#monsters and marriage allegories

[tohakumaru]

good to get it out of the system before the lunar year end :) I guess it's a digital zine, sort of?

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this is not about divorce

make a big deal out of it, the banana dared the dog in a feat of impeccably timed satire. the dog whined and barked, and howled well into the night as the sky grew swollen with stars.

this is not about divorce – by the time dawn broke it had successfully caught its tail. the banana was then nowhere to be found, slapstick comedy at its finest.

i win though, the dog exclaimed, and in doing so let go of its tail.

crestfallen, he left the bar at around time for breakfast.

tomorrow, he thought, i’ll get it tomorrow.

view the full thing here

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[ladyantiheroine]

While I'm still thinking about Nosferatu, am I the only one who sees a bit of a child molestation allegory in Ellen and Orlok?

Ellen tells us that she called to Orlok when she was young. She'd been experiencing symptoms of his influence since childhood, after all. She wanted someone to comfort her, protect her, guide her.

But then that someone turned out to be a predator. To paraphrase her, it was "something sweet turned to torture." She speaks how it fills her with shame, complicates her marriage and sexual relationship with her husband, how she lowers to the floor and makes herself smaller and more childlike ("I promise I'll be good") when beckoning Thomas to have sex with her.

It reminds me a little bit of the book My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. It makes me think of the dynamic of a child who had a relationship with an adult she had a crush on, only to grow up and realize that he was a monster. It's the horror of realizing that the person you are attracted to and even fond of was a predator all along.

[moonlightsapphic]

Releasing Nimona on the last day of pride month 2023 was such a great move because it’s a really needed piece of media right now. Lots of countries that legalised gay marriage years ago have been grappling with this rising TERF narrative of “if you’re gay it’s whatever but if you’re trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming in some way you’re a PERVERT! A MONSTER trying to GROOM CHILDREN!” The outrage against simple things like pronouns and drag events, and the movement against gender affirming healthcare have reached a terrifying peaks for contemporary times.

So a kid’s movie set in a fictional country with controlling government officials with personal agendas, with an openly gay couple but also a shape-shifting kid who cannot even be afford to be out is our reality in the US today. Nimona’s feelings about her vibe, body and form, her insistence that she is only “Nimona” no matter what she looks like and her aversion to “small-minded questions” together forms such a beautiful allegory about trans, genderfluid individuals.

Ballister asks her to be a girl, but for whose sake? It’s only for the comfort of people who refuse to understand her, and would rather see her die than let her be herself. And it’s this widespread rejection and loneliness that has eventually made Nimona indifferent to pain, that makes her feel suicidal.

In the end, it is another member of the LGBTQ+ community that truly sees and accepts Nimona for who she is. And that should be a reminder that we cannot let them divide us. Trans people stood up for the rest of us and made historical change happen, and we need to do the same for them. Besides, cis queer people are only the “good ones” until they’re done with trans people and then will turn on us.

[the-crooked-library]

Yes thank you about the Dracula/Mina trope it's one of the things (e.g Lucy's treatment, or Van Helsing slut shaming and victim blaming her and Jonathan) that makes me tear my hair out because you don't have to manufacture a gothic romance, especially one that erases her intelligence, torment and grit. It already exists. Play with it.

Also watching men tell Harding ok enough moping man up reminds me of a Victorian novel I read where a main character who is usually manful is highly distressed about his missing fiancée and he gets told by two of the other ones to stop having hysterics akin to a woman's.

YES, justice for jonmina!! Their balance, their intelligence, their classically gothic intensity are the blood are the life. The way these aspects of their relationship are evident even prior to the horrors, the way they endure all the way through, is one of my favourite aspects of Dracula the novel.

One thing that I learned from watching the mainstream viewers react to the new Nosferatu is that the people are hungering for a Jonathan Harker. We want a proper Jonathan like we want sleep on a dark December morning. It is unfortunate that, in his absence, people are starting to project his qualities onto a most inadequate, spineless sort of substitute - regardless of how exactly a viewer is interpreting the film, Eggers makes it abundantly clear that Thomas is a terrible husband!.. He's inattentive, he's dismissive, he's emotionally neglectful, frightened of his wife's disability; regardless of his best intentions, he never thinks of Ellen as a person, and her marriage to him is a blatant allegory for repression/being in the closet/masking. He doesn't deserve the praise he's getting. We need a proper Jonathan Harker adaptation STAT, the masses are starving

Your mention of Harding is on point here. He's the personification of the false patriarchal ideal - and the way it turns on him, like a double-edged sword, is delicious to watch. He spends the entire film preaching "rationality" and deriding emotion, trampling the people he considers as lesser for displaying it; and when he has no rational escape from the tragedy his life has become, when he is suddenly broken and powerless, he himself is suddenly told to man up, get ready for a vampire hunt. What's wrong with you?? You only just lost your entire family, quit moping. Act like a man. The surprise on his face is almost funny - but, god, no wonder he crumbles.

It all really comes down to the same central themes. Nosferatu is about the intersection of misogyny, queerphobia, and ableism that keeps Ellen caged throughout her life - infantilized and demonized in turn. The reason why her relationship with Orlok is more complex than some people would prefer to say is because these influences determine the way she is perceived by every single human character - but the monster only ever sees her as an equal.

[akajustmerry]

award-winning playwright and most beautiful woman on earth danai gurira really said, "i will be writing a Brutal Marriage™️ play with zombies and bisexual lighting for rick and michonne. yes, it will be deeply horny but heartfelt two-hander with andrew lincoln, my dilf co-star who is also classically theatre trained and i will showcase that. yes, the entire episode, from its structure to its action and dialogue will reference season 7, episode 12 ('say yes'). however, in that episode, rick was telling michonne that part of loving someone is accepting that you can lose them, this episode will be a tender inversion in which michonne returns the favour and reminds rick of that very fact. and yes rick and michonne will fuck, lovingly, in a luxurious apartment in a crumbling building full of monsters multiple times because nothing could be a rawer allegory for what they are to one another in this world <3" and i think we should all be saying thank you to her!!!!!

[artist-issues]

ohhh it’s like maybe an allegory for the coronavirus lockdown?

…okay i get why putting that under a microscope would have fearful elements but like what about a werewolf and transforming into a non-understanding beast lends itself to that wait I just got it.

If it’s like “We were all under lockdown and isolation and all we had was out-of-proportion fear-flavored social media to connect with, i.e. we felt like everyone around us was changing into non-understanding monsters, so we turned against them” okay, I get it.

But it’s probably not a 1-to-1 allegory.

If it was, a werewolf story is still a really weird choice of premise for that. Because like how are you going to resolve it?

The mom would need to come up with a way to reach the dad, in his werewolf-ness, by realizing that A) something about the infection and his actions as a werewolf is completely fear-motivated and then B) she has to come up with a way to calm the fear that’s “exacerbating his condition” in order to talk him down. Re-establish understanding.

Except the fear was amplifying our inability to understand one another during the lockdown, which led to bad communication. But bad communication is what caused the fear in the first place. So like. It’s a circular problem.

I think I’m talking myself into wanting to see this movie.

But he still looks like stupid Big Buff Gollum. Not a werewolf. So also, why would I see this movie.

You know what I would do? I would have the family established as kind of bad at communicating in the first place—like, that’s their real-world problem—but it’s brought to sharp focus because of a new scary thing happening in their life.

Like, maybe they’re moving. They’re moving, because Dad just lost his job and has to get a new one in a totally new town. He’s scared that his failures are snowballing, and he won’t be able to keep this job either and provide for his family. Mom’s lowkey scared of that, too, and he can sense it, (for some relatable reason, like maybe because her father walked out on her family after losing his job when she was a kid) and it’s creating tension in the marriage.

Maybe the dad was fired because he tried to pull off this big business risk that everyone older and more seasoned than him was telling him not to do, and he did it anyway, because he’s prideful, and it blew up in his face. Then, to make matters worse, he recently stumbled into a destructive habit to cope—like, maybe he came home drunk for the first time, ever, after getting fired, and the Mom didn’t even really know he had a problem with alcohol up until this point.

So he’s scared he’s losing his family because of his mistakes, and his mistakes happened because of a fear of…losing his job and then losing his family, when he felt pressure at work in the first place. So he’s been doing a self-fulfilling prophecy thing to himself. The wife’s starting to struggle with that, too. She’s processing the fact that he’s lost his job and moved them and also maybe has a problem with alcohol or whatever substance abuse—she’s still processing it. It would be one thing if what Dad did just affected her, but they have a daughter.

And Daughter is still learning what to fear and what not to fear. And she’s learning it from Mom and Dad, who are both figuring out how to make her feel comfortable with this move, but there’s marital tension getting in the way.

So when we meet them, they’re driving a moving truck to their new home. The dad is overcompensating, insisting on being the one to drive all through the night, doing all these little things to try and prove he’s got it all covered (even though he just lost his job for making a dumb big-ego move, and then freaked his wife out by coming home drunk the same night.) Everything he’s doing to prove he’s got it covered is actually fear-based pride, and it’s just making the wife a little more tense with him, because him being so insecure and stressed is making her feel insecure and stressed. Plus, their circumstances as a family just got rocky overnight, and she’s had very little time to process. So every time she offers her two cents in any given situation, or tries to help, he takes it as a lack of faith in him and brushes it off, and she takes that as him pushing her away. Which he kind of is.

And then there’s the Daughter, who has no idea what’s happening, she’s young, she’s never moved anywhere before and she really just needs her parents to clearly communicate that everything is going to be okay because they love each other no matter what else changes—actually, let’s make that the Main Point: “Family Shows One Another That They’re Loved, No Matter What Else Changes.” That’s the point of our werewolf movie.

But! Her parents aren’t doing a good job of teaching that to her right now, because they’re not relying on one another anymore. The Dad needs the Mom to show him that even if he fails, she’ll stick with him. But because he’s afraid she won’t, he’s not communicating that that’s what he’s afraid of. So he keeps making all these fear-based macho decisions, and it’s a vicious cycle. (WE’RE TITLING THIS MOVIE “VICIOUS CYCLE”, DO YOU GET IT, LIKE CYCLES OF THE MOON)

And the Mom, she needs the Dad to show her that he won’t give up and hurt them (emotionally or physically) because of mounting pressure. She is showing him that fear, but that’s all she’s showing him. She’s not showing him faith that he can stick it out. The daughter doesn’t even know what to be afraid of, she’s learning that through the movie.

So! That’s where we meet them. And then they’re driving their moving truck through Creepy Nighttime Woods, and Mom’s like, “I can drive if you need a break,” and Dad just shakes his head and shrugs her off all “I-Got-This”, do you get it, it’s a mini-example of their whole issue.

There’s uncomfortable silence, the mom looks back to check on the daughter, expecting her to be asleep, but she’s wide-awake and doing that kid thing where they stare and keep their ears open and just observe their parents’ weird interaction. She’s just holding a little stuffed dragon animal, sitting there, an antenna to catch all their mysterious marital subtext.

Daughter asks Mom how far they are from their new house, and Mom looks at her phone and says, “just an hour, sweetie,” but then Dad answers at the same time, “three hours,” and points to his own GPS, and the Mom realizes their phones are mapping different routes to get to their destination. The Dad picked a route that supposedly has less traffic and isn’t on the freeway. That’s why they’re in Creepy Nighttime Woods.

Mom says something like, “why are we going this way,” and Dad reacts with nervous, reassuring “Leave It To Me” language, but it’s tense—

And then BAM Something comes out of the woods. In the middle of the road.

Dad swerves to avoid it, Mom screams his name in fear (and a teensy bit of involuntary resentment, the knee-jerk “why is the vehicle you’re driving suddenly moving so shockingly” way) and the whole moving truck topples and wrecks. It can be like in the trailer where the Dad comes to with the truck half-hanging off a steep drop, Random Guy in the passenger seat falls out, gets nabbed by some beast, scary scary.

(The Random Guy needs to be there for story-later reasons. Maybe he’s an ex-coworker and friend of Dad’s who feels bad that Dad got fired and offered to go with to help them move, like a real bro. But he’s asleep when the first interaction between Mom and Dad happens)

But you know what I’d do, the monster that takes Random Guy would look like a Beast. A big hairy animal. A frighteningly fast, slavering, bristling creature.

Dad has already helped Mom and Daughter out of the precarious truck when he sees this happen to Random Guy. Then just like in the trailer, the Beast jumps up, trying to get at him in the vehicle, its way too fast to see, but it only gets one crazy slash in before falling. It’s attack upsets the delicate balance of the truck, and Dad, bleeding from the cut, climbs out and tells them to run. It’s just in time, too, because the truck goes smashing down the drop.

They do, Daughter alarmed and asking, “what?? what is it?” and Mom not wanting to run because she didn’t really see any of that with the Beast, and all of their possessions just fell down the embankment plus it’s not really normal to start running from the scene of a car wreck and their friend Random Guy is down there, assumedly buried under the truck now.

But Dad screams at her about it, which is pretty out-of-character and a motivating tipoff to Mom that something immediately dangerous is happening, so they all take off. They don’t know which way to go, there’s a tense moment where they stop and Mom is arguing with Dad because of that, then a horrifying Something makes a Sound somewhere between roaring and screaming nearby, and they all panic again and flee.

They catch sight of the dilapidated one-story house, which looks empty, and Dad breaks in. They all huddle inside, and the Sound happens again—they look out the window Dad broke to get them in, and through the fog and darkness, there’s an even darker mass on the edge of the woods. It’s just a vaguely moving blur on the horizon at first, but then they see the steady evil lights of two predator eyes, staring across the yard.

Mom shrieks that it’ll get in through the hole he made, and they block that up in a blind panic while Daughter stands against the wall behind them, staring with big eyes at her dad’s bleeding arm. They wait to see if it’s coming, but it doesn’t seem to be. No more loud guttural bellowing either. After a minute or two of heavy breathing and silence, Daughter starts crying for her stuffed dragon. It got dropped in the woods during the chase scene. Mom goes to comfort her, while dad remains at the window, leaning against the bookcase, looking at their surroundings.

They’re in a house that’s partially wrecked. There are photographs in shattered frames on the ground of an old man and his grandsons. The old man is the only one holding a fish, and he’s smiling, but the two grandsons in the picture look uncomfortable. Like they don’t know him very well. There are also several broken beer bottles on the ground, and whoever used to live here apparently left in a hurry.

Dad goes to call for help. They left their phones in the truck, but the old man who lived here apparently had a landline. Who has landlines anymore? Dad tries to use it, but it doesn’t work. Well of course it doesn’t. Because who has landlines?

Mom is taking Daughter away from the window and a subconscious protective instinct makes her want to get the kid in the center of the building. She sits Daughter in a bedroom, which was closed, but the door opens to reveal that unlike the rest of the house it’s a dusty, neatly organized little boy’s room with bunk beds. It looks even more deeply untouched than the rest of the house.

Daughter starts to ask where Random Guy is, still crying, and Mom says they don’t know, but—and then Dad sticks his head in and interrupts and says Random Guy is “checking on the truck,” which is believable to Daughter because she’s little and didn’t see where Random Guy went, but it’s a lie, and Mom is surprised he’s dealing with the situation by telling a lie, even if it was to protect the daughter from immediate trauma.

Dad catches that look, and almost like he wants an excuse to get away from it, he says he’ll go get Dragon and check on the truck. Mom immediately protests—she thinks they should all stay there, because of obvious reasons, but she doesn’t want to freak Daughter out by mentioning the dangerous Thing they just escaped. Daughter also doesn’t want Dad to go anywhere, which heartens him.

Dad compromises by saying they’ll have a slumber party, then he’ll “check on the truck” in the morning. Daughter doesn’t like this idea, looking around at the dark strange house; her adrenaline is still pumping and the concept of “bedtime” is immediately terrifying. Fears brought to the forefront of her little mind, she asks what that scary roaring sound was while they were running.

Dad takes her from Mom and sets her on the bed. He tells Daughter “it was Dragon, protecting you, out in the woods. Remember what Dragon’s job is?”

“Protect the Princess.”

“That’s right, Protect the Princess.”

The Daughter may or may not be buying this explanation. “It was scary,” she says tremulously. Dad glances warily at mom and keeps it going. “Well sometimes being scary is part of the job. He has to be scary, and roar like that. To scare anything bad away from you.”

Daughter is sort of calming down, because mom has found a different, dusty toy dragon in the boy’s room. This one is a plastic action figure instead of stuffed, but she hands it to the Daughter, sort of helping to ground the kid in their new surroundings. Daughter asks if this is their new house, and Dad says it’s not, they’re just “borrowing it” for the night because nobody’s here, but “after Dragon comes back,” they’ll all go to their new house together.

Cuts to Mom easing herself out from underneath sleeping Daughter, and kneeling down next to Dad. He’s on the floor, unrolling dusty sleeping bags onto the bunk bed’s other mattress. She asks what they’re going to do, and he says he’ll go out and get their phones from the Truck as soon as it’s light, and call for help. As he’s saying this, he’s having a hard time using just one arm to get the sleeping bag unzipped. It’s been out of use for a while.

And this, so much longer after the fact, is the first time Mom notices his arm wound. She reaches to help him, alarmed and saying something fast like, “what is that? When did that happen?” but he pulls away on a reflex (because ouch) and says, “it’s fine,” then, trying to sound cavalier and a little funny so she doesn’t worry or get her feelings hurt that he pulled away like a child with a scab, “As long as I don’t touch it. It got a little piece of me, but it’s fine.”

This is the kind of personality the Dad character has. He’s very charming, but his personality naturally lends itself to kind of put-on, casual bravado at default.

She wants to clean it. He says he can do it, she can stay with Daughter, and goes out to look through the abandon house’s medicine cabinet. While he does, we can have some quick scary flashbacks cut in, between his tired dirty face in the bathroom mirror and the freaky-blurred-glimpse of teeth and snarl-wrinkles from the attack in the car, and predator eyes in the dark.

Traumatized, he makes sure all the doors are locked, sits on the couch for a little bit with the vague hope that his friend Random Guy isn’t dead and will come staggering up to the door, finds a shotgun in a montage of poking around the house, and then he’s exhausted so he tries to sleep with his wife in the kid’s room. It’s fitful. Because of course it is. And his arm, bandaged now, looks worse. He wakes up in a sweat at dawn and finds that he’s alone; his wife is now curled with their daughter on the bunk bed.

Dad stares at them for a moment, then gets up, rubbing his injured arm, now like triple-wrapped in a bandage.

Cut to Mom exiting the bedroom, careful not to wake Daughter, mindfully removing the now-empty sleeping bag from the area with a concerned glance down at the bloodstains on it. She looks up and around for Dad, and, when she makes it to the window, nudges a crack in the makeshift barricade just in time to see him, toting the shotgun, heading into the woods. She looks helplessly over her shoulder at the bedroom, and then strains to keep him in view as long as possible.

—-

Dad goes out to the wreckage of the truck in dense morning fog and there’s a gradually-mounting, tense sequence of him poking around. First of all, when the truck swerved, it apparently crashed and snagged on more than just a tree—it hit an old telephone pole and took it and the phone lines down with it. No wonder the stupid landline doesn’t work; he wrecked that like he wrecked keeping control of the truck. It’s all downhill from Dad noticing that.

Like, literally! Maybe he can slip trying to get down the steep drop (after all, he has to try and get their phones) and it’s the fault of his injured arm. He loses his grip on the shotgun during that fall and it’s out of view somewhere.

No worries; things are slightly less scary in the day, and he can at least see any predator coming. Besides, there’s a blood trail leading off into the woods where Random Guy was taken…so it’s throat-closingly awful to think about, but maybe the Animal is full, for right now. He looks like he’s considering following that trail, but then remembers the top priority.

First Dad tries to get into the cab of the truck, where he can immediately see that his own phone is totally smashed. I like the idea of it buried under a few other hard objects that were flying around the cabin during the wreck, and one of those is a case of beer.

When he tries to climb into the backseat, where his wife’s phone was last seen, he catches a glimpse of blood smeared across the rear passenger window (which is now pressed into the forest floor, because the truck’s on it’s side.) This blood is in a completely different place than the trail of blood that indicated Random Guy, getting dragged away from the scene of their wreckage last night.

So it’s not Random Guy’s blood. Did the truck squash the creature that attacked him as it fell? If so, how did it follow them back to the house?

Dad doesn’t have time to figure that out, because there’s Something in the woods. He can’t see it, from where he is in the fallen truck, but he can hear it. Heavy breathing. He listens for a second, terrified, staring helplessly out at the shotgun which he can infuriatingly now see through the front windshield, cross the clearing where it rolled after the fall. But after an eternity of listening to leaf-mold crunching and labored breathing, he suddenly hears a human sound. Like a groan, warbling its way out of a weirdly-deep bass breath.

So with that, he decides to get out of the truck. He creeps out, because even if it is a human, he has to pull himself headfirst out of the cab’s window-facing-the-sky, with an injured arm, and that’s a vulnerable position, and he doesn’t know who’s out there. But he does it anyway, because it sounds like the person’s in pain. Even if it doesn’t have the voice of his friend Random Guy.

So Dad drags himself up and sticks his torso out of the car with a, “hey,” and at first the audience is treated just to a view of him looking uphill…and all we can see in the foreground is a pair of grimy bare feet, the legs of which are tense and jerking around like the rest of the body is in a silent-standing-wrestling match with something invisible. The jerky almost-seizure movement is causing the only sound: slightly rustling the leaves. When Dad turns his head and looks in the direction of the camera, at the owner of the trembling bare feet, his face is transfixed with horror.

Well do kind of a pan from around the back of dad’s head just in time to catch a glimpse of what is probably a man—but something’s wrong, he’s moving all hunched over and there’s something scary about how fast, and he might be naked??—stumbling out of sight into some brush with one throaty wordless noise of fear. What’s also horrifying is the otherwise mute-strangeness of the encounter—Dad does not call out to try to get the person to stay.

He pulls himself out of the truck and staggers over to the shotgun. He picks it up and starts following the trail of blood, with many a look over his shoulder, creeped out by the hobo or whatever-it-was that he caught a glimpse of. (It’s the werewolf who slashed him, but it’s dawn, so he caught sight of it mid-transformation back into a guy, that’s what I’m trying to say.) But in his other trembling hand is his wife’s phone—also smashed. The case has one of those clear backs that you can slip a Polaroid into, and there’s one of Mom and Daughter swinging on their old home’s porch swing. He can’t go back virtually empty-handed, with no answers about their friend and no working phones.

Dad finds Random Guy’s corpse at the end of the trail. It is not graphic, I don’t do graphic. But we see enough to know that it definitely is a corpse, and that, weirdly, Dad’s look of horror and revulsion slowly fades after crouching down beside the body. (The actor’s gotta be real good at nonverbal narrative.)

Dad actually drops the wife’s phone and reaches for his friend’s bloodied arm with a very unsettling look on his face. He doesn’t look disgusted or afraid or grieved, he looks something else. There’s heavy animal-breathing, apparently coming from his own imagination, getting louder and louder in his head. But then he blinks at his own arm as it reaches, an inch away from touching the gory limb, trembling. Dad blinks again, like he’s seeing his own bandage for the first time somehow. He comes to himself, and now there’s real horror in his eyes. He stares at his bandaged arm, then the bloodied stump he’d been about to grab, then out at the woods. He grabs the shotgun, and stumbles backward away from his friend’s body. He’s practically fleeing the scene, as if he killed the man.

Cut to Dad picking up Dragon, the stuffed animal, where it fell, bundling it into the same grip he has on his wife’s useless phone. He’s got one hand full of those and the other still carrying the shotgun as he enters the house.

The next scene would be Dad kind of trying to tell his wife what happened out there. She asks if he saw what It was (there’s no need to clarify what “It” refers to, though she’s hoping it was a mountain lion or something.) He says no, and looks very troubled, probably remembering the hobo and trying to figure out what that has to do with anything. Mom sees his face and asks, “What?” meaning, “what’s wrong? What is it?” But he doesn’t like her to ask concerned-questions, so he says, “I don’t know, nothing,” and adds that he thinks the truck took a chunk out of the animal. Maybe in a joke about the phones also being crushed in the wreck, trying to alleviate the disappointed-stressed reaction that gets from Mom.

She wonders how it could’ve followed them while it was hurt, and he says he thinks maybe it was sick, not in its right mind, rabid or something. He’s kind of a know-it-all, always likes to have an answer for everything, plus he’s shaken, so pretending to have answers helps. She immediately says “rabid?!” And wants to see his arm. He hesitates, because ouch, and also there’s a flash of the sight of Random Guy’s bloody body in his mind’s eye—he doesn’t want to look at any more blood, even his own, out of a vague wariness that he’ll experience into that same weird trance again.

But then Daughter comes out and squeals excitedly at the sight of her stuffed Dragon toy, safely returned. The conversation is put on hold.

All of this takes about twenty minutes of the runtime. I don’t know, measure timing was never my strong suit.

Over the next day, the couple is keeping Daughter entertained and avoiding prolonged conversations, except for when Dad tries to convince Mom that he should go and look for help; he’ll just follow the road they came down to a town. She puts this off in hopes someone will pass by, instead; yet Dad keeps bringing it up. But he can’t hide the fact that he’s getting sicker, and she really doesn’t want him to leave the house. She’s more for the idea that they all go together, if anything—but what about Daughter? If there’s a wild animal out there, how do they justify taking her with them?

He says she should just trust him to go get help and be back before nightfall so they can clean up this mess. But she argues that he should not just leave she and Daughter in a stranger’s abandoned house in the middle of the woods, the territory of a possibly-rabid man-eating predator, with no phone.

They fight. Which is sad, because Dad is having a hard time keeping up with the argument, let alone winning it, because he’s running a pretty high fever at this point.

He wasn’t going to tell her about the possibly-homeless disfigured person he saw, but he mentions it by accident as they go back-and-forth, because he’s not thinking very clearly, (being ill.)

The whole argument he’s like clutching his hurt arm and fumbling irritably with the bandage—the argument starts while he’s trying to unwrap it to check the wound before a dinner of cold cans of soup—and Mom tries once or twice to get him to sit down and let her do it, but they’re both distracted by the argument they’re having. Now she’s really mad and a little worried, because hobo, what hobo, what is he talking about? He didn’t tell her about a hobo earlier. What did he see out there?

Daughter is hearing all of this, even though she was told to stay in the boy’s room and play. She creeps to the door and tries to watch the bickering match, but the floor squeaks and her Dad somehow hears it, halting the argument. Mom goes to reassure/scold her, which interrupts the mounting argument, and gets her a can of soup.

When she comes back to the living room, she and Dad share a more tender moment. It’s hard to stay mad when he looks so exhausted and sick, and still doesn’t seem to have the motor skills to unwrap the tightly-wound bandage. He’s just flopped there, picking halfheartedly at it. Besides, if he can’t even do that, she’s basically won—he’s not going anywhere tonight.

During this tender scene she makes some sweet gesture like sitting next to him holding his hurt hand in hers, and quietly saying, “This thing took the fight right out of you, huh?” Then she starts undoing the wrapping, and adds, “you could’ve just let me help you.” She’s talking about the bandage, but also she’s talking about everything else. He just stares at her—because this is the kind of conversation they need to have, and her softening toward him feels good but also mounts that constant pressure, because he really does love her and he really is sorry for all this, but how can he convincingly communicate that without it seeming like an admission of defeat? Not just for the wreck. For the wreck of their lives.

But when she does unwrap the bandage, his cut looks…fine. The skin is red and angry, there’s definitely something going on there, but the actual rip in the flesh is miraculously healed over. It should’ve needed stitches for that. What the heck is going on?

So he gets to have a kind of delirious line with a smile, like, “see, maybe I don’t need help.”

But she doesn’t like the loopy way he says it and checks his forehead, and he’s burning up. She goes to the landline and we can have that scene in the trailer where she tries to reach someone with it: “We were attacked by some animal, I think it was sick, it infected my husband, we need help,” but of course she’s not getting through to anyone.

And he just looks at her in a sad stupor, from the couch, because of course he also didn’t tell her that his truck-wreck knocked down the landline, so that mystery is still a mystery to her.

But then there’s a sound of crying from upstairs. Mom tells Dad to stay put and goes up to find Daughter distraught. She’s in an upstairs bedroom, by an open window. The night air is ruffling the curtains. Mom doesn’t like that one bit and shuts the window, sitting her daughter on the bed, then on further thought goes to try and nudge a bookcase over in front of the window. Might as well have all entrances barricaded. But then she notices that all the books have been tumbled onto the floor (they haven’t been in this room yet.) And when she looks over at distraught Daughter, she sees that the bed isn’t just mussed up—the sheets are shredded.

Mom steps back and out of the room, towing Daughter with her, her face a mask of confused horror. What happened in this abandoned house? Did the wild animal get in here, at one point?

Daughter sees the look on Mom’s face and stops crying, because she’s getting more afraid of whatever could make mom look like that than she was upset about…whatever was making her cry. Mom asks what that was. Daughter tearfully claims that Dragon fell out the window. Mom huffs and sighs and hasn’t the current frame of mind to play along—she says, “you threw your Dragon out the window? Honey—you know we’re not going outside, why would you do that?”

“So he can fly and get help from the town for us and Daddy doesn’t have to. But he didn’t flap his wings! He just fell!”

Mom comforts Daughter and takes her back to her room. It takes a while of playing and promising to go get Dragon the next morning (nobody’s going outside during nighttime, she threw him into the backyard and there’s no back door so you’d have to go all the way around the house in the dark, are you crazy) before Daughter will calm down.

But when she comes back to check on Dad, he’s non-responsive. She’s distraught. Ten minutes ago he was smiling and a little of his bravado-humor was coming through, and now he’s twitching and making really guttural noises. She’s very upset by this, because this on top of everything else? Is he rabid? She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to wake Daughter or let her see how sick Dad is, obviously. So she gets him upstairs, into bed, but he’s thrashing around in the torn-up sheets when she leaves him to try the phone again.

I like the idea of dragging this part out. Because if the scare-factor of the movie is “horrible breakdown in communication is causing hurt” then the right idea is to have the transformation into a werewolf be gradual. And that’s the scary thing. With little moments of hurt before the actual now-it’s-going-to-kill-us transformation.

What am I doing, I’ve spent way too much time on this

BASICALLY in the course of this second-night-in-the-house the dad would do lots of strange, upsetting things. He disappears from the bed upstairs and Mom finds him in weird places, like the basement. (Like in the trailer.)

He’s hallucinating about the moment he came home, drunk,to tell her he’s lost his job, and then hallucinating the day he came home and sprang the news on her that he’d decided they should move, and then hallucinating the resulting fight they had—but she doesn’t know that. She just sees him standing in the dark staring at nothing and shaking. She tries to talk to him and he just looks at her blankly; we get a glimpse into his perspective, just like in the trailer. He can’t understand what she’s saying.

She tries to lead him back to bed and he goes, the first time. As they stumble up the stairs she’s saying things like, “Come on, honey, two more, step up, do you need to rest?” but he’s hearing her say things like “Do you know what you’re doing?!” Like she did before accusing him of “uprooting our daughter’s world, all her friends are here,” or, “do you know what you’re doing?” back during their honeymoon when the car broke down and he tried frustratedly to analyze the problem. Or sometimes the things he hears her say as they inch their way across the landing don’t make sense at all, and that’s when he tries to talk back and ask her “what? What’s happening?” And all that’s actually coming out of his mouth is weird, gurgling snarling noises.

The second time she goes to check on him he’s curled in a ball in the bathroom on the floor, not moving at all, so tightly that at first she doesn’t even know what she’s looking at over there against the tub. When she realizes it’s him again she tries to wake him up and get him back to bed again, but maybe his eyes are actually wide open, he seems to be wide awake, he’s just not moving. That’s freaky. But she gets over it and decides to try and examine his arm while he’s so still—and he lashes out and spazzes, and she gets out of reach just in time but as he flails he busts a hole in the wall next to himself.

He doesn’t seem to even notice that he’s done this. Then he’s coming toward her, and his jaw is jutted out, and the whites of his eyes are completely gone, it’s just pitch-black dilated pupils, and his whole body is shaking so badly that his legs aren’t making the best use of the muscles that would stand him up so he’s sort of just dragging himself toward her on one uninjured arm, making all those deep guttural gargling sounds. She’s babbling to him, trying to snap him out of it, “stop it, you’re scaring me, what is it” But clearly nothing’s getting through.

Then Daughter, waking up after the loud sound, is calling for her mom from upstairs. Hearing that, Mom remembers there’s something happening outside this immediate frightening moment, then categorizes the hole in the wall and insensibility of her sick husband as “threat to Daughter” in a snap decision.

She finally scrambles backward out of the bathroom and locks him in. He doesn’t try to bust down the door, exactly, but she can hear him brushing confusedly up against it, see the shadow of him under the door flopping around. A finger or three scrabbles in the opening—his nails have spontaneously grown in the last few hours, grown to points.

Mom turns, breathing hard, to find Daughter there and tries to explain. Yes, that’s Daddy—he’s not feeling good, they need to give him some alone time. Daughter wants to bring him her leftover soup, but Mom insists that they leave Daddy alone and go into the living room for a little bit. This is so she can try the phones again—the phones, or the old hunting radio she saw in the cabinet.

While they’re there, Daughter is on the couch but she can’t stop looking at the shadow crossing the light of the bathroom, and listening to the ever-deepening, throaty sounds her dad is making. She is clearly remembering what he said about roars, and goes to look out the kitchen window at the backyard. Maybe she can spot Dragon. Instead, we get a nice jumpscare of yellow predator eyes watching her from the treeline. It’s the first werewolf. She’s frightened, and steps slowly back and back, not knowing exactly what she’s seeing. She goes to her mom for comfort. Her mom is intent on the radio. So we just see Daughter look over at the bathroom light again.

We pan slowly around the mom’s head as she gets a signal from the radio. She’s never worked one of these before, so she’s having to experiment. We can see the shape of the kitchen island moving out of view behind her. It does seem like there’s someone responding to her whenever she tries to talk into it. We can see the blurred corner of the stairway coming into view behind her. Whoever is on the other end, they are so muffled, she can’t tell what they’re saying, but the timing sounds like a response. We can see the landing coming into view behind her. She’s turning the knob and repeating things like, “Can you hear me? My family is trapped, there’s been an accident off of, uh, I think we were about twenty miles off the interstate, uh, can you hear me?” She listens for a response. Someone does finally answer, asking if she can confirm if she’s near a particular address. She gasps in relief and tries stammeringly to remember the one outside the building they’re in.

And behind her we stop on the shape of Daughter, outlined by a huddled, freakily-still silhouette framed in the bathroom light.

She let Dad out.

Mom whips around when Daughter says, “Daddy?” in such an uncertain voice. She drops the radio.

Dad’s hair has lengthened and his stubble has come in thicker but we’re not in full-wolf-mode yet. Which is worse, because his face has this indescribably blank, vacant look to it, like a shark’s. Except it’s frozen in some kind of weak grimace, like he was in pain before his facial muscles stuck that way. He’s staring straight through Daughter. Because his lips are pulled back and his jaw is still jutting, we can see the glint of pointed teeth. He’s scarily still, crouched in front of his daughter, except for how the lower muscles of his legs convulse every once in a while and his fingers are twitching. They’re claw-like. The arm that was clawed is ripped back open, this time in several places, and the nails of the opposite hand are stained red.

The bathroom behind him is in shambles. The old toilet has claw marks warping the porcelain. There’s blood on the fractured mirror, and it actually looks like some of the smears are purposeful—was he trying to write something in gore, and forgot what letters are supposed to look like?

Mom tells Daughter to come to her right now, and doesn’t take her eyes off of the uncanny transformation of her husband. There’s something about the way his face looks that is too scary to be considered “sick and in need of care.” Something that makes her want to drop him in a hole far, far away from their child.

Daughter is frozen. (Kids freak out when their dad shaves their face, imagine this.) Mom begins inching her way up the stairs step by step, but the moment one stair creaks, Dad’s head snaps toward her with such stomach-plummeting suddenness—and his right set of clawed fingers clench around the edge of the top step and immediately splinter it with unbelievable force—that Mom has to stop and settle for just reaching for Daughter. “Come to mommy right now.” She hisses, eyes wide.

Daughter tries to take a step back, forgets she’s on stairs, misses the edge of one, and gasps as she slips. Mom lurches up. At the same time, Dad opens his mouth and it’s impossibly wide and toothy and he makes a sound that is his normal human voice if it just had volume and no control over tone. He snatches at Daughter, but his arms and hands are shredding her puffy winter coat because he’s not accurately using the grabbing muscles in them. Daughter is stupefied in fear at first. Her mom is lightning-fast and uses a blue of pure mom speed and strength, and in one crazy twist she rips Daughter away from Dad. Daughter recovers enough to shriek into her mom’s shoulder. Everybody’s moving now.

Mom never stops the momentum that caught Daughter—she’s half-running, half-falling down the rest of the stairs herself as she bundles them into the kitchen, almost-forming the name of her husband into their daughter’s hair. Dad is a blur of reeling motion—his arms appear to have gotten longer, or maybe it’s just the way he’s holding them, endlessly reaching, fingers curled like each is one long claw-from-the-knuckle. His legs still won’t straighten up and hold him so he’s doing a mix of walking on his knees and all-fours hobbling, but it’s all frighteningly fast, and he’s staring, staring, staring.

He stays basically almost on top of them all the way until Mom is in the kitchen, she gets the landing inbetween them and she whips out an old knife from the sink and holds it out. “Get back!”

Daughter unburies her little head from Mom’s shoulder and twists to look at what’s going on. This movement steadies Mom, who tries to hold the kid at an angle where her own body is between her husband and their child. It also seems to momentarily jog her remembrance that this is Dad, at least enough for her to add his name in faux sternness when she repeats, “Get back.” This is like the part in the trailer where the same thing appears to be happening.

He doesn’t seem to register the knife. It’s her voice that has given Dad pause. Not because he recognizes it, but because he seems to have no idea what that sound is, judging from the slowly tipping head and black eyes. He keeps lurching toward them, but when his body makes contact with the island in the way, he goes wild and starts smashing everything he can reach.

Mom makes sure this isn’t her and Daughter. They attempt to escape, and there’s a a series of chases. First, she’s high-tails it to the truck, carrying Daughter. That goes fine until the truck won’t start (just like in the trailer) and then he smashes the windshield. She screams and tries to drive and flee, hoping he’ll fall off, but his flailing claw-hand disrupts her steering and they’ crash straight into the tool shed. Mom sees this about to happen and, in another burst of mom-superheroics, wrestles herself into the backseat and bundles both her and Daughter out the back door before the collision. Without stopping to check the destruction of shed or car, she flees.

They race into the woods, which was a terrible plan, but what else could they do? They make it to the road when they’re encountered by four hunters in a pickup truck.

One of them is holding a radio, two of them have rifles. They appear to offer temporary asylum—but then of course the werewolf gets there, and it turns into a true nightmare. It’s all screaming confusion. Mom is shielding Daughter’s face from all of it, and you guys get to join Daughter in obliviousness of the gory details because what am I doing, this is so long and it’s not even my movie and if it was I would artfully avoid graphic gore.

At one point Mom is scrambling to escape as the hunters are getting mauled in various stages of confusion and gunfire, and she falls down the embankment their truck tipped off of. There’s pained rolling, and she’s stunned, but Daughter is mostly unhurt, rolling a few feet away. There’s a moment where the werewolf approaches and Daughter tries to tell Dad it’s her, and tell him he doesn’t need to be scary, and Mom catches the tail end of this interaction before coming fully to alertness and racing to save her child. That probably would’ve resulted in death, because in all this fighting and gore it is apparent that the werewolf doesn’t appreciate anyone making sudden movements besides itself. But one of the hunters is still standing and shoots at it, so that gets its attention long enough for mom to grab Daughter and limp, one ankle twisted from the fall, back toward the street.

The last hunter gets werewolf-victimized, and then the chase is back on. Mom is barreling back toward the house, with one of the fallen hunters’ rifles, because it’s the last semi-safe place she’d been able to be, but she’s not going to make it. They’re in the backyard. She can hear that horrible throaty noise, this time full-werewolf scream. She ducks into the half of the tool shed that isn’t collapsed around the now-burning truck they tried to escape in in the first place.

She puts Daughter on the floor near the front door and hefts the Hunter’s rifle, peering through the wooden walls for sight of their pursuer. Daughter suddenly starts doing that high pitched scream-weeping-talking kids do, telling Mom not to hurt Daddy, it’s heartbreaking, but Mom shushes her and looks around for a hiding place—too late.

The werewolf is right outside. She can see it through the slats in the remaining walls of the toolshed, which face the woods. It’s looks like a werewolf—just a tad more beastly than the original, classic-looking Wolf Man. It’s lit in the glow of the fire, so the audience can see the weird, fever-seizure way that it moves, and it’s predator eyes. She looks back at Daughter and tells her that on the count of three she needs to run for the house. Daughter is just crying.

Mom counts to three, but before she can get to the last number, BAM the werewolf cannons through the wall and lands on the tool bench opposite mom. She whirls and fires; it’s hit and falls off the other side. But it stands back up and leers menacingly over the tool bench at Mom. It’s got one huge gouge along its shoulder, like a chunk was taken out of it. It’s not bleeding, it’s not a fresh wound—she remembers what her husband said about the animal “getting a piece taken out by the truck.” Daughter screams.

At the same time, one of those uncontrolled-tone animal noises comes from the other side of the tool shed, by the ruined wall. Daughter scoots to one side to get a better look. The camera pans a little to join her in peering around the bulk of the first ruined wall—it’s Dad. He’s pinned all along his left leg and arm, between the burning truck and the wall.

Mom looks back at the menacing werewolf she’s aiming her gun at. Dad never left the yard; the hunters were all taken out by this thing, which caused the moving van to wreck and did this to her husband in the first place. She screams at Daughter to run, and Daughter does get up and stumble a few feet toward the house, staring over one shoulder at her trapped dad—but the werewolf sees the movement. While its attention is momentarily diverted and before it can pursue, Mom fires again.

It’s hit, but it’s a werewolf, so that doesn’t matter; it leaps at her, knocking them both into the 1-and-a-half-walls still holding up the toolshed roof.

As she’s going down underneath its weight, she kicks both legs out and launches it a few feet away from her.

Then she turns and crawls half-under the tool bench for cover, aiming to get herself back between it and the vague direction of her daughter.

But then the toolshed collapses.

It falls in such a way that mom’s lower half is trapped under rubble when she comes to. The rifle is stuck lengthwise along her right side. She blurrily sees that Daughter is still lying stretched, stunned, in the lawn of the backyard. A few inches away is her stuffed Dragon, but you can tell she’s too shocked to move because she won’t even reach for it or crawl far enough to latch on for comfort. And beyond that, about a yard away, stalking toward her in a predatory arc, is the werewolf.

Mom strains to reach for the rifle and screams at Daughter to run, tries to get the creature’s attention. She can’t. She’s been so focused on the stuck-rifle to her left and the prone-daughter straight ahead and to the distance that, for a moment she doesn’t see that she can reach a perpendicular piece of wood under the one pinning her. She grabs at it, with no real plan in mind except to get something in her hands to change the impending fate of her daughter.

But when she does it moves, just a bit, and she realizes it can be used to leverage the beam off of herself. Instantly she’s trying to make this happen as the werewolf looms nearer and nearer to the easy prey of her daughter. But when she gets the beam to move a little, another sound makes her realized she’s not trapped alone.

Dad, still disfigured and snarling, is now pinned more under the same beam that she is than he was by the truck. (I don’t know exactly how; I think with some quick camera work we could show that as the shed collapsed completely he had enough time to get unstuck from his first position before getting trapped this new way.) As soon as she notices this she freezes in ear. If she lifts the beam, it is at an angle where he will be free first.

She stares at him and time slows down. He looks like a slavering monster. His mouth is yawning open hungrily, his face is a mass of darkening wrinkles. There’s fire from the truck right above him, but in its light there’s no human emotion—he doesn’t look afraid of getting burned alive, nor does he look in pain. His clawed fingers have turned black at the ends; he’s carving deep scars in everything he can reach, including the fender of the truck. But his black eyes, and in fact, whole face, are pointed at the same thing she is straining toward: their daughter.

If she lifts the beam, the monster that used to be her husband will be free before she will. She won’t be fast enough to stop anything he does. But if she doesn’t, nothing about the present scene will change, and she’ll have to watch her daughter mauled to death by the first werewolf.

She grabs the perpendicular piece of wood and hangs all her body weight on it. She heaves and screams and the beam lifts, just enough. Dad scrambles free, churning up the dirt floor of the toolshed. His dilated pupils reflect firelight and Mom. He stares down at her, then leers over her, clawed fingers reaching.

Then we cut abruptly to the action in the backyard, to a shot where Daughter is furthest from the camera with the burning toolshed as her backdrop. Dragon the stuffed animal lays in the grass in the midground, and in the foreground are the pacing limbs of the first werewolf. The clawed feet turn toward the prone, terrified child. There’s a scream, not from Daughter, but from Mom, somewhere back in the toolshed. Then silence. And then Dad comes up behind Daughter, bloody claw-hands reaching. Werewolves are moving toward her from both sides.

And then in a rush of motion Dad keeps going PAST Daughter; he pushes off the ground right alongside Dragon and launches out of frame in that single bound—when he comes back into frame, it’s to barrel into the charging first-werewolf. Bowling it straight off it’s feet, knocking it backward, away from Daughter.

Normally I don’t like werewolf-fights in a werewolf-movie. But he’s protecting the princess with his scariness. So I’m good with it. About a minute later, Mom crawls out of the wreckage of the toolshed, carrying the rifle. She shoots the first werewolf in the head, through the eye, right after Dad shoves it into the fire of the burning truck, and that finally does it in. It’s like, crawling out of the flames, on fire, and that’s when mom shoots it. It’s corpse transforms back into the distant-grandpa figure who probably owned the house they’ve been hiding in all along.

There’s like, a beat, where Mom is standing over Daughter with the rifle at the ready. Dad is bristling over the corpse. And then, horribly, Dad immediately starts eating the corpse. (You don’t see it, you see his back, a-la Demogorgon or National Geographic.) You just hear some snarling noises.

Mom hides the Daughter’s eyes by bending, picking up Dragon, and pressing the stuffed animal insistently into the kid’s face. After turning her around and telling her to stay there, Mom approaches Dad. She touches his shoulder while he devours. He doesn’t react. She reaches to do it again and THEN he whips around, bristling, nasty. She freezes, but you can tell (because we got a good actress) that she is forcing herself not to flinch. We flinched, though. We, the audience, we flinched.

She freezes, and he stands—tries to stand, and this time his shaky-bent legs actually straighten out. He’s almost his normal height. She looks at the blood dripping off his face and the freakshow-black eyes and says his name, it’s all very werewolf-cliche, and she tells him she loves him.

And maybe this time we go back into his perspective, like we haven’t since he first started transforming. The words he hears from her are very garbled, he still can’t understand her, and on the edges of the scene he’s seeing, a fever-blur of their old home, or his ex-office, or the road before they wrecked, keeps fading in and out.

The Mom takes his wounded arm, the one that first got the werewolf-scratch. With monster-force he jerks his arm back, as usual—but Mom does not let him slip out of her grip, so as a result, Dad yanks her forward right into him. She just has to go with it because that’s what happens when you choose not to lose tug of war with a werewolf, and embraces him. So, that should be curtains. But instead, of course, he just freezes and doesn’t seem to know what to do. Back to his perspective. He still can’t understand what she’s saying, but the emotion of the moment doesn’t change to confusion; she’s hugging him, you don’t need words with a hug.

From there, Mom slowly pulls away—which results in a snarl—but she doesn’t let go of that rigid arm. She leads him into the forest. They go to the site of the moving truck wreck (she takes him from a different direction, so they go around the hunter-massacre scene I guess)

She leads him into the moving van. All their stuff is laying in wreckage inside, toppled over on top of itself. But she sits down on the back of an overturned couch and shows him a shattered photo, plus the one on her cracked phone case, and just keeps telling him that she loves him.

When the cops show up, carrying Daughter safely from where they found her and closing in on them with guns, and Dad gets all bristly and animalistic-again, Mom doesn’t let go of his arm. She says she’s staying with him, says it to the cops, and says it to him. And he turns back to normal. It’s slow—enough. He’s been turning back to normal incrementally since she let him out of the toolshed. Standing up straighter, not eating her when she touched him, his eyes have been clearing up, etc.

Anyway, that’s how we end it. The police see the photo Mom is holding of their family, so they don’t immediately want to shoot the parents of the kid they rescued (they’re still the police and people are still dead on this scene) especially when one just went through mysterious seizures right in front of them. But when the camera goes dark, the family is still standing together.

I got a little carried away. so. so what, I had time

[justarandombrit]

what is a moomin

LMAO WAIT THIS IS THE BEST ASK I'VE EVER GOTTEN

Okay, right, moomins are a fictional species of troll(?) which look kind of like if you constructed a hippo entirely out of marshmallows. A diagram for your perusal:

They're from a long running Finnish kids series (The Moomins. Self-explanatory), which was created by Tove Jansson, a queer woman who never lived to see the legalisation of gay marriage.

As a result, the series has quite a bit of queer subtext, like one of the series’ monsters being an allegory for her fear someone would discover her sexuality, and one character being heavily based off of her partner of 40 years.

Anyway, it’s had tonnes of books, cartoons, movies, etc, but the way I properly got into it recently (rather than just being aware of its existence), was this YouTube video:

(Oh yeah, the 2019 series is gay as fuck)

Anyway. Uh. Thank you for coming to my TED-Talk

[physalian]

On Writing Theme (Or, Make it a Question)

An element of story so superficially understood and yet is the backbone of what your work is trying to say. Theme is my favorite element to design and implement and the easiest way to do that? Make it a question.

A solid theme takes an okay action movie and propels it into blockbuster infamy, like Curse of the Black Pearl. It turns yet another Batman adaptation into an endlessly rewatchable masterpiece, seeing the same characters reinvented yet again and still seeing something new, in The Dark Knight. It’s the spiraling drain at the bottom of classic tragedies, pulling its characters inevitably down to their dooms, like in The Great Gatsby.

Theme is more than just “dark and light” or “good and evil”. Those are elements that your story explores, but your theme is what your story *says* with those elements. 

For example: Star Wars takes “dark vs light” incredibly literally (ignoring the Sequels). Dark vs Light is what the movies pit against each other. How the selfish, corrupted, short-sighted nature of the Dark Side inevitably leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom—that’s what the story is about.

A story can have more than one theme, more than one statement it wants to make and more than one question to answer. Star Wars is also about the inevitable triumph of unity and ‘goodness’ over division and ‘evil’.

Part of why I love fantasy is how allegorical it can be. Yes I’m writing a story with vampires, but my questions to my characters are, “What makes a monster? Why is it a monster?” My characters’ arcs are the answer to my theme question.

Black Pearl is a movie that dabbles in the dichotomy between law-abiding soldiers and citizens, and the lawless pirates who elude them. Black Pearl’s theme is that one can be a pirate and also a good man, and that neither side is perfect or mutually exclusive, and that strictly adhering to either extreme will lead you to tragedy.

Implementing your theme means, in my opinion, staging your theme like a question and answering it with as many characters and plot beats as possible. In practice?

Q: Can a pirate be a good man? A: Jack is. Will is. Elizabeth is. Barbossa is selfish and short-sighted, and he loses. Norrington is too focused on propriety and selfless duty, and he loses.

Or, in Gatsby.

Q: Is life fulfilled by living in the past? A: Mr. Buchanan clings to his old-money ways and is a sour lout with no respect for anyone or himself. Daisy clings to a marriage that failed long ago, to retain an image and security she thinks she needs. Myrtle chases a man she can’t ever have. Her husband lusts after a wife who’s no longer his. Gatsby… well we all know what happens to him.

The more characters and plot beats you have to answer your theme’s question, the more cohesive a message you’ll send. It can be a statment the story backs up as well, as seen below, questions just naturally invite answers.

—

Do you need a theme?

Not technically, no. Plenty of stories get by on their other solid elements and leave the audience to draw their own conclusions and take their own meaning and messages. Your average romance novel probably isn’t written with a moral. Neither are your 80s/90s action thrillers. Neither are many horror movies. Theme is usually reserved for dramas, and usually in dramatic fantasy and sci-fi, where the setting tends to be an allegory for whatever message the author is trying to send. That, and kids movies.

Sometimes you just want to tell a funny story and you don’t set out with any goals of espousing morals and lessons you want your readers to learn and that is perfectly okay. I still think saying *something* will make the funny funnier or the drama more dramatic or the romance more romantic, but that’s just me and what I like to read.

When it is there, it’s right in front of your face way more often than you might think. Here’s some direct quotes succinctly capturing the main theses of a couple famous works:

“He’s a good man.” / “No, he’s a pirate.” - Curse of the Black Pearl

“What are we holding onto, Sam?” / “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” - LotR, Two Towers

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” - LotR, Fellowship of the Ring

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.” - Horton Hears a Who

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” - The Dark Knight

“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” - The Great Gatsby

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” & “Life finds a way.” - Jurassic Park

"Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind." - Lilo & Stitch

“But… I’m supposed to be beautiful.” / “You are beautiful.” - Shrek

“I didn’t kill him because he looked as scared as I was. I looked at him, and I saw myself.” - How to Train Your Dragon

“There are no accidents.” & “There is no secret ingredient.” & “You might wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.” - Kung Fu Panda

*If any of those are wrong, I did them entirely from memory, sue me.

Some of the best scenes in these stories are where the theme synthesizes in direct dialogue. There’s this moment of catharsis where you, the audience, knew what the story has been saying, but now you get to hear it put into words.

Or, these are the lines that stick in your head as you watch the tragedy unfold around the characters and all they didn’t learn when they had the chance.

When it comes to stories that have a very strong moral and never feel like they’re preaching to you, look no further than classic Pixar movies.

“Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” - Ratatouille

“I’m not strong enough.” / “If we work together, you don’t have to be.” - The Incredibles

“Just keep swimming!” - Finding Nemo

Ellie’s adventure book, to live your own adventure, even if it’s not the one you thought it would be - Up

The Wheel Well montage, to slow down every once in a while, because in a flash, it’ll be gone - Cars

The entire first dialogue-less section of Wall-E, to stop our endless consumption or else

The real monsters are corporate consumption - Monsters Inc

One cannot fully appreciate happiness without a little sadness - Inside Out

With enough loud voices, the common man can overthrow The Man - A Bug’s Life

A person’s worth is not determined by their value to other people - Toy Story

These are the themes that I, personally, took from these movies as a kid and later in life. If I remembered the scripts any better I could probably pull some direct dialogue to support them, but, sadly, I do not have the entire Pixar catalog memorized.

—

After you’ve suffered through rigorous literary analysis classes for years on end, the “lit analyst” hat kind of never comes off. Sometimes you try to find a theme where none exists, coming up with your own. Sometimes you can very easily see the skeleton attempt at having a theme and a message that came out half-baked, and all the missed opportunities to polish it.

Whatever the case, while theme isn’t *necessary*, having that through line, an axis around which your entire story revolves, can be a fantastic way to examine which elements of your WIP aren’t meshing with the rest, why a character is or isn’t clicking, how you want to end it, or, even, how you want to approach a sequel.

Unfortunately, very, very often, a movie, book, or season of TV has a fantastic execution of a theme in its first run, and the ensuing sequels forget all about it.

No one here is going to defend Michael Bay’s Transformers movies as cinematic masterpieces, however, the first movie did actually have a thematic through line: “No sacrifice, no victory.” They didn’t stick the landing but, you know, the attempt was made. Where is that theme at all in the sequels? Nonexistent. They could have even explored a different theme and they abandoned it altogether.

Black Pearl’s thematic efforts fell away to lore and worldbuilding in its two sequels. Not that they’re bad! I love Dead Man’s Chest, but to those who don’t like the sequels, that missing element may be part of why.

Shrek and Shrek 2 both centered on their theme of beauty being how you define it and no one else. Fiona finds true love in her “true” form, then strengthens that message in the sequel when she has the chance to be “normal” and conventionally attractive, and still chooses to be an ogre, to be with Shrek. Shrek 3’s theme is…? 

When it was never there, that theme is missing isn’t so obvious. When it used to be there and got left behind, it leaves a crater in its wake everyone notices, even if they can’t pinpoint why.

—

TLDR: Theme is more than just vague nouns and dichotomies. Good, evil, dark, light, selfishness, altruism, beauty, ugliness, riches, poverty, etc are what your story uses. Your theme is what your story has to say with those elements, using as many characters and plot points as possible to reinforce its message. Is it necessary? No. Is it helpful and does it lead to a richer experience? Yes.

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

The BG3 companions have the same energy to the DA2 companions to me. All emotionally resonate in a real and flawed way, and lovable (and/or hateable) for that. Beaten down and abused by the systems or relationships they were chained to. To the extent they either grow past their pain and anger to forge a healing path ahead or let it define them enough that they lose all perspective and blow their chance for growth (in the story). The messy queer and polam vibes may just be how I play both games, but that's there too.

However, while I think BG3's characters are inspired by DA2's, I don't think there's any 1 to 1 comparisons. Elves and orb contemplating mages are a staple of the fantasy genre; and Fenris, Astarion, Gale, and Anders are different enough that saying they're the same does all characters an injustice (imo). Fenris's slavery allegory is tied to colonialist power structures, for example, and there's a reason his skin is dark. While Astarion's slavery allegory is much closer to commentary on a criminal underground of sex slavery. Which makes sense with the vampire allegory too, because vampires (as a horror monster) often reflect anxieties around sex and sexuality. Nor are Fenris and Astarion like each other at all, they're very different people. If anything Astarion is more like Isabela. What with her deflective flirty humor masking a pain that's related to her being a 'beautiful prize' that was forced into a marriage at a (too) young age to a violent and possessive man that objectified, used, and tortured her, a criminal life of hurting others pushed onto her and it being all she now knows and accepts...

Hmm, maybe there are some comparisons to be made actually... 😅

[villafordefeatedvillains]

and you know what since i'm on a monster kick tonite: human/monster romance in media is never done in a way that appeals to us it's always "finding the humanity in them" WHERE is the human becoming a monster with their lover and embracing the monstrousness in them!!! where is the Equal Partnerships it's always just "i can fix them" instead of the human and monster meeting on common ground and developing a deep understanding of each other! GOD! if you're gonna find the humanity in the monster you gotta find a bit of monster in the human too otherwise it's not fun! or it's twilight where the human getting turned is a sex allegory so she has to wait until marriage. which is a human becoming a monster but like, the Evil Route and Still Not Appealing.

[thestarlightforge]

If I hear one more “the Billy/Tommy reincarnation plotline would be too complicated”—

from a Coven of Chaos detractor.

LET’S REVIEW.

Do y’all not remember how long Kang’s monologue was in Loki, and that was one of, what, a dozen expository monologues in that show alone? How long Red Skull and Alexander Pierce and Justin Hammer went on and on explaining god knows what in their films? How much Thanos drivel we had to sit through in Infinity War AND Endgame— the “best Marvel movie” of them all?

We go film after film with demons, space aliens, genetic engineering psychopaths, magic, science fiction—all manner of exposition that could have easily been cut in half and still maintained clarity—and everyone’s fine with it. The “best Spider-Man film in 20 years” had a guy made out of sand, a dude with robot arms coming out of his back whose robot arms were poisoning his brain, a guy who got electric powers because he fell in a pool of eels, and another dude who is a mad scientist with a personality disorder that dresses up like a g—d— Dungeons and Dragons monster.

But as soon as it’s about “the woman wants to have kids with her husband who became a man rather than being born that way,” or “she would like to find her kids rather than miscellaneous substitutes”—as soon as it’s down to the legitimate humanity of an interracial marriage/trans allegory and two of Marvel’s most prominent queer characters—THAT’S when people want to apply logic to these films.

As I’ve said so many times: “Did we not just get done watching a decade long saga about a purple space alien who deleted half of all life in the universe with a handful of magic rocks? Or were you watching a different movie from me?”

It’s starting to really piss me off. And I’m tired of pretending that it’s not.

[certified-bi]

Just to be clear this isn't intended as hate just simply my thoughts on why elemental isn't hitting with some people. Personally I'm not really invested in this movie being good or bad.

Elemental has reinforced something I've been thinking about for a while. In dramaturgy we ask "Why This Play Now?" Why this script, why our audience, why does it have to be a play. And for some stuff it can be simple. We're doing the Pigeon bus play because we have a child audience, it exposes them to puppetry and live theatre and it's fun.

Another thing that's connected in my head is how form is apart of the message of media. Why is this a sci-fi thriller and not an epic poem? Neither is wrong but the choice to go one route or another can impact the message, and if the person creating is aware of this they can use it to influence how the medium is received by the people who will read/watch/etc. It's why theatre thrives being interactive, but pre recorded media often isn't in the same way. Even in space with markiplier feels different from something like Stupid Fucking Bird(play) it's interactive but not in a live way. The content doesn't change(the clips are prerecorded) by how you interact with it, whereas in a live play the audience would be impacting the actors performance.

Why does this matter to elemental? Simple. Why this movie? Why does it have to be a movie? Why is it in a city? Why is it about elements? And the answer to some is clear!... until you examine the rest. It's in a city because it's a metaphor about second generation immigrants based on the experience of the director living in a city. Okay then why elements? Well at first we act like those that are different than us are dangerous to us... except fire and water don't mix? Like in a literal sense. So the metaphor looses a lot of people. And Asian person can touch a white person(pulling directly from the director's marriage he himself references) but Fire and water literally make steam and one will loose its form. And I doubt Wade is going to turn ember to coal or ember turn wade to steam. So the element thing just... misses the mark. It's like how zootopia made the predators and prey allegories for race which doesn't hit well due to... you know predators eating prey in our world. But pushing all that aside, why does their city look like a regular city and not seem to have touches of the elements? Like there are so many routes you could go with making a city built by just the natural forces. Or they could have less common mixtures of elements. Like a coal person. Or maybe some earth elements are more rocky and some are almost all plant matter.. but instead the idea is modern city and thinly reiled race allegory... oh and puns.

And that's why I think so many people are not hyped for this movie. Pixar was know for pushing what a film could be. Bao might have been a short film but it was pretty tight in playing with audience preconceptions and metaphors and it hit. Bugs life makes the comparison to working life while still clearly being about ants. The ant hill looks like an ant hill because there was no reason for it to be a sprawling metropolitan area to get across the message of workers struggle. Monsters Inc had a metropolitan area but it worked because the film centered on an electric fuel crisis and it doesnt wrok if it's about humans because theyre the monsters under the bed. You could change the setting of elemental or the fact that they're elements and it doesn't seem to make a difference... and I think that's why people are pre determined to be let down. And why the test crowds love the visuals but aren't impressed by the dialogue. Personally I think elemental is the next Soul or good dinosaur. Some people will really love it, some will hate it with the same passion, and most won't notice. It simply something different to put on to distract the kids. And I don't mean that as hate, that's just how it seems to be going.

[the-proofreader]

I would like to object to the mere title of "monster fucker" being put on this queen's name. She is a monster sommelier. She let that man age like a fine Gruyere (or that one Cotes-du-Rhone Village blend, if you want me to stay true to my allegory) in his cave on Mount Crumpit, ripening and maturing and even getting a little funky! She held off the advances of the Mayor for literal decades, even having to weather a very public (by design) proposal of marriage. All this while she waited for the Grinch to return from his self-imposed exile, so she could at last let him know that his gesture of love that day in school wasn't unrequited. And in the midst of all that, she made her love clear while still being subtle since she wore green consistently where she could: her robe when Cindy Lou is interviewing her; the green eyeshadow; the green trim on her dress at Who-bilation... She has the patience of a professional assassin with the dedication to match. You give Martha May Whoovier the respect she deserves this holiday season. She's earned it.

i feel like we need to acknowledge the TRUE monsterfucker this christmas season:

[greatwyrmgold]

The seventeenth chapter of Mushi Musume (aka Insect Girl) dropped today, and it gave some interesting backstory to the main villain. (Spoilers follow, obviously.)

So, Mushi Musume (herein referred to as Mushume for brevity) (also because none of you can stop me) has pretty overt themes of Family, and the story isn't exactly friendly to the concept of family. Yuren spends several chapters desperately looking for her father, Juen, only to realize he's a murderous asshole. Mashiro's own family are also abusive and unsupportive.

So Juen having a similarly cold family makes sense. It fits the themes of the story. But the Kashima family's filial abuse is a slightly different strain. Juen-as-Yuren's-dad is mostly just a supervillain, while the Miyaji family treats Mashiro as a failure.

But the Kashima family treats young Juen with restrictive respect. They're mad at him for not getting a "chamber rank," but only because they care so much.

(I'll explain why Juen's mom sometimes looks like a shoggoth in a few paragraphs. Give me time.)

They care about Juen because he's part of the family. But they only care about him as part of the family, if you catch my drift. He's a good boy if he contributes to the Kashima clan, if he's a good heir, if he attains a chamber rank and has children and acts normal.

I really like that part of his backstory. As is often the case with Mushume, I wish the story lingered here longer instead of moving on to the next plot point, but what's here is good.

It's enough to turn a boy against humanity. Turn him against those who abused him, to the inhuman monsters who accepted him. A solid villain backstory for a villain like Juen.

But.

That's not really why he turned against humanity. That's part of it, but it's not what the story focuses on. It's not what the dialogue or visual storytelling focus on; it's just something that happens to Juen on a few pages to make his heel turn a little more sympathetic. What do they focus on?

Now, this ties into the familial abuse. (The story isn't incompetent.) The last thing Juen's mom says (before one of his mimushi bites her head off) is "Let's get you back to normal, shall we?" And Juen thinks "This isn't something that can be fixed..." It's all very conversion-therapy-ey.

But why did Mama Kashima decide to become an amateur conversion therapist before losing her head?

I'm aroace, so I can theoretically vibe with this. But the narratives makes it clear that marriage and sex are only repulsive because he sees humans as "hideous and grotesque".

And he can't see the beauty in mushi because they're less judgemental or willing to let him live his life or whatever. It's because....

...because mimushi look hot to him. And the manga conveys this plot point not by having this mimushi look like one of the prettier kinds of bugs (butterflies, moths, dragonflies, jumping spiders, etc), but by having his Shoggoth Vision replace part of her face with a pretty human face.

I'm aroace, so I vibed with this better when it was a straightforward conversion-therapy-ey thing. Writing it so that he sees (some) mimushi as hot chicks and falls in love with them instead of human hot chicks feels...allegorically comphet-ish? But not allegorical comphet as in a social pressure analogous to compulsory heterosexuality, an allegory where heterosexuality actually is compulsory, and Juen just hadn't found the right person until he almost got killed by this bug monster.

(A bug monster who he perceives as a beautiful human woman even when she doesn't shapeshift into human form. He's not even a real monsterfucker!)

It turns what could've been a story about a boy rejected by his family for not fitting into the right mold, into a story about a boy being rejected by his family because he fell in love with a girl who isn't his arranged-marriage partner. And that's just so much less interesting.

[zolusbian]

the dracula story can be framed as female sexual libeation through grotesque gothic erotica, although we must remember that this idea of liberation as positive is a rather contemporarry interpretation of a text at mostly exhibits this in terms of anxiety about this happening in a modernizing world to good english women by an allegory for the exotic other. reintepetation in a modern light like the 1992 adaptation are fun and i like them! but don't let your monsterfucking brainrot take you into the nosferatu line of adaptation where it's less "yay, ellen gets to fuck the monster!" and more "the monster is literarlly a void of appetite and want and this destructive nature parallels sexual assault." everybody confusing lily-rose depp's acting of a possessed woman in pain with a woman in the throes of sexual pleasurer just shows that we have all been conditioned to think women moaning in pain is women moaning in pleasue because all sex is pain for women. like egger's interpetation is not a beautiful marriage or whatever you want it to be for your rape kink. thomas hutter is a loser but he's still the hero of the stoyr.

[gameangliaindustrybrief]

Research - 5 Games that are based around mental health

Limbo

A sparse, quiet world with no music and no color. A lonely child who is too small and too fragile to thrive in this landscape. A journey across a bleak and dangerous landscape to reach someone he loves. Limbo lays on its themes thick, demonstrating loss and grief with a kind of attack on your senses of sight and sound. I think that the art style is super recognizable with its bold greyscale sprites. The darkness of the world is to symbolize depression and it a kind of metaphor how the entire world is a dark indistinguishable mess. Something else I noticed is that for most of the game, there is no music playing; this combined with the art style really bring home that feeling of bleakness. Still on the theme of depression, the controls are really simple (left, right movement and jump) which could also be a tie to depression with how someone with depression may feel like there isn't much they can do. Overall I think that while Limbo is a good story game on its own, the hidden implications really sell it for me.

2. Night In The Woods

Mae drops out of college and returns to her quaint, dull hometown. You attempt to figure her out as she eludes us, even though we are in control of her. She avoids questions, and her parents welcome her with open arms without making much fuss at first. As the story progresses and things get weirder, you learn just how deep Mae’s dissociation goes, internally and externally.

3. Celeste

In Celeste, Madeline - the main character - suffers from anxiety and has reached a crisis point in her young adult life where she doesn’t know what path she should be taking. She seeks a sense of challenge and accomplishment and so has come to conquer Celeste.

4. Child Of Light

Aurora, a princess, falls into a cold sleep after the death of her mother and the re-marriage of her father. In this state – an allegory for depression and grief – she arrives in a dreamlike fairy-tale world where she must learn, love, grow, and battle grief.

5. Aether

You control a lonely boy along with an octopus-like creature that he encounters. He swings, soars, and strolls across clouds and asteroids using the monster's elongated tongue. He travels to various monochrome planets, which he must restore to glorious color by solving puzzles. The game plays with feelings of isolation, worry, and anxiety — acting as a visual representation of these emotions in the boy's head.