Reading

So, I am crashing out completely from the Tron Ares hyperfocus. One of the casualties of this is my bi-annual deletion of Reddit, because it is beyond toxic, it had become an addiction, and it has been eating my life.

The moment I do it, is always so freeing. And then, the next few days, I realize just how tethered to groupthink I was. I felt the same way after deleting Bluesky. But unlike Bluesky, I have deleted Reddit and gone back multiple times now.

This time, I really can't afford to go back. It really did eat my entire life there for a while, and I need to let it go.

Oddly enough, I now know how to proceed with my fanfic. More than one of my fanfics, actually. And I have my recent rewatch of Time Bandits to thank for that.

Time Bandits is probably my mom's favorite movie. Like it is the one movie my mom re-purchases every time the format changes (VHS > DVD > Blu Ray > Digital)

I watched it over and over as a kid, until I was about 10 - when suddenly, everything about it became very existentially terrifying. Like to the point where I couldn't be in the same room when it was on. It was the height of the 80s Satanic Panic, and my religious scrupulosity OCD was starting to kick into overdrive right around this time. And the the religious aspects of it triggered something very deep, even if it wasn't a traditional God vs Satan narrative. But, just like something in my psyche saw The Endless in Neil Gaiman's Sandman a few years later and decided that they were real, and The Endless became a very real part of my personal cosmology for a while, something in the conflict between The Supreme Being and Evil felt like a more "real" representation of God and the Devil than the traditional one I was brought up with in church.

Basically, if you grew up in Evangelical Christianity during the 1980s Satanic Panic, as I did, you were getting the constant messaging that any media with magic or wonder was just a trap of the Devil seeking to ensnare weak minds. Fantasy was The Devil/Evil shaking his keys. So the idea that The Time Of Legends was a trap suddenly seemed all too plausible to me as I was then, suddenly drowning in Religious Scrupulosity OCD, but having previously felt like I belonged in The Time Of Legends. Someone who was born as a normal human by mistake, and wanting nothing more than to "get back there." Because my whole life, up to that point, had been trying to find a way to get back there.

My logic at the time went like this: if Evil, and his Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, were located in the Time Of Legends, and it was a place I had already spent my entire childhood hoping a time hole would open up to, then maybe I was already irredeemably corrupted. How could I not be? It was predestination that Evil was going to get me, because I was evil by nature. I belonged there, and there was probably nothing I could do about it. I could try and fight my true nature, but it was probably futile.

The Map suddenly felt like something that could get me if it wanted, something I had to hide from - because it was going to be a straight shot to the Time Of Legends and the Fortress Of Ultimate Darkness. I already believed in it, so of course I was in danger of being taken at any time. (And it just hit me, how much OCD can feel like mind control: as in "Standby for mind control," for those who don't know what it is, who haven't been diagnosed yet.) I began to have a horror of The Map showing up in my room unannounced, of glimpsing that particular shade of blue. It didn't feel like something from a fictional movie - any of it. It all felt like something very real, and dangerous.

I wasn't ok at age ten, about a lot of things. But that was one of them. And I feel like unpacking this now may resolve some things I am still subconsciously dealing with. I needed to confront this movie the same way I needed to confront Rock N Rule again back in 2010, for similar reasons.

Revisiting Time Bandits as an adult who has rejected mainstream Evangelical Christianity for Gnosticism: it's a very Gnostic movie, isn't it? The Supreme Being is the Demiurge. The Dwarves are renegade Archons. Evil is also just another Renegade Archon.

But I realized what a huge influence it was when I was trying to write Watchmen/Moorcock crossover fanfic, even half-remembered from decades before. Like I was unconsciously using the movie's time travel mechanics as a frame work, until I realized that was what I was doing. It was very much Shelly Duvall as Laurie Juspeczyk in my imagination - running around and finding time holes to escape through as she was being pursued by Adrian Veidt through space and time, because she has a MacGuffin he needed (Mournblade, in various forms) and occasionally being bailed out by Michael Palin as Oswald Bastable.

There was a lot of it that I wrote that never got posted. I think I never finished it because I realized how similar it was to Time Bandits. But that's the story as it happened in my head.

I need to work on it, and the Tron fic. Which I should be able to do even though I am crashing out from the hyperfocus - because, oddly enough, the hyperfocus (and Reddit) were in the way.

But yeah, watching a few days ago also caused a lot of "Memory Unlocked" moments. Also: I had no idea there was a recent reboot with Taika Waititi.

But the really weird thing is, my adult life has been spent "gaining an understanding" of computers. So that's something to think about as I sit here trying to rice my current Linux desktop environment. (Evil would 100% be a "I use Arch btw," kind of person.)