert. Middle-aged cis het white male author? Now, whoever could that possibly be based upon, Mr. King?

And hey, despite all my mediocrity, I’m guilty of doing the same. I’ll write a story about someone who likes to write, and then suddenly the character’s a woman with dark hair and brown eyes and horrible myopia.

And yet, there’s something about Bill that makes it impossible for me to like him. I liked him well enough as a kid; he had a very Peter Pan role with the rest of the lost boys + person with boobs, and everything he did was a bit too perfect (because Big Bill- yes, they really called him that- had ALL the answers) for me, but I’m willing to let that slide.

(I’m not, I’m really not. Please give me flawed characters, not Characters with One Singular Flaw Who Do Everything Else Perfectly.)

I don’t think calling Bill a Mary Sue would be too far of a stretch. Also, he cheated on his wife with Beverly- big surprise there, I called it way before it happened- and characters who cheat will never be redeemable for me.

And then we have Stanley Uris. It’s been a couple of months since I last read IT and I’ve already forgotten what greater purpose Stan served for the story. I might be wrong- remember, lizard brain, goldfish memory- but I honest to god cannot, for the life of me, remember what Stan meant for the plot. Except, well, to die a couple pages in.

(According to my quick Google search, his suicide was sacrificial. As a wise woman once said, “Wait… what.”)

Richie’s actually not a character I hate, despite what I said about him. He’s comic relief for the most part at the beginning, and there are loads of things he says that would immediately cause #RichieTozierIsOverParty to trend on Twitter had he existed in 2020, but he’s an interesting character all the same. He’s got some amount of depth to him, more personality outside of being just another kid who encountered Pennywise.

I have a soft spot for Ben, I’ll admit. I’ve been the Designated Ugly Fat Friend of every friend group I’ve been in, so maybe I’m a bit biased, but I find him a lot more likable than a lot of the other characters I encountered in the book.

About Eddie, I’m not actually sure what there is to write. I remember more about him than I do about poor Stan, but aside from Eddie marrying a woman who’s a caricature of his overprotective mother, there’s not much that comes to mind. I’ve heard that Eddie and Richie had some #moments- my dumbass didn’t notice while reading, I’ve read IT only once and I’m awful at reading between the lines- though the boys more or less ogled Beverly all the damn time (poor girl couldn’t even wear a pair of shorts, but I’ll get to her later) so I hadn’t really considered the possibility of them being anything other than Raging Heterosexuals.

Beverly is straight out of r/menwritingwomen- if I took a shot every time her breasts were brought up, I’d have passed out midway through the book. I find it interesting (no, I don’t, I find it demeaning) how every time there’s a female lead with ‘flaming red hair’ in a group with mostly men, she’s described as this fierce, bold, brave Bad Bitch whose actual Badness doesn’t get half as much as screen time as her boobs. And I get that Beverly’s attractive, you don’t have to constantly remind us that BEVERLY MARSH IS FUCKING HOT OKAY GET THAT IN YOUR HEAD SHE’S A GODDAMN SEX SYMBOL WITH HER FIERY HAIR AND VIRIDESCENT ORBS AND GIGANTIC ASS AND BOOBS SO BIG THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE CALLED UDDERS SHE’S THE HOTTEST WOMAN YOU CAN IMAGINE ONLY LIKE A GAZILLION TIMES HOTTER DON’T YOU DARE FORGET THAT BEVERLY MARSH IS HOT (DON’T FORGET THE GIGANTIC BOOBS).

I think we got that the first time around.

And the constant sexualization isn’t just adult Beverly. As if every man in her vicinity staring at her wasn’t enough to drive the point home, we are treated to delights the likes of eleven-year-old (!) Beverly’s ‘budding breasts’; ‘milky white skin of her flat stomach’; ‘her long, coltish legs’; ‘shorts barely long enough to cover her panties’ (which were yellow, in case you were wondering about the underwear choice of a literal child); amongst other lovely descriptions of someone who literally just passed the fifth grade. She’s sexualized by her own father, and I know those things happen in the real world, but what with all the sexualization we already have of Beverly, it doesn’t sit right with me. I think it’s just creepy and unnecessary.

Also, cis woman to cis woman out here, but those ‘sweet pains of womanhood’, am I right?

Mike’s the final one in the trinity of Losers I don’t hate with burning passion/completely forgot about. The fact that he has such a big role in the story but we don’t meet him properly until we’re hundreds of pages in confused me, but he’s an okay enough guy. He didn’t seem like too much of a Token to me, but maybe I missed it. His backstory’s pretty interesting, too. I would’ve preferred him as a main character- his interludes, though unnecessary and adding more weight to an already obese book, were intriguing- and I liked him better than Bill, sue me.

And then we have the Big Bad, Pennywise the Dancing Clown, It, whatever the fuck it is. After all the terror, the Teenage Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, finding out that ‘It’ was essentially a pregnant, mutant Aragog… I can’t be the only one who went, “That’s it? That’s It?”

After Pennywise being Its most common form, it was jaunting, but in a bad way, to find out that It was just some Daddy (Mommy?) Long Legs who was Fucking Shit Up. An invertebrate, a measly invertebrate, was Its ‘Earth Form’? Was there some symbolism, some subtext there that I missed before Pennywise embodied the spirit of the Other Mother from fucking Coraline?

Apparently not, according to yet another one of my quick Google searches. I tried to see if there was any sort of hidden meaning behind the cosmic clusterfuck in IT, but came up short. Maybe I watched too much BEN 10 in my Youth for aliens to scare me.

I’m gonna get really nitpicky here, but: judging by the huge fern forests the kids saw during the arrival of It, It must have arrived at some point in the Paleozoic Era. To my understanding, It is essentially a Boggart-Dementor hybrid; It manifests into your fears and feeds on that. But humans didn’t appear until the Cenozoic Era, if my memory serves me correct. How did It survive until then? Does It have the ability to feed off of animals and their fears? So many questions, Mr. King, and so little answers.

Pennywise was sinister enough as a killer clown. Giving It a completely different ‘final form’ was unnecessary. No one cares, Mr. King, just finish the damn book. Some ideas are best left unwritten.

Henry Bowers was genuinely one of the best-written antagonists I’ve ever read about. He evoked a visceral rage within me, but I was also downright terrified whenever he popped up, because that motherfucker was unhinged. He was even better of a villain than It, because It killed to survive. Henry was insane.

Also, Mr. King, too much blood. He really dumped it in bucketloads- the first few times were scary, but afterwards, whenever ‘dripping blood’, ‘pools of blood’, etc. came up, it felt contrived and like a tacky fairground horror house.

The Losers’ final battles with It (both as children and as adults) confused me. Maybe I’m too much of a simple-minded fool because some of that cosmic galactic science-fiction bullshit went right over my head. And I don’t mean grazing the top of my hair, I mean several thousand miles above it.

I won’t go too deep into it because I’m still not sure what happened exactly, but it came off like a last-minute addition to the book, because it just doesn’t fit in with the mood of the rest of the story. At most, I expected some contrived demonic exorcist bullshit on par with The Conjuring films- instead, I got some weird outer space (?) opera. I’m confused too, dude, but let’s just roll with it.

I didn’t get the metaphorical tongue-biting; I could only imagine a repulsive French kiss. Who the fuck was the turtle? Why did it choke on its own vomit? What were the deadlights? What the fuck went on in those last few scenes? Am I just stupid- don’t answer that.

And then we have The Scene. The biggest fucking yikes I’ve ever yiked. I’ve read my fair share of fanfiction with scenes of questionable morality, but this was just… ugh.

It’s child pornography, that’s all there is to it. I refuse to believe that Stephen King ‘didn’t think too much of it’ while writing, and I’m disgusted by people who say, ‘it’s just one scene, it’s not a big deal’. That’s easily the worst thing I’ve ever read in a published book, and it amazes me I the worst kind of way when I see people who think it’s excusable. It’s not, it’s really not.

For the people I’ve seen arguing that ‘it’s just a couple of paragraphs’… that doesn’t erase the fact that it happened. You might argue that it has some deep metaphorical connotations about ‘the Losers growing up’ and ‘Beverly taking her sexuality into her own hands’… they’re eleven, you cunt. They’re literal fucking children. Sure, they’ve been through crap no one, not even adults, have been through. And that sucks. But how does that justify an orgy between ELEVEN YEAR OLDS?

And we get a nice little tidbit about the boys’ dick sizes; thank you, Mr. King, I really wanted to know which fifth grader had the biggest penis. The constant sexualization of child-Beverly was bad enough without that scene- that was just the nail in the coffin.

To sum it up: the writing’s good, the pacing’s geriatric, the characters are horrible, the story’s meh, and I’ll probably never read it unless I’m at gunpoint. On second thought, maybe not even then. Stephen King can suck my dick.