dream girls fest

This is

What Home looks like.

Happy children. Wide toothy smiles. 

Hugs for a family photo. Arms around each other.

Standing around the kitchen. Eating and drinking at the island counter.

Bilingual conversations in the living room. Voices you need headphones to muffle. 

Huddling close to the fireplace in winter. Grasping for a spot in front of the fan in summer.
Home is not always a place. Home is the people we adore. 
Home is where everything lies. Home is in the little things.
Home is that dusty photo album on Uncle’s cluttered desk.
Home is that one stuffed animal you are too fond to throw. 
Home is dancing to the oldies in the living room with you.
Home is stargazing in tents on the backyard lawn with you.
Home is friends who ride on all the rollercoasters with you.
Home is sitting in the living room as Aunt braids your hair.
Home is Brother dropping crumbs from Mom’s soda bread.
Home is Dad tucking you in again at night after nightmares.
Home is you, me, and everyone around with a beating heart. 

Resisting Conformity 

Uniqueness defines humanity. Sameness is the desire of the people in the world of Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel The Giver. The story follows a boy named Jonas who’s tasked with the job of becoming the next “Receiver of Memory”. He is the new person in charge of keeping all the memories of the past, pain, and pleasure in a world that has erased any semblance of those things. After receiving these memories, he decides to challenge the status quo. The 2014 film adaptation employs techniques such as tone, both in a visual context through color and an emotional one through the score and sound, and Jonas’s styling to convey his rejection of conformity. 

 The film starts with Jonas riding his bicycle to the Nurturing Center along with his friends Fiona and Asher. Here, he meets Gabriel, a newchild he quickly grows fond of. The novel follows different events, starting with a telling of feelings around the dinner table. Jonas doesn’t meet Gabriel until his father brings him home a couple of chapters later. “It was the first thing Jonas noticed as he looked at the newchild peering up curiously from the basket. The pale eyes” (Lowry 25). In the Nurturing Center scene, the film takes the focus away from their connection, instead making it the first time Jonas sees color—the red of Fiona’s hair. This establishes his uniqueness within the first five minutes. Everything around them is gray, but Jonas suddenly sees Fiona’s hair color and the voices are drowned out by melancholy music, highlighting the importance of this realization and “heighten[ing] the effectiveness of the image” (Cahir). 

When Jonas is gifted his position, he has to travel to the edge of the city. The film puts distance between him, his peers, and his family with this location as opposed to in the novel where it is located behind Fiona’s workplace—the Center of the Old. As he goes to work for the first time, the viewer sees him wearing an outfit that makes him stand out. Fiona even comments on how important it makes him look. As the film progresses, the viewer sees his outfits change to be more casual within the Giver’s abode, such as a loose-fitting t-shirt and pants. Within the memories, his outfits match the scene, such as him wearing a jacket, beanie, and gloves during the snow and sled scene and more traditional clothes with the dancing scene. In the novel, he wears the same tunic, sometimes in different colors, but the reader doesn’t see his clothes change in a drastic way like in the film. This styling makes him feel further differentiated from the others. 

At first, all the viewer and Jonas see is gray, but as he receives memories from the Giver, the viewer sees the world fill with color at the same time he does. No one else can understand what he’s going through, despite his desire to share his newfound knowledge. In the novel, he conceals, only sharing when necessary, until the end when he travels to Elsewhere, letting the memories go. On the other hand, the film has multiple instances in which he attempts to share his experiences, such as when he simulates the feeling of sledding with Fiona or convinces her to stop taking the injections that inhibit their emotions. These sequences work to develop a romance between him and Fiona that is not explored within the novel. There is a clear shift in tone in the scenes they are in together. Often they are slowed down as music plays over them, creating tension, especially during the scene where Jonas kisses her. 

The last third of the film reflects the last part of the novel with Jonas’s final act of rejection, escaping to Elsewhere with Gabriel. The elders try to stop his escape, disliking his defiance. Intense music plays in the background, setting the tone for the emotions the viewer is meant to feel. The viewer is at the edge of their seat, waiting to see if Jonas can successfully escape. 

All in all, the film allows the viewer to visualize Jonas’s resistance and rejection of the sameness due to seeing colors within the memories, different styling, and tone established through the score.

Community and Chrononormativity in Queer Speculative Fiction

There is an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End as well as Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s 2019 novel This Is How You Lose the Time War are examples where two are better than one. While the former presents a story of two teen boys living their last day together and the latter presents two women time travelers on opposite sides of a years-long war, both are stories in which characters find community within each other. Community can commonly be defined in one of two ways: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common, or a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing attitudes, interests, and goals. People normally think of a community as large and encompassing, but these stories show that it can come in different forms. 

In They Both Die at the End, the main characters, Mateo and Rufus, live very different lives before they meet each other. At first, Mateo is cautious and reserved, only being very close with two people, his father and best friend, Lidia. On the other hand, Rufus is more daring and willing to take risks, tight-knit with a group he calls “The Plutos”, living in a foster home. This is shown plainly by the difference in their situations when receiving the Death-Cast call. Mateo is at his apartment alone reading a blog on his laptop, while Rufus is out with his friends Tagoe and Malcolm beating up his ex’s new boyfriend. Mateo reflects on his call, thinking, “The list of people I’ll miss…is so short I shouldn’t even call it a list: there’s Dad…my best friend Lidia…And that’s it” (Silvera 12). Contrast this with Rufus, who is close with the people in his foster home and asks to have a funeral after he receives his call. “You guys gotta do me the biggest favor. Wake up Jenn Lori and Francis. Tell them I wanna have a funeral before heading out” (Silvera 30). Despite the fact Rufus’s community is larger in the beginning, both his and Mateo’s offer support to one another, thus fulfilling the notion that a community can mean finding fellowship with one another. 

Having a community can also mean having strength, having courage, and being brave. There is nowhere that is more apparent in showcasing that than with Mateo’s growth after meeting Rufus. He learns to be adventurous and have more fun as being with Rufus brings out another side of him. Rufus offers for him to ride on the back of his bike and while initially he refuses, the next time, he vows to be brave. “This bike isn’t the worst thing…It’s freeing…When we reach our destination I’m going to do something small and brave” (Silvera 157). When they reach their destination, Althea Park, he jumps off the bike. It may be a small action, but as Rufus points out, “he’s…always want[ed] to do something exciting, just [was] too scared to go out and do it” (Silvera 158). This is an achievement for Mateo who has lived his life thus far paranoid of the things that could happen instead of living in the moment. Even something as small as jumping off the back of a bike is exciting. After this, he makes more adventurous choices, doing the “Rainforest Jump!” at the Travel Arena and singing in front of the crowd at a club called “Clint’s Graveyard” (Silvera 180 & 192). His development shows the importance of having a community, no matter who’s a part of it. 

Finding a community can be like finding a home as well. Near the end of the novel, Mateo invites Rufus back to his apartment and Rufus says, “Take me home, Mateo” (Silvera 211). It is as if by this statement Mateo’s home—which is seen as his safe space—is just as much his as it is Rufus’s. In his chapter in the book Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature, entitled “Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, Familial Disruption, and the Space of the Home”, author Angel Daniel Matos makes a similar observation, saying, “...We must acknowledge that it is Rufus’s presence in the home, and not the home itself, that emanates this sense of safety” (191). This fits into the concept that home is not always a place and that people can find home within each other. Mateo and Rufus fell in love in a day, finding themselves along the way and establishing a sense of belonging with one another. 

In This is How You Lose the Time War, the circumstances are vastly different, but the main characters, Red and Blue, still find one another, redefining what it means to have love transcend all. Despite being soldiers fighting on opposite sides, Red for the Agency, and Blue for Garden, they communicate in secret with coded letters. Manifesting in different ways, these letters start off in a sort of snarky manner with lines like, “I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards…” and “Remembering our last encounter, I thought it best to ensure you’d twist no other groundlings to your purpose, hence the bomb threat” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 10 & 14), but, eventually, as their letters back and forth continue, unforeseen feelings develop. “I stand at cliff’s edge, and—hell. I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I?” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 87). Blue reciprocates these feelings, professing, “Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 94). With these letters, they inspire each other to keep going with their language, becoming each other’s reason to continue. They think they’re being inconspicuous, but soon enough, the Agency as well as Garden catch onto their relationship. Red expresses contempt for them. “Garden, panicked, slithers shoots upthread to catch her, chase her, kill her; Commandant, feeling this, sends her own agents in pursuit. Fuck them” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 111). Blue expresses a similar sentiment with this harrowing ending statement to the novel, “I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But, maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win” (El Mohtar and Gladstone 130). Even with all odds against them, they choose each other, going against the very systems that birthed them. Together, they resist. 

Both of these novels present narratives of the enduring nature of love and community no matter how much time one may have. As Wendy Gay Pearson puts it in her article, “Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory”, “queer speculative fiction…speaks to…issues of queer time and the ability to critique chrononormativity (the normative sense of time across the life span) to subvert assumptions about linear time and “normal” life.” They Both Die at the End gives readers a glimpse into a world in which one knows the day they’re going to die, making them think about the impermanence of life, while This is How You Lose the Time War goes in the opposite direction, creating a world in which time travel is possible and people can change how the world looks by moving a single mug to a different spot than it was in the original timeline, but achieves the same questioning by the reader. With their different approaches to critiquing chrononormativity, both novels do a fantastic job of creating characters that challenge the readers’ assumptions about what it means to be human and how to live their lives. 

In the end, these stories show how valuable spending time with loved ones is. The current reality doesn’t let people know when they are going to die nor does it have time travel to try and prevent that death from occurring. But, life is not meant to be lived worrying about the future or the past. Life is meant to be enjoyed in the present and to the fullest, surrounded by good company. 

Works Cited 

El-Mohtar, Amal., & Gladstone, Max. (2019). This is How You Lose the Time War. Simon and Schuster. 

Matos, Angel. Daniel. (2023). Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature. In Routledge eBooks (pp. 183–194). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003269663-18 

Pearson, Wendy. Gay. (2022). Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1214

Silvera, Adam. (2017). They Both Die at the End. Simon and Schuster.