hi!! im here to gush about carrie white bc i remembered that you love her and just !! lov this lesbian psychic girl!! lov this girl who has ptsd and is autistic!! lov carrie white!! she didn’t deserve any of the things that happened to her
i love carrie white so much
i just want good things to happen for her and i’m so tired of the story where something brutal happens to a girl, or many brutal things happen to a girl, and she ‘goes cr*zy’ and becomes violent in her own defense or in defense of those she loves, and yet she is the monster that has to be put down or killed like an animal
(hi, jean grey in the xmcu, you are also in this category)
i just want a story where instead of people responding to a trauma reaction with violence and murder, they respond with compassion and kindness. i want hurt girls to stop having to be monsters for people to realize something has gone terribly wrong.
i’m just so tired of this tragedy, this constant retracing of a tired old trauma narrative that we should know better than by now.
what do we, as a society, actually get out of these stories about girls driven to monstrosity? does it actually convey the moral that we, as a society, hurt girls too deeply, and that can lead to tragedy?
isn’t that something we should already know?
It was two real girls who inspired Carrie, and I think about that a lot. Every time I see the book or film mentioned, in fact. (Sorry.)
I don’t know their real names, Stephen King never gave them in his introduction to the novel, he just called them Tina and Sandy. Both of them ended up dead before they were thirty, Tina through suicide and Sandy through an epileptic fit. (No-one was around, it seems from King’s deliberately vague retelling of it, to call an ambulance for her.) Stephen King refers to these girls-barely-given-the-chance-to-turn-women as ‘unfortunates’, and he mentions he never did anything to stop either of them being the victims of bullying, and I think there are definitely parts of Carrie that are him trying to assuage his guilt-
-but oh man, it’s been like 40 years since Carrie and still no-one gets it. Virtually every single cover of Carrie features a pretty thin girl, when Carrie is explicitly described as chubby and plain! Because that’s the only girl anyone wants to read a story about, I guess? Or something?
God, I was so like Carrie at school. (Right down to the embarrassing, awful period incident in front of people.) I knew a lot of Carries, too. But yeah, I’m tired of hearing stories where the Carrie dies in the end. Just let her live and be awkward and determined and surviving and ugly, whatever the fuck ‘ugly’ is. There are so many girls who’re told that their lack of beauty or their lack of thinness or their ordinary bodily functions make them less than deserving. You shouldn’t be kind to them just because they might have telepathetic powers that could kill you, you should be kind to them because…I don’t want to say ‘because they’re people’ because that sounds too trite and obvious. Okay, you should be nice to them because Tina and Sandy, whoever they were, deserve a better legacy than a betrayed, neglected, dead girl whose own author didn’t even like her.