gonna eat ya

superenvelope:

“Ruby’s head was killing her.”

I finally powered through all of Ruby Quest today.

I wish I could have read it all last night while it was still dark (or had the patience to wait until tonight), but oh well. It’s still scary as hell besides, and such a fantastic story too.

[SPOILERS AHOY]

I don’t get freaked out by creepy images very often, to be completely honest. I don’t have any serious phobias either, aside from one of sudden flashes and noises when I’m alone or in the dark, which I’ve noticed hasn’t been as bad in recent years (though let me tell you, being a kid in a place with violent thunderstorms sure was interesting. Luckily age seems to have softened that quite a bit). Also, I love looking at drawings of monsters, gore, and other horror, but they never actually scare me.

HOWEVER. In the past few years, I have discovered something that I am heart-pounding, body-shivering, paralyzingly terrified of: nothingness. There have been a few images of fairly innocuous things that scared me so badly that I could not look at again until I calmed down, and they have all been of openings or tunnels that disappear into pitch black. Two images specifically caught me completely off guard and alerted me to this fear that I didn’t know I had (GENERAL IMAGE WARNING, especially if you have a hard time with holes, like myself apparently): one is of a dilated pupil on Mydriasis wikipedia page, and the other is an aerial view of the sinkhole thing that opened up in Guatemala two years ago. These two photographs are literally the most terrifying things I have ever seen, and I still have trouble looking at them without panicking a bit.

So, needless to say, the scariest part for me was absolutely when we first see the split in the Brig here. The introduction of that gap is executed perfectly, right after a dream sequence and a series of hallucinations. We don’t see the gap’s creation or what happened to the rest of the room; it is just there. It is not explained, then or ever. In my humble (and biased) opinion, the Brig is the most sinister and and chilling part of the whole story because the void is there, it gets worse, and nothing else happens in that room aside from it being a slowly disintegrating passage to the other, more important rooms. That is just fantastic storytelling, and I applaud Weaver for doing so well with it (and for successfully giving me a hard and lasting hit of the heebie jeebies).