serendipity {sequel to pop} || reddie

Author's Note

thank you guys so much for reading this series! it's been a long and very fun journey! :)

there are just a few things I'd like to go over, if you'd like to read them. no pressure, though!

first off, the scene where It is defeated. ugh,, lmao
when I first wrote pop, I wasn't really intending on a sequel. and I wanted to do something different from the books and the movies with defeating It. I took a lot of inspiration from the book and made it my own thing, revolving around positivity and good vs. evil.
for this book, I, of course, still wanted it to be unique. so I took more inspiration from the movie instead, with the burning of the tokens. I figured that if what they'd used to defeat It was childhood innocence and happiness and goodness, and they no longer had that as adults, they'd need to make room for it to come back. thus, burning the papers. I don't really like how it came out, honestly, it seems kind of dumb; but the intentions are there.

next up: there are some things I left up to interpretation, e.g. what Richie saw in the Deadlights, what Beverly's deal was, and what Richie's big trauma thing was. I still want these to be up to interpretation and open to theories, but I'll go ahead and share what I intended with a couple of them.
!!TW!!
in the book and movies, Beverly's husband is very abusive. and, in the book, there's a whole sequence where he comes to Derry. I cut him out of the picture entirely; his name isn't even mentioned. but Beverly was married to someone abusive before she came back to Derry.
and Richie's trauma. I wanted this most of all to be up for interpretation, so I never explicitly said what it was. and I'd still love to hear different interpretations, because they're all correct in my eyes.
what I intended for it to be was that Richie was drugged and raped at a party in college. a woman slipped something into his drink. at the time, he was also bordering on alcoholism, but he became completely sober for quite a while after that party.
this was a tricky topic to cover. I didn't want to dramatize or, god forbid, romanticize it, but I didn't want to say it explicitly, either; not even Eddie knew the full story, although I think that by the epilogue he does.
I specifically wanted to shed light on female rapists, because they're definitely out there and they're very rarely discussed. there are more male rapists, but that doesn't mean that female rapists don't exist. they should be talked about equally as much as men. it's a very important topic for me.

finally, I want to say how much I enjoyed writing this book and how much I grew from it. I'm honestly not a big fan of phosphenes (one of my other books) or- and don't come for me here- mixtape. do not get me wrong, mixtape is incredibly well-written, and the author took chilling details from the book and incorporated them incredibly. but both my book and mixtape have a similar problem- making Richie's parents abusive.
I'm not mad about it- I wrote it to cope, and I'm sure the author of mixtape had his reasons. but there's just something inherently problematic about over-dramatizing abuse like that. especially when it downplays the canon abuse Eddie suffered. I'm not proud of it.
but this series was different; I've learned and grown, and I'm happy with how this turned out. it's given me lots of writing experience, and I'll continue writing more books in the future.

thank you all for coming on this journey with me. I really couldn't have done it without your support. love y'all :)