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love_hmd_meme2012-01-15 09:19 am
k_squared_mods) wrote in love_hmd_meme2012-01-15 09:19 am
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04. HMD meme
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hmd_me
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.
I HAVE CREATED A MONSTER!
I've been wondering about Brax's self-interpretation too and would like to know more on your thoughts on that. As someone that is also currently playing someone that can walk up to a nearly identical self and kill him, I'm very interested in the idea that someone can coldly discard everything they dislike about themself with what they like, and how that affects them internalizing their successes. It seems like somehow it would make realizing their positive impact at the very least more abstract. Or, in another case, all the negative that the Doctor shoves behind a single compartment to the point that it's creating an alternate personality/regeneration. I wonder if knowing something like that can happen in Time Lords (or being aware of the Valeyard) had made dismissing those parts of himself more of an imperitive.
SO I GUESS GOOD JOB?! You make me think about things like thought processes and emotional impact. And I find that you used Durarara!! as an influence very interesting.
BRAAIIIIINS!!! BRAIIIIIIIINS!! This one is even more rambly and disorganized. And wow linkfail
To me, it strikes me as very abstracting? It asks a really specific image of who you are. Like, we know Time Lords must have a very different sense of identity that isn't tied totally to their physical bodies or even their personalities, and doubtless different regenerations have different ways of processing data, so what, exactly, is the core of the identity that they hold onto? Half of them use aliases, so it isn't the name. People change over time, so it can't even be core values. I wonder if instead it's a timeline, that their sense of identity comes from the continuity between their birth to their death, and that entire thread, whatever it is at any discrete point in time, is who they are.
I know Brax wasn't totally wrong when he told the Doctor that learning to do what he had to to get out of Gallifrey is something that taught him to disconnect like that. I wrote this thing on it a while ago. It seems like it takes away both pride and shame (not that either of them are lacking of it, but in this scope) where you aren't proud of anything you've done, nor are you ashamed of it, because it wasn't you so much as it was someone who happened to be you. I suspect that part of it is the big-picture mentality they have going on? Brax, at the least, sees the universe on a large scale. He sees choices cascading down generations, he sees the ultimate good and the ultimate evil. Benny yells at him on that one, too, where he did something and she is sure he's right in 'the bigger scheme of things' but from her level, it's still wrong. And from the bigger scheme of things, you've got a very Lovecraftian situation, where even Time Lords are just tiny little things that die and are replaced and mean nothing. So you as a person, as an individual, you don't ever get to accomplish anything. It could always have been something else. That seems to also tie in with there sense of time, and an 'in spite of a nail' sense that, okay, maybe you killed Hitler as a baby, but Time will find a way to fix it. The good things that you do come about from some force greater than yourself.
There's a sense of erasing yourself for the purpose of a goal, too, and I know that I have one other character who can do that, and he is simply psychological incapable of having empathy or understanding death. He just can't, and he tries so hard to do it but it's just not something his mind can do. In Brax's case, it had to be learned, and he taught it to himself when he started becoming an actor. JUMPING SUBJECTS AGAIN, there is a story I often think of for Brax: it's Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges. It seems that the multiplicity of Time Lord existence and the singularity of it contribute to their ability to do terrible things to themselves. Even if you kill yourself, there is still the continuity of your time stream, and you can keep going forwards with it. I do think acting is the main path he took himself to do it--as you pointed it out, he has learned to watch himself perform a person. So it's important that he is the raisonneur, and he can subsume himself into that existence.
There is ANOTHER story where Asmodeus accuses Brax of being "Methodical. Precise. Practical. And utterly without a personality." This one also came up in torture thread, IIRC, or in the after-effects. It was an important comment because it's something that Brax thinks about himself. It also reminds me of Jaime Lannister's comment about "going away inside" in times of stress. I think perhaps in the end if may be a response to a very restrictive and stressful life where a lot of really difficult decisions are put on your place. For better or for worse, you stop existing.
It also means you're disconnected socially? I've mentioned before that since Brax never lets himself get drunk, but he's very very VERY fond of alcohol, it's probably not just for the taste. There's a real likelihood that he likes alcohol on a social level, because he can drink with friends and feel a little closer to them. It doesn't matter if he is closer. He can try to ground himself to it. That's why the opening bit of Resurrecting the Past where he pops a bottle of champagne and neither Hass nor Joseph can drink with him is really sad: Benny is his drinking buddy, and he drove her away. The social connection disappears. I would guess that the Doctor does the same sort of thing with his human companions, keeping him from drifting off and away. There's a really intellectual element to it (in The Golden Mean, the final line in the book is about Aristotle drifting further and further into his world of ideas while Alexander the Great falls deeper and deeper into the well of himself) so it likely comes from that academic, abstracting, removed society. Time Lords are individualistic but they also seem very prone to denying the self and the physical body and everything 'irrational' that is emotional, and I think that makes sense.
In fact! Octopuses. As that xenopsychology article mentions, humans will run to get food. Octopuses will sit there and conserve energy. Braxiatel is more like an octopus. Even if he wants to go after that food, he kicks away his silly mammal instincts, draws himself inwards, and forces himself to sit through it.
Okay, if I'm onto octopuses, it's probably time to stop and let you spew back so you can figure out where we are going. That is my new plan. Regarding Durarara!! it has so far been an interesting exploration of writing styles. I'm not sure if it's the matter of translation or the medium or different narrative styles being more common in Japan or something, but if you look at the index, you'll see that Vols 5/6 have a pattern. All of the "Lovey-Dovey Prattles of an Underground Doctor" sections are monologues from one of the characters, taking place at specific points in the stories, and they move forwards the plot as much as they explain things. (And they're dead hilarious, because Shinra is hilarious.) For Vol 9, all of the "In A Dark Place" chapters are set while one of the characters has been kidnapped and is being tortured (well, monologued at, but the character in question would have been okay with torture if it meant getting to see up close and personal what a human is like when they are torturing people!), and the other ones are a mixture of events in recent history leading up to that moment, and major backstory events that explain characters even further back. Vol 9 also starts off in "Colour Illustrations" with a short explanation from... er, from a character who is probably just the sentience on the internet (this character believes in cities being alive, so sure why not) and then the "Prologue - Classmate" is a phone call interview from someone whose significance you don't get worked out until the very end, "Epilogue & Next Prologue," where it once again resumes the script-like pattern of a phone conversation. The prologue for Vol 5 is also a monologue from one of the characters (it's obvious who it is) that sets up the major themes of the story, but it's also part of a conversation by implication, and you don't work out who the other person is until near the end. Narita's done a really good job keeping a light pace and juggling plot points and moving through multiple narrative styles to tell the stories, so I really do like his work a lot.
And related to our discussion, one of the characters in Durarara!! (a victim of child abuse and bullying) is often described as viewing the world 'through a picture frame.' So when it comes to her chapters, there's this lovely doubling of perspectives, where she says 'the girl falls down' or whatever, and you really do get this strong impression that everything is happening to someone else, not to her. She has trouble fitting into society because she isn't sure what to do with herself, what sort of purpose she has in society. She doesn't know what her 'function' is. And it's mentioned that she can't see a difference between friendship-love and romantic-love, and that she views her relationships with others as parasitic. Also, she is host to a cursed sword. That is there too. Since the sword lives off of a love for all of humanity, her inability to feel love keeps it in check. But one thing that's interesting (and very sad) is that she assumes that all of her happy memories of her parents weren't real in part because of this picture frame view of the world.
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