TINSOLDAT

Every cuisine makes sense within the logic that produced it. The climate, the agriculture, the particular history of a place and its people, what was scarce and what was abundant and what had to be done to make either of them edible. Taste is educated by everything that surrounded you before you had the vocabulary to describe what you were experiencing.

There is a version of every dish that exists only where it was made. Street food eaten in the place it comes from bears a family resemblance to its diaspora version and not much more. The hands matter too, the accumulated repetition of someone who has made the same thing thousands of times without thinking about it, which produces a result that cannot be replicated by someone working carefully from a recipe. Care is not the same as fluency, but you can't fault one for trying.

What tends to survive the translation is whatever requires the least explanation. The rest gets adjusted until the dish is legible to the new audience, which is a reasonable accommodation and a real loss at the same time. The meals that live longest in memory were never meant to outlast the conditions that made them.

I can't help but want to be a part of new traditions. To make something so specific to your own hands that someone else carries it the way you carry the things you cannot get back. To be the unreplicable source. A smell that belongs to you. A hunger only you can answer. The occasional reminder that someone misses the taste.

There is real power in becoming someone's home. The way to a man's heart may truly be through his stomach.

You have a face performed in public, granted by others. A shared hallucination everyone agrees to maintain because seeing each other plainly is apparently worse.

You do not know people, but you have a blueprint. Enough measurements to construct something that mostly resembles the original, until it doesn't, and then you feel betrayed by someone who never agreed to be your projection in the first place. The mind fills blank spaces with whatever material is nearby. Your fears, your history, the load-bearing walls of everyone who ever stood in roughly the same position. You furnish the rooms. You decide what light comes in. You love what you built, or you resent it, and either way you are living inside your own architecture.

There are as many versions of you as there are people who have thought about you. Each constructed with evidence, a careful selection of moments arranged around a conclusion reached long before the foundation was ready to hold it.

The stubbornness comes from living inside a structure long enough that it stops feeling built. When the actual person acts outside the walls you raised around them, it registers as damage. The resentment is about the gap between who you designed and who keeps existing outside the dimensions you grew comfortable keeping them in.

Letting the blueprint go means the whole structure comes down. Most people would rather stay inside.

Dolls and puppets. Dolls and puppets. Everyone loves to play. Most people play without ever knowing they are a part of the game.

Not everyone has the touch of an architect.

A common reading of The Steadfast Tin Soldier takes the straight line of perceived devotion. The soldier looks, the ballerina is looked at, the fire closes the curtain. How tragic. A complete enough tale can lead you to believe you understand its rather pessimistic end.

The one-legged soldier stands incomplete within a mold many other soldiers effortlessly fit. On the other hand, when the ballerina stands on one leg she is perfectly balanced, as if designed to mirror his imperfection with her grace.

She is what he is not. More than that, she is what he cannot become.

The ballerina does not move through the world, remaining on her pedestal in a single gesture, held without the pull of another's beauty to give her purpose. The soldier experiences freedom yet avoids it, letting the outdoors dictate his movements without protest. She endures a different kind of sentence in stillness, only able to look back when she is looked at. They are mirrors, distorted enough to hurt.

The fire is usually read as punishment or cruelty, but fire can take many forms. It does what neither of them can do and removes the distance. What follows is collapse into shared material. The constrictions that once defined them do not survive the conditions supporting them. What remains is not a continuation of either figure in a recognizable way, but something reduced to the same substance, freed from the assignment of expectations.

From there, reinterpretation becomes unavoidable. A temporary merging during the switch, as what they were forced to be cannot persist, yet the transition cannot hold either. What remains has to be understood differently for reconstruction to become possible, a permission for something else to be formed from the same matter. Something no longer constrained by the framework once constricting them.

A different soldier. A different ballerina. Their love resolves in destruction.

Realism in horror is a paradox, both overused and underused at once. Too many writers think realism means sticking to the dry rules of reality, as if accuracy alone makes something horrifying. Horror only needs to feel real enough to stick in your mind and leave it rotting.

I do prefer precision. Lazily done emotional realism fools most people, but it falls apart when someone who knows better starts picking at the seams. Guessing only takes you so far, and the research shows. I like to think I would know how to kill someone if I had to. The trick is transcribing that knowledge into writing, capturing the weight, the tension, the visceral reality, all without ever having to act on it.

Well made slasher and splatter films understand this instinctively. They don't bother with full anatomical accuracy, not because it doesn't matter, but because what matters most is that even a seasoned surgeon walks away feeling they witnessed something they were never meant to see. The crunch of bone. The wetness of blood. The primal wrongness of a body breaking in ways it shouldn't. The best of these films twist realism just enough to stay believable without shattering the illusion.

Most writers don't manage it. They either overdo it until it looks like a Halloween decoration, or hold back until it goes sterile. Done right, horror lingers, festering in the back of the mind like a wound that has decided, on principle, not to heal.

Not all things must kneel before your tastes. If the world were crafted to your precise liking, you would grow dull from the monotony of pleasure. Nothing gleams when everything shines. To appraise a work, be it a game, a film, a story, as a reflection of your preferences is a child's form of criticism. A shallow end for shallow swimmers.

A proper critic (note the word *proper*) slips into unfamiliar shoes without complaint, listens without needing to hear their own echo. They can say, "This is not for me," without confusing that with, "This is not good." But you call things “boring” before you have even made it through the front gate. That is cowardice and laziness disguised as a critique.

Are you so scared of encountering something that does not consider you its center? Does it rattle you, being irrelevant? Or is it worse: that deep, hollow thud in the chest when you realize the fault may lie in your comprehension skills? There's a word for that sensation: growth, but I suspect you've never let it settle in.

IQ tests, review scores, digital nods from your cherished little think-alikes— it's all a polite economy of validation. You scratch their thoughts, they pet yours. You have never come close to a hatred solid enough to stand on its own, one that doesn't beg for witnesses or hide among a gallery of fellow dilettantes.
How low of a point it must be to even fail at being hateful.

That is real. That is passion. That is the blood-and-marrow loathing of someone who *felt* something, deeply, and couldn't bear the insult it became. "Boring," you say. "Confusing." Spare me. If that's the extent of your distaste, then you may as well die.

A shame, really. Such a quiet failure.

"Cringe" is a lazy word. It has become nothing more than a label people use to dismiss what they don't understand, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting for two syllables. Some stories, especially ones tied to internet history, are going to be cringe by nature. Trying to scare someone rarely works anyway; maybe a few flinch, but for most people it doesn't leave a mark. If that is your only goal you will look like a dumb idiot with shoes too big for your ugly feet.

Horror isn't always about causing fear. It's about saying something, and that requires playing with ideas that might feel stupid or childish. Do I find those photo edits with creepy dialogue scary? Or perhaps a video filled with constant jumpscares? No, but that is also not the point, and only someone recycling opinions they half-heard would think it was. People are drawn to these things for a reason, and I am more interested in understanding that reason than dismissing it. Internet horror has its own rules, its own logic, and there is real worth in understanding what makes it land for the people it was made for.

It is not the kind of horror I would make for myself. But I can write it better than any pretentious fucker who has already written it off, and better than anyone who slaps horror tropes together and calls it a story.

I don't need to like something to make it work. That's what sets me apart.