Sandemo versus Meyer
Recently I joined a website for book lovers to show which books they've read, rate said books, make their opinions public, and show which books they intend to read. You can even make your own book shelves, tagged with whatever you like (I put "House of Night" into "Guilty pleasure" and the Discworld books into "Brilliant humour"). Anyway, this isn't the main point.
I decided to read the reviews to the Twilight series, because I hoped that a website devoted to books would have some relatively clear-minded people who don't approve of anti-feminism. Of course I was wrong, and saw a couple of "OMG, this is the best book I've EVER READ!" reviews, but I also saw a few decent ones. That's where I come across this:
"I don't really like the Twilight series, they're horribly written. Then again I shouldn't really speak loudly, since I was a huge fan of The Legend of the Ice People when I was younger..."
That comment made me think. That is why I intend to make a (hopefully) short entry about the similarities and huge differences between Twilight and The Legend of the Ice People.
Table of contents
1. Introduction.
2. The characters
3. Love.
4. The writing.
5. The supernatural.
6. Self-inserting
Introduction
The "Twilight Saga" is written by Stephenie Meyer. The series is about this teenage girl, Bella, moving from Phoenix to a place called Forks, where the sun seemingly never shines. There she meets and reveals the vampire Edward Cullen, through whom she meets other vampires and some wanna-be-werewolves. How will she cope with this? Will she grow old with Edward whilst he remains the same physically? Will she end up with the shape-shifter Jacob in stead? Will she convince Edward to make her into a vampire? Let us see, for hopefully I will put a lot of spoilers in here.
"The Legend of the Ice People" (in Norwegian "Sagaen om Isfolket", so we've got one and a half saga here) is written by a Swedish-Norwegian woman called Margit Sandemo. The series was written in the eighties. The series' plot cannot be put into one line, but here we go: A long time ago, an evil-minded Japanese guy and his Mongolian(?) wife had the son that they had predicted would be the most evil living human in existance. This boy, called Tan-ghil, or Tengel the evil, killed his parents and headed off to Norway, where he made a deal with the devil to earn immortality. What he had to give in return was his offspring. From each generation born, there would be a cursed individual, who would either turn out looking like a monster, looking like the personification of beauty, or simply normal; their only similarity is the colour of their eyes, which is either radiant yellow or some kind of green/yellow-ish lime colour. Most of these turn out evil, devilish and sadistic. It's in their nature, but many of them decide to turn against their evil and try to take down the evil Tan-ghil.
This is the main plot throughout all the 47 books. Of course, we don't know the actual story of Tan-ghil or even that he's still alive after a thousand years, but it becomes revealed throughout the books. In the meantime we either read about some people falling in love, some conflicts and some near-death experiences... not to mention that since the story goes from the 1500s to the 1980s, people die. Again, I will write about the spoilers.
The characters
It will probably be wrong to compare all the 10987345 characters from The Legend if the Ice People to the characters from Twilight, but I'll take a shot. The problem I see with some of the characters from Sandemo's series, is that they are similar to one another. I can hardly tell apart Tengel the Third (good guy) from Alv, other than their bone structure. Character traits are repetetive throughout the ages, and though I can blame it on the genes since they're all related, I think it's a step down on the Awesome scale.
The person we first meet is Silje. Let's say she's our Bella. Silje has never heard of the Ice People, and as she's walking through the ruins of Trondheim after a plague killed her family, she sees a member of the Ice People, called Tengel. They later end up together, since this Tengel isn't the evil Tengel. Which impressions do I get from Silje and Tengel? Not much. Silje is an excellent painter who often daydreams and finds herself drawing her and Tengel together while she was not paying attention. She's curious on what life has to bring, but she's down-to-earth enough to be afraid when realistic demons appear in her dreams.
Tengel the good is indeed good. He was one of the first to turn against his evil ways, even if he still struggles. You can imagine the logics in how he wants to not have any children, so he could end the evil curse that runs in his family. Obviously, he has two children with Silje. YOU WEAKLING!
In the Twilight series we have Bella and Edward, the happy couple. Since Bella is supposed to be the character with which you associate, she doesn't give up a lot of expressions or emotions, apart for the obvious ones (stress, fear, joy). Which impressions? While she is similarly (or more) obsessed with the man she decided to be her one and true love as Silje was, she's also less reasonable. She jumps right into potential danger by going up to a vampire and saying "I know you're a vampire, and here we are in the middle of the forest, something I didn't tell anyone, so they won't know if you kill me". At least Silje was skeptical towards joining Tengel to the mountains of the Ice People. I might add that Bella whines, too. She seems utterly bored with everything, and it makes me feel bored, as well.
Edward... where do I start... Mysterious... scary... "perfect". Personally I have always loathed the word "perfect". Having to read it every second page certainly didn't make me like it more. The main impression I get from him is that he is overprotective. He doesn't really do much else than getting up to Bella and protect her. PROTECT! She is protected from a car headed her way (he almost revealed himself as a superbeing just to protect her), he comes in her window at night to look at her and brush her hair, he comes with her to the beach so she doesn't drown at the short end of the sea, and he refuses her to let her see her shape-shifter friends because whenever she's there, his sister can't predict what's going to happen to her, and she might die, since these shape-shifters are vicious. You're not the boss of me, Mr. Vampire!
Love
In Twilight, the love is simple. Love isn't simple, it's so complicated you want to tear your hair out and replace your eyes with it. Edward is addicted to the smell of Bella's blood, and yet he doesn't want to hurt her because he loves her. Here's the problem I see with this:
The first time he meets her in the class room, he practically gnawed his face off not to jump over and eat her. He runs out and doesn't come back for some days. I can imagine he doesn't want to kill someone in front of people... however, I cannot possibly see how he manages to fall in love with her enough so he can withstand the smell of her blood. I don't know what it's like to be a "vegetarian vampire", but when I want to not eat meat, I don't keep it in my fridge and say "Hey, I like you, but I really can't eat you". I give in to temptation and eat the living shit out of it. I refuse to believe that an emotional vampire is stronger than a stubborn girl like me.
Bella loves Edward because he's "perfect" and protects her. Plus, I'm pretty certain she's in it for the thrill. He's a vampire! Oh, the intrigues I can achieve with this! I can become one of them! Oh, the perks. Yeah, she moved from Phoenix to a dull place like Forks. Of course she'd want to become the girlfriend of something irregular.
In The Legend of the Ice People, love appears nearly all the time. Most of them fall in love. I'm pretty sure everyone of them do. Not every person has a story to it, though, some just "happen". The thirteen-year-old girl who was raped by four men when Sol found her and chased the men away (punished them, I believe), moved to Silje and Tengel's farm, and some years later Silje's son Are suggested to this girl that they get married. I believe it's just more than one page of writing.
Other times the whole book is about two people in love. I speak specifically of the great great grandchildren of Silje and Tengel, who are in love with each other. They're not siblings, they're... fifth cousins, I believe. Incest, no matter how far out, is a risk in this family, since the chances of having a cursed child is greater than usual. Risk? A cursed one usually has broad shoulders that ruin their mother's hips and kills her. Anyway, the fifth cousins Villemo and Dominic are madly in love with each other, and wow is Villemo in love. Dominic loves her, too, but knows when she's going to far. Like when she dresses up as a man and joins his army troop.
They end up together, of course, but while I was annoyed with them I also felt curious enough to want to find out how everything would work out.
Some stories are really adorable, like a little ugly bowlegged girl who was in love with one of the Ice People boys, who liked someone else for many many years.
The writing
I'm not going to lie. Sandemo writes very simple texts. Some strange texts. She makes typos that aren't removed from the books. She doesn't use a computer when writing her stories. However, the simple writing makes it easy to read. Every book is very close to being 250 pages. None 350 pages long, none 150 pages long. Some of the simple writing is charming, I think. "The children had made a 'Welcome!' sign with various colours, but like many children they had made the mistake of using the yellow colour, so it looked like it said 'Wel ome!'" Oh, children. So cute and naïve.
While Sandemo makes it simple, Meyer makes it simply complicated. Many anti-Twilighters may say that she "rapes Thesaurus". She uses words nobody knows what means unless they look it up, and while she does so she makes the rest of the sentence seem like a child wrote it. She uses metaphors where she shouldn't (snowflakes looking like the end of a q-tip) and stretches a love confession through a whole chapter while it would be more accepted as a two-pager.
This is my personal thought: I have never skipped a chapter in a book in my entire life... until I read one of her books. I couldn't take it, and I was convinced that if I skipped it, I wouldn't miss out on anything. Which I didn't. It wasn't easy to read, and not because it was complicatedly written.
The supernatural
In Twilight we have vampires and shape-shifters. Not much else. Evil vampires, good vampires, good shape-shifters and evil werewolves that don't really appear, but are mentioned.
In The Legend of the Ice People we have curses, demons, gods and devils, angels, resurrections, the mandrake, time-travel using the mind, "the gray people", moving through different dimensions and contacting the supernatural using your dreams.
While the creatures from the Twilight series are pretty much limited to the rules founds written down (vampires sparkle, they drink blood, the "vegetarians" drink blood from animals, there's a vampire mafia in Italy who decide everything, human/vampire child is possible although vampires are dead and have no blood and can therefor not possibly get a boner), the creatures from Sandemo's world... you don't know what they're capable of doing. Who are those long-dicked demons, and why do they look up Tula? What's she done? Do they want to kill her, have sex with her, or--- oh, okay, they want to have sex with her. I wonder what that's like. Okay, they're cold, apparently. Eeeck.
There was a moment where a demon who grew up with a girl of the Ice People (she was called Vanja... :| ) was taken back to the realm of the demons and locked away. Since this happened he lost all the love he felt for Vanja and when Vanja said she wanted to release him, he yelled that he would kill her if she did. Convinced that he would do so since I don't know anything about demons, I was surprised that Vanja's love for him restored the love he felt when she said "I don't care if you kill me, I just want you free!"
Or something sappy like that.
You don't know where you have these monsters. Will they have sex with you, kidnap you, eat you, kill you, transform you into their kind or lay eggs in your mouth...? It's less predictable, which is good.
Self-inserting
Margit Sandemo appears in The Legend of the Ice People. She does. She helps the little boy Henning by giving him a ride to where he's supposed to be. Margit and her husband then talk a bit about themselves and Henning leaves. This is in the eighties, obviously when Margit is alive in real life. Later, after the main story is closed up, after the evil has been defeated, the remaining people of the Ice People send books to her. These books are the ones written down by the writers of the Ice People family, all about the whole story. They figured that since Sandemo is a writer, they could have their story published as fiction, and she agreed.
The weirdest thing about this insert is the first person. Throughout the whole series, it's been "she looked up", "he didn't like it"... until she appears and writes "My name is Margit Sandemo". I was baffled with the "I". "Holy crap, the book is talking!"
The self-insert might be strange to some. I believe this is because Sandemo is clairvoyant. She can see things normal people cannot, and what she writes about herself seeing, just seems strange and... how do you say... I can't associate with it. I don't see dead people, I have never felt the presence of something out of the ordinary, I have never seen something unnatural. I believe in a lot of it, but I cannot associate.
As for Meyer, she "secretly" inserted herself into the main character Bella. The first person. The one that goes "I looked at his perfect face and he kissed me". One never gets a proper description of Bella save for a few times (I remember her widow's peak)... that is, until some fan asks Meyer about Bella's looks, and she practically describes herself, only younger and slimmer. Very subtle. Very subtle, woman.
BONUS!
One of the things that bothered me the most with the Twilight series was the "imprinting" on Bella's child Renesmee. Her shape-shifter friend Jacob "joined souls" or something with this little newborn child, and would - as she grew up - be her friend, uncle-like person and eventually her husband. What... what if she doesn't want that?
Renesmee, being half human, half discoball, would grow fast. After seven years, she would be a grown-up. At that point, she would stop growing. I thought of this as... well, you can imagine... very strange.
... Later I read the follow-up series to The Legend of the Ice People, first The Witchmaster and then The Tale of the Light's Kingdom. In this series there is a girl who is half human, a quarter elf, and a quarter... earth person, I think they were called. The elves grew quickly, and so did she. She was an adult after just a few years, and Marco, the immortal half human, half arch angel, falls in love with her, but tries his best not to get with her. She's a child! He's many hundreds of years old, and she's a child. He's never felt love before, but he does now, and it's with a child?
He explains this to her, and she says that by the standards of elves, she was an adult. Fully grown. The years of humans didn't apply to her, and she was a legal adult. They get together.
At least he didn't imprint on her.
All in all...
Twilight is terrible although some characters are interesting, while The Legend of the Ice People are superior in every way, even the simple writing. While Twilight is about some wanna-be love of sorts, The Legend of the Ice People is about love and friendship and HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, scary things and mysteries and an actual plot. Thank you.
I decided to read the reviews to the Twilight series, because I hoped that a website devoted to books would have some relatively clear-minded people who don't approve of anti-feminism. Of course I was wrong, and saw a couple of "OMG, this is the best book I've EVER READ!" reviews, but I also saw a few decent ones. That's where I come across this:
"I don't really like the Twilight series, they're horribly written. Then again I shouldn't really speak loudly, since I was a huge fan of The Legend of the Ice People when I was younger..."
That comment made me think. That is why I intend to make a (hopefully) short entry about the similarities and huge differences between Twilight and The Legend of the Ice People.
Table of contents
1. Introduction.
2. The characters
3. Love.
4. The writing.
5. The supernatural.
6. Self-inserting
Introduction
The "Twilight Saga" is written by Stephenie Meyer. The series is about this teenage girl, Bella, moving from Phoenix to a place called Forks, where the sun seemingly never shines. There she meets and reveals the vampire Edward Cullen, through whom she meets other vampires and some wanna-be-werewolves. How will she cope with this? Will she grow old with Edward whilst he remains the same physically? Will she end up with the shape-shifter Jacob in stead? Will she convince Edward to make her into a vampire? Let us see, for hopefully I will put a lot of spoilers in here.
"The Legend of the Ice People" (in Norwegian "Sagaen om Isfolket", so we've got one and a half saga here) is written by a Swedish-Norwegian woman called Margit Sandemo. The series was written in the eighties. The series' plot cannot be put into one line, but here we go: A long time ago, an evil-minded Japanese guy and his Mongolian(?) wife had the son that they had predicted would be the most evil living human in existance. This boy, called Tan-ghil, or Tengel the evil, killed his parents and headed off to Norway, where he made a deal with the devil to earn immortality. What he had to give in return was his offspring. From each generation born, there would be a cursed individual, who would either turn out looking like a monster, looking like the personification of beauty, or simply normal; their only similarity is the colour of their eyes, which is either radiant yellow or some kind of green/yellow-ish lime colour. Most of these turn out evil, devilish and sadistic. It's in their nature, but many of them decide to turn against their evil and try to take down the evil Tan-ghil.
This is the main plot throughout all the 47 books. Of course, we don't know the actual story of Tan-ghil or even that he's still alive after a thousand years, but it becomes revealed throughout the books. In the meantime we either read about some people falling in love, some conflicts and some near-death experiences... not to mention that since the story goes from the 1500s to the 1980s, people die. Again, I will write about the spoilers.
The characters
It will probably be wrong to compare all the 10987345 characters from The Legend if the Ice People to the characters from Twilight, but I'll take a shot. The problem I see with some of the characters from Sandemo's series, is that they are similar to one another. I can hardly tell apart Tengel the Third (good guy) from Alv, other than their bone structure. Character traits are repetetive throughout the ages, and though I can blame it on the genes since they're all related, I think it's a step down on the Awesome scale.
The person we first meet is Silje. Let's say she's our Bella. Silje has never heard of the Ice People, and as she's walking through the ruins of Trondheim after a plague killed her family, she sees a member of the Ice People, called Tengel. They later end up together, since this Tengel isn't the evil Tengel. Which impressions do I get from Silje and Tengel? Not much. Silje is an excellent painter who often daydreams and finds herself drawing her and Tengel together while she was not paying attention. She's curious on what life has to bring, but she's down-to-earth enough to be afraid when realistic demons appear in her dreams.
Tengel the good is indeed good. He was one of the first to turn against his evil ways, even if he still struggles. You can imagine the logics in how he wants to not have any children, so he could end the evil curse that runs in his family. Obviously, he has two children with Silje. YOU WEAKLING!
In the Twilight series we have Bella and Edward, the happy couple. Since Bella is supposed to be the character with which you associate, she doesn't give up a lot of expressions or emotions, apart for the obvious ones (stress, fear, joy). Which impressions? While she is similarly (or more) obsessed with the man she decided to be her one and true love as Silje was, she's also less reasonable. She jumps right into potential danger by going up to a vampire and saying "I know you're a vampire, and here we are in the middle of the forest, something I didn't tell anyone, so they won't know if you kill me". At least Silje was skeptical towards joining Tengel to the mountains of the Ice People. I might add that Bella whines, too. She seems utterly bored with everything, and it makes me feel bored, as well.
Edward... where do I start... Mysterious... scary... "perfect". Personally I have always loathed the word "perfect". Having to read it every second page certainly didn't make me like it more. The main impression I get from him is that he is overprotective. He doesn't really do much else than getting up to Bella and protect her. PROTECT! She is protected from a car headed her way (he almost revealed himself as a superbeing just to protect her), he comes in her window at night to look at her and brush her hair, he comes with her to the beach so she doesn't drown at the short end of the sea, and he refuses her to let her see her shape-shifter friends because whenever she's there, his sister can't predict what's going to happen to her, and she might die, since these shape-shifters are vicious. You're not the boss of me, Mr. Vampire!
Love
In Twilight, the love is simple. Love isn't simple, it's so complicated you want to tear your hair out and replace your eyes with it. Edward is addicted to the smell of Bella's blood, and yet he doesn't want to hurt her because he loves her. Here's the problem I see with this:
The first time he meets her in the class room, he practically gnawed his face off not to jump over and eat her. He runs out and doesn't come back for some days. I can imagine he doesn't want to kill someone in front of people... however, I cannot possibly see how he manages to fall in love with her enough so he can withstand the smell of her blood. I don't know what it's like to be a "vegetarian vampire", but when I want to not eat meat, I don't keep it in my fridge and say "Hey, I like you, but I really can't eat you". I give in to temptation and eat the living shit out of it. I refuse to believe that an emotional vampire is stronger than a stubborn girl like me.
Bella loves Edward because he's "perfect" and protects her. Plus, I'm pretty certain she's in it for the thrill. He's a vampire! Oh, the intrigues I can achieve with this! I can become one of them! Oh, the perks. Yeah, she moved from Phoenix to a dull place like Forks. Of course she'd want to become the girlfriend of something irregular.
In The Legend of the Ice People, love appears nearly all the time. Most of them fall in love. I'm pretty sure everyone of them do. Not every person has a story to it, though, some just "happen". The thirteen-year-old girl who was raped by four men when Sol found her and chased the men away (punished them, I believe), moved to Silje and Tengel's farm, and some years later Silje's son Are suggested to this girl that they get married. I believe it's just more than one page of writing.
Other times the whole book is about two people in love. I speak specifically of the great great grandchildren of Silje and Tengel, who are in love with each other. They're not siblings, they're... fifth cousins, I believe. Incest, no matter how far out, is a risk in this family, since the chances of having a cursed child is greater than usual. Risk? A cursed one usually has broad shoulders that ruin their mother's hips and kills her. Anyway, the fifth cousins Villemo and Dominic are madly in love with each other, and wow is Villemo in love. Dominic loves her, too, but knows when she's going to far. Like when she dresses up as a man and joins his army troop.
They end up together, of course, but while I was annoyed with them I also felt curious enough to want to find out how everything would work out.
Some stories are really adorable, like a little ugly bowlegged girl who was in love with one of the Ice People boys, who liked someone else for many many years.
The writing
I'm not going to lie. Sandemo writes very simple texts. Some strange texts. She makes typos that aren't removed from the books. She doesn't use a computer when writing her stories. However, the simple writing makes it easy to read. Every book is very close to being 250 pages. None 350 pages long, none 150 pages long. Some of the simple writing is charming, I think. "The children had made a 'Welcome!' sign with various colours, but like many children they had made the mistake of using the yellow colour, so it looked like it said 'Wel ome!'" Oh, children. So cute and naïve.
While Sandemo makes it simple, Meyer makes it simply complicated. Many anti-Twilighters may say that she "rapes Thesaurus". She uses words nobody knows what means unless they look it up, and while she does so she makes the rest of the sentence seem like a child wrote it. She uses metaphors where she shouldn't (snowflakes looking like the end of a q-tip) and stretches a love confession through a whole chapter while it would be more accepted as a two-pager.
This is my personal thought: I have never skipped a chapter in a book in my entire life... until I read one of her books. I couldn't take it, and I was convinced that if I skipped it, I wouldn't miss out on anything. Which I didn't. It wasn't easy to read, and not because it was complicatedly written.
The supernatural
In Twilight we have vampires and shape-shifters. Not much else. Evil vampires, good vampires, good shape-shifters and evil werewolves that don't really appear, but are mentioned.
In The Legend of the Ice People we have curses, demons, gods and devils, angels, resurrections, the mandrake, time-travel using the mind, "the gray people", moving through different dimensions and contacting the supernatural using your dreams.
While the creatures from the Twilight series are pretty much limited to the rules founds written down (vampires sparkle, they drink blood, the "vegetarians" drink blood from animals, there's a vampire mafia in Italy who decide everything, human/vampire child is possible although vampires are dead and have no blood and can therefor not possibly get a boner), the creatures from Sandemo's world... you don't know what they're capable of doing. Who are those long-dicked demons, and why do they look up Tula? What's she done? Do they want to kill her, have sex with her, or--- oh, okay, they want to have sex with her. I wonder what that's like. Okay, they're cold, apparently. Eeeck.
There was a moment where a demon who grew up with a girl of the Ice People (she was called Vanja... :| ) was taken back to the realm of the demons and locked away. Since this happened he lost all the love he felt for Vanja and when Vanja said she wanted to release him, he yelled that he would kill her if she did. Convinced that he would do so since I don't know anything about demons, I was surprised that Vanja's love for him restored the love he felt when she said "I don't care if you kill me, I just want you free!"
Or something sappy like that.
You don't know where you have these monsters. Will they have sex with you, kidnap you, eat you, kill you, transform you into their kind or lay eggs in your mouth...? It's less predictable, which is good.
Self-inserting
Margit Sandemo appears in The Legend of the Ice People. She does. She helps the little boy Henning by giving him a ride to where he's supposed to be. Margit and her husband then talk a bit about themselves and Henning leaves. This is in the eighties, obviously when Margit is alive in real life. Later, after the main story is closed up, after the evil has been defeated, the remaining people of the Ice People send books to her. These books are the ones written down by the writers of the Ice People family, all about the whole story. They figured that since Sandemo is a writer, they could have their story published as fiction, and she agreed.
The weirdest thing about this insert is the first person. Throughout the whole series, it's been "she looked up", "he didn't like it"... until she appears and writes "My name is Margit Sandemo". I was baffled with the "I". "Holy crap, the book is talking!"
The self-insert might be strange to some. I believe this is because Sandemo is clairvoyant. She can see things normal people cannot, and what she writes about herself seeing, just seems strange and... how do you say... I can't associate with it. I don't see dead people, I have never felt the presence of something out of the ordinary, I have never seen something unnatural. I believe in a lot of it, but I cannot associate.
As for Meyer, she "secretly" inserted herself into the main character Bella. The first person. The one that goes "I looked at his perfect face and he kissed me". One never gets a proper description of Bella save for a few times (I remember her widow's peak)... that is, until some fan asks Meyer about Bella's looks, and she practically describes herself, only younger and slimmer. Very subtle. Very subtle, woman.
BONUS!
One of the things that bothered me the most with the Twilight series was the "imprinting" on Bella's child Renesmee. Her shape-shifter friend Jacob "joined souls" or something with this little newborn child, and would - as she grew up - be her friend, uncle-like person and eventually her husband. What... what if she doesn't want that?
Renesmee, being half human, half discoball, would grow fast. After seven years, she would be a grown-up. At that point, she would stop growing. I thought of this as... well, you can imagine... very strange.
... Later I read the follow-up series to The Legend of the Ice People, first The Witchmaster and then The Tale of the Light's Kingdom. In this series there is a girl who is half human, a quarter elf, and a quarter... earth person, I think they were called. The elves grew quickly, and so did she. She was an adult after just a few years, and Marco, the immortal half human, half arch angel, falls in love with her, but tries his best not to get with her. She's a child! He's many hundreds of years old, and she's a child. He's never felt love before, but he does now, and it's with a child?
He explains this to her, and she says that by the standards of elves, she was an adult. Fully grown. The years of humans didn't apply to her, and she was a legal adult. They get together.
At least he didn't imprint on her.
All in all...
Twilight is terrible although some characters are interesting, while The Legend of the Ice People are superior in every way, even the simple writing. While Twilight is about some wanna-be love of sorts, The Legend of the Ice People is about love and friendship and HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, scary things and mysteries and an actual plot. Thank you.