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5th floor common room ; sunday night

Besides his throat, Flick was pretty much feeling better. He'd felt good enough to walk his way into town to pick up some dinner and he felt good enough that, instead of eating in his room, he'd brought the Chinese food into the common room and taken a seat on one of the sofas.

When he flipped the television on, he immediately came upon some awards show and immediately decided that he wasn't going to be watching that because nope. He didn't want to watch a giant circle jerk no matter how funny anyone might be. Just not his thing.

So, while he forked some noodles into his mouth, his journey through the channels eventually landed him on a movie that he didn't recognize. Or, well, after watching it for a few minutes, he recognized the story it was based on but it was nothing that he remembered.

Well, he was curious now. Might as well take a look and maybe get a laugh or two while he ate his dinner.

[Open common room, of course. Couldn't help it, I came across this movie and had to use it in a post considering Sebastian ends up playing the Hatter too.]

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Eleanor was growing fond of common rooms; one met such interesting people there. She wasn't sure if it was acceptable to wander into common rooms that weren't her own, but she was poking her head onto the fifth floor, anyway, when she saw a boy she didn't know watching a movie.

"Is it any good?" she asked, as she leaned against the door frame.

(if it's not too late to pop in!)

"Haven't decided," Flick said, glancing up at the new arrival before he shrugged a shoulder. "It's...different. Yeah, different's the best word I have for it right now. Strange."

[Not at all!]

"Strange can be good," Eleanor mused. "I watched several hours of a marathon about cephalopods working in a hospital. It was horrible, but I couldn't seem to turn it off."

Octo ER was addictive like that.

Well now, Flick was trying to figure out what she'd been watching because that sounded not of his world. He narrowed his eyes and then shook his head.

"Sounds...no, I don't know what that sounds like," he answered honestly. "And I don't think I wanna know either. I've got enough in my head without trying to understand that. Might be the straw that breaks the camel's back or whatever."

Fandom got all the good channels. The ones with the really ridiculous programs.

"It focused more on the blue-ringed octopus's love life than anything else," Eleanor said helpfully. "Which makes you wonder why they bothered setting it in an emergency room to begin with. Why is this show strange?"

She had taken one of the comfortable chairs near the sofa, so she could see the TV. So far, everyone seemed humanoid; that was a plus.

"Because I am pretty sure they're trying to make a classic fairy tale dark and gritty and really, it's just kind of ridiculous."

He nodded at the screen.

"That guy's name is Whitey," he said, having picked up that. "In the actual fairy tale, he's a white freaking rabbit."

"Some fairy tales were rather dark to start," Eleanor considered. "Many of those could be done well, in the right hands. Presumably, these hands aren't, if it's coming off so strange."

She tilted a look at the screen. "The one who's late?" she asked. "That fairy tale?"

"That fairy tale, yeah," Flick said, nodding. "That fairy didn't need to be made any darker. It's already an acid trip in its original form. But, from what I've picked up on this one, they think it could be edgier."

"It feels like a metaphor," Eleanor said, chewing it over. "I suppose most things sufficiently odd do. I've never decided what the metaphor is about."

Growing up, perhaps? That seemed a little mundane.

"The Queen already beheads those who oppose her. How did they make it edgier?"

"Well."

He paused and caught himself watching the movie for a few seconds before he shook his head.

"There are hookers. I don't remember the world's oldest profession having a big part in the original adaptation. Maybe I fell asleep during that part. Might have made it a little more exciting, right?"

Okay, that wasn't what she'd expected.

"Why ..." Eleanor stared. She didn't want to know, and yet, she simply couldn't stop herself from asking. "Why are there hookers? Did they need extras to run the caucus race? Are they using hookers to play flamingo croquet?"

"My guess?"

Flick shrugged a shoulder and sat back, slouching carefully back into the cushions to relax.

"It adds sex appeal to the movie which just means it's gonna sell better. People like their nudity and they like their sexual content. Might as well stick it into a weird adaptation of a fairy tale to make it darker and edgier and grittier."

He smirked. "And those are the words that the channel guide used to describe this movie. Not mine. Definitely not mine."

"But isn't that very depressing sexual content?" Eleanor asked. "Several scantily-clad starving junkies, wanting to service a stranger to get their next fix. I fail to see how that's in the slightest entertaining."

Eleanor was vastly unfamiliar with the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope, naturally.

"So who's been bedding hookers?" she asked. "Whitey? The hookah-smoking caterpillar?"

"Haven't seen anyone sleeping with a hooker just yet," he said, glancing over at her. "One character whose name I don't know because I'm not watching that closely had to work in a brothel but that was about it. There was porn on the television but nothing actually happened."

So, the movie was probably a lot of talk for nothing. "And depressing sexual content is still sexual content. The world's depraved. They don't care. And most people can enjoy something like that because it'll give them a thrill but then they can switch television off and go to bed and not worry about the ramifications of this sort of thing."

[And I might nod off soon but I'm always good with SP, if you are.]

Edited 2014-01-13 05:42 (UTC)

"Perhaps most people don't know many hookers," Eleanor said thoughtfully. Or, perhaps, knew about them in less depressing circumstances than Rapture.

"Though I imagine most people also like not thinking about ramifications," she added. "If you enjoy sausage, best not to think of the pig."

(Always! Good night!)

"Exactly," Flick said, nodding in agreement. "I find that's most of society. Okay to fuck someone over for their benefit because they tend to not think of the person that's getting shit on."

He knew that feeling well.

"My mother called them dog-eaters," Eleanor said softly. "Raised on a diet of dog-eat-dog. Taught only to look out for themselves, and never consider who they might be stepping on."

Her mother had been wrong about a great many things, but her condemnation of Rapture had been spot-on.

Edited 2014-01-13 19:11 (UTC)

"That's not a bad way to describe it," Flick said after some thought. It might have even described him in some instances. "I don't know if people would know how to act if everyone was nice all the time. Harmony and peace and puppies and rainbows? Not for this world. It's all about death and darkness and pain."

Optimism!

"Mother thought it was tied to free will," she said, with a light shudder. "That people can't be innately good, not when they have the choice to be evil. But it's that choice that gives goodness any meaning at all."

"Deep," Flick replied, glancing over at her. "You think that too? That there are no truly good people? Just people that choose to be good?"

Eleanor bit her lip as she considered that.

"I think ... people are," she said, with an odd emphasis on it. "Some are good. Some are bad. Most waver inbetween. We're too complex to be such simple terms. Stripping free will to get at goodness is ... falsifying it. And doing terrible things in the service of good is just causing more suffering and pain."

She flushed. "Sorry," she said. "I don't mean to be philosophizing at you."

She had had a lot of free time to think about Mother's philosophy. Not so much to learn the rules of polite conversation.

"It's fine," Flick said, waving the apology away. "It's actually interesting to hear. It's interesting to me to see how many people do strip humans down to such simple terms. A good person can still do terrible things. A bad person can still good things."

Flick shrugged a shoulder. "What one person considers good could be awful to another. It's really not even fair to assign terms like that to people. No way to do it without getting it wrong."

"There are too many nuances," she agreed. "If someone has good intentions, but does terrible things, how does that weigh out? The calculus has too many variables. I expect very few people consider themselves to be evil, rubbing their hands with glee at the suffering they cause."

Psychopaths were their own special case, of course.

"I think stripping away that agency is its own sort of evil," she continued. "Deciding that you know better than everyone else how they should live their own lives."

Ah, psychopaths. Flick knew a few of those. Back home, they were almost a common occurrence. It was kind of sad.

"You're smarter about this than most people I've met here," Flick said, nodding. "And I don't even know your name. I'm Flick. Live down the hall. I'm a terrible person whose done terrible things but I once bought someone a teddy bear so..."

The last part was some truth mixed in with joking.

"Eleanor," she replied, unable to keep from smiling at his joke. "I've been forced to think about it, that's all. I'm not very skilled at light conversation, but I can discuss the nature of evil for hours. I'm a neither-terrible-nor-good person who has done some terrible things, but no teddy bears yet. Who was the teddy bear for?"

"A friend of a friend," Flick said, thinking back to one of Joi's colony kids whose name couldn't remember. "He'd had a bad day, wouldn't stop crying. I bought it under the guise of shutting him up so we could sleep but he deserved something to hold."

"That's sweet," Eleanor said softly. "The Little Sisters used to make ourselves dolls, for that reason. Something to cuddle close when sleep was elusive."

She was now watching him with some curiosity.

"You're kind to small children," she said. "Why did you classify yourself as a terrible person?"

"One moment of charity doesn't make up for the many moments of lying, stealing, fighting, insulting, and threatening that I've done."

And he was probably going to be adding to that list in the near future.

"I'm terrible because I am."

His dad had made sure he'd known that when he was a kid.

"Did you have reasons?" Eleanor said. "It's what we were discussing. The variables and nuances. I've killed, and I wouldn't call myself terrible. Just ... one who survived."

"Sometimes." Flick shrugged a shoulder. "And sometimes I did it just because I could. Because I wanted to."

"Were you angry?" Eleanor asked softly, remembering how it had felt to set the splicers ablaze. How addictive it had been, venting her wrath. "At them, or at the world?"

Edited 2014-01-17 02:05 (UTC)

"Oh, I'm angry all the time," he said like it was the most natural thing in the world. "At people, at the world, at myself, everything. I don't discriminate when it comes to anger."

Eleanor put her feet on the edge of the chair, so she could hug her knees against her chest.

"What happened?" she asked.

"When it comes to life, I drew the fucking shortest stick of the lot," he said, scratching his cheek. "Must have been a real fuck up in another life."

Eleanor laughed, softly, although there wasn't any mirth in it.

"That's why I'm angry, too."

"You can be in my club," Flick said, half smiling. "We can be the angry for all the reasons in the world club. No secret handshakes because they'd probably piss us off too."

"I try not being angry," Eleanor said. "Anger's too easy. It feels like letting them win."

How well she succeeded at that ... varied. Greatly.

"I just go with it." He didn't know how not to be angry for the most part. "It's there so I just let it be there. I'm angry. Not gonna deny it."

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