passed over this one but I gave it a shot.
Decent start but kinda flames out after that. The little girl wasn't bad.
I thought it was very good. I felt the opposite. Good, slow build.
shareIt's a bit confusing, but I think it's better than it is bad.
shareYou fell asleep, didn't you.. I did.. But then I rewound to the last thing I remembered, poured another drink, and it was like the trip finally peaked.
:)
I liked the end, it had an alluring sense of "YESSSS!" to it. And one, for a change, that does not elicit notions of a sequel. We can imagine it.. and that imagined sequel is for us to watch, in the minds eye.. anything else put forward would be a dire thing. and we'd all yell "They didn't do it right!!" and boo and hiss.
except the one person, who wrote the script.
I didn't like the edgelord "Little girls learns to have zero value for human life or personal agency" direction they took the story in. It started off ok, though very vague like you said. Then gradually the girl is seen manipulating/controlling people at will, with zero sense that this is wrong. Then she starts straight up killing people, or getting them killed, with zero sense that this is wrong. Is she by the end just trying to "protect herself and her family"? Sure.
But this is still 100% a villain origin story. The little girl becomes the "bad guy" by the end. Not my favorite.
This is actually a relatively complex story, with many points of view presented.
First of all, the little girl had little sense of right and wrong - just like any other little child. Even less so in fact, since she had not been subjected to a normal social environment. She had only met her father, everybody else was possibly a ghost - or someone not entirely real anyway. And worse than that, her father had been teaching her that the rest of the populace was dangerous and wanted to harm them - and he was right about that too.
Right and wrong are notions (most) people learn slowly, throughout their childhood and adolescence, they are complex things: you are an agent of your own life, but other people are equally agents of their own lives, and sometimes their choices frustrate you, and you are supposed to respect that. A child's immaturity is not characterized by being unable to cause harm - they can do that, even without superpowers. It's just that they cannot be held responsible for it because *they don't know they've caused harm*. THAT's what they are supposed to learn in their first 18 years of existence, or so.
So she's just too young and fvcked over by life to be a "nice" person.
As to her having personal agency or not, that was not an easy equation either. She had about 4 choices:
- stay hidden, and be deprived of a buttload of life
- pretend to be normal, and be deprived of her natural abilities just to fit in
- become a governmental weapon and having even less normal life than in the first 2 options
- go away with mom, which seemed the most decent, from a personal agency point of view...
Not even the conflict between humans and freaks is a black-and-white issue. Sure we are mostly on the side of the freaks, but we are also given a few glimpses from the other side: a rogue freak kid had destroyed a whole city, and what our hero does to the neighbors is clearly presented as disturbing...
Yes, it is very nuanced. At no points can you really say anyone in the picture, not even the smallest characters, is doing the wrong thing from their point of view. That is refreshing and rare.
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