All praise and accolades however are welcome at the current
address. BTW, a few spoilers for various books, movies, mangas
and fanfics are mentioned so please be careful.
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On The Necessity Of Cruelty And Pain:
An Examination of the Use of Physical and Psychological
Abuse of Fictional Characters for Various Reasons
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Since I'm somewhat maligned, or praised, or both, or whatever, in this
essay, permit me to offer another perspective on the topic.
I have a motif in my essays that requires a scapegoat that is both
praised and beaten up. Guess who's it going to be for the On Lemons
and Lesbians article? ^_^
First, this essay should really have had a "SPOILER" tag on it. You've
given away things about Fushigi Yugi that I'd really rather not have known
yet.
I think I put that one in the disclaimer but still sorry about that.
Second ...
It sometimes concerns me that there can be a very dark side to inflicting
pain on our characters: namely, when the author _enjoys_ it.
A fact that has been pointed out to me by a responder. A nice little
counter-essay to mine will probably come out in a while.
For example (and please hear me out before you start throwing things), I
have often taken considerable delight in planning out new hell to put my
characters through. In SM4200, for example, there's the feud that almost
drove Rei and Makoto to kill each other; there's the battle that ends in
Haruka's death; there'e Michiru's emotional disintegration, culminating
in her suicide strike on the enemy.
I enjoyed planning all those story details. I took great pleasure in
laying out all the steps that led up to them. Is this a kind of
vicarious sadism? It's not something I'm proud to admit. But I do it
again and again.
Ah, the joy of playing God and doing things to characters because they
don't have anyway to strike back. A point emphasized by the aforementioned
respondent is the fact that we like seeing/hurting these people, since
well, we like to see other's misfortune. It brings a warm, fuzzy feeling to
our hearts as both author and reader as a planet is destroyed or a family
massacred.
I should add that the pleasure goes right away when it comes time to
actually write the scenes. :) Then it becomes blood, toil, tears and
sweat. I like Haruka, I really do; but when I wrote her death, it all
came pouring out of me in a rush, and when it was finished I looked
back and thought, "Yeah, that's pretty good." And _then_ I started to
notice how dreadful I felt. I couldn't write any more for _weeks_
after that.
The same feeling came over me, with the added incentive of earning enough
money to go to New Zealand and kicking your ass. ^_^
So I think that that, in inflicting cruelty and pain on characters, the
impact on the writer shouldn't be ignored. When I'm writing from a
character's viewpoint, I'm seeing through their eyes, and feeling what
they feel -- joy or laughter, or rage, grief, fear or despair. I suspect
that it's probably the same for most good writers. I've never asked them,
but I suspect that Mike Noakes is going through all the anger and confusion
with Ranma and Akane in "Choices", and Nick Leifker's probably been right
there in all the painful decisions in "Clothes Make The..." or "Iris".
Which is the reason for quite a few stereotypes. You see writers of such
caliber or quality are mostly viewed as well...insane. Taking into the
account that writers have the tendency to strike upon ideas in really
strange places and sometimes a character just demands to talk to you and
even sometimes having difficulty leaving character...well... every writer on
the FFML is probably insane to one degree or the other.
And thus, there's another reason for doing it, inflicting all that shit on
fictional characters. That reason is that, after going through all the
dark places with these people, it's such a marvellous joy to see them
emerge again. Defeating the pain, working through the hard decisions,
and -- we can hope -- growing up in the process.
Yup. That's the point. A little bit Catholic, yes, but still it's a nice
feeling when you see the characters survive after crawling through a
mile and a half of the best crap you can throw at them
My characters in SM4200 have got some dark roads still to walk. But
when they get to the end, and it's all over, they will be very different
people from the ones that began the story.
Which is another good reason for hell and torment: character development.
And the fact that a fic like this has to leave the characters changed.
And maybe I will be, too.
Nope. By then Pluto would have regained her powers and would be going
medieval on your ass. ^_^