vermivox:

“your friend is dead, and their corpse is inhabited by something only you can see for what it truly is" is already good horror. but “you begin to love the thing that wears their face”? the blasphemy of it. terror turning into desire. grief turning into longing. being enticed by what should repel you. it twists the knife deeper, because the horror is not based on deception anymore. the fear comes from recognizing the monster in its raw form and finding beauty there. you’re not clinging to scraps of your friend, you’re surrendering to something other, something wrong, and loving it. you’re not holding onto a ghost of the past, it’s the monster itself that you choose

I imagine this is what it feels like being a parent watching your kid grow up.

Oh no the baby isn’t a baby anymore, the baby is gone forever, mourning the baby… But the toddler is pretty cute. Love the toddler. Oh no the toddler is gone! Time to start loving the preteen. Then the teenager. Then the young adult…

Then suddenly there’s a 30 or 40 year old who has not only been 100% ship-of-theseus’d into an entity that has zero things in common with what the parent originally loved, but also now has zero characteristics that the parent would ever find appealing in literally anyone else

and going by anything about who you actually are, your parents ought to hate your guts, but somehow they still love you? Because love is unconditional! And therefore meaningless!

They don’t love you for who you are, because that would be conditional on you remaining who you are. They love you for no reason at all… except that you occupy the same general space as… the thing they decided they were gonna love before it even existed.

Which doesn’t exist anymore, because you replaced it (and everything else that’s been here since then). But, turns out that doesn’t matter! Yay!

…okay i guess I strayed off of the original topic of this experience being Horror from the viewpoint of loving the thing that replaced your loved one

. …But that’s how it always works, isn’t it. Horror is almost always horror from both sides.