WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Castle Rock Season 2, Episode 5, "The Laughing Place," now streaming on Hulu.

Stephen King’s bestselling 1987 novel Misery is more than a modern horror folklore. It spawned an Academy Award-winning film, a stage play and countless parodies and pastiches. But more importantly, it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession and fandom. Annie Wilkes isn’t just a psychotic nurse with a twisted sense of righteousness, she’s an avatar for every fan who has felt “betrayed” by a piece of pop culture, only dialed up to the nth degree. Hulu’s Castle Rock, which is a hodgepodge of characters, settings and themes from King’s literary world, homes in on the origins of Annie’s obsessive nature, but shirks its most damning attribute.

Annie is as complicated as she is a troubling. When we first meet her in Misery, she comes off as a warm, nurturing caretaker, but a bit of an odd duck. After author Paul Sheldon is injured in a car accident, Annie brings him into her home to nurse him back to health. There she reveals that she is, in fact, Paul's biggest fan and an avid reader of his Misery series of books.

Annie's behavior becomes more volatile after she learns the titular heroine of the book series has been killed off because Paul was looking to move on to new stories. From there, things go from bad to worse as Annie forces Paul to rewrite the final Misery novel under the threat of extreme violence. You see, in Annie's mind, the death of her favorite literary character is akin to the death of an actual family member. The level of ownership she feels over Paul's creation is by no means the driving force behind her volatile mental health, but it is how she channels it.

RELATED: Castle Rock's Worst Monsters Are Bad Parents

King has said Annie represents addiction, specifically his own. But the impetus of her narrative in Misery is driven by obsession and a level of toxic fandom King experienced after longtime fans chided him for his novel Eyes of the Dragon, a massive departure from his horror fiction. Some constant readers felt betrayed by the tonal shift despite the fact that the novel's publication didn't negate all the work which came before it.

Finding an irksome aspect of what most people shrug off as mundane and then exaggerating it to a terrifying level has always been King's creative fuel. So naturally, self-proclaimed "number one fans" creep the Master of Horror out beyond belief (the Dark Half also touches on this quite a bit). King's works are parables, but by no means are they dogmatic doctrines to shape one's worldview. Annie Wilkes represents, at least in part, fan obsession and how incorporating fictional characters into one's identity has the potential to lead down some very dark paths.

To be fair, Annie Wilkes is also a straight-up monster in the source material. She is revealed to be a serial killer, having committed infanticide while employed as a nurse in Boulder, Colorado. This isn't to say every grumpy Star Wars fan railing against The Last Jedi for being "SJW propaganda" (or whatever reductive nonsense term is used) on Twitter is on the same deranged level as Annie. She is the manifestation of the worst impulses a sense of ownership of a piece of fiction can breed. In Annie's mind, the character of Misery didn't belong to Paul Sheldon. She belonged to the people who loved her. The only problem is that it's a love that can never be reciprocated.

Hulu's Castle Rock has changed Annie's background significantly in the episode "The Laughing Place." While her obsession over a specific writer is still in tact, the reason for her violent behavior are deeply rooted in unchecked mental health and overbearing parents. The writer in this version of Annie's life is actually her father, who is looking to write the mythical "great American novel."

It's established early on that Annie has issues with reading due to what is most likely an undiagnosed form of dyslexia, and her father uses her to transcribe his work as a method of helping her overcome this. Her developmental issues are compounded with anti-social behavior, which is either a direct result or a bilateral manifestation of said reading disability. Add in a healthy dose of her mother's black-and-white sense of morality (which led to her taking her own life), and you have a recipe for a kid who never had a chance.

RELATED: Castle Rock: One of King's Most Terrifying Landmarks Gets Even Creepier

Movies Misery

The stern sense of morality instilled in Annie eventually came to a head when she discovered her father had been having an affair with the woman hired to help Annie develop her reading skills. In Annie's mind, her father's infidelity not only led to her mother's suicide, it also stood as an affront to the morality she was taught to follow. After a confrontation, Annie accidentally kills her father, not-so-accidentally stabs her former tutor and absconds with their lovechild.

Annie's actions come from a place of conflicting moralities. And when one of those moralities, the one that understands the world is complex, starts to become a reality, Annie reacts...um, poorly. Castle Rock may have skirted the toxic fandom aspect of King's Misery, but it doubles down on the murky morality that can lead to damaged critical thinking skills. Broadly speaking, the way in which Annie's parents handle their daughter's issues has more in common with something like the anti-vaxxer movement.

Annie's folks know she has an issue, but out of pure hubris, they feel they can shoulder the burden themselves. Annie is their daughter. They brought her into the world, so in their minds, that's all the qualification they need to confirm they know what's best for her. It's a line of thinking that can be destructive, as the show clearly illustrates. Ultimately, Castle Rock usurps one social discussion for another and manages to make Annie a far more sympathetic character in the process. But should it have?

Streaming now on Hulu, Castle Rock Season 2 stars Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins, Elsie Fisher, Paul Sparks, Barkhad Abdi, Yusra Warsama and Matthew Alan.

NEXT: Castle Rock Returns With a Bigger and Scarier Second Season