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haii2uTonight I read a short horror story recommended to me on my Tumblr For You page titled "The Wasp Room" by Rosa Monroe, which you can read here. To any aspiring authors reading this, if you're going to link to a PDF of your story please remember to include your name on it!! I had a hell of a time tracking this author down after accidentally clicking away from the page.
The story is an allegory of the disturbing normalization of misogyny and men's casual sexual harassment (and assault?) of women. Initially the wasp is simply a bad childhood memory; a one-off occurrence that happened while the author was eating a popsicle. A wasp lands on her face, crawling on her, constantly threatening to sting her. Her mother tells her to just stand still, and it will go away eventually. Wasps will be wasps just as boys will be boys.
Honestly I thought it was just alright. The wasps being a symbol for sexual harassment was extremely heavy-handed. They appear mostly in the school's woodworking shops (woodworking being a stereotypically masculine hobby), the author took to wearing longer sleeves and turned-up collars in the summer to deter them (reminiscent of how women are told to sacrifice their comfort so that men aren't "tempted" to harass them), and there's a moment later on where a boy starts misbehaving during class and later spits out what's implied to be chewed-up paper, which wasp's nests are made out of. It's very obvious and left very little room for nuance.
While writing this entry, I initially couldn't find the author of the story and had resulted to searching random keywords I remembered in an attempt to find the original post. In doing so I stumbled upon this post that currently has over 121k notes:
With Tumblr being home to the infamous anti-media literacy take of "sometimes the curtains are just blue" I really shouldn't be surprised by something like this. But it's frustrating. It's these kinds of sentiments that result in authors having to beat you over the head with uncreative, overt symbolism and lines like "[wasps] want you to flinch and bat them away so that you’re the one to blame when they sink their stinger in." There's no way the audience would understand what the theme is otherwise.
Titles like these originated on r/nosleep, a subreddit I really despise. They're clickbait in the purest form of the word, made to make perusers of the subreddit curious enough to click on them and hopefully give the author a rush of internet dopamine in the form of an upvote. It's media purely made to be consumed and spat out, and one of the rules of the subreddit being "everything must be plausible" leaves no room for authors looking to do something actually new or interesting.
People like the one in the image above are the exact audience of these clickbait titles. Readers with no patience who don't care about thinking too deeply, they just want weird scary things NOW! And to an extent, I understand. But there's a stark difference in slow burn and meandering around and taking too long getting to the point (a reason why I can't stand Stephen King). Unfortunately this is just something you'll regularly encounter if you want to read anything with actual substance.
If you can't force yourself to step out of your comfort zone by reading stories that don't hand-feed you the basic premise in the title, then you're dooming yourself to forever reading the horror story equivalent of Marvel movies. Unless you like those too, in which case good for you I guess. I'm glad the title of this entry was eye-catching enough for you.
The story is an allegory of the disturbing normalization of misogyny and men's casual sexual harassment (and assault?) of women. Initially the wasp is simply a bad childhood memory; a one-off occurrence that happened while the author was eating a popsicle. A wasp lands on her face, crawling on her, constantly threatening to sting her. Her mother tells her to just stand still, and it will go away eventually. Wasps will be wasps just as boys will be boys.
Honestly I thought it was just alright. The wasps being a symbol for sexual harassment was extremely heavy-handed. They appear mostly in the school's woodworking shops (woodworking being a stereotypically masculine hobby), the author took to wearing longer sleeves and turned-up collars in the summer to deter them (reminiscent of how women are told to sacrifice their comfort so that men aren't "tempted" to harass them), and there's a moment later on where a boy starts misbehaving during class and later spits out what's implied to be chewed-up paper, which wasp's nests are made out of. It's very obvious and left very little room for nuance.
While writing this entry, I initially couldn't find the author of the story and had resulted to searching random keywords I remembered in an attempt to find the original post. In doing so I stumbled upon this post that currently has over 121k notes:
With Tumblr being home to the infamous anti-media literacy take of "sometimes the curtains are just blue" I really shouldn't be surprised by something like this. But it's frustrating. It's these kinds of sentiments that result in authors having to beat you over the head with uncreative, overt symbolism and lines like "[wasps] want you to flinch and bat them away so that you’re the one to blame when they sink their stinger in." There's no way the audience would understand what the theme is otherwise.
Titles like these originated on r/nosleep, a subreddit I really despise. They're clickbait in the purest form of the word, made to make perusers of the subreddit curious enough to click on them and hopefully give the author a rush of internet dopamine in the form of an upvote. It's media purely made to be consumed and spat out, and one of the rules of the subreddit being "everything must be plausible" leaves no room for authors looking to do something actually new or interesting.
People like the one in the image above are the exact audience of these clickbait titles. Readers with no patience who don't care about thinking too deeply, they just want weird scary things NOW! And to an extent, I understand. But there's a stark difference in slow burn and meandering around and taking too long getting to the point (a reason why I can't stand Stephen King). Unfortunately this is just something you'll regularly encounter if you want to read anything with actual substance.
If you can't force yourself to step out of your comfort zone by reading stories that don't hand-feed you the basic premise in the title, then you're dooming yourself to forever reading the horror story equivalent of Marvel movies. Unless you like those too, in which case good for you I guess. I'm glad the title of this entry was eye-catching enough for you.
