Reminds me of GURPS, the role-playing system, oddly enough, which has formed one of the central ideas that shape my perspective. You have x number of character points (50-100 for a regular person, 250+ for super-people), start out with a typical person with typical attributes. You can buy enhanced stats and abilities with character points, but you can also choose disadvantages -- physical limitations, moral or cognitive restrictions, obligations -- that give you back points. Sure, you can be super-strong, but maybe you're bound by a certain code of conduct.
It's fantastically more complex than this, of course, but it boils down to something I try to enforce in all of my writing -- everything bought must be paid for. If your character feels actual pain when anyone is lying, wouldn't that make it damn near impossible to have a stable relationship with anyone (especially if you keep it a secret)? Can you have enhanced senses (or, in my case, any senses) without debilitating migraines? Does having an innate understanding of how the universe work lead one to frustration with the human race, or even borderline insanity with a mind stretched so wide?
Part of this is my mindset, I know -- if I'm creating a world, I want it somehow to be a just world, a world of balance. But even in this "reality" I never fail to search for it -- someone with any degree of success or distinction has paid for it, somehow, along the way. There are rare cases when someone ends up born into a state of success they haven't and never will truly earn, and there are many more cases where the deserving find themselves at the short end of the stick, but I want to believe that even if they aren't immediately balanced by something in my field of awareness, that there's some sort of force acting to push circumstances into alignment. It's something I need, but need is not quite belief.
Also, I find it hysterical that the TVTropes page uses one of my friends' work as its quote -- an entirely hilarious work, I might add.
The last huge, sprawling work that I tried to complete was maybe 1/7th complete, but most of the characters -- protagonist and antagonist -- fit that same formula. One of my instructors long, long ago insisted on his version of the dramatic formula: "I want ___, but ___, however ___, so ___." And all you need is to fill in the blanks. So all of my characters had that half-complete: "I am/can ___, but ___." And in the best case -- or at least the case that seemed the fairest or truest to life -- that equation would balance. And sometimes they'd differ based on the time -- sure, you might be able to innately understand and empathize with your twin brother, but what happens after he's dead? Maybe you're the deadliest man in the world with a gun, but what if you can't kill anyone anymore? Maybe you can move three times faster than anyone else, but that means the rest of the world is always three times slower than you -- every hour is three hours long, every day three days.... Maybe sometimes you can get a peek into tomorrow, or the day after -- but when things happen to you, they don't necessarily happen in the same order that they do in reality, and your entire life is lived out of sequence and you don't know why....
There were a few central tenets to the work -- the idea of balance, that everything must be paid for, was probably the core. There was also the idea that any venture from the norm, any emergent advantage as well as any disadvantage, would probably end up medicated back to normality, just for the ease of all involved. There was also the concept that with the eventual emergence of the posthuman race that it would require adherence to the core of humanity to guide the ascension to what lies beyond. And there was the idea that humanity could be shepherded into its future, into its long-term survival, but at no small cost to those shepherds, because...everything has a price.
What's deeply annoying to me is that I never got it all done, and now I have to tick off every idea I had that becomes cliche in modern culture when someone else does it. I should've finished it a long time ago, or even now, but I don't think things are quite...aligned. Yet.
It's fantastically more complex than this, of course, but it boils down to something I try to enforce in all of my writing -- everything bought must be paid for. If your character feels actual pain when anyone is lying, wouldn't that make it damn near impossible to have a stable relationship with anyone (especially if you keep it a secret)? Can you have enhanced senses (or, in my case, any senses) without debilitating migraines? Does having an innate understanding of how the universe work lead one to frustration with the human race, or even borderline insanity with a mind stretched so wide?
Part of this is my mindset, I know -- if I'm creating a world, I want it somehow to be a just world, a world of balance. But even in this "reality" I never fail to search for it -- someone with any degree of success or distinction has paid for it, somehow, along the way. There are rare cases when someone ends up born into a state of success they haven't and never will truly earn, and there are many more cases where the deserving find themselves at the short end of the stick, but I want to believe that even if they aren't immediately balanced by something in my field of awareness, that there's some sort of force acting to push circumstances into alignment. It's something I need, but need is not quite belief.
Also, I find it hysterical that the TVTropes page uses one of my friends' work as its quote -- an entirely hilarious work, I might add.
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There were a few central tenets to the work -- the idea of balance, that everything must be paid for, was probably the core. There was also the idea that any venture from the norm, any emergent advantage as well as any disadvantage, would probably end up medicated back to normality, just for the ease of all involved. There was also the concept that with the eventual emergence of the posthuman race that it would require adherence to the core of humanity to guide the ascension to what lies beyond. And there was the idea that humanity could be shepherded into its future, into its long-term survival, but at no small cost to those shepherds, because...everything has a price.
What's deeply annoying to me is that I never got it all done, and now I have to tick off every idea I had that becomes cliche in modern culture when someone else does it. I should've finished it a long time ago, or even now, but I don't think things are quite...aligned. Yet.
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