Alice's Hope
Jan. 27th, 2005 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheathe entry about Alice set up an uncomfortable chain reaction in my head.
What if she is living there in my head, trapped in this world because I feel I lack the integrity and power to make her real and heard. What if ALL the characters in my head that I think about but never realize in some form and locked away like that, each suffering in their own horrible world? Younger versions of me reliving rapes and car wrecks againa nd again, characters in stories beaten abused, violated, hurt, mangled, and left to rot in their little Hells because I never flesh them beyond the few lines that triggers the thought but I never forget them and occassionally recall them with the horribleness of the scene they were associated with. I could have at least let Alice die, it would have been the most merciful thing. She's lucky PostVixen gave her an out that, while not the life I'd have given her, was probably one she would have liked.
One of the notes from the design class was to make the best you could with the skills and materials you have at the time. I've been so guilty of this, promising these characters that when I find the skill and the strength and the time that I'll set them free from their prisons. I've lied to them for decades, promising that one day they'll be free and I'll do them justice, make it up to them, all the time they've spent in their hells by making them beautiful and perfect so that people will loook on them and not see my shakey hand or trite dialog but see them real and alive.
Instead, I've just added new characters to the prison, given them the same lie, and let them all live in their hells, revisitng their most painful moments again and again. I'm a monster, a dead and lifeless thing that preys on their suffering and I've only just awoken to what I am. I did go down the rabbit hole today after all, but I'm not liking what I see.
-The Jailer
What if she is living there in my head, trapped in this world because I feel I lack the integrity and power to make her real and heard. What if ALL the characters in my head that I think about but never realize in some form and locked away like that, each suffering in their own horrible world? Younger versions of me reliving rapes and car wrecks againa nd again, characters in stories beaten abused, violated, hurt, mangled, and left to rot in their little Hells because I never flesh them beyond the few lines that triggers the thought but I never forget them and occassionally recall them with the horribleness of the scene they were associated with. I could have at least let Alice die, it would have been the most merciful thing. She's lucky PostVixen gave her an out that, while not the life I'd have given her, was probably one she would have liked.
One of the notes from the design class was to make the best you could with the skills and materials you have at the time. I've been so guilty of this, promising these characters that when I find the skill and the strength and the time that I'll set them free from their prisons. I've lied to them for decades, promising that one day they'll be free and I'll do them justice, make it up to them, all the time they've spent in their hells by making them beautiful and perfect so that people will loook on them and not see my shakey hand or trite dialog but see them real and alive.
Instead, I've just added new characters to the prison, given them the same lie, and let them all live in their hells, revisitng their most painful moments again and again. I'm a monster, a dead and lifeless thing that preys on their suffering and I've only just awoken to what I am. I did go down the rabbit hole today after all, but I'm not liking what I see.
-The Jailer
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-27 01:24 pm (UTC)Have you seen
I've done some truly horrible things to certain characters. And the authorial-solpistic thing works for me as a worldview, enough to make that thought disturbing.
*hug*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-27 02:17 pm (UTC)