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warning: this solo contains references to past abuse (including fairly graphic references to the potential for it to get lethal), past alcohol abuse (by Vanya’s parents), and somebody being a queerphobic and transphobic a*****e on Reddit (including misgendering an IRL trans person and spouting anti-trans conspiracy bullshit).

Also, a blanket SPOILER WARNING for Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024). If you haven’t seen the movie but want to, please tread carefully! Some pretty major plot aspects get discussed and spoiled.


Rocking up near to the apartment building—more specifically, to the garage that he still wasn’t entirely used to using—Vanya bit back a shudder. His bones ached, even without the exhalation managing to shake him. The freak lightning storms all over the city disquieted him. They’d been doing that for, like, a week or something? Hard for him to tell. Vanya couldn’t recall what day when the storms had started, and the time between those days didn’t feel like it made sense. As he waited for a light to change, Vanya’s hands itched to check his phone, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if he did.

Doing the math on how many days had passed, or trying to count them off, wouldn’t help when he really, really couldn’t remember what day they’d started.

Not that Vanya could blame himself for forgetting. He’d tried to blame himself, because he could have been more diligent, and he knew that……but every time he chased that mental rabbit, he couldn’t ultimately justify his own mental gymnastics. Hard to recollect such things when days all bled together, blurring into an endless string of time without a day off, of mentally tallying up the tips collecting for him in the delivery app where he’d started picking up extra shifts, of waiting for the little alert that said app had sent his payouts to his checking account but never having a sense of when that would actually happen until it did. Hope, the sort of hope that got involved in counting down days, hours, minutes, and seconds like that? Hope was what really killed a person, in Vanya’s experience.

Hope for something better made Vanya’s nerves itch.

Hope made things that ought to have been quick—for example, waiting for the red light—feel like they took an eternity to happen, and then, when they passed, left Vanya reeling, as though he would pass out, be sick, and asphyxiate in his unconscious state from the sheer weight of time that had flown by him in what he would’ve sworn actually felt like it had only taken a few seconds.

Hope made time slow down like trying to wade through waist-deep water, made existing in temporal reality feel like Vanya struggled to swim through an ocean of honey and molasses, one that he kept drowning in, sinking further and further down, the harder and harder he tried to escape. In situations like that, hope was the worst kind of tease. The curse of Tantalus brought to bear on Vanya’s own life, really: he felt himself sinking, but he saw the bright light above him that begged him to fight harder and break free to come join it, and Vanya wanted few things more than to do that somehow, but fighting for it only made the honey-swamp engulf him faster.

Fighting only made the light of hope shrink, smaller and smaller and smaller, as it rose further and further out of Vanya’s grasp, and left his fingers with nothing to show for any of this but the ache from having tried so hard.

Which wasn’t to say hope was completely pointless, or that it had no reason to exist. Hope worked for some people—bright, beautiful people who sparkled like stars and shone like LED bulbs in the otherwise suffocating darkness of Destiny City—and Vanya was happy for them. All those people who actually deserved the magic they’d been given.

Hope worked like Fang, like Demeter, probably like the pink-haired Mirror senshi he vaguely remembered rescuing once or like Helene, whom Vanya knew to exist—he’d helped bring Winston back to the apartment after Murikabushi had backed down because he couldn’t let Order senshi power down around him until he’d left the Mirror himself—but whom Vanya hadn’t really reached out to, like, ever. Muri had been the one to stop Helene and his Saturn Knight boyfriend, to ask them to please help with Achird. Even knowing that both of them were senshi of Saturnian moons—something that made Vanya want to trust that Helene was maybe nicer than his stern, cold exterior suggested, or that maybe he’d at least be that way for Farbauti in particular—Vanya couldn’t bring himself to do the work of reaching out.

Then again, he thought as the light finally changed to green, it was hard to reach out to somebody on one’s senshi phone when he hadn’t powered up into Farbauti in………however long it had been since his second-to-last day off from working at one or the other of his jobs.

The actual last day off, Vanya had spent doing laundry. Enough of a backlog had amassed between him and Winston that Vanya had spent the entire day sitting at the laundromat, scrolling through Reddit in between rounds of sorting or folding shirts and jeans, socks and underwear, or biting back on the need to cry every time the driers finished and the clothes had still been, if not sopping wet, then damp enough to be uncomfortable. Damp enough to have caused mildew if you tried to put them away like that. Vanya’s original plan had been laundry, grocery shopping, and a powered patrol with Demeter as soon as Autumn had gotten off work. In the end, he’d had to text her and cancel, citing the laundry as his reason.

Nah, everything’s fine, it’s my fault, he’d sent her, despite his own mind screaming at him that someone else in the apartment could have also done laundry, considering Winston didn’t do much else that Vanya knew of. I let things build up for too long and now it’s like, deal with it or deliver people’s snow day orders naked

Don’t worry about it, his thumbs had typed while something inside him had screamed about how wrong that statement was and how badly he’d lied to one of his friends. I’m always fine

Fortunately for Vanya, pulling into the building’s lot did not bring with it the same stress that he assumed plagued people who drove cars. Last year around his birthday, he’d wanted to protest Taiki getting him a little moped, but in the past several months, the Vespa had proven itself a lifesaver several times over. Not least because it enabled Vanya to pick up part-time shifts on Doordash to supplement the pay he got from working full-time at Nagisa’s. Electric, the Vespa didn’t require gas, only that Vanya slide into a parking space and plug the moped into a charging station. He’d initially assumed that there wouldn’t be such a thing at his building, but there had been. Part of some citywide initiative funded by some wealthy donors or other, apparently.

Much as Vanya itched to question that entire situation and what was going on with it—who were the donors in question? what did they get out of helping people so (ostensibly) selflessly? where were the hidden clauses and secret traps, and when was the other shoe going to fall on Vanya’s head as punishment for acting like he had any right to use a resource that Gerard, the building’s super, had specifically told him he was allowed to use?—Vanya generally didn’t have the energy to look this (hypothetical) gift horse in the mouth.

Getting off his moped, Vanya moved carefully. As much as he could, he tried to minimize the sound his sneakers made against the pavement. He looked around every corner, every potential blind spot he had. The lack of anyone else in the parking lot only reassured him so much, but that probably tracked. Right now, Vanya’s wallet felt stupid heavy, down in the inside pocket of his winter coat. Having an actual significant amount of cash inside it for once made him extra aware of his surroundings, hypervigilant because he needed to protect what he had.

Exhaustion of the past several weeks notwithstanding, it really had been a good night. In the Vespa’s front basket sat a huge, foil-lined, insulated carrier that he normally used to keep food hot while getting it to customers. Inside, all of the rejected orders from tonight’s shift waited for him, evidence that maybe some cosmic force out there felt bad enough for Vanya to give him something nice for once. Luck had been on his and Winston’s side tonight, sticking them with food they could stretch out for days—maybe even a week if they were smart about it—and at least some of it was the sort of high-quality s**t that Winston felt entitled to have for every meal, rather than the Normal Food that Vanya kept hoping his roommate would get accustomed to (or at least quit complaining about).

He moved to the Vespa’s front basket, looked through the bags he’d piled up in one of the foil-lined, insulated carriers he used to keep food hot while getting it to customers. All the rejected orders from tonight’s shift stared up at him, most of them still smelling perfectly fresh. He and Winston had gotten lucky tonight. So many idiot kids and young adults from Crystal, Azure Valley, Romano’s, and Sovereign Heights had gotten it in their heads that sending each other food nobody wanted was a prank, even though you already paid for it in the Doordash app. Nobody wound up wanting the food, the attached messages (if any) often confused the recipient as well as Vanya, and the restaurant didn’t get stiffed on payment. Sometimes, the rich kids with stupid friends—or stupid enemies, or whatever—felt bad enough to throw Vanya extra tip money.

Eleven different people had done that tonight, handing Vanya extra money on top of whatever tips he racked up in the employees’ version of the app.

Okay, fine, four of those customers had not been stupid rich kids ******** around, but more or less normal customers who’d just who hated the Doordash app capping how much of a tip they could give. The total mirror opposite of every customer who ever performatively apologized while tipping Vanya $2.50 on a hundred-dollar order, those customers—whether stupid kids or normal people with morals—had shoved more cash at Vanya while taking their orders. In his mind, that made all of them

In one case that matched neither the description “normal behavior” nor that of “stupid kids who ******** around with their rich parents’ credit cards,” the customer had left an envelope labeled VANYA R. on the little table on their front porch where they’d wanted him to place the order. Held down with a quite fancy-looking paperweight, it had contained cash enough to cover the entire bill—the one they’d already paid in the app because that was how it worked—plus a thirty percent tip on top of that. Weird but they’d ordered from one of the ritzy, upscale places in town, the ones that made Vanya feel disconnected from his own body with the sheer weight of how little he belonged there, even when he was just picking up an order.

Even now, peeking in the contents of a box of eggplant parmesan from a little family-owned Italian place where the staff was always effusively nice to him, part of Vanya wondered if he should’ve knocked to ask the fancy, ritzy big spender customers what the deal was with the envelope.…… But on the other hand? Several cars had been parked around their place, like they were hosting some kind of party. More importantly, their bill alone had been a good $650. They’d included $200 extra with an enclosed notecard that had read Keep the change! For excellent service! =)

Vanya was in no position to turn down $850 if somebody wanted to just give him that. First thing in the morning, he’d need to get to his credit union and get that, plus the other extra cash from tonight, deposited. For now, he needed to protect all these extra funds as if he was protecting Taiki’s life.

Once he was mostly satisfied that nobody would swoop in out of nowhere with a knife or some ******** up s**t like that, Vanya knelt beside his bike. His backpack made a dull thump as he set it beside him on the pavement. Then, out came two different protective chains. Not that he’d read any statistics lately, but based on his own observations? Crime wasn’t as bad in this part of town as Vanya had expected when he’d first moved to Destiny City, so maybe Vanya didn’t need to worry that much. Granted, some of that was probably due in no small part to youma and Negaverse officers generally (if unintentionally) discouraging people from being out at night for longer than was absolutely necessary. There was a perfectly fair argument to be made that Vanya got so protective of his moped for no actual reason.

………But, like, still. Not preparing for the chance of someone trying to steal his moped would’ve made it Vanya’s own fault when somebody inevitably did.

I wouldn’t blame anyone else in a similar position, though.

That thought flared up as Vanya clicked the second chain together, then spun the eight little dials marked with various letters and numbers, which made up its combination lock. If Autumn had had an electric moped get stolen, it would’ve been the fault of the thief. If Todd had gotten robbed—not that anyone would try it, given how tall Todd was and how physically imposing he could be—then Vanya would have pinned the blame on whoever had decided to rough up and steal from an alien wolf-boy who only ever meant harm to anyone when that person was harming others. And if anything happened to Vanya like that, when he inevitably apologized to Taiki for having been so stupid and “letting himself” get stolen from, Vanya could imagine what Taiki might say about it.

Don’t apologize, all earnest and serious. Maybe dressed up a bit more. Because if he was honest with himself, Vanya was thinking about a moment in a film he’d seen recently more than the reality of how his boyfriend spoke to people or Taiki’s patterns of diction.

Still. Much like Jack Haven’s Maddy-Tara of I Saw The TV Glow, and the Tara-Tara from said film’s The Pink Opaque, an obviously loving pastiche of Buffy the Vampire Slayer dressed up as a show-within-a-film, Taiki was super-hot and didn’t take s**t from anybody. “Expert on demonology” may not have described him quite as well, but he had more experience as Aokigahara of Saturn than Vanya had as Sailor Farbauti, senshi of rage. Considering youma and some of the other monsters lurking around Destiny City, maybe Taiki might as well have been an expert in demonology.

By rights, Vanya should have been a kind of Maddy-Tara in his own right. With that thought nagging at the back of his mind, he stood up. Ruffling a hand over his hair, he remembered a different scene from the film: Maddy, who didn’t know yet that she was really Tara, sitting near Owen-Isabel while [he/she/they] tried to sleep after watching an episode of their show.

“I’m getting out of this town…,” Maddy-Tara tells her friend. “Soon. I’ll die if I stay here. I don’t know how exactly, but I know it’s true.”

Once upon a time, Vanya had felt that same way. He would have died if he’d stayed in Shreveport. Not from something as cool and interesting as being trapped in the Midnight Realm by Mr. Melancholy, megalomaniacal big bad extraordinaire, but something totally mundane and stupid. Something like a raging drunk throwing an empty bottle at him, which would then hit him in the exact wrong way. Or shoving him into the wall too hard, cracking his skull, sending blood and viscera all over everything. Or getting fed up with any of the infuriating things about Vanya and choking him until he just stopped moving.

He’d gotten out of Louisiana, though.

He’d looked at the reality of the situation, realized how inevitable his own death would have been if he’d stayed there, and he’d gotten out. Hung around the city a few days, to see if either of those inveterate drunks—or more likely Uncle Grisha, his mother’s older brother—would care enough to even send the cops after him, or come drag him back themselves. He’d tried to give them the chance to change. To even lead him on with the promise of changing their behaviors, the way pretty much everyone Vanya had met seemed to think ill-tempered, inveterate drunks behaved. But they hadn’t done it. Hadn’t even tried. Ritka Bulgakova-Renault had looked at him from across a street, then gone into one of her expensive-a** boutique liquor stores that imported real Russian vodka as though nothing had happened.

He’d gotten out of that place, just like Tara.

So, why did he still feel like he was suffocating in the middle of an unimpressive parking lot that no one cared about? Why did he feel like there was anything else he deserved to ask for while occupying what should have been a proper place for him? Crouching beside the electric moped that Taiki had probably intended to make Vanya’s life easier, not for him to use it picking up so many extra shifts at a second job……hesitating about going inside even though Winston already might have taken issue with the food not being warm enough, and staying out here so long certainly wasn’t helping……counting down all the reasons why he didn’t feel like a character from a movie……

If he could’ve met “Maddy”-Tara, she would’ve described him the way she did Isabel: “[she]’s a scaredy-cat. She’s kind of the main character, but she’s also kind of a drip.”

Hard to imagine anyone describing Vanya as super-hot or someone who didn’t take s**t from anybody. Extremely easy to imagine them calling him a drip and a scaredy-cat. He didn’t even—

Vanya gasped. A heavy vibration in his hip pocket cut off his thought. Shaking like a fawn who couldn’t walk yet, he pushed himself back up to his feet. Did he forget to clock out of the Doordash app? Did Mr. and Mrs. Nagisa need him to come in early tomorrow, or cover for someone who had something come up? Did Winston decide to harass him about where the Hell he was?

None of those things. Pulling out his phone, Vanya immediately noticed the little orange circle with white cartoon mascot at the upper right corner of this notification. Reddit, thank ********, and it was a reply to one of his comments. Without a second thought, Vanya clicked it. As his phone worked through the steps of opening the app and getting to the right place, Vanya perched himself on the Vespa’s seat.

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Why do ******** queers have to bend over backwards to make that movie sound like it’s doing anything intelligent, the reply read, staring up at Vanya in black text on a white background. It’s not smart, it’s ******** incoherent. What ******** magic are you talking about, it was all in Owen’s head. The movie builds up a whole warning about the dangers of nostalgia but then tries to act like nostalgia is the only thing keeping Owen alive. The movie acts like he’s letting himself die but it doesn’t even tell us what from. The only monsters are in the stupid in-universe TV show. Iswtg, you freaks just can’t help yourselves. Everybody’s lining up to jerk this movie off because the director thinks that he could ever be a woman. None of you even care that he probably wants to make little kids think they’re trans and get them hooked as lifelong customers of big pharma (unless you think that’s a good thing and based on your comment, you probably do lmao). Grow the ******** up and accept that it’s a total dumpster fire of a shitty plotless movie! Why can’t you all just get with reality’s program like the rest of us!

Vanya wrinkled his nose and frowned at the comment. On its own, that pile of reactionary word-salad was more than bad enough. Other users were already downvoting it, as it well deserved. Someone had already quipped back, That’s a lot of emotion for someone else saying “I liked a movie, also it reminded me of a different movie that I like.”

But……scrolling up, he took a moment to reread his own comment. Refresh himself on the context of what this a*****e even thought he was replying to. First of all, the specific subreddit……both did and didn’t make sense, Vanya guessed? r/horror did have regulars who didn’t enjoy TV Glow, but most of them had the decency to be respectful about it (or at least only normal people Internet levels of disrespectful, not full-on misgendering).

Next, there was the thread this had all started in: literally someone asking for “quiet horror” recommendations and welcoming discussion because they knew that people had different definitions of “quiet horror” so they wanted to read a variety of opinions that might help give context on different recs.

Then, there was Vanya’s actual comment. He’d made it from his main account, so there wasn’t any hate or invective. No pretending like he didn’t know things or like he couldn’t read perfectly obvious statements, all so he could make other people angry and bait them into saying something stupid. No bullshit where he pretended to twirl long blonde hair around one finger while using a Valley Girl drawl to say that he didn’t like men with too many brain cells, he-as-Amanda-Jeanne-the-Wannabe-Tradwife only liked manly men who could make him feel like a dainty little princess and provide for the seventeen blonde, blue-eyes babies he hoped to have one day, Lord Jesus willing.

Even by the higher standards Vanya held himself to on his main account, the original comment was so vanilla, it was extract (especially relative to Vanya’s personal standards that he shared with no one):

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Normally, I’m the sort of person who enjoys quieter and more experimental horror films more as art pieces than as horror. But TV Glow, I appreciated on both levels. While it didn’t have as many “scream out loud” terror moments as I think some people expected or wanted, it served dread and the slow-burn horror of the mundane on a level like nothing else I’ve seen recently.

Standard “Roman Polanski is a terrible person and it’s a horrific, disgusting indictment of international justice systems that Samantha Geimer has never gotten to see him truly held accountable for what he did to her” disclaimer, but TV Glow reminded me a lot of Rosemary’s Baby in a good way. The moods are very different between them, it must be said. Rosemary’s Baby goes more for a feel of paranoia and the uncertainty that comes out of Rosemary being gaslit for the entire film vs. TV Glow giving you (like I said) dread more than anything, this simmering skin-crawl feeling of something being wrong, existing just outside the realm of what we can articulate. Then, when the audience learns enough to articulate what’s happening, that doesn’t mean the characters, who are actually experiencing the situations, will do anything about it.

Still, despite their differences, TV Glow and Rosemary’s Baby, to me, are both masterful takes on the idea of someone in a modern, post-Enlightenment, “oh, we’re all so scientific and serious, magic isn’t real” America confronting: A. very real supernatural forces, and B. mundane situations that are actually horrifying when you subject them to any kind of scrutiny. In Rosemary’s case, the horror comes both from the magical/religious aspects of the story (she is pregnant with Satan’s baby), and far more affectingly, from the fact that her husband’s manipulation, gaslighting, and abusive behavior toward her was not seen as normal, acceptable husband behavior at the time. Even if people weren’t telling her to calm down because he’s “just being a man,” she couldn’t escape anywhere, either. Women couldn’t have their own credit cards or open their own checking accounts in 1968, and she was pregnant on top of it.

For “Owen”-Isabel, though, there is a kind of gaslighting going on, but on the smaller level, it’s not being done with the same deliberately malicious intent as Guy and the coven manipulating Rosemary. Mr. Melancholy displays active malice toward Isabel and Tara, but he’s only in one scene. Most of the time, all we see are normal people doing normal things, which help reinforce a system that gaslights everyone. Instead of the active paranoia and uncertainty of one’s own mind that Rosemary experiences, Isabel learns from society how to gaslight herself into believing that she really is “Owen,” and that nothing else is possible for her. It’s a slow, creeping kind of dread and imo, Schoenbrun, their creative team, and the cast execute it beautifully.

Honestly, had he written a single thing worth screaming at like the reactionary replying to him?

Vanya frowned, hesitating a moment. If he’d been signed on to any other account but his main, he would have clapped back without a second thought. He would’ve posted the troll comment immediately. And maybe he should’ve let things go, instead of fighting on the Internet—especially with the food at risk of getting cold. Writing out a whole essay for someone who didn’t want to listen might’ve made the whole thing pointless, but……maybe instead……

Vanya’s fingers flew across his phone’s keyboard at lightning speed, well-practiced at commenting like this:

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Hey.

Hey, buddy.

Look here, friend.

THERE IS STILL TIME.

Not Vanya’s best clapback by any means. Not even his best clapback specifically aimed at a bigot. But still, as he shouldered the carrier from the Vespa’s front basket, then the one from the back, Vanya felt good about posting that. Plus, he and Winston would eat like kings tonight (give or take a few minutes to reheat one dish or another).

wc: 4,300.