2012 Throwback
11/11/2022
I've been thinking about what to write all day, and figured I'd bring us back in time for a second and write about a topic from 2012. It's 3:30 AM and I've been rewatching people playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Specifically Markiplier's playthrough, as it still holds up relatively well. I'm enjoying it immensely, and I remember how much I used to love this game and talk about it with a friend of mine who loved it, too.
I never got to play it at its height, but I can remember the fandom, and my online friends at the time who loved it just as much as I did. We would talk about the character Daniel of Mayfair, and how interesting he was to us. We'd talk about how fucking terrifying the monsters were, and the concept altogether of a character so haunted by his past actions that he'd go through wiping his own memory and telling his future/new self to murder someone just so that he could be free of it all.
Well, okay. We didn't get into the more nuanced bits of this because we were like 12/13-ish at the time. But the fact still remains we loved this character.
Themes of characters who go through hell to absolve themselves of guilt, to be made new, who bury their past, or who block out elements of their old self in order to become someone new have definitely shown up a lot in my own writing since then. The protagonist of my novel at the moment is a great example of that, I think. I won't go into detail for now, but this character, in running from everything he once held familiar, ran into the arms of creating gaps in other people's lives, the holes that can't be filled, the cycle of grief that never ends. He believed in a cause so much that he was willing to kill and die for it. And now that he doesn't, and he's left it all behind, he's trying to forget it and bury it all deep and pretend it never happened. And, of course, he has to question if he really believed in his cause in the first place. I definitely think some of my inspiration for him came from seeing playthroughs of Amnesia. Especially because, in the end, this character learns that there is no escaping your past. The past lives inside of you. You simply grow around it and learn how to live with it, like kudzu sprouting around an ancient tree and swallowing it up.
Psychology is something I'm fairly interested in, if it wasn't obvious. I love to poke and prod the minds of characters I become fascinated by, coming up with new theories for explaining their behaviors, or building upon canon information. I think it's good to get invested in figuring out what makes a character tick. I've got plenty of characters to mess around with, as I'm constantly both creating characters and getting invested in ones from other media. I spend a lot of time coming up with reasons or explanations for actions, thoughts, behaviors, even speech patterns for fictional characters. I won't lie, I do tend to project my own issues onto characters as well - there is a bottomless pit to pull from, I'm afraid - but I also like to explore new philosophies, new ways of thinking, reasons for this or that or the other thing that a character might do.
I think, for me, one of the best ways to explore a character's personality, mental state, beliefs, or anything else about them is through music. I listen to music that reminds me of characters constantly. One song that comes to mind for Daniel of Mayfair is a song called "(Born Blind)" by The Republic of Wolves. I'll link it below if you want to give it a listen. I associate it with a lot of characters from various media (Dr. Schuster and Dr. Groph from CoD Zombies, Daniel from Amnesia, the Dragonborn from Skyrim, and my own OCs) but since we're on the topic of one specific character, I'll talk about it fitting him.
I think the chorus - among other parts, of course - is particularly poignant when applied to this character. It goes, "Can I really choose / If I don’t know the options? / ‘cause this is all I’ve felt / Do we ever use even a fraction of the caution / That we ought to when we meet ourselves?". Applying that to Daniel of Mayfair is fascinating to me, especially the concept of "meeting ourselves". Daniel's diary being scattered about the castle, triggering flashbacks and memories that he had intentionally forgotten, and this idea of having to utilize caution when meeting himself - his past self, the self that knows, the self of guilt - is very fitting. After all, he intentionally forgot his deeds, the murder and torture that he justified for so long in order to free himself of the Shadow. He wiped his own memory, and yet in the end it doesn't matter. He remembers, and depending on the player's actions, he either gives into the shadow, or he absolves both his former and current selves of the guilt that consumed him for so long, and is able to finally be free. I just find him fascinating, because I'm realizing how much of this story subconsciously influenced my own work. The idea of nothing truly being forgotten, how does one live with the past when it lives inside them, how do you move forward when you cannot do anything to change what happened, etc etc is just... I don't know. Kind of enthralling, I guess. It gives me a lot to think about in my work and when thinking of other characters.
This wound up being so much longer than intended, but I enjoyed writing it out. It's 4:07 AM though, so I should sleep soon. I'll drop the song I mentioned above, and I hope anyone reading will enjoy it! Thank you for reading my ramblings. Sleep well if you're sleeping soon, and have a good day if you're not.