Sin título

Buck and his friend's son, Theo

Bobby: Buck, how could you not tell me I have a second grandson? Come here buddy, let’s go make cookies.

Buck: *processing*

Buck: wait- another? Who is your first grandson?

I was thirteen years old and suddenly the wax lady was telling me to go to the first room and get undressed.

Again: no previous comments about hairy legs, no razors appearing in the bathroom, nothing that preceded being taken to the wax salon and informed of what I “needed to do” to look neat.

I asked if it would be painful. My mother said no. (It was a lie.)

I screamed bloody murder when the wax lady smeared that first blob of hot melted wax on my leg. My mom had to cover my mouth because I scared the other patrons. That strip of wax stayed there for a full five minutes because I could not calm down and you can’t remove wax safely if you are all tensed up. I screamed when she ripped it off too.

The session ended there. The wax lady told my mother that she couldn’t do the waxing properly if I thrashed around so much - it was unsafe for myself and her, and she didn’t want to participate in something I clearly did not want to do.

My mother was very angry with me because I embarrassed her with my screaming “over nothing”. I said I never wanted to do that again, she said “too bad, you’re going to do it once a month even if I have to drag you to the salon because you are not going to walk around with hairy legs and armpits.”

This happened when I was 13 years old, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My mother is a lawyer from an upper-middle class upbringing but she was (and still is) obsessed with appearances. The beauty culture in Argentina is something I would need an entire post to dissect, but keep in mind that girls get their ears pierced as newborns (and boys don’t) and one of the most popular toys for girls of my childhood was a toy make-up kit.

Or maybe-

There are two post-grad students, lab partners - a man and a woman. They are trying to finish their research, something that could revolutionize healthcare or make people’s lives easier - but funds are low and grants are hard to come by, so they are looking down the barrel of having to quit their work when suddenly a man appears.

He claims to be working for a company looking to create a serum. Something about unlocking your best self and taking the best of you and giving it new life. It sounds ridiculous, downright fantastical, but the money he offers them is very much real. It’s close enough to their original research objective, they would simply be working for a company and their work would be only for their benefit.

It’s a Faustian bargain, but the company is offering them to further fund their future research too. They just have to do this one serum and they can continue their actually important work. It’s just a simple beauty serum for aging models and desperate beauty queens - what could go wrong?

But then the testing starts. They can’t test it on animals because what does the “best version” of a rabbit even look like? The company insists they test with people. The two scientists protest at first, but they if they quit they lose everything. The money, the lab, the equipment. The company recruits homeless people as lab rats - they clean them up and give them food and a bed in exchange for their participation. Who is going to miss some junkies and hookers?

The horrifying effects of the Substance start appearing and the woman thinks they’ve gone too far. This is unethical with capital U. With every trial to figure out how the side-effects function, the bodies of dead and deformed bodies start to haunt her. She wants to quit - better to leave their research than to continue this madness.

The man tells his partner to think logically and put emotion aside. This could be huge - their work on the Substance could be even more revolutionary than their original research. Their names could go down in history. They can’t quit now.

Maybe the woman threatens to go to the authorities, maybe the man is too ambitious, maybe the Company doesn’t like loose ends. Whatever the case, the woman dies. Her body joins the ones used for testing - she might as well continue to be useful in death, the company decrees. Now with a knot in his stomach, the man is quiet.

The man finishes the Substance but now that he returns to the original research and he realizes he can’t finish it without his partner. He finally starts seeing the deformed bodies in his nightmares, in the mirror, on TV. He starts seeing his partner’s mangled form in the reflective surfaces of the lab, haunting him. He breaks every mirror, but the fractured image makes it worse.

He manages to write down the instructions for the Substance in an attempt at redemption. Maybe the users will realize how terrible it is and won’t use, they will be able to stop what he can’t. He takes his own life in the end.

The Substance is released to the selected few that are able to afford it and are desperate for it. All the deaths and the horror changed nothing. People ignore the warnings they don’t know someone died to give them; they don’t take into consideration what must have happened for the Substance to exist - why should they care? They just want to be young and beautiful again, that’s not a crime. The Substance won.

-

If the Substance is supposed to a critique of Hollywood and the anti-aging industry, this would be a critique of the beauty industry and the unethical business practices behind modern laboratories.

How would you feel about a Female Rage/ Sisterhood/Revenge story?

Let’s say that the main protagonist is an ordinary middle-aged woman. Let’s say that she had a kid or two and never quite lost the baby weight and then got too busy to look after herself and she can’t help but compare herself to the other moms at the PTA who look so much more put together and she feels her husband’s desire for her wane.

She feels ugly and used-up, AKA the perfect candidate for the Substance.

Only she isn’t the one who takes it - her older sister does.

Her sister who was always prettier and more charming, who works in something that shouldn’t be about her looks but will definitely be affected if she doesn’t look pretty enough (like say: a news anchor or weatherwoman). And let’s say that the protagonist feels at first a little vindicated that now it’s her sister who feels like the ugly one, but then she suddenly starts talking about this new Thing she’s started using to keep up appearances: The Substance. She’s been using it for a while and has never felt better.

But just before the woman feels desperate enough to try it, something happens. Her sister got greedy, she took too much, became an ugly old hag and couldn’t live with herself in that state. Her sister dies as a result of the Substance, even if they try to label it a suicide.

The woman is hurt and confused and angry and she wants answers. She wants someone to face consequences. Someone has to suffer as much as she is - because she might have been jealous but that was her sister they murdered.

Cue the Kill Bill sirens and her using the information her sister had given her to try to track down the Substance creators in an attempt to shut them down.

The police don’t take her seriously and there isn’t enough proof to bring to a lawyer to file a lawsuit, not to mention all this subtle roadblocks that make it clear that these Substance people have money and power.

I don’t have a clear idea of what happens in the rest of this, but I want the climax to be a lab burning down in a toxic green inferno that everyone stares at in horror. I want the fumes to be so toxic everyone in a ten mile radius suddenly ages a few years like in The Beach.

The ending should feature another Pretty Young News Anchor Woman announcing that the fallout of the Substance Lab Fire was actually a hoax and that people were lying to get free benefits. Nothing has actually changed. The woman, who looks older and more worn down, sets flowers on her sister’s grave and looks straight into the camera with rage.

The end.

-

- Buck competes in a cooking competition and when asked who taught him he says “my captain 😊” and Bobby is in the audience cheering him on and goes “THAT’S MY SON!” at one point

OR

- Bobby and Buck compete as a team without stating what they are and at some point someone says “oh it’s so nice to see a father and son working together” and neither denies it

Vampires is different, maybe the worst kind. But they live on, even if the one that made them is killed. They gotta be killed, one by one.

Kali = Hindu goddess of destruction

Diana = Roman goddess of maidens and the hunt

Rozgonyi Maria “Mariska”. Daughter of a minor Hungarian noble family, sent to Elizabeth Bathory’s finishing school. Sired by Elizabeth Bathory when she was seventeen.

Expert seamstress, applies vicissitude to make clothing out of her victims - corsets strengthened with femurs, bones added to embroidery, hair woven into thread for a tapestry, skin used as fabric - and to fit current beauty standards to attract them. Usually goes after ‘high-quality’ victims, but waits until they commit an offense that justifies their death (it usually doesn’t take long.)

Neurodivergent (but doesn’t know it) - has spend years hyper focused on a project (spent over a year making a chemise a la reine and only got to wear it once before the Revolution - still bitter about it) and even when human was so caught up in her work that she didn’t notice her ‘classmates’ were mysteriously dying.

Currently living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Hired a fellow Hungarian as a lady’s maid when she arrived in the city in the year 1900 and has consistently employed at least one descendant of hers for the past century - so she has her own serfs. They “sort of know” what she is but don’t ask too many questions - they are happy she doesn’t eat them and sponsors their kids’ education.

…

The Countess was a beautiful woman, the most beautiful according to some, and she took a liking to her skills with a needle. Mariska became so enraptured in the commissions that she barely noticed that three of the girls that arrived with her died suddenly. It wasn’t long before she realized that the long table where they broke their fasts now had ten plates instead of twenty. The servants say it was the plague, their trembling hands have fresh nicks and cuts.

Then one day the Countess asks if she would like to stay with her forever.

No need for her to get married or have children or even help run the keep, all she had to do was say yes and she could spend the rest of her days weaving and making her wonderful things.

Do you know what happened during the last Dictatorship (1976 - 1982)? The military stole the babies of political prisoners and gave them to “good” upper class families. They raped women in clandestine detention centers and took their babies away. To this day they are finding foreign-owned “surrogacy” agencies that target lower-class women to carry the fetuses of foreign rich people.

Every (and yes, I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE) government we’ve ever had as a country has either sold us out to whatever foreign power has more money (the Spanish, the English, the Americans) or exploited for their own gain.