So Iām gonna write a lost boy fanfic, but I wanted to gauge a bit of interest. I recently saw Leviticus and rewatched Widowās Bay so Iām planning on taking inspiration from these media, also maybe a bit of lynchian horror.
I do have one question, since the musical came out recently would you prefer to the musical version of the characters or the movie version?
Genuine question for my the lost boys people: does anyone else still feel confused that they changed Dwayne and Markoās appearance in the musical?
DO NOT GET ME WRONG, I think their musical counterparts are interesting also and their actors are fantastic, however I know a big part of the fandom has mentioned or headcanon(?) that Dwayne is Native American/ indigenous and in the musical he is now white. So basically what Iām asking is anyone confused of this change and does anyone have any opinions about the change?
I do not want to incite a debate, Iām just curious of other peopleās opinions.
While none of the characters are race specific, Dwayne was, from my perspective, heavily accepted to be native American. But yea I agree that anyone can be played by anyone.
I will never be able to recreate 2025 July when I was depressed listening to preacherās daughter and reading bones and all while the smell of apple cinnamon from my candle wafted to through the air.
i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.
basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.
but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.
bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.
now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.
anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.
that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.
and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.
and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.
troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.
or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.
i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.
anyway.
this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.
Genuine question for my the lost boys people: does anyone else still feel confused that they changed Dwayne and Markoās appearance in the musical?
DO NOT GET ME WRONG, I think their musical counterparts are interesting also and their actors are fantastic, however I know a big part of the fandom has mentioned or headcanon(?) that Dwayne is Native American/ indigenous and in the musical he is now white. So basically what Iām asking is anyone confused of this change and does anyone have any opinions about the change?
I do not want to incite a debate, Iām just curious of other peopleās opinions.
Screaming from the rooftops about how vampires are capitalism and how in TLB that presents as Reaganism and everything that comes with that. How youāre led to believe that the āsuper evil bad guysā are four heavily queer-coded delinquent punks who are all āfuck the system and counter cultureā leading the Good Boy From Nextdoor astray from his family, only for it to be revealed that theyāre being controlled by the real big bad evilā¦ a conservative white businessman whoās trying to build a nuclear family.
Some notes on how exactly āvampires=capitalismā for ppl who might not know bc it is a fascinating deep dive and I have written a paper on it for my anthro class:
Vampires historically are rich white dudes w seemingly infinite control and power (both literal power as in mind-control super strength etc and figurative power as in socioeconomic status money influence) who prey on young (poor) people by literally sucking the life out of them
If that doesnāt sound like capitalism idk what does
Vampires=capitalism is not a new thing which is why āvampireā as a genre tends to have a resurgence during times of economic struggle (Twilight and the 2008 recession, the Lost Boys movie and the 1987 stock market crash, the og Interview With a Vampire and the 1973 recession, hell even the Lost Boys musical and everything thatās going on economically now)
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