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#and i was rooting through it bc i was like yeahh how we feeling out there tonight yeah i am not feeling good-
hella1975 · 3 years
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everyone who told me to drink something i now have sambuca in a water bottle are you not entertained
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olreid · 3 years
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hello! i was  wondering if you have any thoughts on (haunted) forest, both as a background for the story, and has a main character. i think trees/forests have a lot of potential as elements of a story, poem, painting, etc.
thank you for your posts, they are always passionate amd thought-inducing. have a nice day!
(if you don't have anythong to say about it pr jist do not want to answer it's totally fine)
YEAHH i love this question!!! and i think forests have such HUGE potential for horror, for a bunch of reasons.. under a cut bc it turns out i had a LOT of thoughts and it got long <3
first, i think forests often symbolize a limit to what we can know or understand about the world. humans have often been interested in mapping and surveying the world, and those projects are not benign but often go hand in hand with conquest and colonialism. it is within the context of empire that territories are ‘discovered,’ surveyed, mapped, and finally annexed. and so i think part of what makes the mind catch on forests is that they resist being fully known, which is to say fully controlled. who can really say what happens in the heart of a forest? forests have often been thought of as places where the veil is thin, where faeries or other creatures from worlds next to ours can be found, where things happen that don’t fit in to what we think we know about how the world works. i’m thinking about that miyazaki quote: “many places have a “forest that shouldn’t be entered.” i don’t know what is there, but i think they are real. i’m not a believer in the occult, but the world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. this world doesn’t exist just for humans.” and so i think forests gesture to something else, something more, something that will always be fundamentally beyond our reach or understanding. maybe the things happening in forests are beautiful beyond our comprehension, or maybe they are horrible beyond anything we have experienced. who’s to say?
something else that comes to mind re: forests and the uncanny is the illusion of timelessness. forests resist the passage of time, or maybe they just exist on different timescales. there are things in forests that have been living for longer than any of us; they remember things that weren’t around to experience. provided they haven’t been altered by human hands, they look much the same as they did decades or centuries ago. entering into a forest can feel like going back in time; if you cannot leave, you might feel that you are trapped in a moment that never ends. forests give a sense of slowing down things which are trying to rush too fast into the future; they root and trap, they snare and catch. how much time is passing? will you return to find your life as you left it? can you be sure?
the last thing i’m thinking about is that forests are ALIVE. that seems obvious, but a lot of horror has to do with things we regard as passive or inanimate coming to life, e.g. the haunted house or the hostile city. and forests are clearly alive, but when you stop to think about it, i think you get the sense that life in forests goes deeper than what is visible or comprehensible to the human observer. we know that trees ‘talk’ to each other through fungal networks; we know that plants know when they are being threatened, and react in order to defend themselves. and so the forest is not only a setting that is alive, but one that is intelligent, even if its consciousness doesn’t take the forms that we’re used to. and this sense that the forest is awake, that it is watching, even if it has no eyes that we can see.. it reminds me of when richard siken says “we do not walk through a passive landscape.” you can ignore your environs all you want, but when you end up lost in the woods, you are forced to confront the fact that you are one small living thing among many, and it’s as likely as not that the things growing up around you can see you just as clearly as you can see them. when you enter their field of vision, will they treat you with kindness? have you always been kind to them?
because we have made enemies of forests. obviously the “we” doesn’t include all people at all times in human history, but recent developments like industrialization, logging, deforestation, forest fires, etc. etc. have all contributed to widespread destruction of woodland areas. and it doesn’t take a big logical leap to think that forests, which we know to be conscious and aware of their surroundings, might harbor some resentment towards those who have been responsible for so much destruction in recent memory, that they might be interested in revenge. surely, being rooted and fixed, they cannot travel to make war on human cities, but if a human were wander outside the protection of their home or car and get lost in their depths, who’s to say what could happen?
ANYWAY haunted forest rights. what are everyone’s favorite fictional fucked up forests. mine are mirkwood in lotr, the forest of the nightmare king in fantasy high, cabeswater in the raven cycle, the fucked up people-eating forest in marielda, the forest of the snare dogs in the silt verses, the cedar forest in princess mononoke, area x in annihilation, the russian wilderness in the winternight trilogy, the forest where archie riverdale has a nightmare trip and gets attacked by a bear... i could go on 
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