Painless

[ava_lava]

Title: Painless

Pairing(s): QMi

Genre(s): Romance, sci-fi, emotion!AU

Length: 4798 words

Rating: PG-13

Summary: In which Kyuhyun cannot feel.

Inspiration(s): This one Fairly Odd Parents episode where Timmy’s feelings were removed. Mixed in with a conversation I had with my mom about whether there is a right or wrong answer for everything in life.

Edited

Comments

[farlookout]

Oh, I'm glad you're not upset with me for speaking plainly. ._.

Yeah, it is impossible, and so I was willing to suspend my disbelief for the most part because I understood that the medical reasons for why this happened wasn't really the point. It's just that the scene where Kyuhyun regained his emotions would have probably been better if set in a hospital setting with Zhou Mi being there ._. because if I knew that a procedure could possibly kill my patient, I'd want to keep an eye on him, wouldn't you? It made me really feel like the GWP organization was really evil because they were so determined to show that their way was the best way that they were willing to allow their patients who had had the reversal process to die, just so that they could say "Oh, everyone dies when they do this, so don't bother doing it."

Idk, maybe I'm just reading into it.

The only other big thing that bothered me was the fact that you said undoing a blood clot could reverse the procedure. When there's a blood clot, the tissues fed by that blood vessel can no longer receive nutrients and oxygen, and they die (it's called ischemia, starving to death). That's what happens in a stroke. If all it took to undo the damage of a stroke was to unblock the blood clot, nobody would have problems following strokes; they'd all just be well again. I was reading your comments, though, and I get where you got the idea from? Neurotransmitters do flow through the blood stream, but you know how the brain's just a big bundle of nerves? Nerves talk to each other by tossing neurotransmitters back and forth, and they don't use the bloodstream to do that. So if you wanted to stop neurotransmitters in the brain, you'd have to stop the neurons from either sending or receiving their neurotransmitters-which is how some mental medications like SSRIs and MAOs work.

(Idk, I find medicine fascinating and just wanted to share stuff with you? The brain is really pretty rad.)

One thing I did appreciate was that you kept sense of right and wrong/conscience, because iirc that area's handled by a totally different area of the brain (frontal lobe) :D

Anyway! You asked for a solution. I assumed this fic was set in the future? By that time, it's certainly possible that we would have come up with new medications that could completely block emotions; a lot of stories that deal with a plot similar to this (e.g., Equilibrium) use this method. Alternatively, by this future point we may have mapped the brain really, really accurately, and therefore they could go in and target the very specific parts of the brain responsible for various emotions to destroy. The only thing is that I haven't thought of a way to undo it, but I'm still thinking, so. ._.

The other problem is that you can't have such a dramatic reversal if you use medication; it'd be more gradual as the drug left the bloodstream. So I suppose it would have taken away your chance to write that scene, but...

Okay, I'm sorry I talked so much. I'm sorry I couldn't be more useful, and that's not to say, of course, that your fic doesn't have a lot going for it, because it does!

[ava_lava]

Yah, don't worry about speaking your mind in front of me - I prefer criticism because it means that I am worth criticizing. Besides, I love science, so your medical-info-sharing is greatly appreciated ^^

So, probably the best way for this procedure to theoretically work would be to find a way of targeting the neurons from sending/receiving neurotransmitters that affect emotions, correct? Do you think that a fictional medication could be strong enough to permanently freeze them? And in this train of thought, I could use an equally fictional medication to unfreeze them?

I'll be rewriting/editing passages on my computer while I await your reply. Hopefully it will be more to your liking by the time I'm through!