If The New Fall Of The House Of Usher Helped Me Realize One Thing, It Is That Edgar Allen Poe Was Really

If the new Fall of the House of Usher helped me realize one thing, it is that Edgar Allen Poe was really just the 1800s version of the Saw franchise.

here's a quick tip for life: if you hate someone and you have a choice in the matter, keep their name out of your mouth and the reasons you hate them out of your head. keep your head on a swivel around people who habitually break this guideline because they're just as capable of obsessive negativity about you

I am sad I wasn't the biggest fan of Mike Flanagan's Fall of the House of Usher, but I also think it would have been dramatically improved by putting Prospero's death second to last, just before Freddy, instead of first.

It's the most gruesome death by far, imo. Leaving it till later would let the show build up to that level of gore, and it would have let them build up Prospero a lot more as a character - e.g., he could have done icky/selfish things like using Leo's death in a gross sympathy ploy along the lines of, "Now I must go through with using my dead brother's drugs/drug contacts for this party he didn't really support, because that's my way of honoring him!"; he could have also been built up more as determined to be stubborn in the face of people telling him his party is a bad idea/totally determined to ignore any information about the state of the condemned building that wasn't, "Neat! Cool looking free building!"

And it would have set up Freddy's death more and made for better payoff there, by letting their dynamic play out longer and get more and more toxic and ugly as their other siblings died around them.

For those who could use a reminder: escapist fantasy fiction encompasses more than, like, purely happy and wholesome stories. If you use 'escapist fiction' to mean, 'things that never make anyone uncomfortable,' then you might want to reassess your terminology.

An (incomplete) list of fiction that typically features 'escapist' elements would include:

-Weird/dark/kinky porn -Horror fiction -Romance novels (and all the unhealthy possessive relationships and dubiously consensual sex that occurs in them for the fun and pleasure of the reader) -Fantasy worlds like Game of Thrones

So when you see things that claim it is people who only engage with 'escapist stories' or 'escapist fantasies' who cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, that's a pretty clear and immediate signal that this person either: a) doesn't know what they're talking about, or b) is being deliberately disingenuous.

Enjoying escapist fiction is not the same thing as never wanting to engage with potentially uncomfortable stories, and a person's ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality is independent of their personal preference in what type of fiction they enjoy.

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

Drawtober Day 8: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster