(no subject)

[camwyn]

Dear Father:

You're not getting bumped up the brain priority list. No. I don't care. Benton Fraser and the icebound community of Inuvik has the first slot and you do not get to boot him from it. I don't care how much you screw around with my iPod playlist so your songs come up- and I swear to God if 'Numb' comes out next I will make you regret it*.

GOD DAMMIT NOBODY IS GETTING ANY PROZIUM AT ALL IF YOU DON'T LET GO OF MY BRAIN RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

Thank you. Yeesh.

*I am not sure how you do this to an emotionless dystopian dictator. Possibly it involves watching movies where his actor is extremely silly and has spiky blond hair.

Comments

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

>>I suppose there are worse embodiments of inner bastardry to have.

Yes, there are, but they're fscking scary.

... admittedly, the reasonable ones top that list of fscking scary.

*has, um. a couple.*

[camwyn]

I have two- no, three- Reflexive Bastards that I know of in my own brain. They're basically the publicly recognisable faces of the really unsavoury bits in the black muck at the bottom of my skull. No, I'm not being emo or anything; everyone's got that muck. It's the bits of the psyche we don't like but all have somewhere. That's where John Constantine comes from, and where Father comes from- and, lord help me, the White Rider. Not Blodwen Rowlands, but the Rider of the Apocalypse- and I do not mean something so simple as Pestilence, either. The third member of the inner Bastardly Trinity is Conquest- the one who knows exactly, exactly what has to be done to crush and break and demoralise and bring the enemy to heel, forever. She is not so much of battlefields- though there is some of that in her, the White Rider comes after. The Red Rider is War and that is fine, but the White Rider is the Roman occupation and the assimilation of your children, the death of cultures and people as they're seduced away from what they used to be, the overwhelming brutal blow that strikes out of nowhere and reduces all plans to rubble so there is nothing to resist with- and the silent presences, the words in the night that leave spirits bleeding and broken. She lives in my skull and never speaks in words, but I see her hand in some of the things I start to write, in some of the strategies I pursue in games, and I fear her deeply. Because I know between her and Father, there is a great big steaming HEAP of nasty in there.

[batyatoon]

... that right there?

That was genuinely scary.



I think I have to hug you now.

[camwyn]

I've actually badly frightened two out of three Geoffs by explaining why I like culture-fu victories in Civilization 3 and 4 so much, because the explanation always comes from the White Rider part of the brain. (The third Geoff is quintus and I think he just finds it a turn-on.)

Honestly, the White RIder is not so very different from what Father was trying to do; he's one of hers, though he doesn't know it. Evil anthropologists are best at remaking people after their own image and likeness.

[batyatoon]

Remind me, have you ever read Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana?

[camwyn]

Never read any of Kay's stuff, alas.

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

... what terrifies me is that there is a voice in the back of my mind, as I read this, going "... ♥"

*twitches quietly*

[camwyn]

Yeeeah... she's like that.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

But we liiiike your scary characters. (Says someone with a few of her own.)

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

P.S. Ok, how do you get the characters who aren't smirking bastards to stick? Not that I don't like the majority of them, but really, I can't write anything if I can't get the rest of the surrounding characters to at least stick a little bit...

[camwyn]

Just because the bastards come from a part of my brain that exists on a fundamental level, doesn't mean the good guys don't as well. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon lives in my head just as surely as John Constantine, and I like to think that I've done better with him than a mere two-dimensional This Is The Good Guy, Dammit stereotype. He grows out of what I wish I were and hope sometimes that I can be, and the stuff I know for certain other people are. Constantine's what I wish I weren't, but what I know is there. The characters who stick are the characters with purpose. If it's a purpose I can either share in or fear on a visceral level- that helps.