From Fiction
2024-06-04

***

Fictionkin: the
identity
that you can at least partially
trace your roots, your origin,
to a piece of fiction.
Whether
as a character
or a place or general vibe,
you were born
in foreign clime
(or maybe here but other time)
with story that takes place elsewhere.

For some, the explanation
of how this came to be
is spiritual: reincarnation,
or a split soul, separating
twins, or some other convoluted
explanation
that I haven't
the words to account for.
For others, the origin
of this phenomenon is
psychological;
the brain
is great
at contorting itself
into maddened shapes
for the sake
of survival,
and sometimes this means
self-convincing
that the person on the screen
or described in novel's prose
is the truest
expression
of the observer that one knows.

Having known
the mania of both,
I must record the following observations.
Please do not think me
some hateful entity
worth of being
erased from posterity
or harassed into silence:
these are not an outsider's
uninformed jabs meant to hurt;
all that I am about
to recount
is from my own experience.

One of the biggest signifiers
of if a kin
is legitimate
is the presence of memories
that cannot be explained by prior
knowledge of the source material.
B-plots discarded; other characters
that would have made logical sense
to paper over a plot hole
but were erased, sometimes with remnants
like a stray clip of audio
or a model left untextured;
an explanation of what came before;
knowing what happens after fall the credits.
Secondarily,
even without exact memories,
a sense of familiarity
with the story's setting.
Like how, even though
I moved out of Forever Home
almost a solid decade ago
and of the changes made since I will never know,
when the plot of my dreams call for a dwelling
that floor plan is the first to volunteer.

There is a man I'll call Anchorite
(although you can most likely guess
his true name if you're reading this
at the end of May's hiatus)
and for a solid two weeks he was *me*, he was *my* life.
I hued my nails, I bought hair dye,
I even tried to exorcise
the belly fat
that sought to pad
my organs from the world outside.
But through all this, though I could point
to a thousand different things
we held in common, what I always lacked
were his memories.

Can an individual form an identity
when removed from their surroundings
and of their memories made bereft?

You know, we bonded through a game
that asks that question in great depth,
and the conclusion that I drew
is that, when all traits
have been drained,
all that remains
is the costume.

All that, after all, I have is
an image frozen, static.
Unless the damned character dies,
I get no closure,
no knowledge
of how
played out
the rest of their life.
Just a snapshot of how they were.

They stay the same
in narrative loop
allowing me to change.

I wonder
how others
handle
sequels.
If having remembered, under assumption
that what we held canon
was all we ever would,
the remainder of a life untransmitted.
To chain one's deepest sense of self
to the whims of a corporation.
If the universe is infinite,
I suppose that'd leave room to interpret
canon in a different
way.

I should know, as Lethe Beltane.

What I have as Lethe
that I never had as Anchorite
or any other
characters
whose "brainworms" wrapped me tight
is that sense of continuity,
the feeling
that the story
is happening *now*
and not something I need to measure myself against: found
wanting
in every category,
as yet the world's worst cosplay.
There is no "out-of-character":
who I am is me, is her.
No fear of discontinuity.
I am my own future.

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander