It wasn't intentional to make it schizotypal. Though I could see how he might slot in there. I know some people peg him as antisocial but that's never worked for me with the obvious massive guilt he expresses and the generally highly responsible bent of his actions. I've never classed Brax with a particular mental disorder aside from the disorder of Brax being Brax, which is I guess a huge one.
The style I tend to use is actually from one of the few stories where we get a solid reflector-of-reality situation with him. It's far more common for stories to write Brax from the outside, not from his PoV. But there are one or two, and one of my favourites is "Dead Mice." Braxiatel is going crazy in this story, and part of what I do when I write close to his head is mimic that sort of language and perspective. The line that I use, "Be safe and calm and Brax" was something that was used in that story. That story had a much more fragmented and panicked tone to it than I usually need, so I usually pull it down a bit.
For the torture thread in particular, I was actually emulating a writing style used by Narita Ryohgo in the Durarara!! light novels. A while back, I was having problems writing Izaya's PoV in prose, because it's just damn difficult. What I noticed was that Narita had gotten around this by externalizing the perspective. Instead of viewing the world through Izaya's perspective, the narration tends to give a very external explanation of him, talking about his appearance and actions, hazarding guesses on what he seems to be, but keeping the actual fact of his thoughts to himself, then offering more universal truths about how Izaya thinks. I used it here to emulate the heavy dissociation that Braxiatel fell into.
Braxiatel is a huge compartmentalizer, and compartmentalizing by removing himself from himself seemed like the reasonable response to the situation. And it's something he seems to often do when he's under stress, so essentially, I wanted to erase Braxiatel as a person from the narrative altogether. This isn't uncommon for Brax to do. In the most useful Brax stories, there's a recurrent theme of Braxiatel being able to cut himself up to bits. This is made literal in the really crappy way he treats his alternate selves, from murdering them to coercing and abusing them. There's a reason I always say there is nothing you can do to Brax that he hasn't done to himself. I was talking about quantum teleportation to Kisha and we noted that, psychologically, it demands that you're able to make an exact replica of a you who is you, and then kill that person. I noted that this is something I'd never be able to do, because it's murder and killing yourself in a really horrible way, but it's something Brax would be able to do. (Incidentally, Jason is also canonically able to do it, which is both interesting and terrifying.) So all of that is just typical of the sort of psychological state that Brax generally seems to maintain. And I really think that's where the fracturing comes from: he has a seriously fractured mentality, and it comes from deliberately fracturing himself again and again and again and again. There's also that bit in The Crystal of Cantus where Brax actually seems to hallucinate himself mocking him, and when Brax talks at himself in his narration there's a certain broken self-mockery to it all, as a rule.
Continuing on: he thinks a lot, we know that. I know in one of Justin Richards stories where Clarence and Brax are in the same story, Benny notes that Clarence and Brax are thinking at the same speed but compiling the data in a different way. We don't actually know what that way is, because Time Lords, but Braxiatel has always also had a very theatrical bent. He'll make really theatrical comments here and there--quoting Macbeth at the Diendum, mocking the Fifth Axis with comments about Wagner, that sort of thing. So I've used that as my baseline for the way he thinks about things. I try to put them together in terms of stories and quotes and the patterns of narratives. He thinks in character types, in plot arcs, in references. He is also an ex-professor, and my experience with academics is that they spend most of their time having lots of thoughts in lots of interesting ways. I know he always gets INTJ when I do those tests for him, and if I recall, that means they have somewhat unusual thought processes that are harder to translate for other people. Playing off of words also seems to be a big thing, so punning off of things and connecting different words together on the basis of sound or playing with meaning is another way I try to do that. It adds to the theatrical element in his thinking so I think it works. And it's all a sort of Romantic bent to it, because there's this heavy cynicism and bitterness and pessimism under all that love of beauty. He dresses up his collection to look like the Enlightenment, but his mental process has been a decay from Enlightenment idealism to Romantic cynicism.
But that's not often what he presents, and I often thing of that in terms of two things: he is an actor and he is a collector. From an actor's point of view, it's simply that he judges and measures what he wants to seem to be. As a collector, it comes another way: he is a master curator, so he knows how to highlight this flaw, shadow this crack, present to his audience what he wants them to see. Mirror imagery is really strong with him, so I try to use it to indicate how he is approaching the subject at hand. I especially think of him as a Shakespearean actor with strong movements, so the internal process is all of his tragedian's monologue, and then the talking is more Benedict and Beatrice at war. He is all illusions and magic tricks--I remember Nyx Ro accused him of being a wizard, magic or not--and labyrinths are useful imagery too. It's like all of that thinking is the backstage work, and the action is the show.
I hope some of that explains it? Or at least that you don't mind all the teal deers. I guess the intention has always been to present the mirror's surface but reveal the depth underneath it, and I do think that's what is under the mirror is a very fractured, partitioned, strange mind. I'm not sure if that even answered the question, though.
PREPARE FOR SOME META TL;DR!! Can you handle it? YOU BETTER BE ABLE TO!!
The style I tend to use is actually from one of the few stories where we get a solid reflector-of-reality situation with him. It's far more common for stories to write Brax from the outside, not from his PoV. But there are one or two, and one of my favourites is "Dead Mice." Braxiatel is going crazy in this story, and part of what I do when I write close to his head is mimic that sort of language and perspective. The line that I use, "Be safe and calm and Brax" was something that was used in that story. That story had a much more fragmented and panicked tone to it than I usually need, so I usually pull it down a bit.
For the torture thread in particular, I was actually emulating a writing style used by Narita Ryohgo in the Durarara!! light novels. A while back, I was having problems writing Izaya's PoV in prose, because it's just damn difficult. What I noticed was that Narita had gotten around this by externalizing the perspective. Instead of viewing the world through Izaya's perspective, the narration tends to give a very external explanation of him, talking about his appearance and actions, hazarding guesses on what he seems to be, but keeping the actual fact of his thoughts to himself, then offering more universal truths about how Izaya thinks. I used it here to emulate the heavy dissociation that Braxiatel fell into.
Braxiatel is a huge compartmentalizer, and compartmentalizing by removing himself from himself seemed like the reasonable response to the situation. And it's something he seems to often do when he's under stress, so essentially, I wanted to erase Braxiatel as a person from the narrative altogether. This isn't uncommon for Brax to do. In the most useful Brax stories, there's a recurrent theme of Braxiatel being able to cut himself up to bits. This is made literal in the really crappy way he treats his alternate selves, from murdering them to coercing and abusing them. There's a reason I always say there is nothing you can do to Brax that he hasn't done to himself. I was talking about quantum teleportation to Kisha and we noted that, psychologically, it demands that you're able to make an exact replica of a you who is you, and then kill that person. I noted that this is something I'd never be able to do, because it's murder and killing yourself in a really horrible way, but it's something Brax would be able to do. (Incidentally, Jason is also canonically able to do it, which is both interesting and terrifying.) So all of that is just typical of the sort of psychological state that Brax generally seems to maintain. And I really think that's where the fracturing comes from: he has a seriously fractured mentality, and it comes from deliberately fracturing himself again and again and again and again. There's also that bit in The Crystal of Cantus where Brax actually seems to hallucinate himself mocking him, and when Brax talks at himself in his narration there's a certain broken self-mockery to it all, as a rule.
Continuing on: he thinks a lot, we know that. I know in one of Justin Richards stories where Clarence and Brax are in the same story, Benny notes that Clarence and Brax are thinking at the same speed but compiling the data in a different way. We don't actually know what that way is, because Time Lords, but Braxiatel has always also had a very theatrical bent. He'll make really theatrical comments here and there--quoting Macbeth at the Diendum, mocking the Fifth Axis with comments about Wagner, that sort of thing. So I've used that as my baseline for the way he thinks about things. I try to put them together in terms of stories and quotes and the patterns of narratives. He thinks in character types, in plot arcs, in references. He is also an ex-professor, and my experience with academics is that they spend most of their time having lots of thoughts in lots of interesting ways. I know he always gets INTJ when I do those tests for him, and if I recall, that means they have somewhat unusual thought processes that are harder to translate for other people. Playing off of words also seems to be a big thing, so punning off of things and connecting different words together on the basis of sound or playing with meaning is another way I try to do that. It adds to the theatrical element in his thinking so I think it works. And it's all a sort of Romantic bent to it, because there's this heavy cynicism and bitterness and pessimism under all that love of beauty. He dresses up his collection to look like the Enlightenment, but his mental process has been a decay from Enlightenment idealism to Romantic cynicism.
But that's not often what he presents, and I often thing of that in terms of two things: he is an actor and he is a collector. From an actor's point of view, it's simply that he judges and measures what he wants to seem to be. As a collector, it comes another way: he is a master curator, so he knows how to highlight this flaw, shadow this crack, present to his audience what he wants them to see. Mirror imagery is really strong with him, so I try to use it to indicate how he is approaching the subject at hand. I especially think of him as a Shakespearean actor with strong movements, so the internal process is all of his tragedian's monologue, and then the talking is more Benedict and Beatrice at war. He is all illusions and magic tricks--I remember Nyx Ro accused him of being a wizard, magic or not--and labyrinths are useful imagery too. It's like all of that thinking is the backstage work, and the action is the show.
I hope some of that explains it? Or at least that you don't mind all the teal deers. I guess the intention has always been to present the mirror's surface but reveal the depth underneath it, and I do think that's what is under the mirror is a very fractured, partitioned, strange mind. I'm not sure if that even answered the question, though.