Fic: Trope Bingo 4, xxxHolic Rou

[evil_whimsey]

This story made me insane. I thought when I was done, it would be amusing to describe how the thing came about. But at the moment, it doesn't seem amusing at all. I just want it gone from my head

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[evil_whimsey]

It is possibly an inappropriate response, when someone tells you that you have skewered them, to come back with "I have decided I actually love you to pieces." But where writing is concerned, I'm intent on always being as sincere as humanly possible. And considering I've been in a post-meltdown stage, creatively and personally, for several months, I'm inclined to grab onto any rope I'm thrown.

Consider Exhibit A: managing to overcome an admittedly bizarre panic-level aversion to logging in on this journal, or writing anything longer than a text msg or facebook entry, just so I can respond to your comment. (And in light of which, please forgive my complete lack of practice with logic and sense-making where things like phrases and paragraphs are concerned).

You talk about looking into the abyss and not flinching, and yeah I was doing that here (actually that was a standard procedure for all the Trope Bingo entries I did), and as it turns out there are actually sometimes serious consequences for that. It's not just that the fucker looks back into you, that I can generally handle. It's when the abyss reflects you from unsettling angles you don't normally see yourself at, like lining up a few mirrors to see the back of your head, or a warped angle on your jaw that makes you suddenly a distant passing stranger you might not trust or like the look of. And the effect may or may not throw you completely off the rails; depending on your psychic resiliency at the time, I guess.

There is also the problem that when I'm up on my game with writing (or at least working the more capable levels), is also quite often when I'm close to a dodgy tipping point in my mental equilibrium. By way of illustration, when I was doing these Trope Bingo entries, I was also doing scattered research into quantum physics, trying simple homebrew experiments with electromagnetism, sewing clothes, roadtripping halfway across the country, trying to learn to write metered poetry, etc. Mostly out of a desperate need to be occupied for eighteen to twenty hours a day, and a desperate inability to stay occupied with anything for longer than ten minutes or so. (This might make sense in light of my also still house sharing with my ex; divorced after a 14-year relationship, but there's also the fact that I am stone crazy, regardless.)

Point being, in the context of all that, I had this Trope Bingo card. And tropes were boring, and subverting tropes was boring, and what I really wanted to do was see just how far out sideways I could warp a prompt before it snapped and made no connection at all to anything.

Now I'm just going to assume this discussion will blow the character limit, so comment TBC....

[evil_whimsey]

The Blanket one and The Chosen One tropes weren't too challenging. Tentacles (aka "The Pearl Diver") is my favorite, I think, in terms of the warpage I was aiming for. By the time I hit Accidental Stimulation, a bystander could probably have smelled the gears in my brain starting to burn. I started with brainstorming all over Google, to see what randomness regarding "stimulation" it might throw at me. I fetched up against the concept of Absolute Threshold, which is a perfectly delicious idea, with tons of acreage for growing metaphors. Particularly attractive was the bit on the absolute threshold of vision, and I tried for ages to figure out how to work the idea of 90 photons into something (absolute threshold for human vision was measured at 90 photons, with only half of those actually hitting the retina, and 20% of those reaching the fovea). But apparently that puzzle piece didn't belong in any jigsaw puzzle I had to hand, so it's gone up for adoption to anyone who'd like to tinker with it.

The trail then led from Threshold to Liminality, where I soon discovered that basically all of xxxHolic is really about liminal states (yes, sometimes I learn things backwards). The discussion about Permanent Liminality and its consequences also rang quite familiar; how things disintegrate when you don't finish crossing that threshold and get closure on the ritual, which reminded me achingly of your Doumeki/Himawari universe.

The fact that this story jives with your work on them is deliberate; I borrowed the spine and angles you've taken for them, because it clicked so well with what I already had stewing. It made a sturdy, trustworthy stage on which to explore a certain mix of Himawari + Accidents, and how what if she is in some sense (maybe whilst looking into her own abyss) stimulated by the awful things that go on around her. Maybe there was some kind of attraction, or fascination there, which obviously she could never reveal to any other human being, ever, and mostly not even herself (hence the Elbow quote at the beginning). Except for Doumeki, because he isn't people, and is the only living human in their world who would think her smiles are less tolerable than the fallout of her curse.

So in a ridiculously scattered mutant nutshell, that's how this story happened. And then my whole writing apparatus ground to a slow halt, which sucks worst of all because it doesn't mean I stopped having ideas for things (Kafka Komedy had some particularly queer possibilities, including John Watson + The Metamorphosis), but whatever mechanism makes these people talk in my head completely ceased to function. For um....going on five months, now, I think.

And I won't lie. It is absolutely horrible. Which is why I teared up and damn near cried with relief upon discovering your comments, because you are one of my favorite human beings, with the loveliest magical brain, which somehow has the extraordinary power of rousing my own brain from deep hibernation under some Antarctic glacier, and when you see a thing like that story up there, you understand.

So again I have to thank you, and to say that nothing would please me more than to help wake up and excite your brain in turn, and hopefully open the door to more grand mad vistas, because they are so much fun, and that energy crackling back and forth makes life totally worth all the trouble. Plus you always have awesome poetry and book recs, and I have terribly missed staring slackjawed at your ideas and the connections you make, coming out of fields I had no previous idea about, it is always fantastic.