olreid:olreid:olreid:the thing that continues to really get me about eskew is how horrifying it&rsqu

olreid:olreid:olreid:the thing that continues to really get me about eskew is how horrifying it’s not? both for me to listen to and for david to live in. david chooses eskew over and over again. he walks out of london into the tunnel; he leaves the safety of the burn unit; he kills the child that saw the city’s nightmares so he wouldn’t have to; he rejects kenneth’s pleas for help, he dismantles the plane that is taking him away from eskew. eskew is the one place where he is always right to be afraid; where he can’t help but be lonely because, increasingly, he is the only one left who is real; where anyone would be sad because it never, ever stops raining. eskew is the externalization of all his symptoms; it provides justification for every single way in which he feels bad or broken. in eskew, david wants to jump off a bridge not because he’s suicidal but because the things under the bridge are calling out to him, pulling him under; he wants to isolate himself in his relationship not because he’s afraid of commitment but because his wife has been consumed by the city and is now bent on his destruction. all of his responses are eminently reasonable, rational when viewed from the outside; who wouldn’t be scared and traumatized when every day is a battle for your life with an enemy so formidable and changeable that you have no hope of ever making out its shape nor escaping its grasp ? no, all of that makes perfect sense. the real horror is feeling that way in a place that is not eskew, where your anxieties don’t manifest themselves in reality, where jumping at sounds and shadows only leaves you looking paranoid, and where picking away at your relationships doesn’t reveal secret tricks being played on you, but instead clearly shows your own woeful inadequacy when it comes to sustaining interpersonal relationships. eskew is the comforting respite; outside its walls is where the real horror beginsanyway just thinking about how the last thing that david has to fight in order to break free of eskew is not some monstrous final boss of the city but instead his own reflection and what that says about who has been preventing him from leaving eskew all this time it’s like. yes david tries to drive out of the city, he tries to walk out of the city, he begs the city to let him leave. but when you start to think about the fact that a city which spends the entire podcast trying to manifest things that david wants, either explicitly or implicitly - from a new shape for kenneth to a partner that helps him feel less alone - fails to produce only one thing, which is any kind of exit, you have to wonder if that’s because the city doesn’t want david to leave, or because the city - which has been attuned to david’s subconscious wants and needs the whole time - knows that as much as he says he wants to leave, he’s not being truthful. is eskew inescapable because eskew wants to trap david, or because david himself wants to be trapped?  -- source link

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