Loving the monster you made
On creation, rejection, and the parts of ourselves we refuse to love
You know that moment when you’re building something and it’s glowing in your mind like something enchanted? You can see exactly how it’s going to be. Majestic, coherent, elegant. Finally, your big break!
Then it starts taking shape in the world and you realize: this is not what I ordered.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein captures that feeling perfectly.
If you’re looking for an actual review, Aidan Alan wrote an excellent (and very entertaining) one HERE. There’s a lot to be said, but I really want to hone in on one moment.
It’s the moment Victor finally succeeds, finally brings his vision to life, and immediately recoils. Not because the Creature is violent or evil, but because he doesn’t match the image Victor fell in love with in his head.
Instead, the Creature shows up unfinished, awkward, stammering in simple sentences. Asking to be loved before he knows how to behave.
The gap between vision and reality
Victor doesn’t just abandon the Creature. He rejects him with disgust. The tragedy isn’t that the Creature becomes monstrous, but that he’s never allowed to be anything else.
We do this with our own creations.
We say we want to write the book, but we hate the draft. We want to learn a new skill, but we despise the version of ourselves who hasn’t figured it out yet. We want children, legacy, and impact, but only if it looks respectable from the outside.
(On that last point—have you ever noticed someone look visibly disappointed or ashamed at the mere mention of their child’s name? And please understand, I’m not passing judgment in any way. I’ve long felt like I was a disappointment to my parents, even though they’ve never expressed this in any way. It’s more like empathy, I guess. Like if I was in their shoes, I’d be a bit bummed).
There’s something unsettling about realizing how conditional our love can be.
Especially when it’s pointed at something that came from us.
I’ve had an intense love/hate relationship with my own writing. Sometimes I wonder what could cause me to feel so provoked by words on a screen, as if they’re personally assaulting me. But in a way, it is personal.
Beyond victims and villains
It’s easy to read Frankenstein as a warning about ambition or science or playing God. And sure, that layer is there. Mary Shelley was writing in a time obsessed with mastery and conquest of nature.
But the film leans into something more relational.
Victor wanted the triumph of creation without the ongoing labor of care.
And the Creature knows it. He doesn’t ask for perfection. He asks to be seen, to be taught, to be met halfway. When he’s denied that, his rage isn’t random. It’s brought on by the fact that he was abandoned by the very source that brought him into the world.
But this isn’t about simple blame, with Victor as the “bad guy” and the Creature as a pure victim. They’re bound, whether Victor likes it or not.
The Creature isn’t an external problem that can be eliminated (in fact, he literally can’t be destroyed, as the movie shows repeatedly!).
He keeps returning again and again, as the living consequence of Victor’s refusal to love what emerged imperfectly.
What if the things we’re most ashamed of aren’t evidence that we failed but that we walked away too soon?
What if the parts of ourselves that haunt us the most are just creations that never received the care they needed to finish becoming?
Meeting our “monsters” head on
This is where the movie surprised me. The ending could have been bleak as hell. Mutual annihilation. No resolution, no relief.
But del Toro gives us something else.
Not a clean redemption or a neat undoing of harm, but a recognition. A return to the truth that creator and creation were never really separate to begin with.
The Creature is Victor’s work made flesh. His ambition, his pride, his desperate need to prove he was worthy of the love he was never given. All of it externalized, walking around with a pulse.
Which means hating the Creature was just another way of hating himself.
And this is where the story stops being about laboratories and torches and starts hitting closer to home.
In our own lives, rejection rarely looks like literal destruction. It doesn’t usually burn villages or leave bodies in its wake.
It shows up more quietly. As chronic self-criticism. As shame loops you can’t seem to interrupt. As hostility toward your own thoughts, tendencies, and unfinished edges.
What the film points at is the possibility that this doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Recognition changes the dynamic.
When you stop treating what you made as an enemy, something loosens. The energy that was tied up in rejection shifts. What’s been demanding attention through pain can finally be met directly.
(Have you ever noticed that those recurring, icky thoughts and feelings—the ones you keep swatting away like a pesky fly—often dissipate the instant you acknowledge them? Or that the messy draft you’d been avoiding wasn’t nearly as bad as you thought it was? In fact, I finally had the courage to face a “problematic” chapter I’d been avoiding for years only to discover I’d already rewritten it and it was actually really good!)
Maybe that’s the quiet hope at the center of the film. That even when creation goes wrong, even when the outcome looks nothing like the fantasy, wholeness is still possible.
Not by undoing what was made, but by refusing to keep turning away from it.
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Kate, your writing beautifully captures the profound truth that the real tragedy is not an imperfect creation, but the refusal to accept it. Through the metaphor of Frankenstein, you show how turning away from our own creations...or the unfinished parts of ourselves, makes them feel monstrous. Your essay quietly reminds readers that without care, attention, and acceptance, nothing we create can ever truly become whole.
This really stayed with me, Kate.
Especially the tenderness you bring to that first moment of recoil, when what we’ve made shows up unfinished and asking for more than admiration.
What struck me most is how clearly you name the real rupture: not creation itself, but abandonment. The refusal to stay once the fantasy collapses. That feels painfully familiar — in writing, in self-judgment, even in how we relate to our own history.
I appreciated how you resist easy binaries here.
The monster isn’t a mistake to erase or a victim to sentimentalise; it’s a consequence that keeps returning until it’s met.
And it's that framing that makes the turn toward drafts, shame loops, and avoided chapters feel honest rather than metaphorical.
There’s something quietly hopeful in the way you describe recognition — not as redemption or fixing, but as staying.
Turning toward what emerged imperfectly and refusing to keep walking away.
It’s a generous and deeply humane piece.