Part 6

Guys I can’t do it.

If I’m going to critique this, I’m going to need to come from a very real place. A place of vulnerability and honesty. I can’t do that through Sam and Victoria because they simply aren’t developed enough as characters. It would be a disservice to them and me.

So it’s me. John. Hi, everyone.

In the last year and a half, a lot has happened to me. I started going to a therapist and realized very slowly that my parents were not good people. They told me they were, so I believed them. But my therapist helped me unravel the strings of manipulation and **** and I slowly realized they’ve done very little to help me, and a great deal to harm me.

I’ve had to cut off them, my extended family, and my best friend.

I was right in the middle of all this when I read HC. I guess I saw a redemption story, a story about a person changing from bad to good. I think I wanted to believe that about the people that hurt me. The characters were very compelling and I found myself hooked on the story.

When chapter 75 dropped, I remember feeling devastated.

The chapter resolves the conflict between Lindsey, Marcie, and Gina with a Deus Ex Machina. The universe, or god or something comes in and saves the story from having a depressing ending.

I remember feeling livid. Like right here at the most crucial point, we just give up. Did the author write themselves into a corner?

I was upset enough to write out another ending, one I thought was better. I sat down and wrote lists of better ways to resolve this.

God intervening does nothing for the characters. It does nothing for anyone’s story arc. It functionally resets us back to right before Lindsey strikes. It’s not used to make the story better.

It turns a tense and emotionally gripping scene into a joke, where we, the audience, are the punchline for giving a shit about Gina’s friendship with Rina, Marcie’s growing greed for power, or Marcie and Gina’s blossoming relationship.

Ha ha, you stupid fuck, you thought this was serious? You cared? Fuck you! Ahahaha!

After this scene, many plot threads don’t resolve. We have a slumber party with some sexual situations, and then we cut to 10 years later where Gina and Marcie act almost exactly the same as now.

Marcie says she loves Cutie more than Gina. Ten years later, Cutie and Marcie are married, and Gina is still Marcie’s ****, though now they work at an office.

Gina and Marcie treat each other exactly as they always have. If there is any change in their relationship it’s extremely slight.

Hard Candy is a story that the author seems to have missed the point of. Gina doesn’t receive help for her mental illness, she doesn’t change her ways, she doesn’t finish developing.

Marcie continues to choose power and influence over Gina. She never realizes she has become what she hates. She never releases Gina from her servitude.

Every scene of Gina crying as she realizes what a monster she is ultimately leads to absolutely nothing.

And Rina? She’s killed off, offscreen, for shock value.

This story was, for a time, my favorite web novel. It beat Worm by Wildbow for my personal favorite written thing on the internet.

I would go to it every day it updated. I felt giddy when I left comments and the author responded.

This whole thing meant something to me. It still does, somewhere deep down. I still smile when I read anything by the author with the girls in it. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth now.

My abusers never changed, nor admitted any wrongdoing. I think maybe, while Gina never changing is depressing and confusing, in a weird way it reflects reality. The sad fact is that abusers, for the most part, don’t change. That it’s pointless to punish such people. That a curse upon them won’t fix them and make them realize what they did to you was wrong.

Hard Candy is fiction, and according to Mark Twain, needs to make sense. An ending where the plot resolves, the foreshadowed character development occurs, and the bad people see the light and change would make sense.

But reality doesn’t follow those rules.

Hard Candy is a story that is crushingly realistic.