#squash rambles

[meta-squash]

i got out of the theater 5 hours ago and i'm still sitting here thinking about i saw the tv glow like the entire concept of a horror movie that's not truly a horror movie until the very last scene. the concept of a horror movie where the horror is not a literal monster or a monster as metaphor for the self the horror is literally just the self and the damage done to oneself when you refuse a fundamental part of your identity. and how part of the horror isn't just the damage done to yourself but also to the people who can relate to you and who love and want to help you. but also that little glimmer of hope in "there is still time" because even just looking into the heart of yourself in the mirror is a step forward, even if you take two steps back immediately after. like the horror in hope and the hope in horror and how the whole reason horror is even a thing is because of the existence of hope (and its failure) god this movie is SO good i need to watch it again immediately.

[jesuisgourde]

i hate the word 'spicy' as a slang/censor word so much, both when people use it to talk about books and mental health.

a 'spicy' novel - oh so you can't say the word "erotic"? can't say "sexy"?

oh im 'neurospicy' - you can't say neurodivergent? autistic?

like are we six years old? are we forever children? why can't we say what things are? the censorship culture and all that tiktok speak doesn't need extra help in neutering language.

[unhingedsquash]

I’m so ill thinking about the fact that Apollo was essentially abandoned by his adoptive father at 9 years old, and clearly never found another constant family by the fact that no one is ever mentioned. So until he was an adult, he was bouncing around the foster system.

And then he finds Gavin Law Offices and, based on the little interaction we see, we know he had a very deep respect for Kristoph, and that he was obviously treated very well.

I think about the fact that Apollo probably found him to be the closest thing to a father figure, or any kind of trustworthy mentor, for the first time since he was literally nine years old.

I think about how he probably held him in such high regards, he probably went to his work every day looking forward to doing literally anything to make his boss proud.

I think about how fucking crushed he definitely was when he found out how horrible and corrupt Kristoph actually was.

Imagine how he is trying to grapple with the fact that someone so evil treated him so tenderly and fondly.

Imagine, even further, he later becomes very close with Klavier and immediately feels guilty whenever Kristoph is mentioned. Not because he is responsible for his imprisonment or anything, but because he knows Kristoph potentially cared for him more than his own flesh and blood, and Apollo only knew him maybe a few years in comparison to the 24 that Klavier had been alive.

Imagine how awful that feels to be loved by a monster.

[meta-squash]

the thing i find funniest about the fandom latching on to the splott joke in torchwood is that some fics act as though it's an area that's like an appreciable distance away from the hub and not a cardiff neighborhood that is like a 10 minute drive away from the plass

[meta-squash]

Once I finish this giant "reading old Torchwood fics that were not moved to AO3 to make a list of the best ones" project I'm also going to make a post about the general tropes and trends I've found while doing this. Nothing super scientific, just kind of a run down of things I've been finding interesting.

I will say that doing this has been really helpful in giving me ideas for fics that I want to see, because there's so much that people don't explore when they only focus on Jack/Ianto, or when they only focus on certain aspects of that relationship. I've already added a number of ideas to my "to-be-written" list to work on once I'm done reading all these.

[meta-squash]

the most frustrating stage of fic writing is when you have an idea but the idea is 95% vibes rather than actual plot

[meta-squash]

The funniest thing about listening to the various Torchwood audio books and audio dramas when I go for a run is that I've discovered that about half the stories published, which are often written by people who have written Torchwood or DW episodes, have the most plot hole-ridden endings. I mean, I spent like 6 months of 2025 reading through an absurd number of old Torchwood fanfics to make that huge rec list and truly most long form or even medium-length fics have better endings and less plotholes than the official Torchwood extended universe media. Which I suppose makes sense, since fans actually care about that shit and official writers maybe don't as much since they're not Actual Fans. But I do find it amusing.

[jesuisgourde]

Like okay just for fun, a list of Squash's pretentious-ass favorite novels that they can never recommend to customers because the book is too weird/too difficult/too niche/etc:

-The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Genuinely one of my favorite novels. It's also the densest novel I've ever read. It's 957 pages and it took me 2 months to read despite reading every single day and it's the most I've ever annotated anything ever. I loved every second of it. It's about art forgery and religion and every person being something or someone their not and the failure of art and it's so good. I wish I could recommend it to others but it's one of those books that's for the real heads and no one will ever read be reading it off recommendations. You gotta be a real dedicated freak to get into it.

-Narrow Rooms by James Purdy. Okay this one I've recommended before but you gotta be ready for an odd writing style and the craziest ending ever. It's about a love square(?) between 4 young men in 1960s Appalachia and obsession and literal love/hate relationships and horses and really crazy Jesus symbolism and I loooove it.

-Body by Harry Crews. A fucked up novel about a woman who's a pro body builder from like Tennessee or something. She and her trainer are at the final big competition and she's one of two people who are guaranteed to win. Her extremely strange hick family (the novel calls them that) come to see her even though she told them not to. Every other page just ratchets the insanity higher and it has the most twisted ending. But I can't ever recommend it because Crews' writing is pretty intense and not pc at all.

-Funeral Rites by Jean Genet. It's my favorite Genet novel but it's also the one that is the most obviously a culmination of all his preoccupations and philosophical theories. So if you haven't read his other stuff it all just sounds really weird and fucked up because it's all about betrayal as an ultimately romantic and loving act. Which is weird unless you've read all his other stuff.

-The Rainbow Stories by William T Vollmann. Another one that's two weird and long to recommend to normies. A series of short stories where each title is themed after a ROYGBIV color of the rainbow + black and white. But they're so odd and dense and the book is so long. I love Vollmann but again it's a book for the real heads like most of Vollmann's stuff.

-Movern Callar by Alan Warner. I just want more people to read this book because its main character is so weird and I loved it so much. The main character is so distanced from everything and yet so self-aware and her language is so strange. I loved this book but when I describe it no one ever seems interested.

-One, No One, One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello. It's basically existential philosophy hidden in a novel but it's so fun and interesting (to me). I would never recommend it to customers because they'd probably find it boring or confusing but I really liked it.

-The Theatre And Its Double by Antonin Artaud. It's nonfiction about Artaud's theories of the Theatre of Cruelty and I think it's fascinating but I would never tell anyone who's not a theatre weirdo to read it.

-Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams. Another one for the Williams real heads. It's my favorite play of his, no one ever puts it on but I think it's absolutely gorgeous. We never have it at my job and anyway everyone's only ever looking for Streetcar.

-Almost Transparent Blue by Ryu Murakami. Fucked up book about a group of people on a drug binge doing fucked up things narrated by an alienated and upset young man. The writing is gorgeous but I wouldn't recommend it to a random customer.

-Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Hilarious Russian novel but it's impossible to explain why it's so funny because all of the humor is purely circumstantial and the actual premise just sounds stupid unless you're reading it.

-Rent Boy by Gary Indiana. Weird book about a gay hustler and his friends/lovers and the things that happen to him. Not quite as fucked up as Dennis Cooper but still has a real weird ending.

-Closer by Dennis Cooper. Really insane fucked up book about a passive young man who just gets manipulated and used by the people in his life in terrible ways but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that the main character is based on a real person that the author loved and took care of for multiple years??? It's just such a weird thing to do?? And I really need to read the entire interconnected book cycle because I need to understand what he's doing with that.

-Summer Fun by Jeanne Thompson. Another one with a premise that sounds too strange when I recommend it so I don't. The main character is a trans woman who is convinced that the leader singer of [a fictional version of] the Beach Boys is a closeted trans woman. Half the novel is her life working at a spa in New Mexico, the rest is her imagined (but maybe not?) biography of this singer as a trans woman.

-Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson. Inspired by the question What if someone literally lived the way that Wittgenstein's Tractatus proposes? The narrator is (or thinks she is) the very last person left in the entire world. But she's utterly unreliable and always contradicting everything she says and you never know if that's the truth or not. A crazy book to read, almost circular in the way it undoes everything it says, and I had a blast with it.