Time to meet Zhavah again
Two months to go, and my thesis question has changed again - What strategies work most effectively to represent, for a general audience, ways in which role-play fantasy games make possible diverse identity experiences?
Should I be so amazed that my thesis question, originally to do with the history of D&D, then the investment in editions of it, no longer has anything to do with it??
Creative draft is finished, now have to go through and edit it, because it's almost totally raw, standing at 8,300 words. Next up is the exegesis, 4,000 words, and I already have 4 paragraph topics for it. Suddenly feel like this is within my sights. As Ann told me today, the work for the exegesis is done - its a record of where I've been and how I got to where I am.
I'm not going to post the whole draft, otherwise you'll see it multiple times, and I'm serious when I say totally raw and in dire need of an edit. However, this paragraph is perhaps the most important to answering the question, and one of both my and Liz's favourites (Ann hadn't read it yet, when I saw them today)
Zhavah is a character.
Zhavah is me.
I am Zhavah.
It all depends on when you catch us. When we’re playing on Saturday night, it is a matter of me becoming her, of assuming the character, of taking control of her, settling into my corner in the same way that she folds herself into shadows. In those moments, Zhavah belongs to me, as I step back into her, controlling her every movement on the board, her every word.
There are other times, outside of the game, when I’ll have a particularly bitchy thought, something that was not so uncommon in my depressive state - flooded with burning anger that I could never displace, I would silently turn my rage outwards - I began to hear it in her voice. Zhavah became that darker part of my psyche, taking over from the part of me that I didn’t want to recognise as me. I recognised what I had become, and was happy to believe that it could be someone else instead. It didn’t make me love her any less - in fact, I was drawn closer to her, enjoying the freedom of being able to think in the guise of someone else, of being allowed to fling out a murderous thought as another being, and then reassume my own life, where I would simply turn you a tight smile, and at worst, yell at you. In these moments, it is not hard for me to imagine her, creation of mine, wandering around me, leaning on the counter beside my coffee machine as I deal with a particularly difficult customer in my job as a barista. She turns towards me, her glare gentle, as she criticises someone’s fashion sense, or purrs how easily she could cast a death spell on someone else. She moves easily between the two because she simply doesn’t care, and in doing so, distracts me from giving much of a damn either.
And then there are the times when we are completely separate. As a writer, I have many characters vying for position and attention, and admittedly, very few of them are as complete as my purple tiefling. I will imagine her in scenarios, allowing her to show me what it is that she wants. I write those moments, and like many writers, don’t always have control over what happens in the stories. She remains Zhavah, in control of herself, refusing any characterisation of her that she thinks I have gotten wrong. And I retain myself.
~*~
Should I be so amazed that my thesis question, originally to do with the history of D&D, then the investment in editions of it, no longer has anything to do with it??
Creative draft is finished, now have to go through and edit it, because it's almost totally raw, standing at 8,300 words. Next up is the exegesis, 4,000 words, and I already have 4 paragraph topics for it. Suddenly feel like this is within my sights. As Ann told me today, the work for the exegesis is done - its a record of where I've been and how I got to where I am.
I'm not going to post the whole draft, otherwise you'll see it multiple times, and I'm serious when I say totally raw and in dire need of an edit. However, this paragraph is perhaps the most important to answering the question, and one of both my and Liz's favourites (Ann hadn't read it yet, when I saw them today)
Zhavah is a character.
Zhavah is me.
I am Zhavah.
It all depends on when you catch us. When we’re playing on Saturday night, it is a matter of me becoming her, of assuming the character, of taking control of her, settling into my corner in the same way that she folds herself into shadows. In those moments, Zhavah belongs to me, as I step back into her, controlling her every movement on the board, her every word.
There are other times, outside of the game, when I’ll have a particularly bitchy thought, something that was not so uncommon in my depressive state - flooded with burning anger that I could never displace, I would silently turn my rage outwards - I began to hear it in her voice. Zhavah became that darker part of my psyche, taking over from the part of me that I didn’t want to recognise as me. I recognised what I had become, and was happy to believe that it could be someone else instead. It didn’t make me love her any less - in fact, I was drawn closer to her, enjoying the freedom of being able to think in the guise of someone else, of being allowed to fling out a murderous thought as another being, and then reassume my own life, where I would simply turn you a tight smile, and at worst, yell at you. In these moments, it is not hard for me to imagine her, creation of mine, wandering around me, leaning on the counter beside my coffee machine as I deal with a particularly difficult customer in my job as a barista. She turns towards me, her glare gentle, as she criticises someone’s fashion sense, or purrs how easily she could cast a death spell on someone else. She moves easily between the two because she simply doesn’t care, and in doing so, distracts me from giving much of a damn either.
And then there are the times when we are completely separate. As a writer, I have many characters vying for position and attention, and admittedly, very few of them are as complete as my purple tiefling. I will imagine her in scenarios, allowing her to show me what it is that she wants. I write those moments, and like many writers, don’t always have control over what happens in the stories. She remains Zhavah, in control of herself, refusing any characterisation of her that she thinks I have gotten wrong. And I retain myself.
~*~