bruh

"I wrote a eulogy for my best friend last week. Then I read it to him. At the pub. On a Tuesday."

He was alive, holding a pint, looking at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I have.

I'm Mick. I'm 70. The man across the table was Barry. Seventy-two. Best mate for 46 years. Met on a building site in 1979. He dropped a plank on my foot. I called him something unrepeatable. He bought me a pint after the shift. Haven't gone a week without talking since.

Three months ago we went to a funeral. Bloke we'd worked with. Cancer. The eulogies were beautiful - people saying what he meant to them, things they'd clearly never said to his face. And all I could think was, he can't hear any of this.

Every beautiful sentence. Every "he changed my life." Said to a room of crying people and a box of wood.

I turned to Barry. Whispered, "What a waste."

Drove home. Couldn't sleep. Because I realised, if Barry died tomorrow, I'd stand up and say extraordinary things about this man. Things I've never said in 46 years. And he'd be in the box, missing all of it.

So I wrote them down. Took a week. Harder than expected - not finding the words, but admitting I had them.

Rang him. "Tuesday. The Crown. Need to read you something."

"Have you joined a book club?"

"Just come."

Same corner table. Pint of bitter. Crisps. I pulled out the paper. He saw my hands shake.

"Mick. What's this?"

"Your eulogy. I'm reading it now because I'm not wasting it on a day you can't hear it."

"Have you gone mad?"

"Probably. Shut up and listen."

I read it. In a pub. To a man very much alive and very much uncomfortable.

I told him about the plank and how it was the best injury of my life. About the night he drove forty minutes in rain to help change a tyre. About how he rang every day for three months after my divorce and never once asked "Are you alright?" - just talked about football and weather, because he knew I didn't need a question. I needed a voice.

I told him he was the funniest man I'd ever known and his jokes were terrible and both things were true. That he'd been a better father than he thinks. That his wife's a saint and he knows it. That I'd have been a worse man without him.

He didn't look at me. Stared at his pint. Jaw tight. Doing that thing men do when the feelings arrive and they'd rather swallow glass than show it.

When I finished, long silence. Then he picked up his pint, took a sip, and said,

"You're paying for the next round. And the one after."

That was his answer. Perfect. Because Barry doesn't say "I love you too." He says "you're buying."

But in the car park, he hugged me. Not the quick back-pat. A real one. Thirty seconds. Neither let go first.

And he said quietly into my shoulder, "Don't read that again at the real one. I want new material."

Who would you write a eulogy for - while they're still here?

Don't wait. The flowers can't hear. The box doesn't laugh. Say it now. At the pub. Over a bad cup of tea. You'll feel ridiculous.

They'll look uncomfortable. It'll be the most important thing you've ever done.

Read them the speech while they can still hug you in the car park.”

Mom never had a mom of her own,

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.