jennfrank.

responsible storytelling

content notes: alcoholism, self-harm; PTSD, suicidal ideation; abuse, reactive abuse; mobs; possible Stranger Things finale spoilers (lol)

In 2014 an acquaintance emailed me a transcript from an IRC channel. In it, a group of young men stated, in plain, explicit text, that the collective goal of GamerGate was to get the three or four of us to kill ourselves. They were gleefully strategizing how to go about doing this. (From then on, my imperative was clear: just don’t die!)

I remember how shaken I’d been—not for the obvious reasons but, rather, because I’ve always been terrified of being pushed past my breaking point, of saying something so irretractable, indelible, that it could actually destroy someone else. Poisonous words spring to my mind effortlessly, and I resent myself for even thinking of them. You destroy a person from the inside out by piecing together a false narrative from their biographical details, a false causal connection: you zero in on a person’s vulnerability, and then you take another painful fact about that person’s life, and then you create a link between the two, almost like a type of red-string conspiracy theory that confirms their worst fears about themselves, that they’re worthless or undeserving or unlovable, or somehow dangerous to be around. It’s as simple as blurting “maybe if you weren’t so X, your father would not have done Y.” It’s a game of two truths and a lie, where the false causal link is the lie. How do I think up such evil so easily? Simple: it’s how I’ve always talked to myself, as long as I can remember.

There is an expression, “give me the man, and I will give you the case against him.” It means you can trump up charges against pretty much anyone, if you hate them enough. I think about that a lot.

In the spring of 2025 I saw this woo-woo video on social media where this guy was explaining that ‘demons’ and ‘angels’—really, regular humans bent on either destruction or on healing—both operate in the same way, by noticing and excavating painful wounds. I think he maybe even pointed out that the main difference between the two is, the destructive type is deliberately confabulating, while the other type is trying to apply a lens of clarity or even of grace.

A couple weeks ago I was dwelling on my lifelong terror of blurting out the exact most evil thing while under psychological duress. It began to dawn on me that I have, not only survivor guilt, but palpable shame at the extent and degree of my survival drive. I emotionally and cognitively understand that everyone has an equal right to be here, which is why an overdeveloped survival drive—“I didn’t come this far just to come this far”—feels so desperate and so shameful. As a child I fought back way too hard, always against peers who’d never had anything in their lives ever go wrong. People always jump backward like “oh my god,” because a little child who goes straight for the jugular is so monstrous. Eventually you get it together, get it under control, but now you’re walking around with the horrible secret that is PTSD, and the rest of your life feels like everyone is constantly getting into your face trying to see what it’ll take to get you to break.

The seductive promise of the mob is that, if you murder someone with a thousand small cuts, no single person will ever be held accountable for the outcome. But this is exactly backwards. In actuality, every mob depends on a fall guy. One person will be the last person to touch the Jenga blocks, toppling the tower, and that’s the person who will be forced, by the collective and by the mob itself, to bear 100% blame.

On New Year’s Day I asked my best friend to drive me to, and through, the coffee drive-through. She agreed, and we hopped into the car. After some distance, I finally piped up: “Sometimes TikTok is amazing,” I said to her. “It’s amazing to see a comment and have a lightning-bolt realization, where someone just says something, and it’s the kind of thing you never, ever would’ve arrived at on your own in a thousand years.”

I asked my friend if she remembered what ‘reactive abuse’ is. (It’s a misnomer; it’s really just “a reaction.”) It’s one of the mechanisms behind DARVO: an aggressor is needling a person who is trying to not react. When the person does inevitably react, the aggressor points to them and goes, “oh my god! I didn’t do anything! I just said X!” No, X is the last thing the aggressor said, and now the person who is being needled looks unhinged. I guess people initially learn to do this in childhood, but I never had siblings.

Anyway, someone commented on TikTok that she’d finally realized her alcoholism was her “reactive abuse.” She had taken her instinct to lash out—to even react at all, giving others the satisfaction—and had choked it, using alcohol to turn her reactions entirely inward. I read this comment. I reread it. I read it a third time. I sat there incredulous.

“When I was a little kid,” I said to my best friend, “I’d hit my head against the wall.” She gasped. “It’s a behavior that we associate with autism,” I continued. (Which makes complete sense if you think of autism, a type of developmental trauma disorder, as a ‘turning inward.’) “But very early on, I guess sometime in that all-important window between the ages of 2 and 6, I’d made this very conscious decision to take all the anger I felt toward my parents and to turn it in on myself, because I was so scared of hurting someone else.

“Little boys have grandpas who might teach them to stick up for themselves,” I continued. “But, whether it’s the religion, the region, the generation—“

“We were taught to sit there and take it,” my best friend said, nodding. “I struggle with this, too.”

We looked at the timeline of my drinking, when it began, its upticks and its downcycles. It began with, and corresponded with, being needled to death. Instead of lashing out, I’d choked it back. (“People are always trying to get you to react, to prove to others that you’re the problem. When you react with just drinking, they go ‘ok I guess we can work with that’ and constantly point to that instead,” I suggested.)

“Do you think you’ve overcome it?” my best friend asked me.

I paused, turning the thought over in my head. “Yeah,” I said, sounding more defeated than anything else.

It’s always been like this, since childhood, with kids trying to compel me to react to them, and me, battling myself to not verbally kill-shot someone in a way they’ll never forget. “Kids don’t consciously realize that what they’re perceiving is PTSD, but they do intuitively recognize the kind of nervous system that is very easy to dysregulate.” Easy pickings.

I didn’t bring it up, but I’d recently watched Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep. I loved it because it fuses together Kubrick’s The Shining with Stephen King’s The Shining. It’s a movie about defeating generational trauma—the original point of Stephen King’s novel—while honoring the narrative tragedy, as well as the aesthetic, of Kubrick’s version. But it’s also about energetic vampirism, about agitating a type of hypersensitive person so that, agonized, the person just fucking sprays qi everywhere. I was a little gobsmacked: wasn’t this exactly how I’d visualized it? And here it was, a movie projected onto my wall, depicting this as little breathy sprays of ionized particles, puffing out in clouds. (The vampires freebase the qi amongst themselves, which raised my eyebrows.)

Instead, I mentioned my best frenemy from elementary school. At one point, exhausted by her bullying, I’d sunk to my knees and sobbed. “Why are you doing this to me,” I’d begged her.

“Oh, Jenny,” she’d said, smirking above me, “you make it so easy.” A preteen sociopath.

“There was something wrong with her,” my best friend said.

“She was a pred—” I said, then stopped myself. “She was the youngest of, like, five kids,” I said. “She was always so insecure, so envious. I think she already felt lost in the mix, long before her dad actually got sick.” I frowned. “You know,” I said then, “[a male classmate] saw it. I remember in eighth grade he said to her, hey, your hair is too long. It’s, like, stringy. Why don’t you cut it like Jenny’s? Because she had fine, thin hair, like I had, and she wore it super long so that it looked even finer and thinner. He was right, it would’ve looked better shorter. But also,” and I sighed, “he was trolling her. He knew how mean she was, and he was being a little chaos goblin, getting under her skin.”

My best friend laughed. “Is it bad that that makes me like him?”

“No,” I said, laughing too. “No, he was always really good.” Really perceptive, really justice-oriented, really good at trolling people.

“You should add him on Facebook,” my best friend said. “I recently added him, after you talked about him. He immediately accepted.”

“No,” I said wistfully, “I don’t think I will.” Life goes on.

What do we owe one another? I keep asking myself this. I continued to ask myself this throughout the Stranger Things series finale, which Netflix released on New Year’s Eve.

The episode closed out on the idea of ‘responsible storytelling’ and believing in better endings for ourselves and others. Not to hamfistedly state the obvious, but it’s a metanarrative about the Duffer Brothers’ own responsibilities to their ensemble cast—their wish for the kids to “level up” and never have to go through Hell again.

The episode is understandably polarizing. Did I expect a time-travel loop story with a lot of moving parts? I sure did. But I felt relief that the Duffers elected to resolve the characters’ emotional arcs instead.

So I got what I wanted out of the episode. I’ve been hating Stranger Things for a while now, just because of how much the show took from its younger castmembers’ lives. They’ve been trapped under this hellish microscope for the past, what, ten years? I came into the finale just wanting to see the show end.

So when a character begins a high school valediction speech with “Our childhoods were stolen,” I gasped and then cried. I was glad that the creators/writers ‘graduated’ the ensemble by giving them narrative catharses they could be content with—instead of yielding to any demands for fan service. It was this commitment to ‘responsible storytelling’ that ultimately won me over.

A friend of mine who is in her 20s had anticipated, ahead of the finale, that any one of the three queer young adult characters would be tragically killed. I’d warned her that there is a lot of pushback against this narrative convention: nothing good comes of torturing characters and then killing them off before their happy ending. In fact, we should witness more characters finding happiness. This is responsible storytelling: it shows us, the viewers, the ‘better lives’ we can aspire to.

Will’s best life isn’t with his friend Mike; it’s a life lived freely and audaciously. Nancy’s best life also goes ‘off-script.’ And anyway, her own parents are so unhappy, why would Nancy ever marry a high-school sweetheart and repeat their awful pattern?

Hopper gets two ponderous speeches in: first he implores Eleven to defy the stories about monstrousness she’s been assigned by others, and to dream bigger and better for herself; then he warns Mike about isolation, self-punishment, and telling ourselves lies about what we think we “deserve.” Monologuing sucks, but these felt important and earned.

The final episode was polarizing, first off, because the Duffers apparently give two whole shits about reconciling actual plot holes. But also, there was a narrative simplicity, a plainness of speech, that I’m really coming to appreciate at my big age. The third issue, though, is that people can’t trust a happy ending. It makes me think of Agent Smith explaining to Keanu that people more readily ‘believe’ grief and suffering—so that’s what The Matrix keeps giving them.

In the Stranger Things finale, almost every character ‘learns,’ and almost everyone receives a sort of happy ending. I do believe that most people can grow and change. The few characters who meet tragic fates are the ones who don’t want to learn, the ones who choose darkness. Fans were clamoring for more darkness, more tragedy, more death and destruction and loss. Many have even called it “cowardly” to not kill off more characters. At this particular socioeconomic moment in time, though, I think shooting for optimism is the gutsier choice.

I told my twentysomething-year-old friend that I’ve read so much speculative dystopian fiction that has subsequently come true, I’ve begun to wonder if it’s irresponsible to even write it. Or, rather, “maybe we shouldn’t warn others about the problems we foresee without also offering a solution,” I suggested to her.

“Huh!” she said, ruminating on this.