I could hand a human from two thousand years ago my pair of flip flops and they’d know exactly what they are and what to do with them. We have the same shoes.
Feeling some way about that tonight. Waving across the millenia. Hey friend. Cool shoes.
That would be such a surreal experience. Like, here’s this bizarre barbarian dressed in outlandish clothes. They’ve got a magic slate that speaks, and they talk like a Gaul. But you look down at their feet and they’ve just got a pair of honest-to-Jupiter sandals on.
Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.
Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.
Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.
Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer
…Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but…
Years and years ago, I read someone’s experience of finding out that his mom’s boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.
But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn’t the clues he’d missed or anything– it was that, one time, they’d been working together on some kind of home project, and he’d been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance– and his mom’s boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he’d been that the boyfriend had been there, how they’d both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment–
And that’s why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white– it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.
In the recent Undertale newsletter, Toby Fox showed off an unused scene that would have occurred in the Judgement Hall had the player decided to speedrun the game! This scene features Sans chastising the player for being early and slowly eating an ice cream for about a full minute while an original, slow song plays. I’m sure this would have been quite a headache for speedrunners!
