The following contains potential spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder and Stranger Things.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the famous story of stranded boys on an island who descend into chaos, was a haunting reading experience for me in high school. I hated the story’s brutality, its ruthless portrayal of the boys’ downward spiral into meanness, savagery, and madness. Maybe I could have handled it if the story were about adults, but it was about children. As a teenager, still really a child myself, I wasn’t prepared to look into that mirror.
There are many shocking, even horrific, moments in Lord of the Flies, but the most shocking comes at the very end. Abruptly, a violent chase to the death shifts perspective when adults arrive and the children—whom the reader has come to slowly perceive as warriors and leaders and even murderers—snap back into their ordered position in society. Through the eyes of a naval officer, the reader sees them again as kids, running on…
