Oh my dear writers. - by Maxwell Okikiola

Some writers deserve to be stripped naked and receive several lashes for the trauma they constantly inflict on their readers and viewers. You could be reading a book, or watching a movie, and suddenly find yourself wondering, “Why would a writer, or the writers in charge of this movie, write something this excruciating?” It’s like they don’t have human feelings like the rest of us. Or are they just writing from that non-emotional place? Are they trying to punish the reader, punish the viewer? Are they deliberately trying to torment us and put us through so much psychological pain that we find ourselves crying while watching the movie? Maybe they find it fun. Maybe they just sat in the corner of their room, hoodie pulled over their faces, grinning as they wrote about how a mother died while trying to save her daughter, only for the daughter to eventually die too. Maybe, as they were writing it, they were smiling to themselves, finding ways to make it even more emotional for the viewer or reader. They were just picturing everything and patching it together while grinning like some kind of evil mastermind. Do they not have hearts? Because I was watching this Korean movie called Along with the Gods, and the beginning alone had me questioning the writers' sanity. At the beginning, you have a firefighter trying to save a child who is trapped in a burning building. Eventually, he gets the child out through a window, but because the fire is consuming everything around them, he jumps through the opposite window with the child in his arms. As he's falling, there's already a rope trap around his body, but the rope is getting thinner as they descend. He tries to pass the child to someone else on one of those cranes firefighters usually use to reach buildings, but he can't because the rope is already giving way. Eventually, the rope snaps, and he's falling to his death. The safety net, the one thing that's supposed to cushion his fall, is just a few centimetres away. He knows he isn't going to make it, so he turns his body around and uses himself as a cushion for the little girl he's trying to save. Then he hits the ground. The child survives. At first, it seems like the firefighter survived too, but eventually you realise that what you've been watching is actually his spirit. He didn't survive. And that's just the beginning of the movie. Because he died nobly, they tell him he's a paragon. So a spirit comes to take him away to the other side. He keeps saying that he wants to see his mother, begging them to let him see her, but they won't. They take him away and explain that he's a paragon, something they haven't seen in 49 years, so they have to take him to the other side. Then you find out that he has to go through another seven trials to determine whether he's truly worthy of going to heaven or being reborn as a good person or whatever. I thought that was it. Eventually, they reveal that one of his family members has already died and has become a vengeful spirit. He only has two family members, his mother and his younger brother. His mother is sickly and mute, so his younger brother is the only person who can take care of her. Tell me why the younger brother dies just a week after the older brother. If you see the way they wrote this, the mother was just left there all alone. The way they kept putting everything together, one tragedy after another, was just... I wanted to cuss the writer out so bad..... It was that excruciating to watch. Eventually, they tried to make everything work and make it more beautiful toward the end, but it can't be undone anymore because they already died. And that woman just... How could they? Omo, some writers are mad o.

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