Hey now, let's be clear. Stephen King did not have the clown defeated by a bunch of outcast youths gangbanging in a sewer. That's just patently incorrect. Every single part. No, he had the ancient terror disguised as a clown temporarily banished by summoning an ancient turtle from the dawn of time and engaging It in a battle of wills. Completely different and, in fact, perfectly reasonable. Anyone that's actually read the book knows the outcast youth sewer gangbang happens after that and actually has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. Stephen King's not some freak writing a book where the entire plot hinges on a bunch of traumatized kids screwing each other to save the world, no; he's a perfectly normal guy writing about a bunch of traumatized kids screwing each other for no reason at all. Bet you feel real silly now, huh?
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I went into IT with an open mind and was prepared for that scene. Kept thinking that it probably made a lot of sense since many King fans had said it had a very beautiful reason behind it.
Then I get to it. And it's just stupid. Genuinely stupid.
The kids are scared of forgetting each other, because that is the power of IT. It makes people forget as they grow up.
So they want to do something meaningful to remember each other. And Bev is like: y'all can fuck me.
And I am over here like: how are the boys supposed to remember each other if they only fuck you? If that scene was supposed to make a lick of sense, the kids would have an orgy with each other and not just the boys lining up to have sex with one girl.
I can go along with weird and uncomfortable ideas in books if they make sense. In this case, it made no sense. But people either seem to defend it because they just go along with the premise or they defend King because he was high or some shit.
I'm not defending bad storytelling. IT has a lot of cool concepts in it and no one can write about small communities like King can, but I'm not gonna pretend like the kids having sex is some clever narrative device. It's very, very stupid.
I also think the Turtle is goofy af.
Tbh if my first time was a train of my bros all with the same chick, i'd probably remember them for a very long time even without a proper orgy. Though i'd probably remember them all for helping to defeat an eldritch sewer fiend anyways.
Still sounds like a stupid thing to put in a horror story about teenagers though..
What makes it bad is they're not teenagers. They're 11 year olds.
That the thing, though. IT steals your memories, so the intimacy was supposed to bond the kids together forever so that they wouldn't forget one another (they do anyway), but to me it makes no sense, when Bev is the only one who's intimate with everybody and the boys aren't intimate with one another.
Then again, I think there could have been other way to get the same point across. They do a blood oath as well and I think that could have served a similar purpose if the kids had all mixed blood like the vikings and become bloodbrothers/sister and symbolically carried a part of each other in their veins forever.
Oddly enough, I put that BS down far before the halfway point back in the day, and never picked it up again.
Thankfully, the only knowledge I have of this King-style WTF Deluxe?
Vicariously. Phew. 😬
It's not a terrible book. The stories and descriptions about Derry through time are really well written and fun world building in my opinion.
I just think the book was a bit too long and also had a couple of elements that were too silly.
I haven't read every king book ever, but currently, I think Misery is his best book. While he likes to have big casts and writing about communities, he's absolutely at his best when he is stuck with two interesting characters who play off one another in a battle of wills.
But yeah, IT is far from a bad book, but in my opinion a bit overrated in popculture.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug...
Washed down with some Listerine according to his On Writing autobio
It would have been so easy to just not write that part. Or her character like that at all tbh
I went in knowing nothing about the book other than there was a supernatural clown in it. When I read that scene I had to stop, then go online to find an explanation of what the fuck I just read (to be fair, I was also pretty confused by the denouement in general) and how it is related to the plot. I was absolutely baffled by the amount of people saying they thought it was fine to have, some people even said it was a good allegory for leaving childhood.

"And you thought I was fucked up? I didn't have anything to do with that! I just eat children!"
Don't get it
The kids defeated the clown by fucking
The book has child porn in it. A group fuck where they all fuck the girl.
Not joking.
Today I learned everyone with a copy of the book 'It' is in possession of CSAM, and amazon and Barnes and noble are actively and criminally distributing the same material.
Words have meaning.
At least in the US, I'm not sure if purely textual would ever be illegal. You could likely get away with a visual depiction of the scence with current law.
The Pedophile-in-Chief is ok with it, even though he personally prefers them to be teenaged, he'll gladly start a war and crash the global economy to defend him and his pedo pals from too much scrutiny in the Epstein files.
The fuck who read that shit Stephen is disgusting
I think a lot of people never saw it coming. He was on a lot of drugs at the time.
That said, in every single book he wrote, he has very elaborate scenes where a person urinates themselves. Every. Single. Book.
I think he actually avoided that in The Stand by having Harold cum on himself.
On the one hand, I kinda get the logic. On the other, Stephen no, wtf.
You get the logic… of… peeing or the middle school gang bang to defeat a monster?
The second one. It preys on innocent childish fears, so kill that part of you. Haha, so clever, makes sense in universe I guess. But like, why would you make your universe that way?
Cause when you use drugs, you are in the deepest, darkest corners of your psyche. You usually start taking drugs because you either want to silence that part of yourself, or because you feel like a piece of shit because of the thoughts you have in your head. Ultimately, healing comes from realising that everyone experiences thoughts like that, they just decide to not live out the thoughts.
That's not necessarily why you take drugs.
Uppers like cocaine (which he was very fond of at the time) are often consumed to be more productive or to "enhance" an otherwise already positive time. From what I've heard, he was introduced to coke at a party, which makes perfect sense. Cocaine abuse starts with making a party exhilarating, then it continues with giving you so much energy while working, finally you simply take the stuff because your brain doesn't know how to work with natural levels or serotonin/dopamine/noradrenaline anymore.
To name another class of drugs, taking psychedelics (which I haven't heard of King having much business with) to hide from your inner demons would be a profoundly bad move since those tend to forcibly confront you with yourself. Great if you have the feeling that deep down there's something you need to address but you don't know what. Terrible if you know there's something but you can't handle dealing with it.
Downers like cannabis (which King apparently did at least occasionally use) can be used to silence the bad thoughts. Putting up a smokescreen between your conscious and your subconscious isn't exactly the best way of handling things but at least you're not pouring fuel onto the fire.
Drugs of all kinds can still take your mind in directions you normally would've shied away from, that's true. And a sustained drug habit of any kind is often indicative of an underlying problem; happy people don't mess with their brain chemistry as often. The specific underlying problem can vary wildly – unassisted psychological distress, physiological issues like chronic pain, performance anxiety, peer pressure... the list goes on and on.
Of course, given that King also had a sustained alcohol problem and apparently at one point abused everything he could get his hands on, he definitely seems like someone who couldn't handle what was going on inside of his head. Thankfully he had the support he needed to overcome his drug problem.
I guess. I mean, he’s a pervert who wants to watch kids fuck. You know he jerked off after writing it.
Why do people love this guy
His early work was exceptionally good. Tommy knockers, Needful Things, Salem's Lot, Misery, Stand By Me, were all pretty good. Not a fan of some of his latest stuff.
I don’t know. His books aren’t that great. His movie adaptations are just okay.
He has some early work that was good and got a lot of attention. It was back in the prime days of horror novels. Right place right time. That’s all.
With the right amount of cocaine I think you or I could probably give him a run for his money
His books are variable, but they usually have like 300 pages of genuinely good character development and scene setting, an inciting horrible incident and then another 100 pages of suspension-of-disbelief. All of the film adaptations I've seen are pretty bad though.
Shawshank? Shining? Mist? Green Mile? Misery? Maybe not everything is a winner, but these are pretty classic movies and some like Pet Sematary, Thinner, Carrie, Dream Catcher and many others are not bad movies. The Running Man wasn't super well made (old one) but a decent movie for it's time. I haven't even seen half of his adapted works and I just rattled off 10 movies that pretty universally are not seen as "pretty bad":
Is using cocaine the writing equivalent of the programmer's Ballmer Peak?
I latent agree with that for all of his books, except for the Dark Tower series. I actually think the Dark Tower series is pretty good. It's very different from his other books though.
He was extremely coked out of his mind during those years.
Let’s put it this way, enough people read IT that IT got three movies and a TV series.


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