the thin line between meaningful and gratuitous suffering

There’s a scene in “The Troop” by Nick Cutter that has stuck with me since the first (and only) time I read it years ago. Premise of the novel is a troop of boy scouts are stuck on an island off the coast of PEI and a lord of the flies-type scenario ensues, plus nasty infectious tapeworms squiggling around making things worse. I have a pretty wide, if not deep, horror lexicon, and horror novels especially rarely inspire more than a shrug from me. I find the combination of visual and audio cues from horror movies or just the audio of podcasts a lot more effective at scaring me than just words on a page. However, in “The Troop”, there is… the turtle scene. Funny enough, I don’t remember the specifics of it, nor the events surrounding it. That hasn’t stopped me from being haunted by this scene since I read it, and presumably, forever more until the day I die, amen halleluiah.

The turtle dies. Is killed. In quite a gruesome way. I cried.

Animal suffering in horror media is not even close to novel, and a trope I assign a combined rank of baseless, gratuitous shock value and counting on the average person’s sympathy toward the unjust suffering of an innocent animal. It’s part of the toolkit of horror more than anything else— a great way to raise the stakes (death) without actually killing off any of the human characters quite yet. I know there’s a whole club of us who cringe every time the happy family moves into a new home at the beginning of a haunted house movie and their loving dog bounds around cheerfully barking in the great new yard it will definitely have lots of time to enjoy!

The turtle murder, the turder, if you will, has stayed with me since the first time I read it. There are a ton of other nasty scenes in that book, and if you’re a fan of gore in your horror, I highly recommend it. Going by what I said in the last paragraph, I should be able to easily write off the turder as a cheap trope checked off the infection/zombie horror subgenre list. However, my memory of that scene is not quite so simple. It’s tinged with a cosmic injustice of the banality of human (or animal) suffering. There was a moment in that scene where the turtle looks up at the night sky filled with stars as it died. And again, I can’t remember the scene well, and feel no desire to search it up to relive it for this blog post. I can only attest to how it’s lived in my psyche since then, and potentially transformed into something more than itself. To this day, I still feel sad about the turder. In the real world, turtles die and are killed every day, which is sad. But the turtle I feel saddest about is the fictional one in “The Troop”. Maybe it helps that it’s not a particularly long scene. Sometimes, emotional resonance in fiction has to be a surgical strike. There are times to linger, but this wasn’t one of them. If I recall correctly, the scene’s place in the larger narrative was to chronicle one of the main characters’ descents into madness after becoming infected by the tapeworms that make its victims violent and homicidal. The turtle’s death was merely a stepping stone on that journey.

This post isn’t about shitting on the narrative stepping stones. How we construct stories, how we raise the stakes, the weight we place on one type of event over another and how that shapes our understanding of rising action, all of that is an interesting discussion for sure. And I’m not here to shit on “The Troop” or Nick Cutter. In fact, “The Saturday Night Ghost Club” by Craig Davidson (Nick Cutter is his horror pseudonym) is one of my favorite books of the last few years.

What this post is about is the turder, and my own personal stepping stones to understanding the difference between meaningful and gratuitous suffering.

I really like to make characters suffer. I think my laser focus on this does stem from my fandom days. Essentially, the more a character suffers, the sweeter the nectar of their happy ending. This leads into another storytelling tool I believe very firmly in— endings must be earned. In general, that doesn’t mean the main character gets what they deserve. It means the ending of the narrative is justified by all that comes before. In fanfiction world, however, it means exactly that. Dean Winchester or Wei Wuxian or whoever your favorite little fictional pawn is has suffered greatly in their life, and after a period of great strife (and usually dying at least once), they find their happy ending with their love interest and even if things aren’t perfect, they are good. It’s cathartic, and catharsis in storytelling, to me, is imperative.

[the link between true happiness as a result of suffering and the christian worldview of the reward of heaven after a lifetime of strife… well… I’m aware of it. I’m just not educated enough on it to probe this avenue of thought any further beyond “We live in a society.” Though I did learn to tie my shoes in church when I was a kid, so maybe god really does exist]

Eventually, I became wary of my love of making characters suffer. Not fully— stories really can’t exist without conflict of some kind, and suffering is absolutely a kind of conflict. In fandom, there are a lot of fics that refuse their characters any kind of suffering or conflict whatsoever, which leads to flat, uninteresting narratives (which is totally fine, I’m only speaking for myself here and lots of people enjoy the comfort of fics like that— I’ve definitely written my fair share). I think my wariness stemmed from the glee of suffering. Obviously, occasionally, fictional suffering is delicious and sexy. But when it got to the point that it was more about the glee, about the gratuitousness, of the suffering, than about what could be meaningfully or cathartically gained from said hardships, I had to take a step back and reevaluate my approach.

I think this became more apparent to me in 2015 (if you can possibly cast your memory back that far, lord knows I can’t without the timestamps) when I wrote my one and only DCBB, take me home country roads (no they never go to west virginia in that fic, yes the title will haunt me till i die as a result). This fic was basically an exercise in gratuitous Muchness, that particular type of overwrought emotionality you see praised a lot in fanfiction but at the end of the day is pretty void of substance with all the empty caloric intake of Guys In Epic Love. i wrote that thing until i was bloated with gleeful misery, so much so i took a break partway through writing it so i could bang out a short goofy haunted apartment fic that ended up being by FAR my most read ever, go figure (for the curious).

I was convinced that all the suffering Dean goes through in country roads made it more meaningful. I was sure that every brutal depiction of violence and gore was absolutely necessary to prove how edgy and nasty the world is. Every tooth-rattling punch, every visceral bloodspray, every violent thought of self-hatred and regret was imperative because more begets more begets more begets more. This Muchness was training the audience to respond in kind— like, I was almost baiting people into frothing sadness cum (tempered) eternally wedded bliss by the end.

There are two MDZS fics that I think of as spiritual successors to country roads, out in the garden, there’s things you hid away, and a moment on the lips. out in the garden is basically a retread of country roads with an mdzs wash of paint and most of what i said about country roads applies here as well— it was the first long fic I wrote for MDZS fandom (technically just cql as I hadn’t read mdzs yet) and i was awash in the new fandom/obsession glow and couldn’t wait to put Wei Wuxian through his paces and see what evil deeds I could visit upon him. It was fun and it was gratuitous, I don’t think there’s a lot more to interrogate there.

a moment on the lips, though, whew. By far, I would call this my nastiest piece of work, but also one that I’m most proud of. While writing it, I was intimately aware of my tendency toward Muchness, and intentionally pulled back on that despite the story itself being, well, quite awful (in terms of plot, not writing lol, I’m actually really pleased with the prose in that one). And I think my restraint (which is hard to demonstrate, considering by its nature you can’t exactly see restraint being applied) is part of what really sells it. if you clicked over to the ao3 link, you’ll notice this story has picked up almost no traction in MDZS fandom compared to most of my other fics. This is because (I think) this fic is lacking in that fandom catnip quality of overwrought emotionality I mentioned earlier. This is a nasty story, but not in a fun way, or a kinky way, or even really a gory way. It’s just awful and difficult and many times I was afraid I was entering dead dove territory, though I’m glad in the end I decided I thought highly enough of it to refrain from labelling it as such. This was also one of the rare times while writing fic I followed the principle of an earned ending that wasn’t happy for the main character (even though it ended with Wangxian together). So that all-important catharsis was minimal, but overall, the story earned the ending, and I think it was a worthwhile journey, and as such I think it’s a worthwhile story (while also completely understanding that almost no one wants to read it cause that shit is nasty).

Now that I’m writing original fiction, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in future stories. I won’t say too much about Don’t Worry About It yet, as it’s still being posted, but I think the ending is earned, and justified by the story it’s built on (and Wren absolutely suffers, but to a degree I think does justice to the story and her character). Though there’s romance in the story, I wouldn’t call it a romance, nor would I even necessarily call the romance the main aspect in the story. This already is a departure from my fic-writing days— it’s surprising to adjust your lens even that small bit when writing where literally anything, not just a romantic pairing, can be the main pillar of the narrative. But my experience writing fanfiction, as detailed in this blog post and future others, serves as proof that it’s been an invaluable experience in how I approach my original work.

Even the Dean Winchester Beat Sheet (née cherry ass au) is what i’d call a spiritual predecessor to Don’t Worry About It. Which is… hilarious. But I suppose at the end of the day in order to learn how to write, you have to write. And from one fic to the next, to the next, all the way to my more recent original stuff, you can see that DNA repeated over and over. Sometimes, like with the Muchness and the gratuitous suffering, I can catch it, interrogate it, and work on it. Sometimes, like with the big gay crises and the vomiting for dramatic effect, I’m aware it’s a bugbear but completely unwilling to do anything about it either because it doesn’t bother me or I think it’s funny (vomiting for dramatic effect). These things can be hard to pin down, not only because they are such ephemeral concepts (not the vomiting for dramatic effect), but also because one woman’s gratuitous suffering is another woman’s “FAVORITE FIC EVERRRRRR MADE ME CRY FOR DAYS I HAVE NEVER FELT EMOTIONS LIKE THIIISSSSS”.

A potentially important caveat to the above is that part of the reason i left fandom is because i started to feel like that Muchness crept into my real life, or, more accurately, rendered me unable to participate in the real world in a way that felt meaningful, because few things in the real world render one as gleefully miserable as a fanfiction that engages in endless gratuitous suffering, only for the characters to rise up out of the ashes of their noble destitution into the light of a clear, beautiful day. To me, it was similar to the social media dopamine machine— those emotional highs that are impossible to replicate in real life, while fine in small doses, are wide open doorways to total and utter mental burnout when real life and real emotions about real things don’t live up to the hype you read about on ao3 (or insagram, or facebook, or blah blah blah).

Again, this is a thin line situation. I want people to read my work and be emotionally moved by it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading a fun, sad, lighthearted, meaningful, gory, gratuitous, or all of the above fic. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with losing yourself for a while in a new interest, a new fandom, a new story. All of these things are fine and part of life, and we are all trying to walk that line, thin as it is, between being real people with real responsibilities and a duty of care to our fellow person and being a basement dwelling troglodyte whose only contribution to society is watching the National Treasure movies on endless repeat (NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT).

Speaking of the difference between meaningful and gratuitous suffering, this blog post is pretty long and pretty self-indulgent. Guess that’s the point of a personal blog, but, y’know. Noted. Caught. Interrogated. Will work on it.

Unlike the vomiting for dramatic effect. That can stay.