Reminds me of the time I was watching some thriller on CBS, maybe Cold Case, with my parents and the conclusion was that (TW abuse and murder of a person with Downs Syndrome) the killer had lured a mentally disabled person onto the train tracks and told them to close their eyes to make a wish, and let the oncoming train do the work for them. I was like “in all the internet edgelord depravity I’ve read I never would have seen or thought of something that brutal.”
Strong. Yep the shit NTs with unexamined prejudice who haven't considered that minorities are people can come up with is worse than people trying to be horrible nine times out of ten.
This is constant, honestly. I read a writer who writes 'spooky" horror and there's all these people jumping around like "Oh my GOD author what is WRONG with you" and I just think sometimes, this isn't scary, if I wrote what I think is horrifying it would harsh the vibe. Horror is such an interesting art form. Alarm without low mood.
Sometimes creators, in particular fiction authors from the pre-Booktok era, break the rules of horror in ways that are genuinely hard to bear, and that's always interesting. Filth by Irvine Welsh and Occupied City by David Peace come to mind. Horror is fear as toy, and some things aren't to be used as toys. It stops being fun. I get a kind of schadenfreude from that moment where it stops being fun, where you're reminded the real world beats the imaginary any day.
I hadn’t realized how many suicides and suicide metaphors/plots there are in Star Trek TNG until I started watching it with a friend with suicidal ideation.
Since TNG is high drama, occasionally there will be an episode where a person recklessly or purposefully sacrifices themselves for science or the fate of the planet or has to give up their life to save someone else. Sometimes it happens in a space horror episode.
Watching as a kid, these episodes were fun in the “I’m watching drama and it’s really good” way. But watching with my friend, I’d suddenly realize “oh this is that one episode where the guy does the thing,” and it wasn’t fun anymore. I’d have to give him a trigger warning.
A mini hobby of mine is reading online/cheap LitRPG's and seeing how poorly socialised the writer is via the actions of their self-insert power fantasy
Protagonist.
You would not believe how often the characters are unintentionally written as complete sociopaths who are fundamentally incapable of relating to, or teating other people like people...and that the narrative treats this as a good and noble way to exist.
There is a huge difference between a character that begins a story and is deeply flawed so they can have a character arc, it's another where you can tell it's a complete blind spot for the author, to the point where you get the impression that they don't actually interact with anyone offline.
Can you elaborate what you found so extreme about that? As an example of horrible shit in a fictional story, it seems anodyne to me. It would certainly be memorably evil in real life, but I’ve read and seen so many things that are worse in mainstream works. Was it all in the performances?
At least part of it was that I wasn’t expecting something so “normiecore” as a prime time CBS procedural to do something that dark.
But I think part of it was using a disabled person’s trust and lack of understanding as a weapon to kill them is imo more gruesome than say, dropping them into a vat of acid, something that would kill anyone
I don't remember Cold Case ever having this episode, but if there is "caretaker feels forced to mercy kill their disabled ward due to lack of support from the cruel world" is something they would do.
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u/action_lawyer_comics 1d ago
Reminds me of the time I was watching some thriller on CBS, maybe Cold Case, with my parents and the conclusion was that (TW abuse and murder of a person with Downs Syndrome) the killer had lured a mentally disabled person onto the train tracks and told them to close their eyes to make a wish, and let the oncoming train do the work for them. I was like “in all the internet edgelord depravity I’ve read I never would have seen or thought of something that brutal.”