I shoulda listened

[yvannairie]

Me, a year back, seeing people making snippy posts about the whole "Pennywise is a gay icon" thing: FFS, let people fucking have fun, it's a scary clown and some people are into that, sometimes marginalised people look at the forces that eat them from the inside and go "lmao same" and it's not that deep.

Me, now, seeing people uncritically complain about how Pennywise, the force that eats marginalised people from the inside, furthers homophobic, misogynist violence: never mind, people having fun is bad, apparently

Seriously, though, I've only read a summary of the book b/c I'm not into horror, and even I picked up on Pennywise being an embodiment of the social forces that harm marginalised people. The point wasn't subtle. Saying IT isn't an empowering narrative for marginalised folks is fair enough but was it really portraying itself as one, though?????

Comments

[cimorene]

I suppose this was the inevitable outcome of the "Pennywise is gay" meme, in retrospect.

Like, I don't know if you remember this, but there were some 4chan raids on Tumblr, and then some people on Tumblr jokingly responded by writing personified 4chan/Tumblr slash, and then some people apparently started to ship it and then other people REdiscovered that 4chan is bad (and doesn't like Tumblr) which they like... had somehow forgotten... and got upset and 'critical' about it.

[yvannairie]

Oh I had no idea, that is actually lowkey hilarious b/c I have no doubt many of them were people who had no idea what 4chan was, they were just there for the vortex of Ship(tm) that happens.

God, the internet is so beautifully stupid sometimes.

[cassini]

[haven't seen the film or the series, only read the book, and i've obviously missed all the 'culture' that horror fans build up (and as far as i can tell horror media culture is 80% about fandom for the antagonist, right?) but yeah it's one of the bits that penetrated my breezeblock brain that it makes best use of the marginalised and poorly-supported because they're carrying the most amount of dormant, potent fear. but while i'm avoiding some shruggy sentiment about 'people just loose all common sense with clowns am i rite', i don't know enough about what is different from the source material in this newest incarnation but i'm not comfy enough with horror to jump into the rabbit hole and find out what fandom culture 201X IT has. but now i'm curious ]

[yvannairie]

I've only really seen particularly boneheaded takes about this so I may be biased, with some key "Steven King Is Bad, Actually" takes thrown in. ATM I'm making nothing of it, but it's just... *bealeaguered sigh* when are people going to stop losing their minds when a thing isn't the thing they imagined to be but rather its own thing? I'm sorry a story did horror in a way that was too on-the-nose for you, but genuinely, if you hadn't built your expectations up to nonsensical degrees this would have not happened.