[narrative] we remember best the secrets we don't keep
the secret is this: you have always been different.
when you were five you were in love with ms. chote. she had light curly hair and a necklace made of red glass beads; they caught the sun when she stood by the window. you watched red light scatter like dandelion fluff, and when she laughed you smiled. when she did you could see her one silver ( Read more... )
One thing I find interesting is the no-caps thing. I don't know if that's just that you weren't bothered to capitalize stuff, or if that was a conscious decision about how West thinks/writes -- I'm guessing the latter, but could be wrong -- but either way, it works better than I would normally think, given how much it would annoy me in other contexts.
Meanwhile, totally agreed on the whole "when you realize you're a little weird, you tend to make yourself more so as a defense against how people might react" thing. I didn't have the "so bored by class being beneath me that they think I'm special ed." thing, though I did have a hell of a time with basic arithmetic in first grade that my parents put a lot of effort on their own to get me past. (Like, seriously, I'd struggle and finally get that "2 + 3 = 5", and then get handed "3 + 2" and totally not get that you can swap the numbers and see that it's also 5. That I'm as good with math as I am now is entirely odd, given this.) I have, however, always had a brain that remembers lots of random details and stuff -- commercial catchphrases were a favorite when I was real little, much to my parents' annoyance in the grocery store -- so I've always been aware of the weird thing, and it's much like this here.
As for Hell and Nexus and ShenaniganderFambly... Total agreement on Hell Folks and what having the world end makes for keeping what you can make yours after. I kind of went differently with that for Smith, in that his world had, in a way, already ended at least once, with the "this is no longer my time" thing and what he made and latched onto for himself being the certainty that he was in Hell to be ready for something and then that something was the defending of the town and those people who'd also found themselves drawn to it. He wasn't attached too much to particular people, but rather to the town and to people being there, which I ascribe at least partially to how he was trained back in his Army days.
Grif, meanwhile, is probably one of the more casual members of the fambly, in terms of fambly-ness, which I'm sort of working towards making him less so, but only so far because of his inherent slack-ness. He doesn't, in the strictest sense, need people with a horrible burning need, but he's had a family (broken though it was, with the parental desertion and the sister-raising), he's done the "being forced to be with these people" thing, he had a long while after Blood Gulch emptied out in which he hung out alone in the base all day except for business matters... and now he's gotten to the point where he's ready to spend more time around people than just a random Nexus question-answering conversation and is gradually increasingly enjoying the concept of having friends around who're close enough to maybe be a new sorta-family.
Okay. Yeah, I think that about covers it. Or, at least, what I can think of right now. I should probably do some work, but hell, I'm the only non-junior SA in the office today, so most of my duty is keeping watch on things.
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In actual relevant response, the no-caps are sort of...half between here and there, in that I had the germ of this idea (which started out very differently, fyi) and was just trying to spit the idea out before it fermented and became stupid, because I really only write narratives if i can make them of significant length.
And as it became clearer where the parallel wanted to be drawn (which is pretty much that West knows what it's like to be different on a lot of levels, as ...I hope is pretty clear) I stuck with it because I liked how kind of - to use Dele's term - minimalist it made it. Stylistically it's in the same vein with how there's no quoted dialog - I wanted it to feel hazy, basically. Old memories tend to be fuzzy on the details, except for the ones that just stick (like the necklace or fingernails or whatever) and so making the text all small was sort of my pretentious attempt to look at it through a long lens.
...things you didn't need to know, round four millon.
And now, my brain has effectively atrophied, so I will address the rest of this insightfulness when I return. WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME THEN, SLARTI?
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And OKAY! I THINK I WILL SURVIVE THE LONG HOURS, JERI! Also, maybe I'll actually get work done. :-P
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Which kind of goes with Grif, too, in that like...okay, he's technically one of the uncles, as far as Claire goes, which I kind of mutate (because I don't play Claire XD) into like....a grouchy, funny big brother thing. PERHAPS THIS IS BECAUSE I AM TO PLAY SISTER SOMEDAY, I AM NOT SURE. But it's there. For Nathan it's like...one more competent person to have around, and he thoroughly enjoys surrounding himself with competency - one of the things you see a lot on Heroes is Nathan working with people he wouldn't ordinarily get to know because they have a common goal, and I think that's an interesting commentary on having been in the Navy, too. You work with the people you're told to work with, and eventually you BECOME friends through those experiences, you don't like...choose buddies.
So those are my thoughts. :D
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Actually, no, I do, personally, tend to intend it as more of a big-brother thing than an uncle thing, as far as Grif goes, partially specifically because due to being familiar with the big-brother role (although in his own case, that includes some amount of child-raising-ness that maybe ends up translating to uncle to others' view), and partially because he's not entirely comfortable with the concept of the larger responsibility/authority that he sees in the title of "uncle"...
On which note, for all that he may well be competent, and in some ways more so than his amigos, he doesn't really like being seen as competent, at least not by others who he pays to do work for him, because that goes right to the place from whence originates the lazy slacker image he cultivated to get him through not having to do much of anything to get through the war. (That he managed to make it all the way through basic training, however, which he was pushed through but not so much that they let him go without being able to pass, ends up meaning he probably is much more capable than he thinks, and led to his cranking up the slack even more once he got posted to Blood Gulch.)
They are excellent thoughts. Here are some more of my own. :D
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