black_sluggard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
black_sluggard) wrote2012-07-20 11:12 pm
black_sluggard) wrote2012-07-20 11:12 pm
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Wtf: Ceci n'est pas une llama (Ramblings on Art School, Fanfiction and Personal Identity)
(no llamas were harmed in the writing of this post)
So I just wrapped up my second week of the quarter. I meant to talk about the first week back when it happened, but the first week was kind of shitty, so I let that slide. It wasn't that I don't like my classes. Though difficult, they promise to be very interesting, but a blinding headache killed the latter half of my first day, and...well, anyway.
In particular, my Visual Language and Culture course looks like it's going to be very interesting. It's about half art appreciation half sociology class, focused on the processes and dynamics involved in deriving or imparting an image's meaning. The text is...kind of dense. I routinely had to make stops while trying to read the first chapter. But it was interesting.
I'm not going to go into it in a lot of detail. But, one thing I do want to mention is a reappearance of our old friend "The Treachery of Images". The chapter also talked about its companion "The Two Mysteries", which took the whole thing a step farther. To quote the book:
"Here, we have two pipes—or rather, two drawings of the same pipe—or a painting of a pipe and a painting of a painting of a pipe and a subscript identifying it. French philosopher Michel Foucault elaborated on Magritte's idea by exploring these images' implied commentary about the relationship between words and things and the complex relationship between the drawing, the paintings, their words, and their referent (the pipe)."
So, of course, once today's quiz was finished, with that in mind, I wound up drawing on the back of my quiz...which was a stick figure llama, underscored by a predictable subscript. Why a llama?
Why not a llama?
But the weird relationship of labels examined in the painting and in the chapter made me think of some of the themes I've explored in my fanfiction. I kind of have this morbid writer's fetish for identity issues, as demonstrated in...pretty much everything. It is, perhaps, my favorite substratum of "The Good Angst", when characters are forced to examine or alter the way they define themselves within the world.
The most obvious example, of course, is in Zeitgeist series:
After all, it was the Konrad photo that turned into a Magritte parody that you have to blame for this post. The entirety of that series, or at least the first three volumes (oh my god) have turned into an extended exploration of the relationship between two individuals who are actually the same individual: former Auschwitz guard and Company spook Konrad Reichardt and his idealized and oblivious alter ego, Detective Kevin Ryan.
But looking at it, it's nowhere near the most complicated example I've written.
My first delving into this theme was an abandoned (and Jossed to hell and back) Supernatural fic called "The Devil You Know". This was actually my first fanfiction, begun right after "Tall Tales" aired, which explored an interesting origin idea for Tricksters: That conmen who were so proficient at lying, for whom being false came naturally and who surrendered their true identities to constructed masks ran the risk of becoming Tricksters, whose "lies" would then impose a false truth on reality.
And, of course, we all know how good Dean is at hiding what's going on in his head. And how much he hates people and monsters and angels who act like "dicks". And how fond he is of sweets...
The hunter-monster identity!fuck trope wasn't new, there were a half dozen or more werewolf and vampire fics written about the boys at the time, and silver ruffian's excellent story "Dog Eat Dog" has since done the Trickster!Dean idea way better than I could have, but I certainly had fun with it.
My mostly unproductive Supernatural phase was followed by an obsession with Heroes. Specifically Sylar. Specifically Sythan. So a series of one shots, as well as a pair of also unfinished (and probably likewise abandoned, but who the hell knows) chapter fics soon came into being, each delving into the Sylar-Nathan situation in a different way.
The first, "In Sheep's Clothing", was begun right after "An Invisible Thread" aired, and began to evolve into an alternate season four (complete with eventual Firefly tie-in).
"In Sheep's Clothing" explored the idea of "Nathan" discovering his true identity the old fashioned way...which is to say, just figuring it the hell out. But while my version of Nathan was clearly just a Sylar that thought of himself as Nathan, he was a Sylar who thought he was Nathan and had really begun to become attached to the people in "his" life. The story would have examined the ethics involved in a murderer adopting the life of his victims, and Nathan's agony over whether to tell Peter or Claire—or Nathan's wife, Heidi—the truth.
The same story would also have involved Noah learning that, as a teenager, he had possessed an ability, and that the Company had feared the threat he posed enough that they had Maury Parkman fake his death and implant him with a false identity with that ability suppressed.
The ability in question? Why...intuitive aptitude, of course.
The second was "Seven Minutes to Midnight", a crossover with one of my favorite all-time mind-screw films, Dark City.
This story made things even worse, tossing John Murdoch onto the existing bag of snakes that is Gabriel Gray's sense of self. To those not familiar with the film:
The City is actually a large mechanism floating in space, meant to house humans whose minds have been wiped by aliens to be used in memory experiments. One of these subjects, currently slatd to be implanted with the identity of a serial killer named John Murdoch, wakes in between lives and discovers that he has developed bizarre telekinetic abilities on par with the aliens that allow him to try and wrest control of their machine.
Not only are the lives of the characters prior to the experiments never talked about, John's telekinetic abilities are never explained in the film beyond a dismissive guess about his being the next step in human evolution.
So, on the one hand we have a telekinetic, shapeshifting serial killer mind-wiped into believing he's one of his victims. On the other hand we have a telekinetic tabula rasa usurping control of alien reality-warping technology... Technology that looks like a fucking clock.
C'mon. I seriously, I had to.
Of course, John's not like everyone else, so after the Strangers are defeated, unlike everyone else, his real memories start to return...right on top of the false ones Dr. Schrieber inserted to teach John how to use the alien's machines. Both sets of "real" memories. So he's John Murdoch. And Nathan Petrelli. And Sylar. And, it's a total mess.
Add into it a handful of equally blank Heroes characters:
Indian nurse Julian Singhal and Italian cab driver Tony Romano (who, after a bizarre encounter, both wind up plagued with a frightening inhuman strength), nightmare-haunted spinster Heather Collins, and a girl named Cathrine Ferris who has recently been institutionalized with the delusion that her family isn't her family.
(Oh, and this was technically my first slash fic, since Julian/Tony...aka Mohinder/Peter was going to eventually be a thing.)
But yeah...
(Also, for Kiefer Sutherland fans, Dr. Schrieber would have turned out to be Dr. Nelson Wright from Flatliners. Which...isn't entirely relevant to the story, though the good doctor's predicament of being the only man in the City not only aware that everyone's memories are false, but the only one without even the self-aware illusion of a past to help him function, is a fun experiment on its own.)
Enter my Castle era, and I've since turned Javier and Kevin's brains upside down in every way possible. As mentioned above, Zeitgeist delves into the implications of false memory, but it also explores the relationship between identity and time: how the person someone is at one point in their life is often a very different person from who they are later on, or beforehand (or in Javier's case...yeah, let's just let that go).
The bizarre sci-fi-horror-romance work-in-progress Sui Generis explores a "The Ship of Theseus"-like dilemma:
In it, Kevin's cells are slowly being devoured and replaced by alien tissues carrying the collective hive-memories of an alien species while his own memories stay intact. I eventually want it to address the muddiness of boundaries and labels. At what point is enough of him alien that he stops being human? And is there a given point at which he's no longer even really Kevin Ryan? Or will he always be Kevin because he has Kevin's memories?
In the same story, Javier takes it a step further. In this story, Javier was an entirely alien creature who killed and consumed the real Javier, mimicking his form. He is a copy, but a perfect one, and has all of Javier's memories and his personality, but also the hive memories of the alien and the knowledge of what he really is. Assuming Kevin is always Kevin, even after none of his human cells remain, has this Javier ever really been Javier? Is this Javier a migration of the individual, or will he never be more than an obscene mimicry of him by the thing that killed him? As a non-sentient creature that has copied a sentient being's mind, can he even be considered an individual at all? And the copy is the only Javier that Kevin has ever known. Does that matter? Should it? Is it possible for him to gain legitimacy enough to become the "real" Javier?
A similar idea is explored in an as-yet-unwritten story, "If Shadows Offend".
In this story, a clone of Kevin comes into being. A clone which, confronted with the existence of the original Kevin, cannot escape the fact that he is a copy, and is later dubbed "Raley" after the fictional character Castle based off of Kevin in his novels. By the end of the story, the two characters have undergone a very noticeable shift in personality due to the events they've each encountered separately, and the differences with which they come to perceive the encounters they do share.
No one can argue that Kevin is not the real Kevin. Faced with this, Raley eventually makes the choice to abandon that identity entirely. But at what point does Raley become a distinct individual? Is it when the copy is first created? Is it when he first realizes that he is a copy? Is it when he gains experiences that the real Kevin doesn't share that cause their personalities to drift? Is it when the people he knows begin treating him like a thing, or later when they acknowledge him as an individual that, while not Kevin, is still a feeling being? Is it when either of these force changes in his interactions with them, eventually altering the relationship he feels to those characters entirely? Or is it simply when he finally gives up his claim to that identity?
Acorn, from the Fables crossover "Of Mice and Men" is comparatively simple.
Kevin Ryan is just a name that he uses for himself, but one that he uses internally to the point where it isn't a lie. He is Kevin Ryan...even if he began his life an unknown number of centuries ago as a fairytale mouse. But while this Kevin's idenity isn't as abstract as the characters in some of the other stories, it isn't without his own struggles.
His are mostly about conflict and loyalty and the internalized politics of identification.
In the beginning of the story, Acorn is a Fable, a mouse, the City Mouse, a resident of the Farm, and a citizen of Smalltown, and an officer in its Mounted Police. All of these are interconnected and part of the same truth about him, but they are also traits that conflict each other. He is a mouse, and thus an animal Fable, and so part of a minority that is forcibly segregated to the Farm. He is a Farm Fable, but as the City Mouse, an existence in the country chafes at his very nature. As a cop, he feels a sense of duty toward Fabletown as a whole, but the isolationist structure of Smalltown would have him set the interests of Smalltown over Fabletown's ruling "Gullivers".
In the present, Keven Ryan is juggling a completely new set of identities. He is still a Fable, but he now plays a part in the Mundane world. Like Smalltown, Fabletown requires that his loyalties as a Fable take precedence over other concerns. He is still a cop, but now a member of the NYPD. By giving up his species in order to live in Manhattan, he has lost his former identity as a mouse, and as a "Gulliver" he has lost access to his acquaintances in Smalltown, and this has cost his close ties with members of his family as well. By choosing to operate within Mundane society, he has created himself as a two-fold outsider: on the one hand hiding what he is from his contacts in the Mundane world, and on the other choosing their companionship over that of his own kind.
The main conflict of the story for Kevin, therefore, is handling the direct conflicts of these identities: His loyalty as a Fable is called into question when Javier uncovers the Farm, and his loyalties as a friend and partner are called into question by the potential that Javier will need to be silenced. And the eventual solution to, erm, marry those two problems into something manageable together only further alienates him, his "unnatural" attraction to Javier marking him as a scandalous aberration...
So...this is me doing way too much self-reflecting for really no purpose at all. There are even a few I'm forgetting, but I'm not going to push myself to write about them right now. I'm tired.
Anyway, because you've been so patient...
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I'm at kind of a weird point where my brain doesn't know what it's going to attach itself to next, so I have no idea what stories are going to see actual progress in them or when. :/
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