DON'T PANIC

It's not about morality or who has the high ground. It's about survival. So much of therapy for trauma survivors is learning to own your shit and moving forward. It may mean apologizing, self-reflection, reparations, and much work. It's going, "damn, I did an awful thing while trying to survive," and then you have to decide what next, how do I fix this and myself? One of the most complex parts of moving forward is realizing you are also toxic; you also did terrible things. Sure it is a result of your environment, but that doesn't change the fact that we resort to underhanded tactics and lousy behavior to survive. Everyone in Evangelion does something bad, it's layers of pain and complex reactions and emotions.

But there is also hope. The hope is to change, to move forward, and to learn to love yourself and others. Evangelion is about light in the darkness so that humans may learn from their past sins and choose to better themselves.

And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.

Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.

Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.

just when you thought you’d escaped the slaughterhouse

if you read Tatsuki Fujimoto’s new one-shot Just Listen to the Song you may have noticed it was drawn by another artist. Oto Toda previously worked as an assistant to Fujimoto on Fire Punch. Toda’s collection of short manga, To Strip The Flesh, was recently released in English and i really recommend it!

the eponymous story of To Strip The Flesh (and its follow-up shorts) is definitely the high point of the collection but i have a soft spot for Hot Watermelon

Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you.