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[afeldspar]

The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading-well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time-or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book

Comments

[bensanaz]

I was with this until the "pretend your ex is dead and replaced with a soulless zombie" part, which is kind of creepy. Not creepy in the way that zombies are always creepy, creepy in a "this person is not real if she does not love me" way that gives an uncomfortable feeling that we're going into horror-story country. Again, not zombie horror-story country, but "only my collection of skulls really loves me" horror story country.

Totally down with the book part though. I swear Wheel of Time did not have flying laser dickslap fights when I read it in high school.

[afeldspar]

"Soulless zombie" is not the metaphor I would have chosen, myself, but then again, there are not many metaphors for "this was once a person whom I loved, and who loved me, and now even though there's someone walking around with the same name and the same face, it is not the person that I once loved" that can't be read as "the someone walking around with the same name and the same face is not a person." Pod person? Not a person. Changeling? Not a person.

I suppose we could go for the "surgically altered duplicate" so popular in the mid-60's Eurospy flicks, but then again that just changes the implications being made about the person using the metaphor. "Oh, so he's a conspiracy theorist; he attributes the change in the person he cares about to the actions of some fictional organization constructed around cartoonish evil." Maybe it's better just to remember that, by their very nature, metaphors always part ways with the real state of affairs, and it's not wise to pack too much into them or read too much into them.

[bensanaz]

The thing is that the person both is and is not the person you knew, and all these metaphors sort of do their best to ignore that, while people change, it also does not transform them entirely. The book part has the same thing, admittedly (moreso, since books do not in fact change) but it's uncomfortable when applied to a human - like, it carries the subtext "the only reason for the breakup is because the other party transformed into a terrible person" if that makes sense.

I'm not casting aspersions on you, since, well, it's someone else's quote. That part of the quote just makes me uncomfortable even though I'm very familiar with the book part of it.

[ba1126]

Very interesting analogy!