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I’ve started noticing it while doomscrolling YouTube Shorts.

A jealous werewolf king imprisons his fated mate on one app. A werewolf rejects his destined mate for someone else on another. A vampire billionaire plots revenge on yet another. A dragon prince discovers a secret heir before I’ve even finished refilling my latest obsession: a tumbler packed with pebble ice and water.

Half the time the names don’t even change. How many Alaras and Lucians can one industry produce?

The funny thing is, I don’t object to monsters.

I love fantasy. Science fiction. Horror when I’m in the mood for it. Give me dragons, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, fae, sea serpents, eldritch horrors lurking beneath forgotten waters, and I’m willing to hear your pitch.

What I object to is treating monsters as shortcuts. Because monsters are fascinating.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the monsters aren’t why these stories feel repetitive.

The shortcuts are.

Which got me thinking less about the monsters themselves and more about what monsters have always represented.

Full disclosure: I don’t like Twilight. Never have. I got through the first two books, but the third was harder and the fourth almost impossible. I tolerated the movies more than the source material, and never once liked Bella and Edward as characters—two people whose self-hatred, insecurity, and boundary-crossing got dressed up as forever-love for four books running. Needless to say, that confession remains unpopular with the fan base, but one of the joys of literature is the subjectivity, isn’t it? I even follow someone on YouTube who’s built her whole channel on being openly critical of Twilight’s problems while still loving the series anyway, a position I respect and have never personally been able to reach. I just never loved it. I don’t think I ever will.

But not liking something doesn’t stop you from thinking about it, if anything, it sharpens the question. Strip away the vampire baseball and the werewolf drama and what’s actually happening between Bella and Edward is stranger than “great love story,” and it’s not even one-sided, which is what makes it more interesting than the average toxic-romance template. Bella wants to be seen, permanently, immortally, by someone who will never stop looking at her. Edward wants the one mind on earth he can’t read, the only silence in a world of constant noise. Neither of those is really love. They’re both solving a personal problem and calling the solution “devotion.”

They aren’t unique. Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s grave. The Phantom builds an entire opera house’s worth of architecture around a woman who never asked to be watched. Fiction is full of people who love so hard the other person becomes optional—a fixed point to orbit rather than someone to actually reach.

Some stories want you to feel that discomfort on purpose, the unease is the craft, not an accident. The best of them save the real reveal for the end. Tangled (2001) does this on purpose: Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Alan, the edgy newcomer the audience is trained to distrust on sight, opposite Shawn Hatosy as David, the familiar, established best friend everyone assumes is the safe choice. The twist is the misdirection itself, the one who looked dangerous isn’t, and the one who looked safe was obsessive the entire time.

So here’s the question underneath all of it: when does watching someone become louder than loving them?

Sometimes our mouths move faster than our minds.

Sometimes our bodies move independently before our brain can register consciously what we’re doing.

Sometimes exhaustion, fear, or anger closes the distance between thought and action until there’s barely any distance left at all. We say something we don’t mean forever, only for a heartbeat. We do something we would undo instantly if time allowed it.

Most of those moments disappear.

Some don’t.

During the years I cared for my grandmother, we had nights when exhaustion got the better of both of us. One night she misheard something I’d said and became convinced I’d called her a name I never would have used. The argument escalated. Frustrated, I threw the television remote in her direction. I wasn’t trying to hit her, but it struck her in the chest anyway.

More than anything else, I remember the look on her face.

I can’t undo that moment. Intention doesn’t rewrite consequence. Love doesn’t erase hurt. Regret doesn’t travel backward through time.

It happens to us all. Nodding off at the keyboard mid-sentence. Eyes drooping during a show, reopening on a completely different episode (or worse, the credits). You weren’t sleeping. You were resting your eyes. Sure. Whatever helps.

And it only gets more complicated with age, doesn’t it? That surplus of energy we once took completely for granted has quietly negotiated itself down. Then factor in circumstances: tossing and turning, unable to find a comfortable position, a body and mind locked in high alert waiting for a call, running through a list, going past the point of no return out of sheer stubbornness and a flat refusal to admit there are limits.

There’s a word for the space where sleep and waking can’t agree on who’s in charge. Liminal, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Not in. Not out. Suspended at the door.

We spend more time there than we think.

From 2019 to 2022, I was a Pampered Chef consultant on top of my day job as NewPages Managing Editor. The gig itself was nice on paper: work from home, run your parties on Facebook, no garage full of inventory, no hauling gadgets into someone’s kitchen. Low pressure, low risk, or so it seemed.

Here’s what the recruitment pitch doesn’t tell you: the whole thing runs on connection, and “200+ friends” on Facebook is not the same thing as 200 real, tangible relationships. Some of those names were core friends. A lot of them were distant family, old coworkers, people I’d liked a few photos for over the years but hadn’t actually talked to in forever…if I knew them personally at all. Selling requires reaching past that surface layer into something real enough to ask someone for their time, their money, their living room—and that gap between the friend list and the actual friendship was where most of the exhaustion lived.

Then the pandemic hit, and the math got worse. Asking people to host a virtual party during a year of layoffs and economic free-fall didn’t just feel awkward, it got you shamed for it. Guilted for daring to ask, even gently, even apologetically. I was supposed to keep hitting a quota built on relationships that were mostly performance, during a year when even real relationships were straining under the weight of everything else.

Language. Semantics. Word choice. If two words are essentially the same thing, then why do we struggle so much to figure out sometimes the perfect word to embody something? Having lived in the house that I have lived in for 39 out of my 41 years of life and being a first-time homeowner, I became fixated on the idea house versus home. Since I grew up here, it truly is my “home”—memory and ghosts live here.

Most everyone knows the difference between house and home in our bones, even if we’ve never stopped to examine the why. One is a structure while the other is something you carry with you.

The same quiet revolution happens in other word pairs. Mother is the formal term—clinical, correct, used in paperwork and introductions. Mom is something else entirely. It’s the word worn soft by use, the one you say when you’re scared or homesick or calling from three states away. And then there’s the pair that carries the sharpest edge: father and dad. Anyone can be a father. It takes something more—time, presence, choice—to become a dad.

What makes these pairs so powerful isn’t that the informal version is “better.” It’s that the shift between them contains a whole story. And this week, we want you to create that story.