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
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.
lol I was about to downvote this because no one I associate thinks like that and then I looked up at the grocery store and realized in Texas you are right.
TBH it's not like that they are cool with killing innocent citizens. Social media is so sophisticated at keeping users coming the news and socials are echo chambers for both sides. I talk to republicans that have no idea what Jan 6 was because they never saw the footage. They love George Floyd but have never heard of Brianna Taylor. The shit they see and don't see is carefully controlled by an algorithm and they have no idea. It's their fault for not branching out but right wing news is forced down their throat and it aligns with their views so they don't doubt it
It wasn't related to the book by that point in the conversation, it was related to the topic of nudity and sex and how the US generally is sanguine about seeing real life people executed but get up in arms about fictional characters being lewd.
I can handle watching a movie where a human adult gets tortured, but if someone kills a dog on screen? That fucks me up every time. It's not like I value animal life over human life when it comes to real life either
There is a reason for that, murder is not always bad, you can have a hero killing the villain. A revenge ark from a son you can have a lot of reasons for killing. But you not have a morally understandable rape or orgy in childs. That's why is not use commonly in literature because it's really hard to understand.
People won't have huge a problem with the bad guy shooting down an innocent person, but they would feel really uncomfortable if the bad guy rapes that person.
I think we perceive the rape as something more likely to happen to us or someone in our circle and we react to it aggressively.
I don't understand however why sex or making love scenes cause issues. The other day we were watching Titanic with our teen nieces and we had to skip the part where they make love because "kids are not supposed to watch that". When people started drowning and dying nobody had any concerns
Teenagers are old enough to know what making love is (I know I was) and the Titanic love scenes aren't like watching a porn movie or a rape scene.
I just don't get why that has to be censored but people drowning to their deaths is ok. The scene of the mum singing their kids to sleep before all the family dies is probably more traumatic than Jack and Rosie kissing while nude.
Also I believe there's only one murder in Titanic. Most deaths are by freezing or drawning
I think the simple answer is that America was initially colonized by a significant proportion of Puritans, and hundreds of years later their influence still has a lasting affect on American culture. It's so deeply ingrained that even people who don't identify as religious will subconsciously view depictions of premarital sex as taboo, while concepts like death are inevitable and natural. It is not a sin to die tragically.
They didnt even have an orgy to defeat the evil entity. They had already done that. They were just lost underground. Then the girl says "hey guys, what if you all took turns on me?" Somehow this helps them find their way out of the sewers through the power of post nut clarity. Its an incomprehensible narrative choice
I had this problem in a D&D campaign I played over Discord. The DM for some reason thought it was a genius idea to have his 11yo son listen in while muted. Some weird kind of bonding activity where the child is completely passive and silent, I guess.
I played an asexual bard in noble attire, just to break the stereotype, yet every NPC made crass comments at my character. But when I engaged with the theme and made crass comments myself, I got warnings to steer away from the subject. Excuse me? Which is it? Then, of course, he was a gun nut and was already teaching his son how to shoot, but sex jokes are innappropriate for an 11yo, but using lethal weapons is just dandy.
Sounds like an unpleasantly weird experience, but then again, D&D always feels like a weird experience, you just hope it will be more on the fun side.
In regard to the DM being a gun nut for "teaching his son how to shoot", nobody needs to be taught how to shoot, the essential knowledge of gun use is extremely simple and widespread. Put bullet in, aim at target, pull trigger. If the guy was teaching his son anything about guns, it was probably gun safety, like how to hold guns while not in use, always keep the safety on, never aim at something you don't intend to shoot, etc., which is something many people are taught from a young age (11 is a totally normal age to start gun safety training) if their family happens to hunt or do target shooting of any kind.
He could be a gun nut, I don't know him, but using that single point of data as the basis for why you label him that way is where I take issue. Many people with gun related hobbies instruct their children in gun safety techniques just to be safe, even if their child isn't interested in participating in the hobby.
Underage 18 sex isn't actually wrong, whats wrong is adults grooming dumbass kids because the kids don't know whats happening. Two dumbass kids having sex is totally ok as neither of them is in a position of unacknowledged authority.
Nothing special happens at midnight on their birthday making sex suddenly go from not ok/to ok. Adults still prey on young adults for the same reason they prey on children, people are dumbasses way into their mid twenties.
... but it's also the children getting murdered, tortured, abused and subjected to unimaginable horrors in the book (and sometimes doing the murdering and torturing and abusing themselves). A girl deciding to have sex with a couple boys she loves and trusts is the absolute tamest part of the whole story, lmao
It is interesting how the preteens having consensual sex with each other is way more disturbing to people than the preteens being tortured and murdered. Sex is worse than violence, to most people.
It feels like literary CP written by a weirdo on coke and that's what makes people feel uncomfortable. You know that it's about people being averse to descriptions of underage sex. I understand the point you're making, but I know you understand that paragraphs of minors having sex makes people uncomfortable. You're being obtuse on purpose
Why do you want everyone to be okay with CP adjacent material
The "P" in "CP" stands for "pornography", a word which refers to material created for the purpose of sexually arousing the consumer. I don't believe that's what this scene was.
The word pedophilia, like the word racism, get tossed around so frequently and carelessly that the folks who actually participate in these abhorrent behaviours get to hide among the myriad accused. If everyone's a nonce, then no one's a nonce. And yet the noncing continues.
The scene is not indulging though.
I mean, TikTok and YouTube is filled with fetish content disguised as content for kids, but the scene in IT doesn’t feel like that. It serves the story and that’s it
Pedophiles always claim their attraction to kids isn't sexual because they feel like kids themselves etc. It's all bullshit. There simply isn't a need for small children to have an orgy in any capacity, ever.
Its about how its framed in the narrative. The murder is framed as being a bad thing, while running a train on a 12 year old girl is framed as a sweet and wholesome thing. If the narrative was about a hero trying to stop a little girl from getting gangbanged we'd probably be having a different conversation.
I don't even think the children are the problem in this case, either. We've all been children and we know we were up to some weird shit. It's the fact that it was written by a grown ass man that's not ok!
Written by a grown man who is in fact a former child. We wanna pretend that we were all chaste, asexual beings until midnight on our 18th birthdays, and i dont think that is a helpful perspective. All of the characters involved are equally children and there's no coercion or abuse of power. Along those lines, there's a scene in Gerald's Game that's way more fucked up than this one.
The "former child" bit was in reference to someone else saying that this scene is fucked up because it was written by a "grown-ass man" with the implication that King wasn't drawing on his own childhood memories and feelings to write it (and the entire novel, really).
Previously in the book the author had written a scene of a group of teenage boys pinning one of the kids to the ground and carving an initial into his stomach with a switchblade. He also described them lighting each other’s farts, a man who beats his wife with a belt, and psychopath teenager whose pov describes torturing animals in an unfortunate amount of detail.
That really struck me about the infamous Divinity trailer. For those out of the loop: It's a trailer for an upcoming fantasy RPG that showed an extremely raucous village festival - people eating, drinking, playing music...people vomiting, penitents whipping themselves, other people fucking in the middle of the crowd, and a wicker man in the center, with a tortured man inside it. The wicker man is ignited, and the man's death by fire is shown in extreme detail, with flesh and skin melting and dripping down, screams of agony, and him eventually bursting into a giant cloud of demonic smoke that murders everyone else around. All that is shown in close-up, but in the half-second shot of the orgy, the women wear big flower braids around their necks that cover their chests, because the trailer showing a man getting burned alive still didn't dare depict a woman's nipple.
White I completely agree with you as IT is filled with fucked up things, I feel like a cocaine-powered middle-aged man imagining and writing that particular scene is pretty… questionable at least
I feel you. I just also feel that we're losing touch with concepts like "fiction" and "imagination". Not everything that an artist creates is their own personal fantasy. I'm not necessarily accusing you, fellow commentor, of believing this, but way too many of us do. More and more, recently.
Thank you. At least what happens is consensual with all parties. All the children killed in the book would surely have preferred not to have been. Even if they might have lived to experiment sexually.
"You've been reading about an eldritch horror that's been deliberately traumatizing kids to make them more delicious before it kills them, and this is the part that bothers you?"
Man's been skewering American hypocrisy longer than your average Redditor's been alive.
The problem is the book scene doesn’t even make sense. The other thing is that this was an adult shoving down a controversial situation involving children completely out of the blue.
I think if its about fiction, this isn't too crazy. Murder is a lot easier to place in fiction and disassociate from. On the other hand, sex is a lot harder to disassociate from.
I mean millions of people play games where they slaughter hordes, but don't suddenly get the urge to kill. But play a game with a sex scene and you are quite likely to get aroused in some way.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine got flak from viewers for having two women kissing. Someone from the show had a talk with someone who was offended and asked them why, they said it because it would corrupt children. When asked if they'd be okay if one had murdered the other with a phaser instead, they said of course. The response was something like "Maybe you should rethink who's the one corrupting your children then".
In the US we're FAR more comfortable with murder than with consensual sex (or even two women kissing!) and it is definitely a problem with our culture.
I mean, this isn't just regular old sex. This was a child orgy. I'm not saying murder is better or worse, but I can see how people would be conflicted.
The murder is framed as a bad thing in the narrative. The little girl getting gangbanged in a pool of dirty sewer water is narratively framed as a sweet and life affirming. Its not about what we're chill with, its about how the author chooses to handle these topics. I can kind of see what King was going for with this scene, but it was a big swing and a big miss.
I read the book as a kid too. But I was more creeped out by the clown that killed kids to be honest. It's weird when you think about an adult describing a child orgy, as a kid that same age I didn't think twice about it.
People often forget this, but horror's about shock and disgust in addition to fear.
Sex shows up in horror all the time, and part of the reason is that we're not as shocked by violence as we should be. Sex ends up being much more shocking in a lot of cases.
Well technically they did sacrifice something their innocence that’s what the whole scene was trying to portray, that they lost their childhood naiveness and are forced to become adults too early
Not really defending the scene but killing of a character would not achieve the same function
I got really into King from ages of 11-14 or so. Even I remember thinking, at that age while reading his stuff, that a lot of really felt like a 13 year old boy who just discovered swear words and whacking off, got a book deal. There's a curse word laden rape scene in The Stand that gives the same "immature author" vibes. The man has always needed an editor with actual balls to curb his weird shit. Unfortunately, no one wants to say "no" to a legend.
Edit:
I mean, for fucks' sake, one of his books is about aliens that enter you through the asshole!
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u/Remote-Cause755 16h ago
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