heyy haha have you heard about this cool new unwitness protection program thing. yeah i hear it’ll have you feeling like you’re 13 again and you’re out too late in the dark and like your dad will probably yell when you finally get home. like the shape of you might be different than everybody else and you’re glad and you hate it and it scares you haha ha. like youth is a prison of circumstance. like you’re trying to figure out how not to bash a window in. dawg this stuff will have you feeling like you’re the lamb and your hometown the slaughter

thinking about isaac being a sacrifice in both cases.. being treated as though he is inherently worth less than what others want, as though he's disposable. in diseased residents, he's about to be one more kid crystallized and split open by this old priest and left behind in the woods for the sake of his hunger. literally consumed and disregarded by a figure of power in a religious institution he's trying to distance himself from, both despite and because of his parents’ pressure. in empty graves, presuming what the rest of them interrupt is actually a human sacrifice, caleb abrahams wants to offer up isaac's life for his son's. while it's not of his own volition, it's significant isaac's father is the one doing the offering - taking him to the altar, preparing him for slaughter. isaac's father, who has spent years trying to change and control him, is trading isaac's life for another son's. a son who was happy. who loved the snow. who, being only 8 years old, probably still went to church with his father. who hadn’t yet gotten the chance to grow up and discover who he is outside of his father’s orbit. the abrahams’ son gets to live because he is unmarred by the natural process of growing up and away from your parents - isaac, on the other hand, is already a lost cause. his father’s last act of control over isaac will be to put an end to his perceived disobedience forever. but that’s not how it goes. in the end, back in his own control and confronted with what he's done, mr. brooks cuts isaac’s binds, giving him another chance at a life he pleads for. just as he has to kick his way through floorboards in order to get a chance to run from the old church, just as he begs mrs. wisp not to call his parents, just as he desperately tries to get his dad to see his perspective while they’re in the car. isaac has had to claw and push and plead and apologize and try so hard to even start to be seen and treated as someone worthy of respect and care without control, of a real life to call his own. but instead he'll always be the delinquent, the whipping boy. he'll always be brought to the woods to die for someone else.

William Wisp is such a fun character because on one hand he is a coward and so terrified of everything but on the other hand he engages in like. Pathological levels of risk taking behavior when answers are on the line. “Do it scared” (derogatory)

the Unwitness Protection Program is so insane, actually, because yes, it’s about plagues and strigas and arcane rituals that make the dead come back, but once you remove the supernatural elements, the verismo of their situation really hits you. You are fifteen, and your father forces you into a car so he can scream at you as he takes you deep into the back country late at night. You’re sixteen, and your aging grandmother refuses to accept that something is wrong with her sense of reality. You’re sixteen, and you have to pretend you still know what’s real as your father cheerfully tries to solve problems you aged out of three years ago. You’re fifteen, and you’re the only one who can stop your friend from hurting herself. You are fifteen, and a priest has done something terrible to you that no one will ever believe or understand. You’re not even eighteen yet, and you have a terrible feeling that you’re not making it out of this year alive. You’re just sixteen, and you can tell no one. You’re only fifteen.

Horrible cruel ironic reality where all of upp always feel a slight sense of dread whenever William starts leading them ahead only for it to be William who dies in the end . Worth the cost being a song all about how Norah isn’t sure of where they stand and what she means to Will, Isaac constantly getting into trouble with his parents because of Williams stupid shenanigans and Lui, who despite having been put in the least amount of danger By William, might have never gotten controlled by Mr Abraham if William hadn’t snuck off into that basement . All these fears and complicated feelings boiling between all of them and then one day William just disappears . And all these things they never spoke about are just . There. Forever. Because William is never coming back and they’ll never get the chance to sit down and actually talk . Dies