Moooooon Chiiiiiiiild!

It’s Thursday, which apparently means that old stuff is acceptable, which is excellent timing because I just last night finished reading The Neverending Story and SOMEBODY ELSE READ IT SO WE CAN DISCUSS.  Or maybe you already have, I don’t know.  I somehow made it all the way through 35 years of my life without knowing that it was a book first.  And it is SO DIFFERENT, y’all.  I mean, the first half roughly accords with the movie, except that Bastian is generally sadder and wetter, and of course there’s more to it, but that’s fair.  I always assume there are things left out of the movie, although the ending is pretty wildly different and involves, like, 80% more Childlike Empress.

But then there’s the ENTIRE SECOND HALF OF THE BOOK, which is infinitely stranger and more astonishing, and in which (tiny spoiler?) Bastian is a giant dick for the bulk of the action.  In case you’re wondering, no, it’s nothing like the sequel.  I imagine that, if the screenwriters actually read that bit, they just drew a big red X over it and were like, “Fuck it.  Too much plot, unlikeable hero, nope.”  And I can’t tell you the other reasons without giant-rock-chewer-sized spoilers, so please read it?  Or tell me I’m lame and you read it when you were eight and thought everybody knew it was a book.  Either way, as long as I get to talk to somebody about it.  This is as bad as when I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the day it arrived, and then was trapped alone in my pit of despair and couldn’t talk to anybody for three days while I waited for them to find out what I already knew.

Also, the name of the magical country is Fantastica, which took me a possibly ridiculous amount of getting used to because I keep hearing the Childlike Empress saying ‘Fantas-i-a’ in my head.