The Cutprice Guignol

The Ninth Year: The Haunting of Swill House

Category: Discussion

April 7, 2020

Stephen King’s The Stand: My Dream Adaptation Casting 2020

Hi! I’m Lou. This is my blog, where I share my Pointless Opinions (copyright pending) for your reading edification. And this week, my Pointless Opinions are rendered DOUBLY pointless: both by the fact that I have actually already written this article, and that someone else has been commissioned to create a “real miniseries” with an “actual cast” that doesn’t “refer to some weird list written by a blogger people avoid eye contact with in the street”.

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March 24, 2020

Buffy Summers, Clara Oswald, and How to Pull Off a Chosen One Story

Let us talk, for a moment, about The Chosen One.

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March 16, 2020

Trisha Paytas, Mental Illness, and the Self-Diagnosis Debate

A few days ago, Trisha Paytas released a video. The internet’s most dedicated full-time troll, it’s not exactly as though she’s a stranger to controversy, but this video hit that internet sweet-spot and soon blew up in a big cloud of outrage. In it, Paytas claimed to have Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), which, she mentioned, she had diagnosed herself.

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February 8, 2020

Influencer Culture, Eating Disorders, and the Promise of Wellness

Wellness has a nice ring to it, right? There’s something soothing about that term. Calming. Wellness, like it’s all about shifting your life into some soft-focus place of warm, pillowy goodness. You just want to be well. It’s simple, isn’t it? Really?

Trigger warning for discussions of eating disorder behaviours.

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February 5, 2020

Bojack Horseman, Suicide, and Sad, Happy Endings

Ever since Bojack Horseman came into being, people have been trying to predict just how it would end. Spoilers ahead, for the final season and finale.

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January 9, 2020

Notes on a Sex Object

What does it mean to objectify somebody?

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November 9, 2019

Problematic Media, Villainous Villains, and that Surprisingly Anti-Queer Pennywise

In the wake of IT Chapter Two, amongst the maelstrom of Reddie fanfiction that I was certainly not churning out at the rate of six per hour and Bill Hader actually becoming a sex symbol, Out.com released an article that swiftly shot to the top of the Discourse surrounding the movie: Pennywise is Surprisingly Anti-Queer in IT Chapter 2.

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November 2, 2019

Bojack Horseman and the Legacy of Recovery

With only one half-season of Bojack Horseman remaining, I fully intend to spend as much time as humanly (and horsenly) possibly talking about it. Bojack Horseman is one of the best shows of the decade, one of the most consistently brilliant, insightful deep-dives into trauma, abuse, addiction, and mental illness, not to mention a magnificent vehicle for Noted Character Actress Margot Martindale to spin her winsome charms over the nation at large. The last half of this season drops at the end of January next year, and I’m already a little sad to think that it’s going to be over all too soon.

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August 27, 2019

In Passionate Defense of Fanfiction

Look, fanfiction gets a bad rap, and I get it. I get that most people think of the iconic Ebony Demenita Dark’ness Raven Way I get that maybe they even looked up, to their great regret, that one story about the giant squid having sex with Hogwarts castle. I get that, well, Fifty Shades of Grey happened because of fanfiction. But I’m here to make a defense of fanfiction, and you’re here to read it and then maybe do your own alt-universe slashfic take on it where this article has soft, tender sex with this article? Fanfiction is so rich, guys, I’m telling you.

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August 21, 2019

How to Handle Life (And Your Own Mental Health) When Your Partner is in a Psych Ward

(trigger warning for discussions of suicide, hospitalisation)

In March of this year, at about eleven in the evening, I sat down on the edge of my bed. My partner, of six years, who I had met in the smoking area one Halloween when he was dressed as the wrong Doctor from Doctor Who and I just had to pass comment on it, had just voluntarily left our shared home to go to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after a suicide attempt. From there, he would be committed to a mental ward, where he would stay for the next month (note: would it be funnier if I had titled this article “in the month of madness”?).

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