Friday Black

Ben is the narrator and protagonist of “The Era.” As someone who wasn’t optimized at birth, he is overly conscious of the difference between himself and his peers, as well as his family. He is often looked down upon by members of both groups, which makes him desperate to fit in. He tries to pass himself off as a friend to his class bullies but acts oblivious when they decide to make him the butt of the joke.

To deal with the emotional trauma of being ostracized, he becomes dependent on a mood-enhancing drug called “Good.” That dependency drives his motivation throughout the story, leading him to seek it from the McStowes, a family he wouldn’t have any other reason to visit. However, he becomes frustrated because the McStowes want to help him live a drug-free and more compassionate alternative lifestyle instead. He is resistant at first, still convinced that Good will resolve his personal issues, but when he returns to school, he is opened up to the possibility of a life that doesn’t fall back on Good to cope with his trauma. The story ends with him rejecting an extra dose of Good and expressing Father McStowe’s influence as he repeats one of his jokes, suggesting the shift in his character.

William Cropper, referred to as Fuckton throughout “Light Spitter,” is a clumsy college student who decides to commit a school shooting in retaliation for the way he’s been treated in life. Fuckton explains in a monologue to Porter that he was bullied early on in life and wished to be left alone. In college, he found that being alone isolated him; despite his attempts to reach out to student organizations, nobody wanted to be his friend. This worsened his emotional state and caused him to become resentful of the world. As a result, he attempted to begin an ideological movement called the Order of the Stingray with the sole purpose of affirming the lives of ostracized people by robbing the world of its meaning and joy.

When Fuckton kills Deirdra, he is shocked by his actions and quickly abandons the desire to kill anyone else. He promptly retreats to a bathroom, where he dies by suicide. In the afterlife, unable to remember much of his life, he meets Deirdra’s spirit, who is transcending into an angelic state. Fuckton, on the other hand, is destined to dissolve into nothing. He later realizes that all that’s left of him are the resentful feelings that drove him to violence. As he comes to remember what caused that resentment and recognizes it in Porter, who subscribes to the Order of the Stingray, he realizes the emptiness of his own creed and sets out to change Porter’s mind. In the process, he reconciles with Deirdra and commits an act of self-sacrifice to help Porter. As such, Fuckton is a dynamic character whose arc illustrates how empathy can break cycles of violence.

In “Through the Flash,” Ama is a young woman trapped in a time loop caused by a weapon of mass destruction. She is forced to live through the day of the detonation over and over again, which she can preemptively restart from her perspective by prematurely dying. Before the first iteration of the destructive event known as the Flash, Ama was an athletic teen who played on a school sports team.

Her mother died by suicide two months before the Flash, which took a great emotional toll on Ama. She came to resent one of her schoolmates, Carl Samuel, after he made disparaging remarks about her mother’s suicide. After the Flash trapped their neighborhood grid, she subjected Carl to intense violence and torture, transforming her grief into bloodlust with the knife her mother used in her suicide. This inherited weapon illustrates the cyclical nature of trauma as Ama lashes out to soothe her emotional distress, cultivating a similarly bloodthirsty spirit in Carl. She developed superspeed in the Loop, which she used to commit further violence as Knife Queen Ama. Eventually, she and Carl became equals in their conquest of the neighborhoods, calling themselves war gods and alienating themselves from the community through violence. This continued until Ama became bored with their way of life and disillusioned with her coping mechanism in the Loop. She committed herself to a new way of living focused on affirmation and nonviolence. As such, she is a dynamic and well-rounded character.

When the story begins, Ama dreams of her mother from before the Flash. Her brother Ike theorizes this may be a sign that the Loop is collapsing, though they are unsure of what will happen when it does. Ama continues to use her mother’s knife but only in self-defense. She regrets her past actions and refers to her violent life as “Old Ama.” However, her neighbor Mrs. Nagel tells her that there is no real difference between the old and new Amas, suggesting that the past is part of Ama’s history but doesn’t preclude her evolution. Ama is forced to engage with Carl when she and Ike consult a neighbor on the significance of her dream. When Ama meets him again in her home, she decides to pacify him and spare him out of mercy in the hopes of rehabilitating him, reinforcing that even the worst people can change and the most destructive cycles of violence can be broken. The story ends with her and her family welcoming the Flash, consoled by the fact that they are not alone.