The Cow-Headed Boy
Oct. 25th, 2022 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingContent warning for a brief discussion of cannibalism in horror fiction, and also not-so-horror fiction. It's nothing explicit, but I'm probably not the best judge of what's upsetting to read.
I got immediate feedback on my submission of my story "The Cow-Headed Boy," which is that it needs to be 2k words or less. The suggested wordcount wasn't posted anywhere I could find, so I initially made a guess of "around 2k words" but ended up going a bit over. With the (entirely reasonable!) maxim that shorter is better, I edited the story again to cut out about 400 words. In order to do so, however, I had to get rid of the taboo of "abject bodily mutilation" and substitute it with implied cannibalism.
For me personally, this makes the story less creepy, as I find cannibalism hard to take seriously. The idea that an isolated community isn't a good place for a scapegoat has real-life resonance, but the possibility that an abused child would be literally eaten is just silly. Still, I've been playing a lot of Elden Ring recently, so I guess cannibalism has become somewhat normalized in my mind.
I also have Blue Car Syndrome in that I've started to see references to cannibalism everywhere. To give an example, I just finished The Return of the King, and I forgot that there's cannibalism right at the end of the "Scourging of the Shire" chapter. The references to cannibalism associated with Smeagol/Gollum in The Hobbit make sense, but the suggestion that people have been hanging out in Frodo's house and eating hobbits that comes ten pages before the end of the book is wild.
Idk, I guess cannibalism is useful and convenient in that it's a high-impact trope that doesn't require a lot of wordcount.
I got immediate feedback on my submission of my story "The Cow-Headed Boy," which is that it needs to be 2k words or less. The suggested wordcount wasn't posted anywhere I could find, so I initially made a guess of "around 2k words" but ended up going a bit over. With the (entirely reasonable!) maxim that shorter is better, I edited the story again to cut out about 400 words. In order to do so, however, I had to get rid of the taboo of "abject bodily mutilation" and substitute it with implied cannibalism.
For me personally, this makes the story less creepy, as I find cannibalism hard to take seriously. The idea that an isolated community isn't a good place for a scapegoat has real-life resonance, but the possibility that an abused child would be literally eaten is just silly. Still, I've been playing a lot of Elden Ring recently, so I guess cannibalism has become somewhat normalized in my mind.
I also have Blue Car Syndrome in that I've started to see references to cannibalism everywhere. To give an example, I just finished The Return of the King, and I forgot that there's cannibalism right at the end of the "Scourging of the Shire" chapter. The references to cannibalism associated with Smeagol/Gollum in The Hobbit make sense, but the suggestion that people have been hanging out in Frodo's house and eating hobbits that comes ten pages before the end of the book is wild.
Idk, I guess cannibalism is useful and convenient in that it's a high-impact trope that doesn't require a lot of wordcount.
