Humanist+HumoristErin Watches/Reads: Genie (2023), Camp Damascus
…not actually a full-on review post, I just couldn’t think of a pithier title, when the actual subject is:
The weird experience of reading/watching two different things right in a row that both went “btw, Hell is official canon here, people are actively being tortured, ok moving on, none of our heroes are gonna have any concern about that ever again.”
One was the recent movie Genie, where, yeah, it was a throwaway gag. And the movie overall was one of those “MC gets infinite wishes, never even thinks to drop by the nearest hospital and start wishing cures on people” stories. So you can’t expect much.
(MC does wish for his greedy boss’s fortune to be donated to a housing nonprofit! I was delighted when that came up! Then…he time-travels and retcons it, and never re-wishes it. Whyyy.)
But still! This happens:
- Careless statement of “I wish you would go to hell”
- (This part is fine, it’s a genie story, gotta get in a valuable lesson about being careful what you wish for)
- Hasty “I wish he would come back from hell!”
- Victim reappears, sooty and singed, understandably ticked off
- So now we know some form of eternal flaming torment is real, AND there’s no foolproof filter on who goes there, AND your genie pal has the power to free people from it
- None of this is ever mentioned or thought about again ever!
Nobody involved in making this movie ever second-guessed that…?
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Anyway, the other incident is Camp Damascus, the “what if Chuck Tingle decided to write serious horror” novel. (For a YA level of “serious horror.” Which is about the level I like to deal with, so that worked for me.)
Real mixed feelings about this book. It has good points, it has bad points. Not mad that I spent my time reading it, but it did kinda feel like the first draft of a better book.
But, uh. It sure is A Choice to write a novel about the literalized horrors of religious abuse and anti-gay conversion therapy, and have part of the worldbuilding be “some form of Hell is real! Demons are real! They really do put people through agonizing horror-movie torture scenarios! Just not to gay people.”
The MC spends most of the book afraid of these demons doing horrible brutal murderous things to her, and/or the people she loves.
Then in the climactic showdown, demons do even more horrible brutal things to a bunch of camp counselors, and she’s just…unmoved.
Because, hey, the demons were only threatening gay people because of the church’s control. And now they’re free! So now their standards for “whose limbs do we get to rip off” are…uh, MC explicitly doesn’t know what their standards are…but she doesn’t spend any time stressing over whether the new victims deserve it any more than the old ones did.
To be clear! This is not part of a reveal that the counselors were one-dimensional evil!
The MC is friends with a former counselor. Who’s also gay, and has also been living with the threat of demon-torture. They’ve had heartfelt conversations about how, yes, he did bad things at the camp, but he can’t be too hard on himself, he was being manipulated by a cult, and he can make up for it now that he’s free.
How many of the present-day counselors are in the same situation? Who knows! And nobody left in the book has any interest in finding out.
Someone could write a dissertation about which “assumptions baked into this kind of Christian worldview” Camp Damascus takes the time to unpack, compared to which ones it just…doesn’t question or second-guess at all.
I won’t — I’m not nearly invested enough to do the rereading it would take to get all the details right — just saying that in general, wow, there is A Lot here, if anyone was interested.
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Gonna wrap this up with a Hazbin Hotel reference.
Obviously it’s not the first story to do “okay, some form of Hell is canon real, now let’s actually stop and dig into the implications.” But it’s almost certainly the first one to drop the banger line “if Hell is forever, then Heaven must be a lie” in the middle of a song, and I think that’s beautiful.
ship
DR. CHUCK TINGLE
chronohart
IO (they/them)🏳️⚧️✨️
Aerliss
Farrell