LJ Idol, Season 9 - Week 31

[tsuki_no_bara]

title: Hope
topic: "the future outwits all our certitudes

Comments

[reckless_blues]

I like stories like this, where after the end people just kind of get on with it, and there's love and community and companionship. Although other kinds of post-apocalyptic stories are exciting (I love them, even) I'm tired of that smug attitude that the strong, callous, and vicious survive - it's unscientific! (I hate it when people try to use intellectual superiority to be 2edgy4me, especially if they're wrong. And they almost always are.) If that was evolutionary fact, then how could we have evolved to be such complex social animals?

So I think this is most realistic. There would be chaos, and life would be cheap (for a while and in some places, almost certainly, I don't know to what degree). But I'm certain we'd see this and (as time went by) a lot of it.

I like the motif of water/liquid. Tea, rainwater, baths, coffee, and the recurring thoughts of indoor plumbing. Flowing water is cyclical, but also cleansing. It's a good metaphor for this.

[tsuki_no_bara]

i like a good post-apocalypse as much as the next person, but yeah, at some point things are going to calm down, and the strong and callous and vicious aren't going to be the only people left. (and what kind of society would that be if they were? y'know? who'd want to live there?) there probably still are some really hard and vicious places left in this 'verse, but for once i wanted an almost pioneer-y post-apocalypse, where you're at the mercy of the weather and the shit in your own head more than the armed-to-the-teeth hardcore survivalists down the road. i'm really glad you liked it. :D

i honestly didn't do the water motif on purpose, altho maybe i shouldn't say that....

[reckless_blues]

HR Giger did a painting of Debbie Harry once with rods through her face. He commented on it that these rods represented the four elements, but that he didn't realize it while he was painting it, only afterwards - sometimes you don't understand things until it's finished, he said. He put it a little better than I did. But I think of that often.

[tsuki_no_bara]

it's always really cool when that happens - when you finish something and look back at it and go "oh, i see what i was doing!" - but i always need someone else to point it out to me in my own work. i'm kind of crap at discovering things i didn't deliberately put in there. and i'm now super curious about that giger painting! his stuff is so disturbing and weird and i wouldn't think it would mesh with debbie harry's kind of new wave punk aesthetic. to google!

[lrig_rorrim]

I like the quiet mundanity of this piece. The aftermath of upheaval and change is always most keenly felt in these little thing - the lack of coffee, the new routines, the collection of rain water.

[tsuki_no_bara]

thank you! and yeah, that's what i was thinking. i mean, right after the big apocalyptic event there's naturally going to be chaos and anarchy, but after that? people still have to live in the world that's left, and that means figuring out how to feed and water yourself and where you're going to live and how you're going to stay warm and dry and clothed, and learning what you can survive without. so i wanted to write something that happens after the anarchy has calmed down.

[suesniffsglue]

This really speaks to the strong parts of being human. It's so encouraging and relatable. Really nice job!

[tsuki_no_bara]

thank you and... thank you! :D

[halfshellvenus]

I liked this very much, especially the sorrow and longing-- not just for what was, but for the people Deanna has lost, including the schoolchildren she tended to, most of whom probably did not survive.

It's hard to want only what you can realisticallly have, when you know what and who you used to have. But it also marks the difference between those how survive and those who don't.

[tsuki_no_bara]

thank you. ^_^ she misses what was, and also who was. (and that's a lot of people.) by now she's mostly adjusted, but man, there are some things you're never going to get over. having had indoor plumbing, for one.

i think a big reason she survived was because she found noah and he let her travel with him, because helping him out and looking after him gave her a purpose, which she'd lost. having someone to love - and someone to love her - kind of mitigates some of her losses.

[jem0000000]

Aw. I hope she finds the future she's looking for.

[tsuki_no_bara]

i do too! now that she's actually looking towards the future.