but westward, look, the land is bright

SCRATCH: CONGRATULATIONS!

Bog is like the wolves of Yellowstone. Leaving them as they are and observing them from a distance is great! But if you come close or disturb it, you face consequences. You are first greeted by ticks (Lyme's disease) and adders. Then you are faced with bombs and bodies. Only then do you realize you are lost. Your franctic screams for help do not rescue you from your fate of drowning. Your corpse will be laughed at, and you will be used for your stupidity as a cautionary tale. Those who try to convince you otherwise are affiliated with the Big Evil Bog Limited TM.

Setting aside, for a moment, the Kelpies, the Will-O-The-Wisp, the Boggarts, the Redcaps, the Pixies, the Leprechauns, the Kappa, the Banshees, the Salamanders, the Witches, the Trolls, and the many many other folkloric beasties one might encounter in such a place

It is a Mouth Of The Earth

Mires, both Bog & Fen, are peat-accumulating environments. They’re carbon sinks. They’re the spots on the earth where the Carbon returns to the Stone. In most biomes, Dying is simply a temporary form of transformation. The deceased becoming food for other living things, predators and scavengers and detrivores, within short order, biomass reorganized and set about into motion again through the endless alchemy of metabolism. Nothing on Earth stays dead for long, if you remove Ego and Identity from your framework.

But not in Bogs

Bogs keep their Dead

The water, acidic and oxygen poor, rich in bitter tannins and dissolved minerals, but poor in essential nutrients, acts as a natural preservative, preventing the usual nutrient recycling and upcycling found from the jungles to the poles everywhere that life usually flourishes. Those that live in the Bog live the drama of their lives out on top of a gradually accumulating crust of rotting biomass that can get deep enough to swallow a man whole if he steps in the wrong spot. Say, a spot with poor structure, held aloft by a hidden bubble of toxic, flammable methane gas, liberated from rotting carcasses below by methanogenic archaea.

The Bog will LITERALLY consume you

no. tell me what you fixed. i wanna know what the glitch was.

you know those patch notes that are like “fixed an issue where if the player sat in a bush for too long, they’d become the size of a skyscraper” 

-Fixed a bug where players could be teleported to hell and not have visible bumper car

Image #2: Text reading: Crusader Kings 2

-All byzantine emperors will now have clothes regardless of what DLCs are enabled.

-Can no longer press the create Hungary button multiple times.

-No longer possible for AI to plot to assassinate self (unless they are a lunatic).

-Celibate characters should no longer be worried about their conjugal lovelife.

-Made Buddhist ambitions easier to fulfill.

-Impregnation of lovers is now handled in the code.

-The Hordes will now be more prone to head in the “right” direction.

-Louis d'Evreux now has the correct mother.

-Tweaked deathDate of Mubashir, Duke of Mallorca, and made him eunuch.

-Fixed an issue with some plots where plotters did not get what they plotted for.

Image #3: Text reading: Dwarf Fortress

-Babies don’t start strapped with a knife.

-Stopped vampires from pinning their crimes on babies and children.

-Stopped zombie cats from adopting dwarves.

-Stopped ghosts from maintaining secret identities.

-Stopped dwarves from trying to clean their own missing or internal body parts.

-Made strangulation take less time.

-Demons masquerading as gods will try a little harder.

-Adjusted value of bees

MY LORD?? there is no way I can follow you there!

My Lord, the map

THE MAP, MY LORD

Like "You have to venture into the scary insane asylum!" VS "You're a patient who was admitted by force to an asylum, and you are very clearly in real danger, but everyone is pretending that you're just deluded, and are essentially leaving you to die because they don't really see you as a person."

It's been interesting to see what media people are recommending based on the first post alone. A lot of recommendations for games/franchises like World of Darkness, Carrion, Kill All Humans, Among Us, etc. It's interesting because these are games that put you into the shoes of the violent other that has to infiltrate, without actually challenging the idea that the other is a threat. They actually parrot the ideas of the other as violent.

Funnily enough, the people recommending the comedy game Octodad understand the post much better than most of the people recommending horror media. A few mentions of Am I Nima, which isn't finished yet but does look like it could be what I am describing, so brownie points to the people recommending that.

But everyone saying stuff like "This is just being Trans/Autistic/Etc" really gets it, like really really gets it. Horror always communicates the fears and anxieties of the people who create it, this post was basically: "What if instead of communicating the fear of the other, we communicated the fears of the others, which are actually vastly more legitimate than the dominant groups fear of the other. We should recognise that it is overwhelmingly the others who are the ones who actually suffer and die, all for the perceived "saftey" and "comfort" of the dominant group."

This idea is about transphobia, it is about ableism, about anti-imigrant rhetoric and white supremacy, about queerphobia, it's about all of it. It is horror from the perspective of minority groups. It is the twisting of a trope built upon reactionary fears and narratives in order to critique them, it is a direct allegory for all those experiences you are describing.