There have been times in the past where I feel like I’m getting close to being suicidal (idk how to phrase it, sort of like a yellow flag thing) and I always just felt like “the writing was bad.” Like surely there is something controlling my life and not just that, it’s bad writing.

The story of the movie is very meta. The main character is told that they are not in fact a normal person living a normal life, but they are actually a character from their favorite childhood show. The series ended on a cliff hanger. The main villain of the series locked the main characters into a nightmare. The other character reveals this to the main character.

The movie is just already really good and hits a lot of gender things for me and was sort of sad because of that… But the tantalizingly feeling of being able to just escape to a better reality by something so simple as offing yourself is terrifying. It hit startlingly close to a bunch of themes I already experienced for whatever reason. Like feeling like my life is fake and part of a show or movie. And seeing it just gave me this dread. Like those stories where people hear someone trying to talk to them from outside of a coma. And it happened in a period when I was, idk, I guess just extremely pessimistic about the state of the world. It was awful. (Not in a bad way, just the feeling.)

I’m just glad I watched it with a bunch of friends who were also queer and many gender queer. I hadn’t even come out to my friends yet about that topic, and I don’t think I have either, but I’d seen a lot of people say the movie was really devastating because of that stuff, so I knew going in to be ready. But… Wow. The reality escaping stuff just came totally out of left field and it’s not even something I knew to be wary of in content or anything.

I’ll close with this. The movie is good, I enjoyed it over all, but that hit like a sledgehammer. Also, I am safe. None of these things are anywhere close to attempts or ideations or anything of the matter.