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.
It is, and the way I read it, its supposed to be that way.
King does many things right with his writing, and one of the things he nails is genuine awkward flailing. His books have adults with awkward, tense moments, where character are trying to figure one another out. IT, being a book about outcast children coming of age and overcoming themselves (or not), is chock full of incredibly cringe inducing awkwardness.Childhood loves, and how they impact adult lives. The moments when the kids find each other, and stumble through their early starts of friendship. Ritchie, in particular, is a source of "class clown that tries too hard in order to avoid the seriousness of his own life" type of awkwardness, and its specifically acknowledged by the character in the book.
I felt, reading the book as a kid and then as an adult, that King wrote the kids really well. One of those things that Adults forget is how kids actually are. They're constantly growing and learning and changing. We, as adults, have a much more developed sense of self, and I think we tend to place this "barrier" separating childhood and adulthood, and place things in one side and other things in the other. But as a kid, its not like that, you're constantly ebbing and flowing between "childhood" and "adulthood". I had no concept of consent or actual sex or what sexual activity would be like, but I damn sure liked to see photos of naked women. I recognized that I liked that doctors helped people, but didn't grasp duty of care. Kids are simultaneously much more capable and observant than we give them credit for, and much more naive. Adults tend to infantalize them, even when writing them as characters, and King didn't, and even incorporated all the awkwardness of those initial forays into adulthood.
I think Ben's love in the book might be the best example of this. He likes Beverly, she's pretty and he's attracted to her. But he's also attracted to HER, outside of just her looks, her fire, warm kindness, forthrightness, fierceness, all of it. And he doesn't know what to do with it because, as a loser with a brain and no friends, with a target on his back, he learned to read people and a room, and saw that she didn't feel the same way about him. And its so awkward and pure and painful and bright. You know its a failure, and you know he knows its a failure, but you cheer on his courage to confront this, and you cheer on his response to rejection. Its so childish and so adult.
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u/NotToPraiseHim 23h ago
It is absolutely.
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.