#The problem with my first-person fiction despite my gravitas towards it is that

[soft-serve-soymilk]

Adventures in writing my English SAC, also known as 550 words of Theon being an angsty bitch,,

[myvoicenottheoneyougiveme]

In an Orwellian nightmare, thought crimes are the new “crime”.

You’re gonna tell me, gonna tell anyone what something is based on its ability to render unto you greater power over me and my life. It will be framed, recast, rewritten even, to serve a narrative completely removed from the thing actually being talked about.

Everything is this way.

Some things are easier than others to twist and make a scene about. In said nightmare the purpose is control. The truth isn’t the truth; the truth is what you say it is--you the person or entity in control. And that truth is always self-serving and more than anything, decoupled from reality.

The fact that you’re going to burn my life down over every breath I take, one might learn to just stop existing short of actually ceasing. In fact that is my life, in short, where I have stopped existing. Every facet of my life I’ve let go of, claimed by you, taken by you as an instrument of power. Every relationship, friendship, relative, acquaintance, every activity, hobby, place I used to frequent. Everything a “crime”.

Reduced to suffocating and becoming more dysfunctional just holding my breath waiting for it to be over, my every breath--movement of a muscle--it’s picked apart and scrutinized in this utilitarian fashion. The more dysfunctional I get and the more given to dysfunctional means of coping with what can’t be resolved by conventional means (cause reality can’t even be agreed upon by anyone involved you see--”this” isn’t happening and I’m crazy you see) the more my “savior” has as ammunition to justify their occupation and “management” of my life. I have been consumed by the womb-like warmth of an iron maiden. My understanding of medieval torture devices is lacking, but I find it an apt description of the god-queen amalgamation reigning supreme over my life. I get cut up just breathing.

Everything is “this” way. Everything is an avenue, a door, a means--an opening into me to be used as a tool to the deconstruction of my personhood and humanity. To end a life, literally, actually literally. .....The intentions may not be agreed upon, but that is the result. And last I checked your intentions don’t matter, only the consequences. Your own words to me, “we don’t get to decide when we have and haven’t hurt someone”. It isn’t for the person doing to decide that they’re one thing or another, self-delusionally too often. It’s the person that it’s being done to who has the first and last say to the true costs of the “vivisection” (as though there could be any kind of rhyme or reason to the things you do beyond the acquisition of power and control and “supply”).

In the iron maiden I have survived by becoming smaller and more non-existent. The smaller I’ve gotten the more the grip--the noose--has tightened. The more of my life I surrender to shut the door on you, the further in you have encroached. Absolute suffocation and self-medication become the new reality for me. And moments like this one remind me why existing.... it costs too much. But that’s what the powers that be in said nightmare live for--to absolutely brutalize every kind of self-assertion, to hollow out, to leave compliant, empty shells of people.

Art doesn’t ask your permission. But I’m cast a villain for the smallest, simplest things. How much more so for the brutal honesty of someone channeling therapy work into his art form, the emotional crux of which is a real life relationship with a spouse. The best of these examples have a propensity for weaving layer upon layer often coming across as esoteric or worse impenetrable--meaning lost on many (worse when you decide to take a fan cut of something set thematically to a song that has almost nothing to do with what’s actually transpiring on screen--but Linkin Park nailed the gravitas, no?) What we’ve ended up with is a work truly and deeply inspired by a serious depressive episode in an artists life. It’s almost a completely different story being told first half to second half (the tone and the focus having shifted to the deepest darkest and most fundamental places about human existence).

What do you do in therapy? (I keep coming back to the way Richard Grannon described it.) You take trauma and you transform it into pure gold. You perform “alchemy”. To process and integrate, the opposite of shunt and dissociate. All of the episodes (original and director’s cut) leading up to 25 and 26 focus in on each of the main characters. Those final episodes, 25 and 26, play out completely decoupled from the plot that had been building up to that point. Some cited budgetary problems or other things. Production was anything but smooth (especially when you consider the state of the author). But all in all despite being a massively anti-climactic let down in most ways, it played out like a therapy session--surrealist trip into the minds of each of the characters all taking turns in “the chair”.

Hope was the theme--the moral of the story in its most distilled and basic form. When they went back, after public reception to this ending was less than satisfactory, they retold 25 and 26 on the silver screen but reattached to the fictional events that the story had been building up to, before this point. The result was an utterly mind blowing finale which was by every measure a critical and commercial success. Hope was still the moral of the story--the future is unwritten.

There is far far far too much to unpack. I’m still finding examples to this day of this show’s influence and lasting impact far beyond anime itself. I could never address here all the things its been to the numbers of people that were impacted by it. They were even going to give it a Hollywood treatment starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) were it not for licensing and corporate studio legal controversy. I’m, in most ways, glad they didn’t, however, given Hollywood’s priorities and propensity for terrible adaptations, but my point is that this isn’t (as you paint it) some obscure work by and for deranged and disturbed individuals. It’s a lauded work of art held in the highest esteem. But it’s also brutally honest, but it would seem that one of these statements usually follows the other. The most impactful and meaningful art is more often than not the art that can be said to be the most unfiltered and honest--raw and genuine.

The future is unwritten. They switched places. In terms of the characters, it was the first real, honest moment either of them had had with each other. It was poetic. It was symbolic. In blurring the lines between art and real life, a bad translation almost ruins this ending. Her next words to him then, read as “disgusting”, should read instead as an expression of “morning sickness” instead of one final fuck you. It’s not even delivered in voice inflection (subs not dubs, people) with the same caustic bite that usually accompanies her usual condescending attitude toward him especially over matters of vulnerability. It would be just like her to find such vulnerability to be pathetic and loathsome. But that’s not what’s happening in this moment. They’ve switched places. One simple touch, in what is the first real, honest moment either of them have had with each other, and he melts. Another heavy moment of silence after looking at him [an image actually replicated in FLCL btw ep.6 he melts] she says, “(you’re) Disgusting / (you disgust me) I feel sick”. “I, myself” said blankly and soberly as originally voiced ...The message here as though to illustrate this statement ...”and life goes on“. Life moves inexorably onward--pulled--moving--with or without you--whether you’re ready or not. A baby. How many rocky marriages, and then a baby...? It’s almost to make trivial the shit they’ve ever fought about. Shit just got real. A baby. ...and life goes on.

The future is unwritten. This isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.

[picture proof FLCL and Eva side by side climaxes to follow... or you know, just refer to your dragnet “screen captures” if you don’t believe me.

As much as I might of my own accord have ever mused about these things, putting out fires you intentionally start whose real consequences drain the life out of me, from you invading my personal space and using whatever you can get your hands on therein to start shit ...the mental and emotional cost to me is beyond taxing in every respect. My every breath, shouldn’t have to answer to you. We’ll go round this block again soon enough, but frankly I just don’t have the time or the energy to waste putting out fires that have absolutely nothing to do with me or anything real but whose cost I am made to bear anyway.

I can’t live “this” way.]