For Surely Someday...

New character: Droki
they go by all pronouns, they dont really have a set gender. they eat rocks. and so in this world, dragons exist, but theyre rare and dying out. the milatary has been wanting to use them as weapons, but they’re too wild and can’t be controlled by humans. and so these scientists tried to fuse a human embryo and dragon dna. They sucueeded. and if you’ve seen like, in science fiction movies when the have creatures in large glass tanks filled with liquid and hooked up (kinda like in the mewtwo movie) yeah it’s like that. so. after about two years they take the creature out of the tank (They’re about 2 ½ feet tall, they smol) and they start doing experiments on them. like. testing how resilient she is by firing light cannons at her. I forgot to mention that the lab is also doing research on crystals, so there’s gems everywhere. and the creature gets pissed. so, like, it takes 3 days of them testing on them for him to freak out and kill everyone in the building, but they accidentally set off some of the radioactive chemicals and make an explosion. They survive because they’re part dragon, but many of the crystals in the lab painfully jammed into their skin (Ouch its like. glass. blood. ew.) and kinda fused with their skin. So now they have rock powers. I can describe their powers if you want, but the character now lives in this abondoned, radioactive labortory for years on end. They have a long lifespan cuz part dragon, nd they try to be evil but no one takes them seriously.
So when they beat their wings hard enough, they can make crystals shoot up from the ground and attack enemies from below. They can lash their tail to create an enormous gem sheild. They can produce a diamond and shoot laser beams from it, and the spessartines on their legs can help increase their strength

nonomella

Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me

cthullhu

Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age

whatthecurtains

“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”

-Neil Gaiman on Coraline

greenbryn

@nightlovechild

lierdumoa

This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”

redgrieve

Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much

12drakon

An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.

gokuma

Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger - while children see themselves facing danger and winning

rosymamacita

i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.

jewishdragon

Also, in an interview, he said that Coraline was partially based on a story his not yet 6 year old daughter would tell him

SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?

GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.