One of the things I love about Discworld is how it tackles heavy things without being too... Depressing or graphic. And still maintains an air of hope.
Like in I shall wear midnight, a book with a stated target age of 12 and up, a 13 year old girl gets pregnant out of wedlock and her father beats her so hard she loses the pregnancy and gets knocked unconscious. The father then attempts suicide.
And yet! The book remains suitable for that age group.
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I was thinking the other day that man, kokuto neji is such a character and I haven't liked a writer character like this since... shang qinghua?
which naturally led me to this thought: jj fic with svsss-style au where neji transmigrates/gets isekai'd into the world of havenna. as domina, of course.
it's extra fucked up imo because at least when sqh transmigrated in his book, he made up all of those characters and they mostly stayed in the realm of fantasy. like, sure, lbh was kinda based on himself in some ways and mbj was his ideal fantasy, but they still mostly stayed fictional, you know? sqq (sy) had to fix his plots because the characters sqh wrote strayed too far from their original plotlines
but theater makes a fictional world a bit too real and personal, especially when you use real people as inspirations for your writing. with neji, he'd be looking at rukiora and see three different people (mitsuki acting as rukiora; rukiora who was written based on a younger version of neji; rukiora who is her own person in this weirdly real world of havenna). neji would see fugio and to him that is both sou acting as fugio and the fugio who grew up with poison flowers. miguel is both fumi and the guy who ran away from his neshiromi fields. the only constant would probably be chicchi. she is too much like kisa in that... well. neji didn't really have a backstory for chicchi. chicchi is a blank canvas just like kisa is as an actor.
anyway. yeah, very sv-style character arc where neji, much like shen yuan in sv, is forced to humanize the villain. except this villain was his creation and is also tied to a bunch of personal issues for neji that he Doesn't Want To Think About and also he doesn't? really understand the character he wrote tbh?
isn't art supposed to process your emotions for you!! why must he process these himself!!
can you imagine neji, who always casts himself as a seer of some sort (fortune teller, ushinoko) or someone who generally has some control over his future or his "creation" (who is mary if not just another side of neji anyway; she's takihime redux, and takihime is also. neji). imagine this dude being transported inside the play he wrote but he doesn't understand it and he has no control over it and everyone's acting both in character and out of character. he both knows and doesn't know these people. they're fictional but also... real? does he treat them as real people? is domina real? he wanted his actors to imbue parts of themselves into his characters. are these people really just characters from a script? are they his quartz classmates? is he allowed to even hope that that's the case?
it's both THE improv exercise of his dreams and also. a nightmare
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"She was a ruthless woman who injured many, myself and my sainted mother included. She was quite capable of playing the King false, I promise you. My advice to you, Sister, is to forget you ever had a mother like that."
Elizabeth caught the note of obsessive grievance in Mary's voice. She knew instinctively that it would be unwise to provoke her further by arguing with her.
"Forgive me, Sister, but I had heard otherwise," she said simply.
"Then you heard wrongly. She had me sent to wait upon you when you were a baby, and she told those that had charge of me to beat me for the little bastard I had become. How could you think such a one innocent?"
"I am very sorry for your afflictions, Sister," Elizabeth whispered, aware more of the need to be diplomatic than of the desire to defend her mother. "They were not of my making, nor my desire."
"How could you think her innocent?"
"I heard things," she answered, then grew a touch defiant. "The whole world does not think my mother guilty."
The Lady Elizabeth [Chapter 8: 1544], Alison Weir
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