0163 - In which Lee is wrong. - 2020.11.16 |
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Comment: As a creative person, having a sounding-board is essential. It doesn't even have to be a person, necessarily, you just have to talk your way through things sometimes. Very often, you'll have what feels like a full idea in your head, and it's only when you try to describe it in words that you realize it's half-formed. Very often, a plot feels sensible, but you don't see the logical hole until you try to tell the story to someone else. Very often, you think a character is complete, but when you have to answer questions like "and what was their childhood like?", you find yourself giving your sounding-board answers you didn't know you knew. Very often, an idea will be bone-stupid, and you'll only realize the stupidity when you try to communicate it outside of your own head. And, of course, while a sounding-board doesn't have to respond in any particular way, different sounding-boards will prompt different responses from you. This is tied to the different selves we all have - you'd respond differently to your mother than you would to your friend, your co-worker, a stranger, or an angry cop. I say all this to explain why Lee Caldavera is just now expressing their own deeply-held beliefs about the fundamental nature of authority - perhaps beliefs they didn't know they had - and they are coming as a surprise to Doc, who has, ostensibly, been psychoanalyzing them for years. Zoa is just a different sort of sounding-board. "Insanity", you'll recall, is not a medical diagnosis, but a legal term - your mindset has diverged so far from the norm that you cannot function in society. Long-term isolation from society may not necessarily breed mental illness, but it can't not breed insanity. Believing that all authority is, by its very nature, hostile to you is much like believing that your neighbours are secret aliens - it makes you, by definition, insane, regardless of whether or not it happens to be factually true. |
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