Oskar at 40

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WhiteBackground
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by WhiteBackground » Tue Jul 06, 2010 8:47 pm

drakkar wrote:This is the core. Eli being an eternal 12 years old who cannot mature and learn from Oskar's attempts to educate her.
That's the point, even if she is not mature enough to fully understand why Oskar is hurt, she clearly understands that he is, in fact, hurt, and hurt badly. She is not THAT immature. That should already be enough to get her into rethinking her ways.
Also, the book's Eli was clearly not as nonchalant about people helping her "for very different reasons" as this fanfic suggests, she was clearly hurt by that memory.
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by PeteMork » Tue Jul 06, 2010 10:10 pm

This is my take on this grim, but realistic tale of Oskar and Eli. If I have it wrong, please correct me, Sauvin.

I think that, if neither Oskar nor Eli were capable of taking control of their lives, this is a quite plausible outcome. Eli has, for over 200 years, survived without adult supervision or guidance, using her sexual attractiveness to pedophiles as a survival tool. She has no so-called “moral compass” left after all this time to tell her that what she is doing is wrong or will somehow “damage” her, and her ideas of adult sexuality and social interactions are severely limited by her age and the fact that, as a vampire, she is almost completely isolated from normal society. She’s on her own, a true feral child, and she is eternally 12 years old. She may have a superficial idea of the “badness” of what she is doing, but has no emotional stake in it whatsoever, which is why she can’t fully understand Oskar’s adult objections to what she is doing. She attempts to minimize the damage to Oskar in the best way a 12-year-old can manage: She simply keeps it from him whenever possible. She has the best of intentions, but none of the mental maturity necessary to be effective at it.

She knows that sometimes the sexual interaction with adults is unpleasant, but she also knows her life is really never in danger, so ‘unpleasant’ and ‘a little painful,’ are about the biggest negatives she can attach to it. On the other hand, the plusses, i.e., temporary safety, shelter, FOOD, survival, etc., far outweigh the negatives for her, and Oskar is often unable to provide these things for her without damaging himself – something she does understand on some level, because she loves him. No wonder then, that human sexuality and the concept of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do ‘it’ are confusing to her. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.

And, let’s face it. Oskar is a wimp. It would be almost impossible for him to take charge of his life at twelve, let alone Eli’s, and thus, if he’s not careful, he travels down that slippery slope that the inability to take decisive action in one’s life often results in. (other than ending a sentence with a preposition :) ). One day he wakes up as a young man, and realizes that, no matter how much he loves Eli, she can no longer give him the support he needs as a young adult. She becomes a little sister, but one he still has to kill for occasionally, because he still loves her and has to protect her as best he can. And Oskar DOES know right from wrong, and IS damaged by what he has to do. And Eli knows it, but doesn’t know how to fix it. And Oskar’s sexuality, once awakened, combined with Eli’s only experiences with sex, could quite easily morph into what Oskar himself would consider unacceptable sexual perversions and, horribly for him, with someone he loves dearly. Inevitably, Oskar becomes bitter because he can’t resolve his own ideas of right and wrong with what he has to do to help his, by now, daughter, to survive. His life is one major ethical dilemma, and neither of them can even begin to see a solution to the problem – and Oskar’s death from old age is looming on the horizon for Eli.

And this, my friends, is why I feel compelled to write the fan fiction I do. I can’t bear to think about this outcome to their lives, unquestionably the most realistic and likely one that anyone on this forum has had the guts to put forward, at least for a scenario where Oskar is not turned. And frankly, I can’t see a realistic happy ending for that scenario either, try as I might. :(

Fortunately for me, my own standards of realism are a bit lower than Sauvin’s, so my savior, in Dr. Dawson, is quite believable to me, at least through my rose-colored glasses. ;)
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by a_contemplative_life » Wed Jul 07, 2010 12:14 am

Well as usual, Sauvin has taken us to new vistas of grittiness that I suspect even JAL never imagined. :lol:

It seems to me that this is what it means for Eli and Oskar to become an "old married couple." In their own completely bizarre and twisted way, of course. :shock:

Seriously, though...is this really an existence worth living? I think this piece, together with "Oskar at 40," points to that as a central question, that maybe isn't clear in any of the other fan fic written so far. Do they really experience enough happiness to justify all of the misery? If this is how it's going to turn out, maybe it really is finally time to consider doing the "easy" thing.
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by PeteMork » Wed Jul 07, 2010 12:24 am

a_contemplative_life wrote:Well as usual, Sauvin has taken us to new vistas of grittiness that I suspect even JAL never imagined. :lol:

It seems to me that this is what it means for Eli and Oskar to become an "old married couple." In their own completely bizarre and twisted way, of course. :shock:

Seriously, though...is this really an existence worth living? I think this piece, together with "Oskar at 40," points to that as a central question, that maybe isn't clear in any of the other fan fic written so far. Do they really experience enough happiness to justify all of the misery? If this is how it's going to turn out, maybe it really is finally time to consider doing the "easy" thing.
I think Eli, because of the few years of real happiness she had with Oskar (even in Sauvin's tale), would want to stay around and take care of him in his declining years. After all, she still seems to love him. After that, who knows? :cry:
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by sauvin » Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:47 am

PeteMork wrote:
a_contemplative_life wrote:Well as usual, Sauvin has taken us to new vistas of grittiness that I suspect even JAL never imagined. :lol:

It seems to me that this is what it means for Eli and Oskar to become an "old married couple." In their own completely bizarre and twisted way, of course. :shock:

Seriously, though...is this really an existence worth living? I think this piece, together with "Oskar at 40," points to that as a central question, that maybe isn't clear in any of the other fan fic written so far. Do they really experience enough happiness to justify all of the misery? If this is how it's going to turn out, maybe it really is finally time to consider doing the "easy" thing.
I think Eli, because of the few years of real happiness she had with Oskar (even in Sauvin's tale), would want to stay around and take care of him in his declining years. After all, she still seems to love him. After that, who knows? :cry:
Gritty? Dude... this story was EDITED for CONTENT. Even common rabble like myself have pride and standards and values and suchlike!

"I love laying in bed with him, with my ear to his heart. It's comforting. It makes me feel safe, somehow, and it make me feel good about myself. Who could have ever believed that a simple ba-doomp ba-doomp kind of sound could be magic?" Did I include this text? If not, maybe I should have. It was towards the end of the story.

I don't know the answer to ACL's question. Virginia probably didn't, either, but what little she did know of her new existence scared her quite literally to death.

All I know for sure is that Eli lived for two hundred years with only the promise of hundreds of years of nothing more than the same. That promise was broken; she loved, she was loved, she lived again, in a manner of speaking. Can she survive Oskar's death? Even Eli herself can't answer that question.
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by Angelalex242 » Wed Jul 07, 2010 3:04 am

Turned Oskar is the only real chance to make it work. Two child vampires have an eternity to figure things out. An aging Oskar cannot help but grow apart.

It could, would take time for two child vampires to figure it out, but when you've got centuries to burn, it would work itself out, eventually.

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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by sauvin » Wed Jul 07, 2010 3:07 am

Angelalex242 wrote:Turned Oskar is the only real chance to make it work. Two child vampires have an eternity to figure things out. An aging Oskar cannot help but grow apart.

It could, would take time for two child vampires to figure it out, but when you've got centuries to burn, it would work itself out, eventually.
Lacke's visit to Eli's bathroom may not actually be such an unusual event, and Eli's longevity isn't guaranteed to be typical.
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by a_contemplative_life » Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:04 am

sauvin wrote:Gritty? Dude... this story was EDITED for CONTENT. Even common rabble like myself have pride and standards and values and suchlike!

"I love laying in bed with him, with my ear to his heart. It's comforting. It makes me feel safe, somehow, and it make me feel good about myself. Who could have ever believed that a simple ba-doomp ba-doomp kind of sound could be magic?" Did I include this text? If not, maybe I should have. It was towards the end of the story.

I don't know the answer to ACL's question. Virginia probably didn't, either, but what little she did know of her new existence scared her quite literally to death.

All I know for sure is that Eli lived for two hundred years with only the promise of hundreds of years of nothing more than the same. That promise was broken; she loved, she was loved, she lived again, in a manner of speaking. Can she survive Oskar's death? Even Eli herself can't answer that question.
I think you have a valid point: there is no objective measure of happiness to weigh and determine at what point life is worth living. Perhaps the comfort Eli derived from listening to Oskar's heartbeat was alone sufficient to make it all worthwhile to her. Even so, I feel that at some point, one must throw up one's hands and say, is this really worth it? Where, exactly, that line is, I don't know.
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by lombano » Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:06 am

a_contemplative_life wrote:Seriously, though...is this really an existence worth living? I think this piece, together with "Oskar at 40," points to that as a central question, that maybe isn't clear in any of the other fan fic written so far. Do they really experience enough happiness to justify all of the misery? If this is how it's going to turn out, maybe it really is finally time to consider doing the "easy" thing.
I think Oskar at 40 and this piece point to the outcome if Eli and Oskar lack the courage to genuinely face this question. This is a fate surely much worse for Eli than her past; as she herself points out, if the bullies started killing Oskar inside, she's completing the job. As for Oskar, the previous piece gives no hint of tenderness towards Eli, but in this one it is clear that, under a grim mask of scar tissue, Oskar still loves her. Yet surely this existence is utterly miserable, and surely he must realise he's just becoming an increasing burden to Eli, both mentally and materially. I may be biased, but I see Eli turning him and then watching a sunrise together as a much better outcome. Love's Epitaph too seems a much better outcome
The whole issue of Oskar's sexuality is very realistically handled I think, as is Eli's view of it.
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Re: Oskar at 40

Post by sauvin » Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:13 am

If you don't like this particular Eli looking at this particular Oskar, that's OK. I am at times sorry I even wrote Oskar at 40 because he reminds me too much of people I've actually known. Ugly son of a [deleted], and I never intended that anybody like the story or the Oskar in it; this may well be the only time in my life I deliberately created something I knew I would hate. What's so amazing about the story is that I was even able to write it at all. My own internal running monologues never take on this kind of tone.

I was very disappointed with how Eli's view of 40something Oskar turned out when I crawled out of bed this morning. Writing into the wee hours of the morning well past normal bedtime can be disinhibiting, but it'll also likely be markedly unbalanced. It may furthermore be a mistake to try to write something like this after having read too much LTROI fanfic and having watched the movie a couple of times for the first time in quite a while: Elina does at times strike me as being a very sweet girl, and it's easy to forget she can have the mind, heart and soul of a crocodile when her stomach starts rumbling loudly.

It's easy to forget that I spent quite a while wrestling with the idea that Eli manipulates people masterfully. She's a vampire, after all, whose diet consists exclusively of the most dangerous, effective and omnivorous large predator this planet has ever seen: us. There's no guarantee the humanity we see in her (in the movie) isn't just some kind of facade. I personally reject the idea she's totally a masquerading child-sized lizard but find it advisable to bear in mind that even if she's fully human with cyclical fugues, the term of her survival is due at least in part to her acquired proficiency at hunting.

It occurred to me that Oskar at 40 is a very angry man, dangerous and potentially murderously violent, and sexually voracious. This anger may (or may not) be relatively diffuse and quiescent most of the time, reaching the near extremities suggested in the story only when exacerbative circumstances (such as procuring) challenge Oskar's normal control, but if this is the case, one would expect some of this violence to accompany Oskar when he goes home to Eli. Her view of 40something Oskar not only doesn't discuss it, it explicitly denies it in at least two places. There's a disconnect here that states that either Oskar at 40 isn't normally like what we saw in the monologue, or that Eli is in profound denial, or some combination of both.

I think I goofed. Badly.

I didn't give 40something Oskar a lot of thought when I wrote it. Like JAL, I was just trying to paint an emotional picture without the slightest concern for being able to "prove" its plausibility. Rereading it, it seems to me the anger, the capacity for murder and the sexual rapacity mask (and are propelled by) raw fear. Any normal person can fear losing his lifemate, even after thirty years of being together, but Oskar can never allow his fear to abate, fear that somebody will discover them somehow and destroy them both, fear that his continued aging will drive him further away from her, fear that he is himself becoming less human when it's plain that she wants nothing more than to be more so. An Oskar worn down by decades of vigilant fear is an Oskar who manifests it more palpably, if not with crystalline clarity.

I'm going to let the story stand as it is. It's not only good for comedy relief, it's also not terribly inconsistent with the majority of the fanfic on this site. Also, it's one heartfelt perspective from a gibbering old fool with a genuine fondness for LTROI camp and kitsch.

If I were to rewrite it, though, the issue of domestic violence would play a much greater role, even if only subtly. In another thread, I'd speculated that much of her interaction with "normal" men seems likely to have been with paedophiles who'd tend to have a magnifying effect on her view of her own monstrosity: she's not only a serial murderess, she's also just a piece of cold meat to serve as a vessel for her minders' pleasure. Nothing more than that, just a cordless vacuum-operated masturbatory device that doesn't even need batteries.

This alone would be enough to create an emotional recursively descending [deleted] that produces the wooden and lifeless Elina as she leaves the cab in the movie. If her paedophiliacal minders had been given to physical violence (as I understand many are), would the anger the 40something Oskar brings home not also be something she'd accept as a matter of routine course, not knowing that "normal" couples never countenance such things? She certainly seemed to forgive him easily enough in the deleted scene; there, my impression is that the only emotion she experienced after having been struck so forcefully was a very mild and fleeting disappointment. Maybe she felt she deserved it.

One of the major failures I see in the story I wrote was then the fixation on "deviant" sexuality as I imagine it would proceed from years of using it and being used by it in the course of routine daily survival and ignoring (or forgetting) the myriad other aspects of dysfunctional relationship.

I can hear the other members of the forum shouting "Not our Elina! She doesn't even go to the bathroom! She's strong! She's powerful! She's an angel! She has an ethereal gossamer purity you can obviously never understand! She doesn't peddle her a%#, and she sure as [deleted] won't let anybody smack her around like a painted drunk trailer trash whore! Take your streetbound pseudosophistry back to IMDB where you belong, you cheap guttersnipe iconoclastic [deleted], and take your fake [deleted] pervert Oskar with you!"

And to such members, I say this: I don't blame you one tiny bit for taking such an attitude. I might be the one writing about it, but it doesn't mean I like it at all. I just can't get away from the passage in the novel where Eli tells Oskar about how her long sleeps leaves her "small" again, leaving her with needing "helpers". I can't help remembering how she grimaced after saying that her size makes people want to help her... but "for different reasons". That tiny handful of sentences opens up whole dark horizons of what her backstory might be like beyond the surface horror of what we plainly see of her, and within her, in the present.

PeterMork, a truly meaningful discussion of what adult sexuality might mean or imply to a castrated preteen boy would probably take much more time and effort that any of us can easily spare. It would probably also tax this forum's tolerance unbearably. This is partly because sex, sexuality, sexual {morality,ethics,values} and so on and suchlike may be the most complicated thing I've ever tried to encompass. The simple mechanics are certainly seem straightforward enough, but I used to get really confused when I heard stories of how these things differed in various places around the world. As an example, Eskimo hospitality, I remember hearing, demanded that a host share his wife with his guest. Some folks in various places in Africa are said to [deleted] like bunnies on speed as a normal part of their funerary functions. I've yet to try to unravel polygamy.

I've not made a study of these things (my actual interests when nosing about other people's customs have very little to do with sex) and so can't certify that these to examples have any solid basis, but it seems clear enough that on top of being very complicated for us, there are very few "golden standards" to which the world in its entirety adhere with any consistency. The world cannot even agree on a common age of "consent".

As another vexing aside, the notorious American Puritans, according to the History Channel, were far less concerned with the reality of premarital sex, for example, and much more concerned with paternal responsibility. A young woman became pregnant, and throughout the course of her pregnancy, people would pester and heckle her, asking "Who's the father?" When she went into labour, they withheld some service or boon (I forget what) to coerce from her whom to assign paternity. As I recall, she relented, the baby was born, the young couple were actually married and went on to live unencumbered lives. If this is true (and other sources do indeed accuse Puritans of often recording remarkably abbreviated periods of gestation), I'd then suggest that Americans don't even understand their own sexual values if Puritanism is raised as the iconic standard of sexual "purity".

PeterMork, I say all this in defense of Eli's apparent lack of sexual "moral compass". The usual rules don't apply to her for a variety of reasons, and the harm done her (which is undeniable) is at odds with the harm done by her profound isolation and by the resolutely deferred weight of her murders. There's no sexual "right" and no "wrong" for her, no "badness"; there are only degrees of acceptability (witness her reluctance to allow Hakan to touch her; she doesn't SEEK it, she merely endures it when she must).

I can't myself imagine what it must be like to be a preteen who endures sexual contact with adults as a matter of survival, but there's a great deal more besides that we do know of Eli's life to suggest that even real-life child prostitutes may be leading relatively safe and comfortable lives by comparison.

Wasn't it you, PeterMork, whose Oskar noted that "you wouldn't believe how much pain she can take"? Having no apparent chance of understanding why adults want such things, she might simple accept small degrees of physical discomfort without attaching any "meaning" to it at all. Odd pressures here, unusual feelings of fullness there, maybe a few faintly unpleasant odours. It doesn't hurt her, it seems to make her minders a lot more mindful, and yes, as you suggest, PeterMork, I fear she'd have quickly discovered that allowing her body to be used in this manner greatly enhances her survival odds.

I don't suggest her (non)attitude towards sex parallels her attitude towards killing. The former is an empty, meaningless thing, and the latter is what denies her utterly what she wants more than anything else. She's specifically said (in my fiction) she hates that people die when she gets hungry. I tried to suggest (and apparently failed) that the Elina we see in the movie (and the Elias in the novel, to an even greater extent) kills only when it can't be avoided precisely because she values other people's skins almost as much as she does her own. She doesn't think about it because she can't; "something inside her" tells her with strident clarity that thinking about it means dying because her tiny mind and her partially formed heart can't handle the "moral" responsibility for all those uncounted deaths. She can't safely consider the turmoil and the misery she brings her victims' survivors. In other threads, I've likened her attitude towards that of a soldier in the bush: fight or die, and then get back to camp and have a couple of beers with a couple of buddies.

"I am a vampire, and I live by my own rules because people's rules would kill me", reflects my Eli as she lay in bed with her father, both naked, because she's very well aware of the incest taboo that could never realistically apply to her - it's just utterly impossible for her to have (or cause) funny-looking children. She makes this assertion to herself in recognition that various social welfare agencies would take a very dim view indeed of such a scene. She makes this assertion because conceding to prevailing values would deny her yet one more comfort in her already inhumanly deprived existence.

How did Oskar become her father? Heh... how could he not? She may be unchanging, but Oskar isn't. He grew, physically, mentally, emotionally and in every other way any other person grows. As he did so, he saw weaknesses and shortcomings in her makeup, vulnerabilities he felt he had to shield. He'd start seeing many of the things members of this forum see, in fact.

She might be more and more a child to him, but this in no way necessarily implies she would become less and less important. One way or the other, she's the very centre of his life, and it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to assert she's the very core of his being. Whatever he's become, wherever he's been, she was there helping him with it. She's just always been around, and it'd be the easiest thing in the world to believe he believes that if anything happens to her, his life just wouldn't be the same, maybe even not worth living at all. Maybe he even consoles himself that he's leaving the world a better place when he passes if he leaves it with an improved, morally and socially expanded Eli.

Besides, after all, she did save his life at least once. That's gotta be worth a couple of brownie points.

As he aged, Eli would have become somewhat less of a "friend" as we understand it, and more of a responsibility. My Oskar cherishes this responsbility almost as much as he does her, even if the way he sets about it isn't what we'd liked to have seen, and even if we're repulsed by what it is costing him.

He would have started taking a more minder-like role in any event. Being a man does have certain advantages, after all: no more hiring potentially unreliable people to pose as parents to get hotel rooms or sign leases.

I don't see Oskar as being a "wimp" or being unable to make or enforce hard choices. Life with a vampire would quickly dispose of him otherwise. Quite the opposite, I see him as being one who's just a little too ready to make hard choices without indulging his childhood habit of long reflexion. The man will not hesitate to kill on suspicion of mortal danger.

One of these hard choices would be in tolerating Eli's habit of "buying daddies", conceding to the necessity not only of having a second pair of shoulders to ease the burden of assuring Eli's survival, but also of buffering himself and Eli against discovery. Eli's minders aren't just procurers, they're also red herrings for the communities to hunt down and destroy when "food shopping" goes badly in a given area.

It's certainly possible Oskar's stomach burned with anger (and probably jealousy, at least at first) when Eli uses "other things" than money to secure their services, but an older Oskar with broadened horizons and more complex experience might eventually view these paedophiles' predations as being harmful to her emotionally. If the stalls in the men's room have any credibility (and their rude little gems often do have a hard core of reality to them), then Oskar would be correct at least as far as her social development is concerned: "You can't be good friends with a [deleted]buddy". These minders, however, face a much greater danger with Oskar around than just with Eli alone: if he should come to suspect their sexual predations source more from anger (or other destructive emotion) than from simple lust, they're worm food.

Worse, Eli's Oskar isn't stupid. Her having to "buy" such men (and sometimes women) almost necessarily means being exposed to other victims on occasion. He'd see what they're like and probably connect their damages causally to the paedophiles. He'd research. He'd be appalled. And then he'd set about trying to armour her against the harm he sees them bringing.

For these reasons, and probably a few I've forgotten, never considered or never knew to consider, he starts taking his love to town. Or, sometimes, when he's unusually angry or distracted, when he brings home the bacon.

PeterMork, Oskar wouldn't view sensuality with child Eli as unimaginable (or even particularly disturbing, truth to tell) if their lives together unfurled the way my stories suggest because he'd have the memories of having experienced it. In fact, if they'd lived in total isolation, Eli's child-like appearance would probably never be brought to the fore to impact this aspect of their lives. His natural aging and attendant socialisation (such as it may be) would imbue her with more and more of a child-like appearance, and thus naturally less sexual appeal.

He loved her before sex, and he'll continue loving her long afterwards, but not with his nads.

Their growing sexual estrangement is something that I fear Eli would misinterpret, given she's just a child and especially in light of her probable background. I could very easily see this stressing their relationship in ways we'd consider paradoxical: when the adult stops having sex with the child, does this mean he doesn't love her anymore? If not, can she still trust him? How? Remember, even after long years of being with Oskar's empathy and concern for her true welfare, Eli would still be wrestling with two centuries of conditioning as a masturbatory device and the only "real" influence she has with her "daddies". The paradox is this: normal human children normally experience indescribable relief when chronic sexual abuse stops; Eli's first thought would be "Uh oh... wa fan...?"

PeterMork, I also don't see that Eli was no longer able to support Oskar in any way. She might not have the emotional depth and the perspectives to understand his various crises to help in any directly significant way, but she can continue being the one unchanging fact of his life, the comfort of immutability no other girl could give him. In material terms, she's got him covered a few million ways from Sunday; she's rich, she can get lots more money if she has to, and if the chopped steak she cooks for him don't always come from the grocery store, well, ain't it wonderful what a few spices can hide? As Oskar grows, he'd need "support" less and less, and he actually needed so little by the time he'd left Blackeberg anyway, Eli didn't actually have much to fear on this score.

However, I'm forced to agree with PeterMork that the Oskar at 40 monologue is just an extension and reasonably plausible expansion of the irresolvable conflict Eli's vampirism imposes on her, and an extension of Wolfchild's assertion that Lindqvist deliberately engineered a story for which there is no possibility of a "happily ever after".

I'd never considered it in these terms, and never intended it, but it does seem so. These poor kids are tragic :\

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.
Last edited by sauvin on Sun Nov 06, 2011 12:30 am, edited 6 times in total.
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