A lifeline in your brainstem, another step offstage. Your director's instructions re-interpreted through a thousand channels until all that's left is warped and hollow. What do you do when you fall in love with a mask? What do you do when you lose who you might never have been?
I don’t understand petscop story much but i like that so maky prople who do see it as a trans allegory .. i wanna hear ur thoughts ( i saw your petscop art)
THIS ENDED UP A LOT LONGER THAN I MEANT IT TO SO I’M PUTTING IT UNDER A READ MORE BUT It means a lot that you’d want to ask about the story from me :sob: thank you!
to be honest, i find it hard to talk about petscop cohesively or PROMPTLY as an entire story - because i have so many Literal scattered thoughts about it (so excuse if this makes no sense) and it’s of course incredibly complex. i might get back to it a bit more later if you want elaboration on the actual events of the story itself, i recommend checking out the subreddit at the very least. (i do want to say upfront that i’m writing this with the assumption that you understand the basics of paul and care being the same person, though)
one thing i do feel strongly about is that i personally see petscop as less of a story with a central trans allegory (it’s definitely still there and is very important), i think that the story rather centers around the themes of childhood trauma and it’s effects on the self and sense of identity, dealing with those events and the effects of them. there’s a lot of themes of rebirth in all sorts of ways, but i find a main theme to be the way that you can perceive the aftereffects of traumatic events that happen to you as a sort of “death of the [old] self” or as a sort of “death”, in general, that’s impossible to return from... (rainer seems to hold this perspective very strongly, especially near the end, but i’m not going to start going on a tangent about rainer),
... or you can view it as a sort of “new beginning”, a fresh start and an escape from these awful events that caused it all, focusing on the present - “your new life letter”. the ending of the series in particular has paul going against marvin directly with his own unique ‘melody’, and escaping to investigate his own mysteries with belle together, so i find this one particularly applicable there :]
the protagonist/narrator just also happens to be trans, whether that be as a result of these things that happened to him or not lol. i personally think paul’s identity as a trans person goes hand in hand with his sense of recovery, and only he is the one who has a say in what that identity means to him, or is as a result of, etc... and that’s what makes it very special to me, the mysteries that we don’t get answers to, because they’re not ours to have a say in. just like no one has a say in our own identities either, or a right to know more than they need to!
i think that the story has a lot to say about the way these two things link with eachother in general, but that’s just coming from someone who has similar experiences. the effects of being trans while also dealing with trauma is a very specific kind of thing in how they affect eachother, i find a lot of petscops themings to be applicable to that.
I JUST HAVE A LOT TO SAY IN GENERAL BUT IT’S LIKE THIS POST BY MY BEST FRIEND CHARA:
thank you for reading my novel length ask response about JUST LIKE A HANDFUL of central theme of petscop. if you want to go back and try to understand the story i hope it helps a little to keep these things in mind
