The Colour of Magic

Faye Seidler
22 min readNov 7, 2021

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I’m going to be writing an essay on every Discworld book that Terry Pratchett wrote. I’m not coming to this project as a literary expert and I haven’t read all of his books. I’ve read maybe half of them and in no particular order, but they had a profound impact on me and the activist I’ve become that fights for equity and emancipation of marginalized people. I’m also coming to this project as a writer who appreciates good stories over literature. These essays will always be framed in the stories Pratchett's books tell and the impact these stories have on people.

I stumbled on Pratchett's work in my early twenties, when I was trying to make sense of not just my life, but life in general. I chanced into reading Thief of Time, a Discworld book with a small section explaining that we tell ourselves stories about things we don’t understand. It made me start to think about and question the stories I told myself, about both my life and my future. I was in a very bad place at that moment, but through the stories I read, I gained an appreciation, love, and hope for the world I didn’t have before.

I’m 34 years old right now and by the time I finish the project I’ll likely be 35. Terry Pratchett was 35 when he published The Colour of Magic and that feels extremely meaningful to me. I feel like in some way I’m where he was when he set out to create the Discworld. I want to use this project to honor him and the impact he has had on my life. I want to use it to understand how he evolved over time and through that journey explore my own evolution. I want to take to heart all of the wit and humanism he put into every book, grok it, and share that journey with everyone else in the hopes it can have a similar impact.

Discworld: The Origin Story

Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld book was described as his attempt to have a laugh and bring to fantasy fiction what Blazing Saddles brought to Westerns. Which means on a long enough timeline you could say Mel Brooks is responsible for all the Discworld books and a sassy old man halfway across the world getting knighted. An absurd connection, but one that really defines the Discworld series as a whole. This first book, The Colour of Magic, deconstructed contemporary fantasy fiction writers by defying fantasy genre expectations, such as using a cowardly protagonist or playing the tropes of fantasy fiction so seriously that we spend whole sections discussing the sciences of magic particles.

He did this because he absolutely loved fantasy fiction since he was a boy, but to his disappointment it seemed like every story was following Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Fantasy fiction became the repeating assets flip of dragons, magic swords, elves, dwarfs, wizards and sexism. Pratchett held stories and fantasy to the highest regard and hated that something so powerful, meaningful, and human could be corrupted by our prejudices.

Imagination is limitless and in it we can be anything we want to be. So, why are wizards in fantasy fiction always male, powerful, scholarly, and important? Why are witches always female, dangerous, villains, or emotional? Why do our magic systems in fiction have to be split by sex in this regard? Why are heroes typically big men with swords? Why are women often just the trophy for these heroes to earn? These are questions he asked of fantasy fiction in the 1980s because he saw these stories as reinforcing sexism and men’s fears of women with power. He firmly believed in self identity and agency, he believed in social justice, he believed in punching up, and that one shouldn’t be limited by their gender. We see this in future works with female wizards, male witches, gender liberated dwarfs, and just a diverse cast of weirdos who feel like a family that would never judge us on anything other than the content of our character.

Interestingly, the same idea was happening in science fiction around the same time with Whoopie Goldberg and Star Trek. Goldberg fought to get on the show because this series was the only time she saw black people in the future. And while science fiction has all the same power of fantasy fiction, it also is marred by the same prejudices that we have the same duty to fight against. And while these two people were not the first or only to fight for equity, they represent individuals who knew the power of stories and how the stories we tell impact and shape the reality we live in.

He described his initial book as being what Blazing Saddles was to Westerns, but I think his career is ultimately more akin to being what Bruce Lee was to martial arts. Lee’s philosophy around fighting was to be like water, because water has no form, but can take any form. Water can be both gentle or powerful enough to cut diamonds. Those who read Pratchett can likely understand just how true this is within his works. You can read several pages that wash over you in gentle enjoyment, before coming to a line or paragraph that cuts you to the bone and in that moment changes who you are forever. From the very beginning, Pratchett saw fantasy could be better. It could be less about creating these fantastic worlds and more about exploring the people in them. That if reality mirrors fiction, maybe fiction had some responsibility to set a tone for reality to follow.

I can’t help but think a project like what I’m doing would embarrass him. I get the impression he wouldn’t want every detail or every word of his books scrubbed clean for reference or meaning. He was staunchly against literature, even if he was found guilty of it. I think like many storytellers, he painted with broad strokes and wanted those reading to discuss the ideas, but also to enjoy them, to share them, and to laugh with the works he created. I think he likely values more what people got out of his works than some objective measurement.

This is why I think my contributions here will be valuable. I’m not an expert, but I can at least share why his stories shaped me into being an activist and on a long enough timeline you can make direct connections between a British Author being responsible for a woman winning an award for activism in North Dakota. Which by the transitive property means Blazing Saddles is why I’m an award winning activist. That seems like a more absurd situation than a Discworld floating through some set of secondary dimensions.

Before I get into The Colour of Magic, I want to say that reading this first novel with the knowledge of what the series would eventually become adds this layer of appreciation and reverence for the work. This book is a fun read, but not something that would be described as life changing. I know Pratchett will explore some of the heaviest topics of humanity, morality, and adversity in his future books. I know he will go on to write stories that will be meaningful to millions of readers and offered in dozens of languages. I know that in 32 years after publishing this first book, he will die of a disease that attempted to rob him of all of his amazing gifts, insight, and passion. I also know how much he fought this and what pride he took in overcoming it for as long as he did. In short, this book is the start of the journey Terry Pratchett takes into becoming a hero of literature and stories. This first book comes with its own magic, the ability for the reader to glimpse into who this hero was at the start, the values he brought into this first work, and how he would spent decades refining all of these ideas and concepts into something that moved a generation to read, laugh, reflect, and grow.

The Colour of Magic: Establishing Shots

What I’m going to explore in this first book is mostly how Pratchett both embraces and defies genre expectations. I’ll be discussing how he lures us into a false sense of security that this will be like any other fantasy fiction, before knocking us off our feet. I’ll also be looking at the roles of the two main characters of this novel: Rincewind and Twoflower. Then I’ll discuss the general structure of the story and the impact the ending has on us, the reader. At the end of all of that, I’ll feature several memorable quotes in the book that really stuck out to me as I read it.

This story begins with the Great A’tuin, an enormous turtle flying through space with four elephants on their back that carry the great weight of the world’s disc. A concept of a World Turtle is seen in many different cultures around the world, but here Pratchett parodies this mythos by giving us a small kingdom with an astronomy-based government who wants to know the sex of A’tuin at all costs. After all, the great turtle could one day find another to mate with and the results could be disastrous — a theory known as the Big Bang Theory. This prologue serves to identify that this book may get a little silly.

We then turn to the point of view of the heroes Weasel and Bravd overlooking the burning city of Ankh-Morpork. More experienced readers would recognize these characters as references to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from Fritz Leiber’s Sword and Sorcery books. I didn’t and it isn’t important either to know this, because we immediately identify these characters as our hero adventurers. Bravd, carrying a sword nearly the size of a man, doesn’t need to be identified as a “Fafhrd”, because he embodies the “Fafhrd’’ archetype we know from a thousand other sources. Bravd is Fafhrd, he is Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy Seven, he is Guts from Berserk, he is The Mountain Who Rides from Game of Thrones, and a thousand other asset flips we know all too well. Weasel is the cunning hero and together they form their own archetypical team of brawns and brains.

The two heroes meet a wizard and gain vital information on what caused the fire. In just a couple of pages Pratchett is setting up the reader’s expectations that these two heroes will manage this fire in some grand way; that it’ll be part of a bigger plot hook as this wizard explains the mysterious circumstances of the fire and this “Reflected-Sounds-as-of-Underground Spirits”. You can practically taste the fantasy adventure, which is indescribable, but could be summed up as a citrus grape flavour.

But, you don’t get this. What you get instead in the next scene is a tourist whose very presence deconstructs and destabilizes the fantasy fiction genre. But, before we get to all of that, we have to address the elephant in the room. This tourist’s name is Twoflower, which is very close to the second Lord of the Rings book Two Towers. I can’t confirm this is why his name is what it is, but Sean Astin did play Twoflower in The Colour of Magic television series. Sean Astin also played a hobbit in the Lord of the Rings movie. I can’t confirm that Terry Pratchett demanded a hobbit play Twoflower because of this connection, but this is likely the case.

The Tourist

What Twoflower brings as a tourist is a narrative placeholder designed to organically explain the ways of the world to us, the reader. Twoflower can ask questions about the places, people, or the magic to compel other characters to flesh out details and build the world without it seeming like arbitrary or needless exposition. It makes sense within the context of the story for the character Rincewind to explain to Twoflower about the city or world around them. Often, in fantasy fiction, this type of character is from a far off village. They may have been transported to a new world. In science fiction we can see Luke Skywalker serving this role in Star Wars. We see Harry Potter serving this role by entering a magic world he was removed from his entire life. This is the hobbits leaving the shire; very basic stuff.

While this kind of character isn’t required, it becomes very difficult to write around it. If you have a starting scene with two jewel thieves, there would be no reason for either to say out loud what they’re doing or why.

Jewel Thief One: Remember, we’re here to steal the Jewel of Venture.
Jewel Thief Two: Ohhhh, I had forgotten, because I’m poorly written. Thank you!
Jewel Thief One: No problem, now let me explain the plan to you again, that we spent twelve months preparing, just so the reader knows what we’re doing.

These characters wouldn’t have a reason to say that, so you’d likely try to establish the scene by having them run into a guard who could exclaim that they’ll never get the Jewel of Venture. The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, as an example, is incredibly skilled at telling a story by what isn’t said. There isn’t a “newcomer” in those books, so the story and world are slowly revealed by observations and conversations that make sense for the characters in it.

In this regard, having a tourist style character is the writing equivalent of taking the easy way out. Often writers painstakingly try to hide this, by creating narrative justifications for a character to need to be introduced to the world they’re building. Pratchett, instead, draws as much attention to this as possible. He puts a gaudy, brightly colored, modern concept of a tourist into the medieval fantasy fiction setting. This character doesn’t just stand out from the crowd, they stand out from the reality. It wasn’t until I saw Sean Astin playing Twoflower in The Colour of Magic Movie that I finally understood just how absurd this character really is from a visual standpoint.

Now this juxtaposition is itself hilarious, but it goes even deeper than this. Not only are these characters designed as excuses for world building, they can be placeholders for the audience themselves. Video games often feature voiceless protagonists as a way for people feel like they are actually the character they’re playing. Typically these characters are the heroes, who start off with either no knowledge or power and through the course of the work gain significant amounts of both. As the reader, you get to experience that journey and imagine yourself taking it. Maybe you could enter a world you don’t know, pick up a sword and learn some magic? Maybe you could be a future vampire wife like Bella in Twilight?

This story intentionally takes this blank template too literally, as we learn that this tourist is an insurance salesman traveling with the purpose to see the heroes he heard about in stories. This tourist is, very literally, just an exact stand in for the reader. There is no power fantasy here or escapism. The character is as much a typical businessman at the beginning of the book as he is at the end. And it is through this lens of making this character an exact stand-in for the reader that we get the third way this character is being used — to judge the reader.

A tourist can be used as a way to describe the non-sexual equivalent of a voyeur: a person who is living through other peoples’ experiences by proxy, that draws deeply intimate and one-sided connections from them. A person who gets to experience the sights, cultures, and lives of other people, but who doesn’t participate in them. In our modern day we’d likely see this as a parasocial relationship, such as those who watch people on social media platforms like Twitch, YouTube, or TikTok. It is interesting to me that the word tourist was used in this exact context in the movie Fight Club, which described a healthy character who was going to support groups for people with chronic or terminal illness to feel their pain by proxy.

In fantasy fiction we often romanticize violence as something noble. Most fantasy fiction series feature a good amount of murder or killing that is often never seriously discussed. In reality seeing someone brutally killed is going to be a big moment, a psychologically horrible event that is trauma-inducing. In fantasy fiction you kill the bad guys and then throw a party or have sex with the woman you saved, and it’s all cake thereafter. In the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game your characters are typically killing sentient creatures for experience or gold, thinking nothing of endling life.

In The Colour of Magic we see a tavern brawl breaking out because everyone is desperate to steal Twoflower’s gold. Dozens of people end up dying in the melee and the scene that follows this is Twoflower getting pictures with the corpses. He happily rummages through the bloody mess and asks Rincewind if any of the bodies are heroes, to Rincewind’s abhorrent terror.

Rincewind: You want to see a fight?
Twoflower: Yeah, what’s wrong with that?
Rincewind: For a start, people get hurt.
Twoflower: I wasn’t suggesting we get involved, I just want to see one that’s all.
(PG 35)

In fantasy fiction we are sometimes asked to suspend parts of our humanity and to accept the barbaric nature of the world we are reading. The Discworld is a violent place, but from the perspective of Rincewind this violence isn’t something to glorify, it is something to survive. As a reader you don’t have to get involved. You’re safe. You get to instead enjoy it all through proxy and Pratchett wants you to really think about this. He wants you to humanize these struggles by showing how real they are to the people experiencing them.

Twoflower, as a Tourist, not only plays the trope of a naïve newcomer on its face, he also serves to ground the reader in reality, disillusions them of power fantasies, and reminds them of the actual brutality of the fantasy. And while all of this is true, he’s also just a tourist and Pratchett uses this for comedic effect time and time again. Twoflower also has magic luggage that will follow him absolutely anywhere, which serves as a sentient suitcase/mimic monstrosity. And it feels like the perfect accessory to some fictional Tourist Action Figure.

“In an instant Rincewind became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.” (PG 225)

The Guide

If Twoflower represented a stand-in for the reader, Rincewind represents the realistic experience of fantasy fiction removed from romance as we discussed briefly before. As a character he serves as Twoflower’s guide both literally and metaphorically. This is my third time working through this essay and let me just stop a second here and sigh. I didn’t pick up on this until I wrote it down here and it feels so obvious now that I’ve written it. The joy of reading and discussing Pratchett’s works is that it seems like there is always more to find. He just has such a talent to draw you into these worlds and make you absorb these stories that you get to slowly unravel the depth and complexity of. I can just imagine him as this old storyteller around the fire, with a twinkle in his eye, knowing he pulled a fast one on you.

In fiction, Rincewind’s character equivalent would be Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker; they would be Gandalf to the hobbits, Dumbledore to Harry Potter, Merlin to Arthur, and so forth. They fill this specific role of knowing things about the world. They’re the Dungeon Master’s player character, who the party can ask questions when they get stuck so the story can move along. Here we’re given another lampshade that this character is both a paid guide and the story guide.

However, the twist here is that he is constantly terrified, because he is the logical and sane conclusion to living in a world where one could be stabbed, poisoned, exploded, or magic’d to death on any given day. A thought occurs to Rincewind immediately after Twoflower pays him upfront to be a guide:

“The sensible thing to do, he knew, was to buy a horse. It would have to be a fast one, and expensive — offhand, Rincewind couldn’t think of any horse-dealer he knew who was rich enough to give change out of almost a whole ounce of gold. And then, of course, the other five coins would help him set up a useful practice at some safe distance, say two hundred miles. That would be the sensible thing. But what would happen to Twoflower, all alone in a city where even the cockroaches had an unerring instinct for gold? A man would have to be a real heel to leave him.” (PG 27)

The very next section features the aftermath of Rincewind trying to escape, exactly how he had described. This scene also has the first instances of the Patrician, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, but it’s unclear if Pratchett at this time had an idea of what that character would become. We do get some idea that this character is ruthless, extremely intelligent, and meticulously cunning. What we don’t get in this scene is his love for meat pies that will be, for some reason, explored in later books.

The point being that Rincewind, our secondary hero, is a coward. The pair we have in this book are a failed gutter wizard who doesn’t know any spells and a tourist that works a desk job. However, we also know Rincewind holds one of the great MacGuffins of the plot. A spell straight out of Octavio, the magic book of the creator of the universe, and something that could rewrite the very world if he ever utters it. This creates this tension about when he’ll use this spell, because in fantasy fiction this is what we’d call Chekhov’s Spell. However, within this book it isn’t something he ends up saying. It is another inverted power fantasy and trope that denies the reader their expectation or reward.

I think many folks would read this book and the various scenes where Rincewind was about to utter this magic spell and have a strong desire to see it happen. However, if the same type of magic was real in our world, how would someone feel about the chance of it all being destroyed in an instant? This is a world changing, absolutely terrifying thing within the context of the Discworld, but we as a reader just want to see what will happen. We, I will remind you, are the tourists.

Rincewind spends much of his time in this book dodging Death, literally and metaphorically, as Death is personified as a skeleton in a black cloak holding a scythe that appears around Rincewind when his life is in danger. Wizards of the Discworld have the honor of being collected by Death personally, rather than being taken to the afterlife by some lower ranking demons. As discussed with Twoflower as a tourist and Rincewind as a guide, I feel most of Pratchett’s work is being both literal and metaphorical at the same time.

Aside from that, Rincewind latches on to a picture box that Twoflower brought with him, believing it to be some kind of high technology. He imagines it is a way to capture light using a photosensitive material and from this imagines maybe there can be a world that is better than magic, that makes more sense — namely our world.

Later in the book there is a point in the story where Rincewind and Twoflower are escaping the Wyrmberg, a place of old residual magic that allows imagination to become reality. Twoflower had been imagining the dragon and they were flying away from the Wyrmberg on it. Twoflower got the notion of wanting to travel to the stars, but Icarus symbolism’d himself into unconsciousness. Then, as they started falling to their death, Rincewind tried as hard as possible to imagine dragons to ride on, but Death appeared and chided him, because Rincewind didn’t believe in dragons. Reaching for the only thing he thought could save him, he imagined a world of technology. He imagined himself in a better place, one that had harnessed lightning. This means that to Rincewind, our world is his escape fantasy. The grass always being greener on the other side and all that.

Ultimately, Rincewind is a survivor. And while a coward, he desperately fights to keep his life as the odds and gods themselves conspire to take it. Beneath all of the fear, there is a hero there. Not the hero we’re used to, not the ones that make us feel big and strong or safe, but the ones that teach us how to get to tomorrow. Beneath all of this, Rincewind does have a lot of value as a hero*.

*Editor’s note: Actually the other satirical anti-hero protagonist Rincewind is bringing to my mind at the moment is Fry from Futurama. His flaws (laziness, cowardice, incompetence) are meant to be relatable to the viewer in a humorous way, and at the same time, they implicitly deflate the seriousness of threats from powerful systems and institutions (megalomaniacal villains, cosmic/magic forces, etc.) with their groundedness.

**Actually, is Rincewind just Shaggy from Scooby Doo?

The Story Proper

In these reviews I don’t really want to spend a lot of time on a point for point recap of the story. That isn’t extremely valuable, as you can easily look up a wiki and get a feel for what happens. There are academics and scholars far more qualified to sieve this story through the finest sieve and mine the value of every word. And I could spend thousands of words looking at every moment Pratchett said something interesting or funny, but honestly just read it. All of those moments aren’t meant to be dissected, they’re meant to be enjoyed.

However, in this particular book, I think there is an important reason to summarize the story, because we need to spend some time exploring this story to lure you into a false sense of security before doing a big reveal.

As we’ve talked about, this story starts out with two archetypal heroes before we move into the first part of the book, also called The Colour of Magic, told primarily through flashback. This introduces Rincewind and Twoflower and their journey through the city of Ankh-Morpork. This is a bit of a series of mishaps ending in the city burning down over attempts at stealing Twoflower’s gold, but more directly from the first instance of insurance fraud to ever happen in the city. This chapter ends with the point of view switching back to the two heroes, and this teases the idea that now the book is really going start; that now we’ve established the rules of the world, we can see what adventure Weasel and Bravd get into! Except they’re never mentioned again in 41 books.

We instead continue to follow the tourist and the failed wizard in the next part: Sending of the Eight. This appears to be a riff on Dungeons and Dragons more than anything, featuring the gods of discworld playing a tabletop game. We see monsters mysteriously appearing, treasure hidden behind altars, and a horrible eldritch boss at the end of a dungeon. There is less to comment about in this section, because with everything being established, we’re really just moving from one set piece to the next. It really has the feel of Blazing Saddles, where it just keeps moving and exploring and adding to the story as it goes. This section does feature Hrun, who acts as a more stereotypical fantasy hero, who is genre savvy to the role of hero.

We do see additional commentary here on how heroes are all bloodthirsty, battle crazed maniacs. After their adventure in the temple, Rincewind and Twoflower buy Hrun’s protection by taking his picture, with Rincewind commenting that heroes love themselves above all else.

They move from this set piece to one featuring the imagined dragons of an upside down mountain. After some heavy action adventure, they ultimately escape and find themselves on a raft drifting towards the end of the world. They get caught on a fence surrounding the edge of the disc, aptly named the circumfence, because Pratchett is a man of culture and loves puns. They get rescued by a slaver and make their way to the Krull kingdom to be sacrificed to appease the god of fate for his loss to Lady Luck in the Sending of the Eight. One thing leads to another and they find themselves on the space ship being launched off the disc to determine the sex of the Great A’Tuin. Rincewind isn’t able to get into the ship in time and instead falls off the side of the world.

This is Pratchett’s final hurrah in this parody. This man ends the book on a literal cliffhanger. I would pay money for a picture of Pratchett looking smug when a fan expressed indignation over this affair. I didn’t even think about it when I read it. I simply was talking to a friend and describing the plot of the book and casually said, “then it ends with Rincewind hanging on a cliff…it…it ends in a cliffhanger! DAMN YOU PRATCHETT!”

And this is probably the most important lesson of all and something I’ve had to build up to over the last few thousand words here. The real meaning of this work, the romantic center of Pratchett, his themes, ideas, beliefs, and fantasy is just right there and let me tell you what it is!

To Be Continued.

Memorable Moments: The Text Highlights

Page 10
‘He talks pretty big for a gutter wizard,’ he muttered
‘You don’t understand at all,’ said the wizard wearily. ‘I’m so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it’s just that I’m suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I’ve got over that then I’ll have to be decently frightened of you.’

Page 20
Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of a defiance, boredom, fear, and lingering taste for heterosexuality.

Page 36
The Watch were always careful not to intervene too soon in any brawl where the odds were not heavily stacked in their favour. The job carried a pension, and attracted a cautious, thoughtful kind of man.

Page 37
There were no survivors. The Watch had ensured this by giving them ample time to escape via the back door, a neat compromise between caution and justice that benefited all parties

Page 82
He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used.

Page 94
All Rincewind could manage to say was, ‘You know, I never imagined there were he-dryads. Not even in an oak tree.’
One of the giants grinned at him.
Druellae snorted. ‘Stupid! Where do you think acorns come from?’

Page 98
Rincewind wasn’t sure that he dared, although the spell was trying to take control of his tongue. He fought it.
“You thed you could read my bind,’ he said indistinctly, ‘Read it,’

Page 113
In consequence his temple was being abandoned to the ravages of Time, who for thousands of shamefaced years had been reluctant to go near the place. Now the suddenly released, accumulated weight of all those pent-up seconds was bearing down heavily on the unbraced stones.

Page 125
Slowly over the millennia, releasing as it decayed myriads of sub-astral particles that severely distorted the reality around.

Page 137
Rincewind occasionally had nightmares about teetering on some intangible but enormously high place, and seeing a blue-distanced, cloud-punctuated landscape reeling away below him (this usually woke him up with his ankles sweating; he would have been even more worried had he known that the nightmare was not, as he thought, just the usual Discworld vertigo. It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.)

Page 155
Then the dragons pop through, as it were, and impress their form on this world’s possibility matrix.

Page 159
‘It is forbidden to fight on the Killing Ground,’ he said, and paused while he considered the sense of this. ‘You know what I mean, anyways,’ he hazarded, giving up.

Page 222
‘I too cannot be cheated,’ snapped Fate.
SO I HAVE HEARD, said Death, still grinning.

Page 239
‘Won’t work,’ said Rincewind smugly.
THERE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A REASON, said Death, I CAN JUST KILL YOU.
‘Hey, you can’t do that! It’d be murder!’

Credits

Written by: Faye Seidler
Editing by: Shane Thielges

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Faye Seidler

I write essays on literature, pop culture, video games, and reality. A throughline of my work is metanarrative horror and defining what it is to be human.