Cis-Woman, 38, Asexual. Teen Wolf, H50, Mako Mermaids, Yuri on Ice, Voltron, Check Please, The Dragon Prince, Lost Boys, Star Wars. Current ships: McDanno, Victuuri, Petopher, Sciles, Talia/Melissa, Keith/any and everyone, Zimbits, Bitty/Parse, Bitty/Tater, Callum/Rayla, Michael/David, Anakin/Padme. Icon by Matt Spencer.
On collaborating with designer Ryan Park and the thought behind David’s dagger earrings:
“…and it would be cool if I like, handed a blade to Michael, like if I gave him the blade to take control of his life, and he walks around with this choice he’s made on his ear”
Which he ultimately uses on you! Cool! Haha! Yeah, cool! I’m fine btw.
You Are A Killer - an examination of The Lost Boys
I have an internet connection and a hyperfixation I cannot be stopped.
As always and forever: shoutout to my partner @berd-alert for helping me by editing, offering concrit and being the world’s cutest rubber duck when the brainworms needed debugging. Love you -3-
Here we go.
The Lost Boys is a cultural phenomenon for a myriad of reasons, not least of which because it redefined the look and appeal of vampires in media for the next nigh-on forty years. The film is a cult classic with a fandom that’s still active to this day (hi!) and there’s plenty about it to take apart.
There’s a lot of ways to look at this movie and what it was trying to say. It’s billed as a ‘horror-comedy’, and it certainly delivers on that front, combining creepy, monstrous vampires with characters played by Corey Feldman of Goonies fame who brings a similar feel to the movie. It’s a fun summer flick, but it’s also a time capsule of mid to late 80s fashion, music, and culture. It’s commentary on ‘the youth’, on the changing values of the world. I remember my own first viewing of it thinking it might have been trying to tackle the issues of substance abuse in teenagers and bringing light to warning signs of addiction. ‘It’s 10 o'clock - do you know where your child is?’
For this essay, I’m going to be looking through a wider lens. Some of this is going to be my own personal interpretation of writing choices from changes to the script to directorial input. Other parts are conjectures of cultural osmosis of the time finding its way into the subtext of the film regardless of intention on behalf of the writers. Either way, as always, feel free to take this analysis with as large or small a grain of salt as you feel is necessary.
The thought that started this whole thing was just a little observation from good friend @misslavenderlady pointing out the poigniancy in this post about David and Michael’s final confrontation, and it certainly got me thinking.
While this conversation, from a Watsonian* point of view, is a confrontation between the protagonist and his foil about reason and rational versus carnal desires and id, from a Doyalist** perspective, it’s a much, much larger discussion about the social and political climate of youth in America at the time.
More specifically, the AIDs crisis and the rise of queer identity as a political force in the nation.
To begin, what is AIDs, and what does it mean in the context of The Lost Boys?
According to HIV.gov, AIDs stands for Acquired Immunodeficiency syndrome, the late stage of HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus. It is a virus that attacks the cells responsible for the body’s immune response, so while the virus itself does not kill, it destroys the body’s ability to protect itself against diseases and infections.
The effects of the virus were first recorded on June 5th, 1981, when the CDC published a weekly report wherein it described a case of five previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles suddenly developing a rare lung infection. By the time the report was released, two had already died. The article noted that it seemed like the mens’ immune systems weren’t working properly to help fight the infection.
By mid June, the first person was admitted into the Clinical Center of the National Institute of Health and died in its care. He is considered the first person with AIDs. By July, the disease was colloquially named by a San Francisco gay and lesbian newsletter as ‘Gay Men’s Pneumonia’, and a few days later the New York Times published an article detailing a rare and aggressive cancer among 41 homosexual men. The term ‘gay cancer’ entered the public lexicon.
In 1982, the acronym AIDs was coined by the CDC, and some advocacy groups started to form about how the disease might spread. While there were reported cases in people outside of the demographic, the idea that it’s a ‘gay man’s illness’ had already started to take hold in public perception. Representatives Phillip Burton and Ted Weiss introduced legislation for the government to give funding for research, but the proposal died in committee, never having made it to the floor of Congress. It would not be taken up again and agreed to until a whole year later.
In 1983, the outcry from and for activism for the burgeoning crisis amped up. Congress approved 12 million in funding for research, and at the Pasteur Institute in France, Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Dr. Luc Montagnier discovered the retrovirus potentially responsible. At the time, almost 2,000 diagnoses of AIDs had been confirmed, and more than 500 of them died. The first lawsuit against discrimination against someone with AIDs was filed, and the World Health Organization holds a meeting to oversee global impacts.
Over the next three years, 1984, 1985, and 1986, the AIDs epidemic went through many ups and downs, with many perspectives from many people. Misinformation was passed as much as facts. AIDs could not be passed through saliva or touch, only through blood or certain body fluids such as semen or breast milk, but fear of the virus and who carried it spread like a virus itself. Ryan White, an elementary schooler in Indiana, was denied entry into middle school when it was revealed he’d gotten HIV. The US military began testing for the virus and denied the ability to serve for those who tested positive. President Ronald Reagan spoke about AIDs for the first time, and received major criticism for not providing enough funding for research. In 1985, there were some 13,000 cases of AIDs reported in America. By 1986, that number will have doubled, with a near 50% mortality rate.
The public perception of the disease and those affected by it continued to worsen. People estranged from their families for their lifestyle choices, for being queer at all, were left destitute when they became ill. If they were forced to be outed at work, they were often fired from their jobs leaving them without healthcare, or without any place to go. There was stigma around receiving a test for it at all, in having one’s name recorded and put on a list that the government could access if they wished. Ile Haggins, a former director of the Good Samaritan Project, described it as “this thing just hit. It was like there was no hope on the forefront.”
Activists described the utter frustration with the government’s response to the epidemic. Much of the organization and fight against it was coming not from any federal response, but from people-lead grassroots organizations. Many politicians in fact had gone on record as condemning the illness as some form of divine punishment, or that those who became ill due to unclean needle sharing ‘deserved’ it for using intravenous drugs. Nurses in hospitals were reported as leaving patients’ food outside the door rather than being in a room with them. Although it would not be until nearly ten years later, gay artist John S. Boskovich created the artwork ‘Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers)’ - a found-object sculpture made from a box fan that was the only item salvaged after the AIDs-related death of his partner Stephan Earabino, whose family had emptied the apartment they’d shared and refused Boskovich any other mementos.
So we come to 1987. In February, AIDs activist Cleve Jones created the first panel of what will become the AIDs Memorial Quilt to honor a friend who died of HIV related illness. The panel is 3 feet wide and six feet long, the dimensions of a typical grave. The ‘AIDs Coalition To Unleash Power’, or ‘ACT UP’ was formed by activist Larry Kramer in New York and began demonstrations. They pressured drug companies, pharmacies, religious institutions and political groups that stood in the way of better testing and help for those affected. Princess Diana became a fervent advocate for people with AIDs. In Florida, when a judge ordered a school to allow two siblings with hemophilia - a group highly susceptible to HIV through necessary blood transfusions - to attend, parents rioted and refused to allow their children to attend with them. The family’s house was set on fire and burned to the ground. October will be designated the official AIDs Awareness month, while at the same time hosting the first showing of the AIDs Quilt. The US Senate adopted the Helms Agreement, which requires any federally financed education about AIDs to stress abstinence and forbids anything perceived to promote homosexuality.
There was more to come, more won and lost battles in the ongoing war. But here we are - here they were. The summer of 1987.
When the forces of politics, science, and the public seem to be coming to a boiling point over an ongoing epidemic, The Lost Boys debuts on the silver screen on the last day of July. A quartet of vampires swoop in on an unsuspecting everyboy Michael Emerson and offer him a world of darkness, endless fatal fun, and blood.
While there remains some controversy around whether or not it was intended to be, The Lost Boys continues to find immortality in the queer community for its subtextual themes of anti-establishmentism, counterculture, and coming-of-age. Director Joel Schumacher was a gay man himself and played a huge part in shaping how the titular Lost Boys would be presented to the audience, including aging them up.
Joel’s vision of the Boys was very different than the first drafts of the script proposed, where they were much similar in age to the younger boys they were named after in the story of Peter Pan. The vampires in The Lost Boys were also a very different breed to what most other media had done with the mythical monster up until that point.
The typical portrayal of a vampire had been somewhat codified by Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ published nearly a full century before, depicting them as old, decrepit beings that can hide their crumbling forms with magic, but must feast on the living to sustain it. Usually unholy, they were like living ghosts of a past age, unable to move forward in a prison of undeath. There was a given ethereality to them, and while the idea of romance towards the darkness had been toyed with plenty of times before, the narratives upheld the idea that it was at best a tragedy, and at worst a corruption of the victim. The Lost Boys, by contrast, chose to take a far different angle with the relationship the audience was to have with these vampires - namely: the relationship. These vampires are sexy.
Moreover, these vampires are grounded in a way not portrayed before. Rather than being a phantom of the nobility of an era long dead, they’re punks. They ride motorcycles and dress in contemporary fashions and speak in slang and modern lingo. They smoke, do drugs, drink, listen to rock music, and as the tagline of the movie goes, make it indeed seem like ‘it’s fun to be a vampire’. The Boys could be anyone spotted in a typical mid-80s coastal Californian crowd during summer break, blending in rather than standing out. This new take on vampires was almost human. You recognized them.
The Lost Boys were very much reflections of the real world outside of their story. Maybe a little larger than life for the film, but they represented through clothing and language and actions the subcultures of the era. And along with that portrayal came the attitudes ascribed to them. In this case, the temptation of the illicit.
Vampirism in media, and the vampire itself, represent a number of themes that coalesce into a single form. Dracula, and even before then, works like The Vampyre by John William Polidori or Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, attribute certain characteristics to the vampire that, while not outright something to be sought, were still desirable in a subconscious way. Repression of anything relating to sexuality, even heterosexual, was a huge cultural norm at the time of the publishing of these pivotal works. The concept of a romance that lacked an overtly physical nature was the ideal. In a time when women were often institutionalized for ‘hysteria nervosa’ and figures like Freud were only beginning to lay the groundwork for psychoanalysis, the idea of people, especially women, wanting something as physical and carnal as sex was worse than indecent. It was obscene. A corruption of the pure and innocent with something dark, and while tempting, ultimately all-consuming and fatal.
The vampire is a representation of desires society has deemed illicit and incorrect, but when Dracula came into the scene, it immortalized with it another trait into vampire canon: the notion of the curse of the vampire having the ability to spread. With a draining bite, or giving a victim their own blood, the effects of vampirism consume the victim until they too are a monster and will spread it to others. In the story of Dracula, this is an allegory for the intense xenophobia/excotisization of the day and age. The Eastern ‘wild and uncivilised’ parts of Europe and Asia spreading to Western Europe, particularly England. The fear of the mixed race, the non-English, the foreign immigrant ‘infecting’ society like a plague carried by things that only look human. It should also be noted, that with this uptick in racism came a huge swell in cases of tuberculosis and influenza, the spread of which was poorly understood, and would leave the victims lingering on for weeks before death.
In The Lost Boys, this theme of vampirism spreading can be used as a metaphor for the spread of an actual virus that travels through the blood, among queer, young men, partaking in what was seen as taboo acts and perverse culture. It wasn’t just the virus now that had people up in arms, however.
Public perception of the queer community thanks to the visibility the virus had suddenly given them varied widely, but among those views was a definite weaponization against the culture itself. A once vibrant demographic that many considered the foundation of the arts was brought under fire from agendas against the freedom of the arts, gender experimentation, and sexual liberation. Among these accusations was the assertion that queer people were somehow enjoying the death, using it as some kind of kink or fetish. Glorifying the spread, and doing so intentionally as a form of cult activity. Even among the gay and queer community itself, those with HIV and AIDs were often pushed out of their social circles, talked about in hushed voices. “It became the punchline of the world’s worst joke,” said one man to Kansas City PBS in an interview reflecting on the time. “Where’s-? Oh, he went home and died, because he had AIDs.”
Even when early methods of helping slow and stabilize the infection started becoming available, a diagnosis was still seen as a death warrant. That while one was still present and here, they were already in some ways considered gone. A living death.
It’s very easy to see how such a perception of the queer community can worm its way into the portrayal of vampires in the media. The Boys represent the taboo desires - promiscuity among all genders with each other, experimentation with drugs, gleeful, impulsive violence with both their peers and with institutions like the police, a lack of respect for the older generations and the rules of society - but they also represent very well the cost of those things. How these desires are ultimately the downfall of society and those who participate in them. They’re illusions and trickery, a devil’s deal. The Lost Boys are villains because what they are meant to be offering - an outsider’s perspective on what the queer community was - is a black hole that only ends in suffering and death for an empty pleasure of the flesh. They are the main antagonists for this reason.
And yet, there is an even bigger villain that is not revealed until the very end, until after the Boys are dead and gone.
Max, the video store owner. A straight, white, businessman who is exonerated by all the events of the movie leading up to the final confrontation. He can’t be a vampire, the in-canon tests and subtext uphold - he’s dorky, he dresses like a square, he has increasingly bad luck with dating Lucy Emerson, and at multiple points in the movie, is presented as a target for the Boys to go after as the perfect hapless victim of their wanton destruction.
But in the end, he is as much of an antagonist as the other vampires, regardless of all these factors.
The dichotomy of who the ‘real’ villain of The Lost Boys is sets up a fascinating contrasting perspective, depending on who you are, or were, at the time of its release. The Boys are a very clear example of queer youth. A group of homeless teenagers, specifically teenaged boys, who seem to live as though they were dying tomorrow - because they might well be.
Max, on the other hand, is the parent who is exceedingly frustrated at their own children for not doing as he asks or following the strict rules laid out for them. Straight, white, middle class society seeing this social group and condemning everything they are, while being an even bigger monster themselves. Max created the problem and is part of the problem, but rather than attempt to fix it or keep it from perpetuating, he uses the Boys and the threat they pose to coerce a woman to be with him, holding her entire family hostage to ensure his success. He attempts to enforce the toxic mindset of the rigid nuclear family with highly defined roles and punishment for not following those roles onto a group that would arguably be harmed by trying to live up to such definitions beyond the fact that they don’t even want to. The Boys in the end are victims of a much larger ploy, where their lives are completely expendable in perpetuating power and control. Max, and the majority of the world that he thematically represents, doesn’t care if the Boys - the queer community - die. As long as he can use them to push forward his own agenda.
In the end, the movie presents the villains as a top-down Ponzi scheme, but as time has shown, it’s much harder for the audience by the end to see the Boys as ‘real’ villains, unlike Max. Over the course of the plot, Michael is offered the darkness of partaking in vampirism multiple times, and multiple times, he chooses to participate. He accepts the drag race across the beach, he accepts the food and the drink and drugs. He goes along with them to the bridge and hangs with them underneath it. Michael is drawn to their world, and even though he clearly has reservations, there’s something about them he keeps finding himself drawn to.
Star is often presented as the driving force of these choices, but most of the time, when the Boys are involved, Star is either in the background, or ignored. She’s threatened through implication of potential abuse if she doesn’t go with David before the race, but it’s not because he’s fighting for Star that Michael punches David. “It’s blood,” she says outright to Michael, who then scoffs, and drinks the wine. She is not present at all during the bridge scene, nor when the pack attacks the Surf Nazis, only in spirit as a motivation for Michael to follow them.
For the final confrontation, when Michael and David are facing off, Star is nowhere to be found, and she never gets brought up at all in their fight. This conflict is between David and Michael, and arguably has been since the beginning. When Michael has expressed concern over Star, there’s never any concrete discussion about why exactly she wants to leave other than that she doesn’t want to be a vampire and what that entails. What exactly David and the Boys are doing to her is never laid out. Star is very much treated as merely an inciting incident and a very flimsy reason for David and Michael to have interactions and be given that push by the narrative. She is the rope they’re pulling between them; both are holding on to her, but they’re looking at each other while they’re doing it. David’s interest, either because of Max or because of his own whims, is solidly in Michael.
Michael is very much an everyman in the movie. Similar to many romance novels’ use of a very bare-bones physical description and personality for their female lead so that readers can more easily slip into her place, Michael is every average audience member who would have been most of the demographic for the movie. He’s young and adventurous, he can make mistakes but he rights his wrongs in the end. He stands up for what is presented as good and correct in the world, and while dabbling in the dark when it draws him in, ultimately rejects it.
Supported with the history, the current events of the time, and the subtext littering the movie, Michael Emerson’s journey through vampirism could, and very much does in my opinion, represent the arc of a young queer man almost coming out of the closet, and choosing to go back in again. David by contrast represents the queer community offering him the experiences and the connection.
In another time, this plotline of someone offering a character a chance to explore their perceived darker side with a guiding hand may have been framed as a good thing. ‘Turning Red’ and ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’ are a couple good examples of this sort of narrative, where the main character has a side of themselves they’re told to repress and hide, that the side will ‘take over them’, and cause destruction both to the person and to their larger community. In these stories, the main character doesn’t get rid of the alternate side, but instead accepts it and embraces it as a part of their whole self, ultimately living authentically in the light even if there are those who still hold reservations or concerns about it.
In 1987, during the height of an epidemic with no real cure or course of mitigating action in sight, with few resources being allocated for those infected and dying and an already persecuted and marginalized community being blamed for its existence at all, no such respite was given.
Even if the battle with Max is the final battle, Michael’s fight with David is the moral and emotional center of the story. Again, Star, the object of affection that Michael is supposedly fighting to save as much as himself, is nowhere to be found, as well as any other characters. It’s purely Michael and David having a literal power struggle over the continued path of Michael’s life. Michael calls out David, “Are you afraid to face me?” when David hides in the rafters. While this can be read as David playing more mind games, there’s also the read that like every other time they’d come into contact, David is allowing Michael to come to him instead. David is not punishing Michael or toying with him for the sake of it - he’s waiting for him. He wants Michael to want this as much as he does.
And then the three little lines of dialogue that started this entire essay, and upon which the entire movie hangs is thematic hat:
“We tried to make you immortal,” says David.
“You tried to make me a killer!” Michael responds.
David and the Boys offered Michael a world outside of what Michael knew. They offered him experiences he’d either never conceived of before, or only in his wildest, most repressed dreams. These things were terrifying and new, but thrilling in a way nothing else in his life was. Things he wanted - to be respected, to be part of something, to have people who understood him and loved him. Away from his annoying little brother and loving but misunderstanding mother, the memory of the divorce and horrible father, the move away from the only home he’s ever known. They offer to help ease that discomfort and accept that life can offer him much, much more if he just reaches out and takes it.
Michael responds to the outcome of all of this. The perceived cost. He may never see his family again, the home he’s come to know even after only a short while. How good can the good times really be when they’re so off the rails? He’s terrified of people seeing him as what the Boys are, the words they may use to describe him afterwards. How his brother backs away from him, how his mother looks at him like a stranger in her home. And in the end, what comes of it all? Death. Death of people, and glee at the death in an unhinged, hysterical celebration.
When David accuses him of being what he is, Michael Emerson is not a willing participant in biting people’s throats out, or tearing them limb from limb. He is not calling Michael a murderer.
But he is calling Michael what Michael fears to be. Not something that hunts, but something that creates a gruesome end anyway. Something that will always cause fear, no matter how much Michael tries to hide it, or assure people that it’s not what’s really inside. Michael can go back to being an everyman. He can live his life to the cookie cutter cleanliness that makes his mother smile, his brother comfortable, and enable him to walk in the sunshine of greater society. But it will always be at best, only half-true. At worst, a lie.
Michael is simply a queer man in the 1980s.
“You are a killer.”
-
*Watsonian - (per TV Tropes.org): “An in-universe or diegetic explanation for events within the logic of the narrative.”
**Doyalist - (per TV Tropes.org): “Out of universe or exegetic commentary considering the work as a created concept”, which focuses primarily on the author’s intentions rather than ‘eye level’ character explanations.
*** a joke - all the resources cited in writing this essay
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Bilby o graphy*** or what ever it’s called (list of very good and very insightful resources and documentaries that you should totally look at, regardless of if you’re queer or not!)
Explore the HIV and AIDS timeline to learn about key moments and progress in the fight against HIV. Discover the history on HIV.gov.
Minor pet peeve: Y'all really gotta start looking up when things are invented. I am SO happy about all the new fics in The Lost Boys fandom. Great writing, great characterization. Big fan. But oof. Guys.
There was no "putting someone on speaker". It was a landline, you either held the receiver up between the two of you, or someone picked up another receiver in the house.
Waterproof eyeliner? That was invented in 2006. 30 years after The Lost Boys.
It really only drives me wild because I was born prior to The Lost Boys coming out and I have very vivid memories of the early 90s and what life was like pre-internet and pre-cellphone.
The slang is also positively hilarious. "Cringe"??? No, that's a strictly 2020s word. People were "uncool", "weird", or the f-slur.
Fun 80s words that I distinctly remember actively being used by my older cousins: rad, gnarly, bogus, clutch, ditz, warped, to veg out, scarf down. There's a bunch out there. They just sound boring to 2026 ears because they've been around so long. They were new once.
Seriously, it's not a big deal. I just find it so funny reading 1987 vampires saying "Ugh, don't be cringe." Or someone just "looking something up". No babes, that involved a library, card catalogs, the dewey decimal system, and microfiche or microfilm. And a phone number? That was the yellow pages or the white pages. Boy was it not a good time if that book wasn't tied down to the payphone or if the pages you needed were ripped out. Best to have those numbers memorized.
Cannot begin to tell you the amount of time research over even small things has taken up in writing a fic, just to make it feel set in the world at the time. ESPECIALLY THE FASHIONS AND AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY.
If you're writing about queer identities for a fic involving the Boys, or any fic set in the 80s (yes, looking at you, Stranger Things fans, I know we're a big crossover) then you NEED to do some research into the queer community of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It was NOT like it is today, not even close. Labels were different, flagging/markers were different. The movie was not being made for or played for a modern audience - it was made for a straight, summer horror flic audience of the mid to late 80s. The Boys are villains for a reason.
Anyway. Yeah. And research can be very fun! Go learn about the beginnings of the internet and stuff like 'phone phreaking' - it's really cool!!!
YES! Queer culture was very different! What ear someone got pierced was SUPER important. Left ears were considered fine, but if you got your right ear pierced? You were giving a MASSIVE signal that you were gay, out, and signalling to literally the whole world. That singular choice could end with someone getting hate crimed. Guys even avoided getting both ears pierced, just in case someone took it wrong. I very much remember being flat out told: "Left is right, and right is wrong."
My uncle contracted HIV in the 80s. I am so lucky that he is still alive today. And he's doing great! But the way people talked to him, refused to hug him. They were afraid that they would catch AIDS from even his sweat. It was so sad. He was treated like a criminal for contracting this disease. Seeing how hard it was when his friends died horribly and he survived ... it was brutal.
1987 was when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was first created. The summer of '87 was the first time Reagan even addressed it, and it had been a burgeoning epidemic since 1981.
Minor pet peeve: Y'all really gotta start looking up when things are invented. I am SO happy about all the new fics in The Lost Boys fandom. Great writing, great characterization. Big fan. But oof. Guys.
There was no "putting someone on speaker". It was a landline, you either held the receiver up between the two of you, or someone picked up another receiver in the house.
Waterproof eyeliner? That was invented in 2006. 30 years after The Lost Boys.
It really only drives me wild because I was born prior to The Lost Boys coming out and I have very vivid memories of the early 90s and what life was like pre-internet and pre-cellphone.
The slang is also positively hilarious. "Cringe"??? No, that's a strictly 2020s word. People were "uncool", "weird", or the f-slur.
Fun 80s words that I distinctly remember actively being used by my older cousins: rad, gnarly, bogus, clutch, ditz, warped, to veg out, scarf down. There's a bunch out there. They just sound boring to 2026 ears because they've been around so long. They were new once.
Seriously, it's not a big deal. I just find it so funny reading 1987 vampires saying "Ugh, don't be cringe." Or someone just "looking something up". No babes, that involved a library, card catalogs, the dewey decimal system, and microfiche or microfilm. And a phone number? That was the yellow pages or the white pages. Boy was it not a good time if that book wasn't tied down to the payphone or if the pages you needed were ripped out. Best to have those numbers memorized.
“There are moments where I’m looking at Michael and I'm like ‘This is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen’, and then there's another scene where I’m like ‘Oh no, look at this poor lost little puppy, I need to save him, I need to fix him’. And then there’s other moments where he reaches out to me and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I've never had a brother in my life, I need– I want to reach out and hold your hand so you can be there for me’."
Ali on how he manages to play David as a father/brother/lover/son all at once
if you posted a fic on ao3 and there was a typo* in your fic's description, would you want someone to comment** to tell you about it?
yes, i would want to know
no, i would not want to know
Voting ended onMay 23
* typo along the lines of a spelling error, the wrong your/you're or there/their/they're used, etc.
** in this scenario, a comment is the only way to get in touch with the fic author, no social media dm option
no nuance. just yes or no. feel free to leave any commentary or whatever!! i'm curious.