okay… i know i usually don’t do a lot of thought giving besides the basic #geralt is hot and the whole #jaskier is baby but… i feel like no one really talks about this #yennefer and i just-
pre- tissaia yennefer lived in a small town as a farmer’s daughter who 1) had no one to acknowledge her existence beyond the fact that she provided free labor and 2) knew nothing of love, even that of her mother’s had it’s limits
even still. even still. she hands this flower (that was thrown to the ground) back to the girl that tossed it down
that smile, that little upturn of her lips, the small flash of hope that flares in her eyes, the kindness she offers despite never being shown any
and being shoved to the ground. into a pile of hay. afterwards.
this yennefer breaks my heart more than the cold, badass yen because i know her heart was broken over and over and over again
because she was different.
because she was sold for four marks.
and because she came out stronger eventually, without the same hope. but stronger. wanting everything the world has to offer. and then some.
crack open a cold and broken hallelujah for all the fandoms whose top kudoed ao3 pages are all tagged Time Travel or Everybody Lives/Nobody Dies or Both
HAHAHA oh my God, anon, i’m so sorry i’m subjecting you to this. “clown movie” is my stephen king’s it tag. i have not actually seen it chapter 2 or read the novel. it’s also not “good”. but here’s the thing: there’s something so almost-good about it that the concept of remaking canon with my bare hands has consumed my waking hours. thank you for putting up with my bullshit, i love you.
—-
so here’s the bare-bones plot of IT: every 27 years, a monster who lives in the sewer system underneath the town of derry, maine, surfaces to kill and eat children. in the 50s (in book canon) and the 80s (in movie canon) seven kids who call themselves “the losers club” fight the clown, then make a blood pact to come back and kill it for good if it comes back. they all leave, except mike hanlon; when they leave, though, they forget the clown, and they forget each other. 27 years later, when they’re 40, mike calls them back and they all (except stan, who k*lls himself when he remembers) return to derry to kill the clown for good. they do, but eddie dies in the process.
there is something SO foundationally interesting about IT that stephen king proceeds to squander and then destroy over the course of his story. why is it an alien spider clown, stephen. why would you end it like that, stephen. (stephen king, in ‘on writing’: you shouldn’t outline because i never outline. i just wander until i find my ending! me, making uncomfortable eye contact: i know) (the cocaine. may also have something to do with it.)
i love stories about big groups of friends, and i love time-jump stories where they reunite with each other after being apart for so long. and frankly what pennywise was shaping up to be, before the space clown reveal, is also really interesting!! if he’d turned out to be the concentrated manifestation of decades upon decades of small-town hatred and bigotry, targeting every generation of children to instill that same hatred? brilliant commentary! i love horror as a genre because it lends itself so readily to metaphor. sure would have been cool. to use that.
ok moving on! IT opens with a hate crime, which i read and proceeded to say, hm, i absolutely cannot read this book! adrian mellon, an openly gay man, is pushed off a bridge by homophobes and then eaten by aforementioned space clown, while his boyfriend watches helplessly. it’s why mike calls the losers back to derry in the first place.
eddie and adrian are twinned in the narrative; there’s a very solid reading of eddie, tiny rage-filled hypochondriac, as a closeted gay man. and in the movie, they almost connect these dots into something useful by making richie tozier, loudmouth comedian, gay and closeted. but here’s what they do - they don’t ever confirm, explicitly, that richie is gay; they just make it canonical enough for him to watch his best friend and love of his life die. it sucks. it’s narratively unsatisfying. i refuse to accept it.
here’s my ending: in a story that begins with the murder of a gay man by the concentrated evil that exists in every single small town - anywhere people stoke hatred in their hearts instead of understanding - another gay man delivers the killing blow to this small-town evil. this man kisses his childhood friend, and it frees him from the grasp of that evil. the jewish man lives. the black man is lauded as a hero for loving his friends enough to stay in a town that hated him. a group of friends, each thinking themselves alone in the world, remembers that they have a family in each other. and then, in the end, everyone gets a chance to put the hard work of healing in - to take what they remember, good and bad, and make an entirely new life with it. together.
“I love it here.
I love looking out at the horizon
and imagining all the other places
there are in the world.
And all of the possibilities.”
- (Anne with an E, S02E01)
