black_sluggard | Wtf: A little bit of randomness (Reply)

I've gotten my prompts for

spook_me. The creature prompt I was assigned was "bogeyman". I was stumped at first, but I'm currently leaning toward an epilogue/coda for last year's Halloween fic, "Trick or Treat" (i.e. the comment fic that turned into a 5k homage to stories like IT, Monster Squad and The Halloween Tree).

One thing that I never mentioned about the creature Kevin and Javi faced in "Trick or Treat" was that she was based on a figure in a dream I had a few years back. The dream involved the very vivid imagery of a blood-red skeleton of a woman, her hair and rags floating around her like seaweed in a cave underwater.

Yet, as horrifying as that might be expected to be, the thing I most remember about the dream was this strange feeling of peace...feeling protected...

Naturally, for Kevin's sisters and the daughters of their murder victim, that protection was a trap.

The Red Mother has since become my own personal bogeyman. I've incorporated her into the mythology of my original fiction as a malicious water fairy that lives in a lake notorious for drownings, where she plays the part of an unorthodox "fairy godmother" to the protagonist.

I've also adapted her as a bogeyman for the Ravenloft setting (where bogeymen are a type of malicious fey creature, similar in nature to the Candyman from the Clive Barker film). Her story is that, long ago, she lost her two children to the sea. In her grief she walked into the sea, seeking to join them, until the salt and the sand in the waves wore the flesh from her bones... Now she lurks at the sea-side, waiting lure children to the surf with lullabies so that she can snatch them away to replace those she lost. In some stories, these unfortunates merely drown, but most tales she takes them down to her sea-cave lair and turn into crabs, and that the reason crabs are so often found on shore is that they are trying to escape her. Adults can't see her, and assume that she was invented to scare children away from the dangerous waves.

She was even the subject of one of the very first digital illustrations I put any real effort into:

(God... I still think the line art on her looks good, but the kid and the shading are just terrible...lol)

I've thought that she might have been inspired by stories of rusalka, Jenny Greenteeth, and other dangerous water fairies from mythology. In the fic there's a bit of La Llorona in there as well. While I didn't read about her until some time later, I think it's interesting how closely my image of her falls to that of Santa Muerte.

Oh, here's another interesting (dubiously fic related) Wikipedia article. I was looking at a few philosophical thought experiments (because they're fun, and often have the strangest names, i.e. "the infinite monkey theorem" or "the buttered cat paradox"), and stumbled across the idea of the "Swamp Man".

From the article:

Swampman is the subject of a philosophical thought experiment introduced by Donald Davidson, in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind". The experiment runs as follows:

Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death. This being, whom Davidson terms 'Swampman', has, of course, a brain which is structurally identical to that which Davidson had, and will thus, presumably, behave exactly as Davidson would have. He will walk out of the swamp, return to Davidson's office at Berkeley, and write the same essays he would have written; he will interact like an amicable person with all of Davidson's friends and family, and so forth.

Davidson holds that there would nevertheless be a difference, though no one would notice it. Swampman will appear to recognize Davidson's friends, but it is impossible for him to actually recognize them, as he has never seen them before. As Davidson puts it, "it can't recognize anything, because it never cognized anything in the first place."

This was interesting to me, because I'd never heard of this before, but the scenario in it is very similar to the plot of "Sui Generis", where Javier faces the quandry of being just such one near-identical copy.