04. HMD meme

[k_squared_mods]

☑ HOW'S MY DRIVING MEME

All of us have those moments where we are uncertain about our characterization. Sometimes feedback is the best medicine! So, step on up and post your roleplay accounts and the games you have them in. Let others come by and tell you how you're doing and let others know what you think! Give legitimate reasons and not just "I love you!" Save that for our monthly love memes.


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**The basic formatting of this meme was borrowed from hmd_me

Comments

BRAAIIIIINS!!! BRAIIIIIIIINS!! This one is even more rambly and disorganized. And wow linkfail

[collector]

BASICALLY, YES. THAT ONE. But yeah, he also does often have inappropriate reactions, and that's a Justin Richards thing, so I treat it as especially true. He mentions that Brax sometimes feels helpless and uncertain and that it bothers him a lot, because that's not who he is supposed to be. There's another time where he mentions that Braxiatel is awful at sympathy because he just doesn't understand it so he usually doesn't try. There's also another story where someone is suffering, like, hugely, because basically by playing a video recording, Benny is killing that person over and over. She realizes and asks Brax for help, and at one point, she yells at him for being so calm about it and not really feeling anything. And he snaps back that he wasn't taught to express himself the same way she was, but he does care and he's trying to solve the problem his own way. Braxiatel is in a lot of ways like someone who is living in a foreign country and is trying hard to mask what nation, exactly, he comes from, because if he doesn't he is screwed. So he really can't just react naturally, because he isn't trained in the right sort of social cues, even after all of these years.

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.