Fanfiction about people we know
We Made it All Up & two movies featuring girls in caves
Hi, friends,
I hope you had a solid weekend. I saw a family member that I hadn’t seen since pre-covid times (lovely), ate fried scallops (also lovely), and went for a million walks. On one of said walks, I ran into an old neighbor who is currently reading A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (hooray!) and on another, I saw two perfect fawns (fawns are always perfect) and a street sign that had been graffitied thusly:
I ended up reading far less than I’d thought I might—which is par for the course, there are never enough hours in the weekend for all the reading I think I’m going to do—but I’m halfway through A Master of Djinn at the moment, and it is, as expected, delightful.
Part of me is still in denial, telling me Joss is up there hiding behind the cedars, playing a trick on us all. But the other part of me, the calculating, frozen part, knows I’m in grave danger.
—We Made it All Up, by Margot Harrison
To get a fresh start after a pretty scary—and not entirely over—situation back home in Montreal, high school sophomore Celeste has moved to Kray’s Defile, Montana, with her father. She stays pretty under-the-radar—both because of new-kid cautiousness and because of anxiety and self-imposed isolation due to the aforementioned Situation—but before too long, has been befriended by social outsider Vivvy Kray.
She and Vivvy share a common interest: golden boy Joss. After a Mysteriously Dramatic Exchange in English class between Joss and another classmate, Seth, Celeste and Vivvy start writing fanfic shipping the two.
Time passes, real-life relationships shift and change, the fanfic progresses, and then one night, all four of them go drinking up on the mountain… and Joss ends up dead.
Told in alternating timelines—Now and Then, current and past—We Made It All Up is a solid contemporary mystery-thriller. It deals with all the things the premise promises: Friendship, small-town history, revenge, trust, and trauma. Mystery-wise, I particularly appreciated that Celeste’s background made it extremely understandable that she’d shy away from telling her whole truth to the (male) authorities—and their behavior absolutely reinforces her reasoning/instincts, which was maddening but felt sadly realistic. Harrison also allows her characters to be messy, for them to have motivations and choices and morals that are more realistically gray than black or white, and I’m always here for that.
What makes this one a stand out, though, is the fanfic element. Some of it is included—it’s of appropriately iffy quality, given the age/experience of the characters who are writing it, which I loved—and it, of course, does more to expose the inner journeys of the authors than it does to shed any real light on Joss or Seth.
In a big way, We Made it All Up feels like an exploration of parasocial relationships, and how rapidly they can go weird and gross and toxic. When you’re putting all of your own Stuff onto another human being—assigning feelings and motivations and histories to them that are more about you than they are about them, and then kinda maybe forgetting that your stories aren’t true?—things can go sideways, and fast. And of course, all of it—particularly the general ickiness of it all—is compounded by a gazillion percent when we’re talking about a local ‘celebrity’ that you have daily in-person access to, versus a celebrity that you’ll never meet in person.
[Note: Did I find the usage of the name ‘Joss’ entirely distracting? Yes. Am I aware that there are people who exist in the world with that name who did NOT create a beloved show and then get accused by many people of being a creeper? Also yes. So I’m trying to be an adult about it, but hoo boy it’s amazing how much it made me twitch. Is there something to be said there about celebrity? Probably, but that’s beyond my pay grade.]
Two movies featuring girls in caves
Hellbender
Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams, 2021
Streaming on Shudder, rentable on Amazon
This is a stretch for the theme, as the cave bit only kicks in at the end, but GOOD GRIEF the cave bit is A. LOT. to the point where it was so claustrophobic and terrible that I couldn’t look directly at the screen for some of it. Which was rad. It’s a Very Arty movie about adolescence and witches and mother/daughter Stuff and would make an AMAZING—if extremely dark and extremely bloody!—double feature with Julia Ducournau’s Raw, which I also loved. The trio of directors are a mother/father/daughter team, and they did it all: writing, directing, acting, editing, music.
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Peter Weir, 1975
Streaming on Criterion, rentable on Amazon
Also a stretch for the theme, as it appears to be more a Rock Doorway than an Actual Cave, but I just rewatched this one recently—I’d been wanting to ever since finally reading the book—and I loved it even more than when I originally watched it back in my early 20s and I can’t stop thinking about it, so here we are. It’s set in Australia on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and features a group of boarding school girls going on an outing to a local landmark and four of them going for a walk and then… not coming back. It’s about nature and “civilization”, expectations of girls and women, British colonialism, what happens to us when we are forced into boxes that we don’t fit in. It’s weird and quiet and unsettling, and it’s flat-out gorgeous to look at. My guess is that Sofia Coppola watched it at an impressionable age and was like, THIS. THIS IS MY AESTHETIC.
Thoughts? Recommendations? Any good reads/watches over the weekend?
Talk to you soon,
Leila
HAHAHAAHSOB
I, too, could only think of The Show Creator and flinch. Sheesh, that's never going to go away, is it.
Ooh, Picnic at Hanging Rock looks like Enchanted April. Gorgeous, if a bit unsettling sounding!