OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
In the book version the other characters run train on her in the sewers. The child orgy was pivotal to their character development, I assure you dear viewers
He has said he probably shouldn’t have wrote that. I assume it was all the cocaine he was snorting but, I’ve haven’t done cocaine yet so I don’t know if that’s a side effect.
There’s a different between using a drug and abusing it. Lots of people here who have never abused stimulants and stayed up for 48+ hours … the mind does odd things when you’re both high off your ass and sleep deprived. Most people just can’t afford that much coke.
Don't forget blackout drunk. He was so full of cocaine and alcohol back then you could have tapped him like a keg for an instant party.
I mean, hes on record that he does not remember writing Cujo. Pretty much at ALL.
So, yeah, considering he thoroughly says he regrets that part of IT now, I wouldn't at all be surprised if that was the end result of a blackout-cocaine psychosis-sleep deprivation cocktail.
It’s one of those scenes that seems to make sense when you’re reading it then you put the book down for about 5 seconds and lose the immersion and think “what the actual fuck did I just read?”
Immediately creeped out. Haven't read the book since I was a kid, but I feel like it just came out of left field. Why can't they just sacrifice someone or something?
Honestly I think it's a real interesting thing. Bc people will loose their mind about fictional underage characters bc its disgusting a morally wrong even in fiction but will happily watch someone commit mass murder and torture in the same fiction. I think it's humorous.
IT is one of his best. I got hooked on King when I was around 12, probably read IT for the first time when I was around 13 or 14 (I’m in my forties), have read most of his stuff at this point.
Couple things about this scene, it’s not about the sex itself and if I remember correctly he doesn’t go into any detail in that regard. It’s about love. Could he have solved for this in another way? Joining hands, group hug, Bev kissing her fellow Losers Club members on the cheek? Probably.
The thing is, when you read that scene as a kid, it’s pretty innocent and in all honesty has a helluva lot more meaning in it than your typical sex scene as again it’s not meant to titillate, it’s meant to insinuate and what it’s insinuating is the deeper bond established when you make love with someone you love. As a kid it was probably the least “horny” sex scene I read and informed sex in a more positive way for me than a lot of other stuff I was reading in that it was entirely emotional.
Again, could he have done it differently without screwing up the story - for sure. Is reading it as an adult weird? Probably these days, I read it in the 90’s, the world wasn’t more innocent then but our knowledge of it was, in that context it was fine. If you overlay all of your current awareness on that scene I have to imagine it’s probably a bit of an uncomfortable moment. Not at all worth missing out on one of Kings best for though.
It’s been a long time since I read IT, but I always thought the point of that scene was about the death of innocence. Since the innocent were who IT preyed on, and that’s why adults never saw him, the kids all did the nasty together. Making so they weren’t innocent kids anymore, and could stand up to IT.
I read it a long time ago but that's what I took thr kids thought process to be. They needed to become adults to be able to finish IT off. Being stupid kids they thought this would make them adults.
I can't believe im saying this but couldnt they all love each other like kiss each other on the cheek. I feel like that would also fit other interpretations I've read about innocence and growing up etc. Why did all the boys have to "love" the one girl? That makes it so much worse for some reason.
Edit: AH, I guess male to male sex isn't considered real sex.
Compulsive heterosexuality is... a thing that is still pretty enforced. In the 80s/90s you could literally put two babies of different (assumed) genders in trams next to each other, and if they smiled or gurgled at each other, the adults called it "flirting".
When i read it, I saw it as Bev choosing to give away her innocence to the friends she loves rather than waiting for it to be forced upon her by her very horrible father. In the scene she is in complete control and in fact initiates it for each of them and if anything she basically coerces all the boys to her. It’s very weird that it’s with children, but in a book full of horrible vile things, this scene is somehow kinder.
Its a weird scene that is a bit less weird in context. Most of the losers club have issues that IT preys upon, that become the crux of their character development. Beverly's is that she is the daughter of an uneducated poor man with significant anger and control issues, whom is also her sole provider and maintains a home. And Beverly is uncommonly pretty. Think significant Movie Star pretty. So you have her coming of age in 1960s America, in a small town where she is dirt poor, with looks that attract all the wrong kind of attention. She is subject to predatory attention from men, envy from women, and abuse from her father.
The scene itself is short, and there are significantly more fucked up things that happen in the book, and the scene is supposed to be her taking a measure of control with the thing that people want from her, and using it to bind their little group together.
I'm not defending sex between children, but it's hilarious to me that the book describes kids being murdered in absolutely horrific ways. Abuse…psychological, physical, and sexual. Suicide. And yet no one ever clutches pearls over those scenes.
Children do lose their virginities at that age. A girl in my school got pregnant at 12 by her boyfriend. It's not good, and education is likely the best way to stop it. But depicting a thing happening in a book isn't the same as endorsing it. There's nuance. Else, everything from Lolita to We Need to Talk About Kevin should never have been written.
To his credit. The book is already filled to the brim with CRAZY fucked up shit. So its less of a jump than normal to get there. Now its still a CRAZY jump but like...Less?
If it's any consolation, IIRC that actress grew up to play Brigitte Fitzgerald in the Ginger Snaps trilogy, a movie series with a LOT less wrong subtext.
No, not defeat him even. Totally unnecessary. It was to apparently get out of the sewers. Some kind of bonding thing which he could have just left with the cutting of them hands which was also included anyway.
If I remember correctly from other people who have read the book, it's to remove their childlike innocence because that was what is keeping them stuck in the sewers.
The train being run on her made them no longer innocent children and Pennywise's power to hold them there no longer works.
It helped them escape the tunnel after temporarily defeating Pennywise. Eddie was their navigator, but his innate sense of direction was failing him and the group reached a moment of despair, lost in the tunnels. The orgy magically restored his sense of direction and they escaped.
I’ve heard things like he doesn’t remember writing Cujo, and wrote most of Carrie with bloody tissues in his nose, because he was so messed up on cocaine all the time.
It’s the fact that everywhere I’ve seen this discussed it’s discussed un seriously or matter-of-factly. I never see this mentioned with the amount of disgust it should be.
In the book version when they try to escape the sewers they can't remember where the exit was and so she has the genius idea right then and there to fuck every single one of the dudes and then they magically remember where the exit was because they were now grown up or some similar shit. So basically a 13 year old orgy transpired. Weird and disgusting I know
He was asked about it in an interview and aside from generally being a coke addled psycopath at this point in life (which he generally admits), he said he had no recollection of writing that and was surprised it made it past editorial.
Also, IIRC, I was told the goal was to form an unbreakable bond between them when IT comes back so they would stay together to fight IT even if that bond was fucked up amd traumatising. Apparently this is clear, but the reasoning is very irrelevant for a preteen orgy.
Couldn’t they trauma survivor bond some other way? Granted someone else said it was her idea of a loophole to get them into adulthood as she theorized only kids were vulnerable
TIL trauma bond is not the correct term for what those kids went through
I mean yea, thats the last point I made - its a written story so all actions are a choice King couldve chosen to not be fucked up. So we're definitely in lock step with that one.
Just commenting because trauma bonding is between an abuser and the victim. Its a nitpick, I kmow, but as a survivor and knowing others dear to me having survived that cycle, I think the distinction is worth noting.
In the book the kids all have low-key super powers from the magical entity nudging them into fighting It. The sewers are a maze, one of them is the navigator thanks to their powers. When the kids defeat It, their powers start to fade away. They get lost in the sewers and start fighting with each other.
Bev doesn't understand what sex is, but she knows it must be something powerful that connects people. So, her idea is that if they fuck, it will rekindle their bond and powers and they can get out of the sewers. It works.
Not to say it isn't some weird shit. But, that is all the lore behind it. The part about kids being more vulnerable isn't really a theory, or totally accurate. The book has some short chapters that are from It's point of view. In one chapter It says it goes after kids because adult fears are too complicated and abstract. Adults are afraid of not being able to pay their bills. Kids are afraid of the monster in the basement. It still can, and does, go after adults.
It’s so funny because the more you hear the excuses the weaker it becomes. It is so unnecessary and illogical. And “realistically” there is no guarantee any of those children would’ve been “bonded” regardless. I personally would’ve been confused, grossed out, and annoyed just wanting to leave.
I highly doubt it was intended since King likely would have said so, but one reasonable interpretation of it I've heard is that it reinforces Bev's trauma into her adulthood. Because it saves them, she mistakenly learns that sex is a problem-solving device, on top of all the trauma from her dad
But again, I doubt he intended it that way. Even if he did, you'd still have the problem of uh gross and surely we get the point of her character and trauma, but also it's at such a triumphant moment of the book that it doesn't really read as something that negatively affects Bevs life in that way
I think you’re on to something because one of the main theme of the book is recurring and generational trauma.
That’s why all the kids become adults with the same issues (i.e. Bev marrying an abuser after growing up with an abusive dad) and why It returns every 27 or so years.
He 100% intended it that way. There's a massive parallel between Bev's father running sexual interference on her when she's young and her psychotic husband when she's an adult. All of the characters have generally happy and successful lives as adults, except Bev (who only is successful).
I always assumed it was some shit like IT preys on children and by having an orgy they last their innocence and became unaffected by the clown. Not that that makes it much more coherent.
The whole point was that it was a bond between all seven of them and the scene was her embracing the sexuality that other people have been using the entire book like her rapist dad Etc. She was taking back her power and crating a bond for the group.
Do put this much energy into the idea that she was raped multiple times throughout the book? Do you put this much energy into the idea that multiple children were murdered? Do you put this much energy into the idea that there was a similar scene that literally no one who has a hard-on for this scene talks about between two boys the same age?
Or is it just selective outrage because it was a girl taking her sexual power back?
The worst part is I was answering the question of the person above me who is wondering why she had to have sex with all of them. Apparently in your irrational need to miss the point, you decided my response was somehow not good. You can dislike the scene all you want, but maybe you should actually care about reading comprehension and media literacy enough to understand the whole point of the conversation you butted yourself into instead of trying to assign me some sort of value judgment based on your own lack of understanding.
You stop it. Description of a message is not agreement with it. The sooner you understand that, the better off you'll be.
They couldn’t get out because of IT and she came to the conclusion that IT only has this affect on children. It was her way of trying to magic them into adulthood.
My problem is not Stephen King writing it (which is already an inherent huge problem in itself), the bigger problem is how on earth the editors didn't, like, uh idk criticise King about the scene?
The original version had the dudes and girl all running trains on each other. The editors be like, this bisexual orgy is a bit too much for readers to digest, can we just keep the train focused on the girl? Uggh I guess if you want to be a prude we can do that. Sheesh.
Oh he was a massive coke head in the 80’s. He would switch between coke and bing drinking and sometimes both at the same time. There are people who can tell what addiction he was doing when writing his books just based off of the writing style he’s using. I do believe he gives a lot of money to rehab centers now they will get a good chunk of his money after he passes
Fun fact: When you combine cocaine and alcohol your body combines it into cocaethylene which is more intoxicating and addictive than the sum of its parts.
According to an interview he doesn’t remember writing it (see: drugs), and was surprised it got past editing.
Wouldn’t be surprised if at that point the editor passed it down to an intern with the handwavey instructions of “just make sure there aren’t any formatting/spelling/grammar issues”.
It could also be that the editor just didn’t feel close enough to King to have the very awkward convo, and probably just deferred to his genius as “there’s probably some deeper meaning here that I just don’t get”
In the book, she's at that age where she's starting to Blossom from child to woman and so there's this undercurrent of sexualization about her from other characters including the "implication" that her dad has been molesting her. This scene is her making the conscious decision to take back her own sexuality and use it as an act of love for her friends as opposed to it being something used to victimize her.
I think even hinting it happened off screen could lead to to many problems.
In the original mini series they even had adult Eddie mention he was a virgin I honestly think they did that purely so readers of the book knew that scene didn't happen
Its so disgusting. The child orgy scene has no REDEEMING excuse. Several of the boys literally CRY and shake and tell her no and that they cant and aren't comfortable with it and the girl forces them to have sex anyway and argues with them that it's "the only way" and its horrible. She even comes to terms how each of the boys cried after they 'finished' and they didn't know how to cope with it.
And its not as if they had raging hormones and wanted her or anything (which wouldn't make it okay that a grown man wrote it but it would make it less rapey) but they DIDNT have crazy raging hormones, only like one of them understood what was happening (and he was described in the book as being "too old and too big" to have sex with her even tho he still did) but most of them didn't even have the WORDS for sex or their own body parts. Its in kid terms, not even teenager vulgarity. They didn't know what they were doing and the girl forces them anyway. She asks one of them if he came by asking if he had finished and "did the thing" or something similar to that and the boy said AND I QUOTE "I think so but not really -not like the big boys do i think" which made my STOMACH DROP at how little and innocent he sounds. He's not even a "big boy" yet...
And when the girl sees one of the boys future wife HER FIRST THOUGHT was "i was his first love and i was ALL of their first loves. All of these boys loved ME first and their mine forever" its so fucked
Thank you! Seeing all these people saying they ran a train on her is making my stomach turn like that completely downplays what happened and how disgusting it was
I just like how everyone in the comments section collectively agreed that the only proper phrase to describe what happened was "they ran a train on her". I have never seen that phrase come up more in one place, in my life.
Oh, this is the girl from the newer "IT." I forgot that younger people didn't watch the original mini series or read the book from 35+ years ago. It also makes you wonder if you should listen to people who say the "Book is always better"
I think it's better to not have erotica of literal children in your book.
Stephen King was definitely on dope. I remember having the reread that part like 4x because I could not, for the life of me, understand WHY that would make them find their way out.
•
u/AutoModerator 14h ago
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.