Talk:Penpal/@comment-4533241-20180507120450/@comment-4533241-20180510031703

I lost my reply because Fandom is lovely and I forgot to copy, but to sum up what I was going to say without trying to remember it and typing it all back out: schools and police are useless, and will either downplay anything or completely disregard it as speculation. And we can't blame Josh because the kid was 12 and apparently thought he was sleepwalking up until he got kidnapped.

And then this is the part where I blamed the mom the most harshly because she doesn't work for the school or the police and could've easily just told Josh's parents that there was a pedophile on the loose, since she was an adult and (apparently) had complete knowledge of what was going on and also knew that Josh and the author hung out all the time without supervision. She could've done something but just chose not to, either due to stupidity and self-centeredness or naïvety, but neither one is better than the other.

As for the stalker, it was stated end of story that he was behaving as a "man in love," so it's obvious why he may not have taken the author with him after everything that happened. Even though he literally sat next to the boy he "loved" and wanted for himself for hours and watched a whole movie in Screens, he still did nothing to actually kidnap him or harm him physically. I wonder why that is.

The stalker was horrible, but it was obvious to him by that point that he would never be able to go through with doing anything to the author. Ever since the author moved, the stalker had chosen Josh to share the part of the central character in his twisted play, and there was no way to stop it anymore.