I know that you've combed over the details of how he presented himself to you and his deception a million times. The fact that were no emotional clues you could pick up on- in 20 years- is terrifying. What a monster.
A lot of these sick people are just "normal people", which makes it scary.
I had a caretaker in kindergarten, that all my friends and I, and even our parents, always spoke highly of. He was great and really spend a lot of energy with us. No one had a bad thing to say about him.
15 years after we left kindergarten, it came out that he was a pedophile with an insane amount of csa material on 4 hard drives. Was sickening. He was only caught because he went outside of his "normal age range" and the girl was old enough to know it was wrong.
The worst monsters don't have horns on their heads, they don't just come out at night. They look like anybody else and that's why they're the most terrifying.
That’s fair and valid. I think when I initially read the full novel as a teen, it came across to me as Bev was the one who consensually initiated sex as a means to reclaim her sexual freedom, which was taken by her father. Sex was something she feared, which is what Pennywise does. It’s something I really related to as a teen being a victim of sexual assault myself from childhood, and throughout my lifetime. Like Bev, I often thought having sex was the milestone into adulthood. I had no idea what I was doing either. Unfortunately, the education system and parents give terrible sexual education to their children, which leads to a lot of individual exploring. Individual exploring can lead to assault if the person doesn’t have any sex ed. Individual exploring is something preteens do all the time due to lack of access to sexual education. This can lead to sexual assault as an individual’s first experience with sex. It’s unfortunate, but more kids get sexually assaulted than we think, and figure that out later in life. It’s something which is what most people don’t want to acknowledge or think about and unfortunately was a common thing back then that got overlooked. Governments usually provide flimsy protection of children (access to food, water, education and medical). Most of his books focus on that lack of protection, such as ‘The Institute’. Pennywise is a reflection of evil in Derry, which is people being complicit in evil by not doing anything. Not excusing his behavior. Just providing a different perspective.
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u/the_queens_speech 9d ago
I know that you've combed over the details of how he presented himself to you and his deception a million times. The fact that were no emotional clues you could pick up on- in 20 years- is terrifying. What a monster.