holy necrogamy

@igottafindawaytostopitstopit child labor laws are a whole different topic, and I'm not sure what simply pausing education has to do with starting work.

If an adult says, "I no longer want to go to the government institution where I am tortured for 8 hours a day," people will for the most part be horrified that happened at all.

But because of the survivorship bias of those who weren't being tortured to death, people refuse to believe it until it happens to their own child.

By which point, they've invested enormous amounts of mental effort into justifying the child torture apparatus. Best case, they realize they fucked up but now they will have their child stolen by so called protective services if they help their child rest and recover, due to MANDATORY SCHOOLING LAWS having no mechanism for health or safety related pauses.

More likely?

I dropped out of school when I was 17. I spent some of the worst years of my life trying to stay in school after having a major surgery that left me in chronic pain (and I was highly depressed, anxious, and chronically ill in general).

If I'd dropped out of school right after the surgery, I would have been able to get my GED early and go to college. Instead, I spent those 4 years being harassed and hated by ableist teachers, bullied by homophobic peers, and learning the material at home on my own anyway.

I dreaded going to school to the point it made me feel physically sick. I know other people who have similar stories, and I don't think it's a coincidence that they're all either queer people, people of color, disabled people, abuse survivors, or some combination.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

Like, I'm not saying parents like these don't exist, cause when I was a kid and neither me nor my parents were aware I was autistic, they hurt me. Not that they were straight up abusive, but my dad would yell at me when I was overwhelmed and having meltdowns and would believe I'd sabotage social situations on purpose like his father would. He eventually came to realize he shouldn't be so angry and when I started seeing a shrink at High School, he and my mom learned I was autistic and he put in the effort to make things up to me. He researched about it, he listened to podcasts BY autistic people to get how my mind works and how I'd manage to live after becoming an adult, and he'd even try advocating for autistic people at his workplace. AND he's deeply regretful about how he treated me as a child. And I've forgiven him, but just writing about how he'd use to treat me brings me to tears.

So yeah, I know parents can be well-meaning but flawed.

HOWEVER, the way his Carrie adaptation's press release is portraying Margaret White as a well-meaning mother who just wants to protect her naive daughter from the evils of the world is very tonedeaf, cause it's straight up Parents' Rights rethoric that's being paddled to cut off children from anyone and anything that doesn't align with the parents' own values and beliefs.

growing up as a fat bullied girl means that book carrie was everything to me and seeing her constantly stripped of her physical reality feels like a personal insult at this point. even if you want to argue about "beauty standards of the seventies so maybe she wasn't fat but she was just a bit more curvy" the text is right there. she has weight on her and she has acne and she's frumpy. by making her "hollywood ugly" they’re completely missing the point of why her story is a tragedy. it’s easy to feel bad for a beautiful girl who’s just a little shy but it’s a lot harder for a general audience to look at a fat weird girl and acknowledge her humanity and that's exactly why the story needs to be told that way

and i just know they’re going to make her a perfect little angel again because they’re too scared of her actual personality. in the book carrie is genuinely spiteful even before the prom scene (when we see her inner thoughts she has violent fantasies about hurting her bullies iirc amongst other moments) because being bullied for years doesn't turn you into a saint it turns you into someone with a lot of repressed rage. she’s a sweetheart deep down sure but she’s also weird and difficult. the whole point is that she’s an unconventional victim. she isn't "relatable" to the people who would have been her bullies and that’s what makes the prom scene so visceral

loss.jpg from Ctrl+Alt+Del is intersex!

carrie is almost explicitly about the cycles of abuse. it is almost explicitly about how women and girls are taught to reproduce the patriarchy. it cannot be isolated from either message.

it shows cruel teenagers not as a random whacky plot point but instead to highlight that we are taught to mock other girls for not being fuckable; lest we ourselves be considered not-fuckable. we will eat our own kind to survive. nobody helps her because to help carrie would be to turn against the patriarchy.

carrie's mother has experienced abuse at the hands of her husband and religion not as a "sad backstory" but instead because it lampshades her behavior when she then turns and abuses her daughter while citing that same religion. we are forced to ask the question: what is the difference between the patriarchy and religion? aren't they both systems of control? we often see mothers as being the "ultimate" in innocence and kindness - but this book challenges that narrative. abusive mothers exist, and and always have. abusive women exist and always have. white women, after all, love voting for donald trump.

men are almost absent from the book, but their presence lingers. it feels almost like the red mark made after a slap - the men do not have to be there; the women will continue to abide by the rules without question. it is a devastating, haunting condemnation of the notion of feminine fragility. it accurately asserts that women are cruel, are capable, are power-hungry - and often are hiding behind perceived innocence to mask that cruelty. the abuse carrie experiences rests in a doubled betrayal: it is because of another woman. the supposed "sisterhood" is revealed to be thin, a guise of equanimity that is only offered to the "right" type of girl/woman.

many of us were not the right type of girl.

to go back on these main and obvious themes of the book - to rewrite the mother as some caring and sad creature is... a curious choice. i can't explain it, but it feels almost like censorship to me. it refuses a deeper meaning of the book (and one that questions the patriarchy) in favor of the incredibly thin plot of "what if scary girl had scary powers." i literally don't even know what level of misogyny it is that we have to defang everyone around her in order to tell her story. i'm baffled by it.

in the era of trad wives endlessly posting abusive content of their children online - the adaptation had plenty of meat to modernize her mother. in the era of AI and revenge porn and social media - there's a huge amount of space for a competent writer to play around in. after all, if the abuse is recorded and posted to media - and as the audience we're watching it without interfering - the story is now about us. it asks us who we are comfortable bullying.

it's okay if you feel like you don't have the writing chops to talk about how many religions are abusive and tacitly enable domestic violence. it's okay if you feel like you couldn't write a believable teenage bully. it's okay if you're just interested in "scary girl has scary powers."