Broken Pieces
I have this problem with filters. Or so I have percieved. I really don't have one. I say what's on my mind for the most part. While that does include oppinions, I find that it normally gets me into trouble when I'm describing images that I grow in my brain. Many have noticed that I'm a visually-minded person (haha, Star), which would make sense given my background as an artist. In truth, I have a better tactile memory than anything else, but that's not the point here. Stack the lack of filter and visually-tuned brain on top of a pretty high tolerance for things most people would find disgusting and it's a recipe for trouble. Mostly trouble for other people.
Case in point, the Shadow of Yesterday Zombies game in that I'm playing in on Sundays with
crowyhead,
harrytheheir and some people that don't have LJ accounts. (By the way, I shall forever refer to this game as Shadow of Zombie. This is because that title is undeniably awesome.) The game is modernish, a post-undead-apocolypse thing like the Stand or Dawn of the Dead. I'm playing a character named Carmen "Southpaw" Navarro. Navarro is a woman in her late twenties that was born just after the zombie apocolypse. Having been raised in such a terrible time, she grew to reflect it. She became a "ranger", a person that goes outside of her community and patrols its borders for undead incurrsion, gathers supplies, etc. While out on the range, Navarro and her patrol were attacked by some undead. The rest of the patrol were killed but Navarro was able to get away, though she had been bitten on her left arm during the battle. She was able to wrap her belt around the top of her arm and cut off the circulation which has led to poor Carmen having a terrible, twisted, monstrously powerful left arm.
Navarro, like so many characters that I play when I'm on the other side of the GM screen, started as an image in my head. She began her life as a picture of a woman with a twisted, leathery, overly-muscled left arm stuck on the body of an athletic hispanic woman. Kinda like this...
Things got worse from there. I started imagining what the zombie arm meant for my character, what it could do. Super-strong made sense, but wouldn't it be cool if it had a little bit of a mind of its own? And what if I couldn't feel anything through that arm at all? No sensation. The thoughts chrystalized a little more when I realized that the arm was a bit violent and for Carmen to sleep she needed to literally nail her hand down in order to keep it from trying to attack her while she rested.
Not much was discussed of the state of the zombie and undead world outside of our sheltered community of Sulphur, OK. During gameplay Dan, the GM, revealed more and more that the undead weren't just slavering roving hordes. They had community, they had memory, they had society. This made the bite that my character recieved a much different ballgame. I had orriginally envisioned the zombie bite to be the equivalent of a bite from a rabies-bitten dog. With this new information, and the knowledge that my character would have known about the presence of zombie culture, it seemed obivous to me that things needed to get much deeper.
On our first excursion outside of town my character runs into a character named Tottenkoph, a lich from the undead community and a bit of a diplomat. (I think I spelled that right.) Dan tells me that Tottenkoph was there when I was attacked and asks me to fill in the blanks. I immediately decide that my character hates and distrusts this guy. He was there when I was attacked and he did nothing to help me, so of course I hate and distrust him. The problem was, of course, that he had already gained the trust of two other members of the group, which ostracized me in turn.
Dan and I talked about Carmen and discussed what I thought happened. I had a hard time trying to discribe to Dan the violation that had been done to Carmen and how it would hurt her so much on a psychological level. His arguement, which extended through the character of Tottenkoph, was that the undead don't just attack for no reason, so I must have been doing something to get them riled up. And since I've been bitten I am undead too. I should just embrace it. I hated the arguement but couldn't really frame a rebuttal.
It was after a session of the game that I realized how to describe it. I told Dan that Carmen was a rape victim. I hated to say it, and I hated to make it a character point, but it was the only correlary that made sense in my brain. Something had been done to her, against her will, and it was beyond intimately physical and it left her both physically and emotionally scarred.
It was during the next session that things got worse. Dan and I had talked about Carmen actually being undead, unlike the "not quite undead" that I'd been thinking about when I first envisioned Carmen. I liked it, but I needed to make it terrible for her. Part of my character's point was to show how truly awful, how horrifying the undead were. And I was willing to go the distance.
I thought about the rest of Carmen's body and what might be happening. I thought about how she might be hungry all of the time. She just eats and eats and eats and never gets full. Hell, her stomach never stops growling seeing as how she doesn't feed it what it's starting to crave. Maybe she gets fevers and cold sweats for no reason. Even with all of the food she's been eating, Carmen can't really remember the last time she used the bathroom. Sometimes her eyes bleed.
Then I went to the really disgusting stuff.
What if her insides were starting to rot. I thought about Carmen's menstrual cycle. The idea came in to my head that the next time her period came around, rather than having blood come out of her, tiny little twisting white maggots would crawl their way out and flop onto the floor.
With these images in my head I knew that Carmen was not going to be going good places. She was changing into the thing that had attacked her, that had killed her friends, and she had no control over it. She was angry. She was vengeful.
During the next session I shot Tottenkoph in the face with a shotgun the first chance I had. He was a lich, I knew he was coming back, but he needed to be shot becaue of what he did.
The players were floored. They didn't know why I did what I had done. After a couple of scenes they were able to question me in character. And once again I felt like I couldn't get the other people around me ti understand what I had thought Carmen had gone through. One of the other player's characters had been going around in the undead community and was taking a liking to it. The others found them to be inoffensive mostly. I felt like my character had been neutered. So I said that only thing that I could that I thought would bring them around to the horror of my character's life.
"They raped me."
This time I meant it literally. My character became a rape victim. I hate it. I really do. I don't like that she's become another one of those female victim characters. I wanted her to have more dimension than that, to be deeper. I didn't want to be the male writer that uses rape, the most horrific fucking thing that can be done to a person, as an excuse. But so much of gaming is about the exact opposite of subtlety and I saw it as the only way to communicate what I had wanted to, to make the other players at the table to feel it like I did.
Okay, I'll admit it. I made Carmen to feel powerless and alone at the outset of character creation because that's the way that I feel too. After Star, well... I couldn't really wear a character that wasn't feeling the same fucked-up, painful feelings that I was. I wouldn't be able to relate. And over time Carmen's become more self-loathing and I've made her more fucked up. She's become more violent and angry and cut-off and I can relate to it.
I'm trying to think of a way to make her okay but I really can't. In a scene from last session I came across a character that was on Navarro's trail for some vengance against her. We tussled and I cut his achilles' tendon and put him down. I stood over him with my knife in my hand and I asked him what he wanted me to do.
"I don't care," he says and spits.
I dropped the knife on the ground by his hands and turned to walk away. I said over my shoulder "Use it on yourself. Use it on me. Either way, use it in time."
In that moment, that one bried excahange, Carmen became the weathered, beaten down soldier; the broken, weary gunslinger from a western just waiting for that one guy to come along and kill her because she can't think of any other way out.
I don't know what to do next as a player. I like Navarro and I like the game. I want to keep playing, but I feel like I've bullied myself in to a corner and I don't know how to get out. I didn't feel like I could talk to the rest of the group before as I've been felling distant and I found it hard to communicate. Maybe I don't have a choice anymore.
Oh, Ron Edwards, rescue me!
Case in point, the Shadow of Yesterday Zombies game in that I'm playing in on Sundays with
crowyhead,
harrytheheir and some people that don't have LJ accounts. (By the way, I shall forever refer to this game as Shadow of Zombie. This is because that title is undeniably awesome.) The game is modernish, a post-undead-apocolypse thing like the Stand or Dawn of the Dead. I'm playing a character named Carmen "Southpaw" Navarro. Navarro is a woman in her late twenties that was born just after the zombie apocolypse. Having been raised in such a terrible time, she grew to reflect it. She became a "ranger", a person that goes outside of her community and patrols its borders for undead incurrsion, gathers supplies, etc. While out on the range, Navarro and her patrol were attacked by some undead. The rest of the patrol were killed but Navarro was able to get away, though she had been bitten on her left arm during the battle. She was able to wrap her belt around the top of her arm and cut off the circulation which has led to poor Carmen having a terrible, twisted, monstrously powerful left arm.
Navarro, like so many characters that I play when I'm on the other side of the GM screen, started as an image in my head. She began her life as a picture of a woman with a twisted, leathery, overly-muscled left arm stuck on the body of an athletic hispanic woman. Kinda like this...
Things got worse from there. I started imagining what the zombie arm meant for my character, what it could do. Super-strong made sense, but wouldn't it be cool if it had a little bit of a mind of its own? And what if I couldn't feel anything through that arm at all? No sensation. The thoughts chrystalized a little more when I realized that the arm was a bit violent and for Carmen to sleep she needed to literally nail her hand down in order to keep it from trying to attack her while she rested.
Not much was discussed of the state of the zombie and undead world outside of our sheltered community of Sulphur, OK. During gameplay Dan, the GM, revealed more and more that the undead weren't just slavering roving hordes. They had community, they had memory, they had society. This made the bite that my character recieved a much different ballgame. I had orriginally envisioned the zombie bite to be the equivalent of a bite from a rabies-bitten dog. With this new information, and the knowledge that my character would have known about the presence of zombie culture, it seemed obivous to me that things needed to get much deeper.
On our first excursion outside of town my character runs into a character named Tottenkoph, a lich from the undead community and a bit of a diplomat. (I think I spelled that right.) Dan tells me that Tottenkoph was there when I was attacked and asks me to fill in the blanks. I immediately decide that my character hates and distrusts this guy. He was there when I was attacked and he did nothing to help me, so of course I hate and distrust him. The problem was, of course, that he had already gained the trust of two other members of the group, which ostracized me in turn.
Dan and I talked about Carmen and discussed what I thought happened. I had a hard time trying to discribe to Dan the violation that had been done to Carmen and how it would hurt her so much on a psychological level. His arguement, which extended through the character of Tottenkoph, was that the undead don't just attack for no reason, so I must have been doing something to get them riled up. And since I've been bitten I am undead too. I should just embrace it. I hated the arguement but couldn't really frame a rebuttal.
It was after a session of the game that I realized how to describe it. I told Dan that Carmen was a rape victim. I hated to say it, and I hated to make it a character point, but it was the only correlary that made sense in my brain. Something had been done to her, against her will, and it was beyond intimately physical and it left her both physically and emotionally scarred.
It was during the next session that things got worse. Dan and I had talked about Carmen actually being undead, unlike the "not quite undead" that I'd been thinking about when I first envisioned Carmen. I liked it, but I needed to make it terrible for her. Part of my character's point was to show how truly awful, how horrifying the undead were. And I was willing to go the distance.
I thought about the rest of Carmen's body and what might be happening. I thought about how she might be hungry all of the time. She just eats and eats and eats and never gets full. Hell, her stomach never stops growling seeing as how she doesn't feed it what it's starting to crave. Maybe she gets fevers and cold sweats for no reason. Even with all of the food she's been eating, Carmen can't really remember the last time she used the bathroom. Sometimes her eyes bleed.
Then I went to the really disgusting stuff.
What if her insides were starting to rot. I thought about Carmen's menstrual cycle. The idea came in to my head that the next time her period came around, rather than having blood come out of her, tiny little twisting white maggots would crawl their way out and flop onto the floor.
With these images in my head I knew that Carmen was not going to be going good places. She was changing into the thing that had attacked her, that had killed her friends, and she had no control over it. She was angry. She was vengeful.
During the next session I shot Tottenkoph in the face with a shotgun the first chance I had. He was a lich, I knew he was coming back, but he needed to be shot becaue of what he did.
The players were floored. They didn't know why I did what I had done. After a couple of scenes they were able to question me in character. And once again I felt like I couldn't get the other people around me ti understand what I had thought Carmen had gone through. One of the other player's characters had been going around in the undead community and was taking a liking to it. The others found them to be inoffensive mostly. I felt like my character had been neutered. So I said that only thing that I could that I thought would bring them around to the horror of my character's life.
"They raped me."
This time I meant it literally. My character became a rape victim. I hate it. I really do. I don't like that she's become another one of those female victim characters. I wanted her to have more dimension than that, to be deeper. I didn't want to be the male writer that uses rape, the most horrific fucking thing that can be done to a person, as an excuse. But so much of gaming is about the exact opposite of subtlety and I saw it as the only way to communicate what I had wanted to, to make the other players at the table to feel it like I did.
Okay, I'll admit it. I made Carmen to feel powerless and alone at the outset of character creation because that's the way that I feel too. After Star, well... I couldn't really wear a character that wasn't feeling the same fucked-up, painful feelings that I was. I wouldn't be able to relate. And over time Carmen's become more self-loathing and I've made her more fucked up. She's become more violent and angry and cut-off and I can relate to it.
I'm trying to think of a way to make her okay but I really can't. In a scene from last session I came across a character that was on Navarro's trail for some vengance against her. We tussled and I cut his achilles' tendon and put him down. I stood over him with my knife in my hand and I asked him what he wanted me to do.
"I don't care," he says and spits.
I dropped the knife on the ground by his hands and turned to walk away. I said over my shoulder "Use it on yourself. Use it on me. Either way, use it in time."
In that moment, that one bried excahange, Carmen became the weathered, beaten down soldier; the broken, weary gunslinger from a western just waiting for that one guy to come along and kill her because she can't think of any other way out.
I don't know what to do next as a player. I like Navarro and I like the game. I want to keep playing, but I feel like I've bullied myself in to a corner and I don't know how to get out. I didn't feel like I could talk to the rest of the group before as I've been felling distant and I found it hard to communicate. Maybe I don't have a choice anymore.
Oh, Ron Edwards, rescue me!