[Report This]Date: August 05 2023 4:44 AM Title: Ending 1: Part 1
Man, with how this chapter went down, I half-expected the Crypt Keeper to pop up at the end of this chapter and make some stupid pun, like, oh, I don't know, "Well, it looks like David and Courtney are learning the agony of ... de-FEET. Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
You know, I have a strong preference for happy endings, and I was actually glad to see that this was only Ending 1, which leaves some hope that Ending 2 will go down a happier route. But let's be honest, even if Ending 2, in its entirety, goes like this:
Part 1
He dead.
Part 2
He still dead.
... it'll still be happier than this one. This is clearly a fate worse than death, one I couldn't have predicted (and I thought of some scenarios that might play out). I mean, not only are David and Courtney going to spend the rest of their lives in absolutely agony, but David is also going to have to see the woman he loves, who he knows loves him back (I know it was important to Emily to get that out, but it probably only made things worse for David in retrospect), forget about him entirely, move on, and fall in love with someone else. Damn, that's brutal!
But, after saying all of that, while I don't like this ending in the sense that it's definitely not how I wanted to see this story end, I can absolutely appreciate how great it is in an objective sense.
As I said above, this was ending was completely unpredictable, but it fit the story up to this point so well, and it just made so much sense. All of the torture David went through up to this point was just a prelude to this, and Caitlin's gradually revealed sadism makes it totally plausible that she would do something like this (and hire others who would be cool with it, too).
Also, the nature of David and Emily's relationship, as we've seen it throughout the story, makes her confession (and David's unheard confession) really hit home. It was well developed, even though we don't really see the two of them knowingly interact before this point beyond chapter 2.
We get to know Courtney just well enough to actually give a fuck about her, so while she's kind of an after thought, I still feel bad for her.
And knowing that Caitlin's villain monologue was really more of a taunt of David and Courtney, as Emily is going to forget all of it, just makes her that much more evil.
However, this ending does leave a couple of questions:
Won't people who know both Emily and David ask her about him? She may not know what, but she's going to know something's up when people keep trying to tell her about this dude that she doesn't know exists.
The same goes for Courtney. Won't it be weird when her teammates are talking about her going missing, and Emily asks, "Who the fuck is that?"
If they could just take Courtney like that, why did it take so long to get a dude for the experiment? Couldn't they have just taken some random guy, or, better yet, scouted out someone that's likely to not be missed?
And this last one is more of just a curiosity, but if Caitlin had made good on her threat to graft Emily to her foot, would Courtney and David have still been alive or would that have killed them?
I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking those first few questions. I don't want to take away from what I again thought was, at least in the technical sense, a really good ending. I just found myself wondering about those first two once it became clear that Emily was going to forget them altogether.
Oh, and I think it was definitely a good call to go with the cruel ending first in this case. Even if Ending 2 is super happy, it'll make it even more so. And if it's not, it'll still look happier compared to this one. I don't know if the inverse would have been true if the cruelest ending was the last one (maybe I'm getting ahead of myself saying that this is the crueler ending, but I don't know how you could get much darker than this one).
Anyway, enough ranting from me. I'll be interested to see David and Courtney's new hell in the next chapter, and I'm definitely looking forward to whatever Ending 2 has to offer!
Author's Response:
Thank you so much for your incredibly in depth review, both this one and the other you left on my other story! You actually covered some very important points that I hope I provided sufficient coverage for in the story refresh! I wish I could give you a reward of some kind on this site for a good review lol, but just know I would give you 5 stars if I could!