Pranams to my most dear and queer Strange fam. We are finally at the penultimate episode of this show and I do not know how to process this. I’m scared. I’m hungry. I’m sleepy. LIFE IS SO CONFUSING! I’m not too sure what to expect but as we have seen, literally anything can happen in this story. Anyway,
Let's go!
Let’s start with a completely unreliable recap of our story and cast of characters.
There are the Wilsons who are dead, the mayor Hugh, his inappropriate wife Anna, a handful of assorted professors, an annoying doctor and poor Janet who is being plagued by the mud and the doctor.
This episode was frustrating and hilarious, just like so many things in life. What do the last two episodes have in store for us? Maybe something coherent happens in the story? Maybe an appearance by verbally abusive rocks? Plants that extensively quote things with no reliable source?
Science fiction is part of our world, and is much more than the presence of stories with the furniture (robots, aliens, rocket ships, cyborgs) of the genre. It is the way we respond to changes and technology. It is a palette of reactions and discussions palpable in classrooms, headlines, and news rooms every hour every day.
Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
Well, when people say writing every day, I think some people take it too literally. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about writing every day. People use the term dailyness to mean consistency. Write Consistently. Time-wise, write consistently. You build a practice. Because remember what I said earlier, a writer is someone who writes. It's about being in the present. Writing has to be a present practice for you. That's all it means.
My most hearty and luxurious greetings fam, hope all are doing well. Friends, I feel like I often start this column by saying I can’t remember what happened in the previous episode. Today, I honestly cannot remember a single thing that happened last time. Fam, so many things happened lately and my brain has been all over the place. I had to move! I am getting too old for this kind of lifestyle and now I’m not going to unpack anything because I will just have to repack and move again at some point. I don’t know if that is a healthy outlook but it’s where we are right now.
Stories of extensive evil, in which the threat is not a single villain, nor even a man-made pollution monster, but systemic structures of harm in which we are all complicit, offer tools to think through real-life problems, which are rarely fixed by defeating one villain.
So, meeting some fun history and SFF concepts, those are our goals, plus some mitfreude, and the vorfreude of knowing that, forever after reading this, you’ll get more richness out of every time somebody mentions anime or manga. And hopefully this essay will also mean that the next time you know young people who are getting into anime, and their parents say, “I don’t understand this thing! Is it good for my kid? Is it dangerous for my kid?”, you’ll be able to give a useful answer.
Ghosts, monsters, murder, death, haunted houses, various kinds of supernatural mayhem, body horror, the frights of the unexplained … Horror comes in a multitude of flavors.
