Running on a queue

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2006) dir. by Glen Morgan

how do you say goodbye, you know? it’s not an unfriend and block kind of situation. but you watch the people you once loved go on and have a life and you’re outside of it. and it’s bittersweet because of course it’s okay that you’re both thriving. but she used to be who you’d call if you needed to cry. she used to be who’d you’d be binge watching the new series with. you used to be hers, in a way, even if that way wasn’t permanent. and now she’s someone else and so are you and your friendship is clicking heart shapes next to pictures where she smiles next to people you’ve never met. you know where her birthmark is. she knows where you’ve buried your dead.

the house isnt haunted you are 

the monster under the bed isnt the bad guy its the only thing keeping you safe 

something that looks almost exactly like, but is not in fact, what you think it is (deer has too many antlers, that sure is a convincing portrayal of a person, etc)

smiles that are just a little too big, not like, the comically ridiculous cgi smiles that they throw in every horror movie, just a little too big, with teeth that are a little too sharp

why do they have two shadows 

And those teeth, those teeth that’ll tear and chew and eat them alive a piece at a time.

—

A Treasury of American-Jewish Folklore

it’s such an unreal experience

like

you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face

and

you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is

it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing

But You Are Not Seeing Anything

Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.

But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.

So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.

Brain is like “there’s a hand there”

Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”

Brain is like “nice”

but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best

I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall,  and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not - I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Fighting side by side. Trusting each other completely. Trying to protect each other. Casual banter in the middle of a fight. Their teamwork. Sparring each other to keep their skills sharp. Getting uncontrollably angry if the other gets hurt. Kissing each other when they’re victorious.

I marvel at this every time I poke my head into a fanfiction archive somewhere, after finishing a series or a movie when I’m not quite ready to let it go but I’m not quite willing to dive in and participate. There’s always certain kinds of stories that are intensely popular in a self-contained fandom that are enormously rare in others. 

There are, of course, some tropes that exist in virtually every fandom. You will never not find a Harry Potter AU or a coffee shop fic if a fandom has existed for longer than a couple months. The bigger the fandom, the more of them you’ll see. This is an Absolute Given. But others are less universal.

Some are self-contained types of AU’s that simply can’t work in another fandom, due to the nature of the original content’s story…but despite dozens of other potential tropes, one is just seized by the fandom as a fan favorite (literally). Take, for example, the plethora of chimera!fic in Fullmetal Alchemist (or at least, back for the 2003 anime there was a plethora of it. Maybe it’s changed since then, it’s been a while since I was in the fandom). It’s not really a concept that works in other fandoms, because the idea of chimeras is so strongly rooted in the source material’s lore, ‘magic’/science system, and concepts. But despite there also being dozens of other things you could run with in this universe too, this was a fandom-trope that was super popular. 

But there are other things that I continue to be surprised at to this day. I watched a movie the other day and decided to poke my head into the fandom community and just scroll through AO3 without any filters. Every single page had at least one vampire AU, but that’s not something I see a lot in other fandoms. Why vampire AU’s? I don’t know, but something about it appeals for that fandom, clearly! 

Sick!fics are super popular in several of the fandoms I’ve hung around in, but in others they’re all but impossible to find. In some fandoms whump or hurt/comfort is overwhelmingly the majority, and in others the bulk of what you can find is fluff so sticky sweet you’ll get a toothache. I’ve seen dozens of niche, oddballs sorts of premises or AU settings when browsing fanfic archives that seem to exist in only one fandom, but in that fandom they have an incredible amount of power.

It’s just fascinating to me, to see how trends fall based on what is presented in the source material, and the kinds of people that are drawn to that material. Things that are enormously popular to the point of being almost commonplace in one fandom might be a breath of fresh air in another. And clearly, no idea is every really ‘old’ or ‘done to death’ or ‘unoriginal.’ It’s all about the context of where you’re writing it, and about perspective.

Remo Drive//Yer’ Killin Me

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