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Jan. 5th, 2019 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: amnesia, Maze Runner spoilers]
I first encountered the Maze Runner series by running across the first book in a display at a bookstore. I was bored, so I picked it up and read the first few pages.
My immediate thought was "Thomas is making a huge assumption when he thinks he's amnesic, and I hope he turns out to be wrong."
Like, "amnesic protagonist wakes up somewhere with no idea how he got there and very little idea of who he is or what his world's worldbuilding is like" is so *cliche*. I wanted it to turn out that he was actually an artificial being, some sort of experimental clone or humaniform robot, with pre-implanted semantic knowledge and a pre-implanted first name. I wanted it to turn out that the reason he couldn't remember ever being awake before the elevator was because he *hadn't* ever been awake before the elevator.
I was so disappointed when Maze Runner became popular enough for fandom osmosis to start seeping through to me, and I learned that no, it was the boring old amnesia trope.
---
(This post brought to you by watching the CinemaSins sporkings of the Maze Runner movies. I've been finding that CinemaSins are pretty good for jogging, because they come with subtitles so you don't have to be able to clearly hear what he's saying over the sound of the treadmill. I do wish, though, that he'd consistently subtitle what the characters are saying and not just what he's saying: occasionally he does, but mostly he doesn't. Fairly often he reacts to something and I didn't catch the thing he's reacting to.)
I first encountered the Maze Runner series by running across the first book in a display at a bookstore. I was bored, so I picked it up and read the first few pages.
My immediate thought was "Thomas is making a huge assumption when he thinks he's amnesic, and I hope he turns out to be wrong."
Like, "amnesic protagonist wakes up somewhere with no idea how he got there and very little idea of who he is or what his world's worldbuilding is like" is so *cliche*. I wanted it to turn out that he was actually an artificial being, some sort of experimental clone or humaniform robot, with pre-implanted semantic knowledge and a pre-implanted first name. I wanted it to turn out that the reason he couldn't remember ever being awake before the elevator was because he *hadn't* ever been awake before the elevator.
I was so disappointed when Maze Runner became popular enough for fandom osmosis to start seeping through to me, and I learned that no, it was the boring old amnesia trope.
---
(This post brought to you by watching the CinemaSins sporkings of the Maze Runner movies. I've been finding that CinemaSins are pretty good for jogging, because they come with subtitles so you don't have to be able to clearly hear what he's saying over the sound of the treadmill. I do wish, though, that he'd consistently subtitle what the characters are saying and not just what he's saying: occasionally he does, but mostly he doesn't. Fairly often he reacts to something and I didn't catch the thing he's reacting to.)
