2025-01-27 5:31:05 ¶ ●

Me: I understand that the point of a story is not always to make the audience feel good, but to make an audience think. When we are presented with a cast of morally complex characters it is the writer’s responsibility to make those characters full and rich, and the audience’s responsibility to identify that fullness, and to question the instinct to villainize or justify any given character at any given time. In a world built on fear, largely following the perspective of one man who is just as flawed as all the people around him, it is more realistic and in some ways more interesting to embrace the emotional conflict that will come when these people all inflict trauma upon each other. They all hurt each other so deeply, because they’re all stuck in the same pressure cooker with literally no escape and no outlet and no information. The tragedy of it is the fact that there was never going to be a chance for them to work together because by the time they learn of that necessity the bridges have already been burned. Sure, they could have stopped it all from happening if they had done it differently. But could they really have done it differently? In their heart of hearts, with the context they had, could they really? And that’s what the narrative wants to make you think about.

Also me: But what if like… What if they were friends… What if things were just nice sometimes… As a treat…