i'll see what i can do

i made a choice to be interested in female characters from there on out. like, really interested. think about her motivations instead of his, her themes instead of his, her perspective, why she's cool, why she's a loser, why i'm like her or not like her, what it would be like for her to interact with this or that character, what would happen if she chose this instead of that

for a while, i had to actively make that choice every time i engaged with media and fandom. now for the last 10 years, i don't have to actively try. i simply am interested and invested in female characters, even minor ones, even badly written ones. i write about female characters. i think about female characters all the time. there was a time where i felt defensive about not being that way

everybody on the planet is in a different place with regards to this, but i think a lot of us could benefit from making that choice. and from recognizing that being fans of male characters, m/m ships, and the male perspective in general is the majority in fandom. a challenge issued to think about female characters more is not oppression

i'm willing to wait for games, yet i also don't want it to have to take 7 years to make games. we're running up against the border of both developer and player life expectancy now. i could not care less about reusing assets and old mechanics as long as an RPG is telling a good story

that one walker wears Converse - because Converse are American. Garraty and Pete and many of the boys show up in jeans because blue jeans are American. wearing bad shoes and jeans can mean that the boys are poor and don't have other clothes, sure. that is a plausible, literal reading of the text. but these details - these symbols - are in the movie not because the movie is trying to root us in the plausibility of the narrative, but in the metaphor and the message. so much of this film is full of American symbols and Americana. that long empty stretch of highway. the baseball. the chewing gum. the accents. the police. reality TV. fireworks. what is the film saying about America?

the Major talks like that because he represents hyper-masculine machismo and the kind of attitude used to galvanize young men in the military. Collie takes a guy with him but does not fire at the soldier in the turret - not because the filmmaker forgot to make Collie shoot him too, but because Collie is a young man and not some peerless warrior or killing machine, who pauses to call out to Pete who only wants to live a little longer and whose "fuck the Long Walk!" chant was just feelings and morale at the time and not the promise of action that it was for Collie. Collie's efforts were always going to be fruitless beyond living true to his own sense of self.

Pete and Garraty toss the baseball around because baseball is "America's pastime." it keeps them amused, energized, and working together as a team in the midst of horror.

Harkness writing his book and remarking on the commerciality being hurt by gruesome details is surely a reference to King's writing itself, and also to why King required the filmmakers to show the gore and body fluids - it's disgusting and disturbing because we should not be like the audience or the "die-hards" in the story who are watching the Long Walk and boosting America's GDP by watching these boys die. comfortable with suffering and violence for their own entertainment.

that kid with the radio plays "My Eyes are Getting Heavy" by Parish Hall because that is a rock/blues song released in 1970 at the height of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. a time of protest and rebellion in that music. yet the lyrics say "no need to think about it... it does no good to talk about it... nothing I can do or say, so I might as well play"

yet the film is not "about" the Vietnam War even if you could argue the book is. why did this film come out to tell this story, today? "an epidemic of laziness" "we can be number one in the world again!" now why does that kind of talk from the Major sound so familiar? it sounds like the GOP. and why was Mark Hamill specifically cast to say them? because Mark Hamill was Luke Skywalker for the first time in 1977 just a couple years after the Vietnam War, and George Lucas has stated that he sees The Empire as America and Star Wars' indigenous alien guerilla fighters as the Viet Cong, and like a poem, Mark Hamill has been loudly anti-Trump for the last 10 years.

the film does what Stephen King does in many of his books - it highlights the good in America that keeps her people kind and the camaraderie that keeps them going, but because it is horror, it highlights the awful, creeping ugliness in America using metaphor, symbols, and irony without too much subtlety, as I also don't find King to be subtle, lol. the film isn't perfect, but like with a lot of horror that gets quickly dismissed or goes unexamined these days, it's smarter than it looks

in those last couple minutes, we enter the world of the metaphorical and allegorical and there is nothing given to us about what happens to Pete because it doesn't matter. what matters is that Pete acted out of love and grief, but he also acted against his own counsel and personal morals, and the walk will never end for him. because war, authoritarianism, desperation all hurt and change even the best of us, and the system still wins in the end. it's a tragedy at the end of a torment nexus. the boys and America's citizens at large are framed cynically and tragically on purpose, helpless against the regime they live under, their small personal rebellions mattering at the personal level but no further, it's a tragedy and a warning. (see this excellent analysis of Collie in particular.) there is no broader rebellion to speculate on, there is no reason to want answers about the nebulous big war and the current state of that dystopian America, the Major isn't even a "real" person, just a stand-in for hyper-masculinity and totalitarianism and open hypocrisy that we are meant to both laugh at and be enraged at - all because the literal facts and details about these circumstances don't matter. only the boys' personal narratives, the personal morals and personal decisions as they compare to one another and compare to the hyper-masculine narrative forced onto the boys, matter. the story exists in a constant state of the overlap between what the characters literally experience and the metaphor we are meant to be understanding, and the ending blurs that line most heavily of all on purpose. practically a fantasy in the end. cunningly highlighted, in my opinion, by how Pete is lowkey a fantasy in and of himself - beautiful, impossibly tireless, forgiving, doesn't take an ounce of shit, all the way there until the very end