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Friday, September 14, 2012

Character Obsessions

I've been a rather horrible blogger recently, a bad student too. There's my general laziness but contributing to the problems recently have been my character obsessions. I occasionally get drawn into spirals of useless character obsession that can take up a sickening amount of time. I've done this for as long as I can remember with a variety of T.V. and books. I find a character or a world in which I fall in love and continually daydream about it. I create characters and insert them into the world and make up a continuation of the story. It's essentially fanfic that I don't write down and it's the bad shit too since they usually involve a Mary-Sue (a perfected awesome version of me) but not always. The first time I did this was with the Xena universe, there was Sinbad the sailor, and then it was Lord of the Rings. Actually I'm pretty sure my first sexual fantasy included Aragorn. When I was a teen I fell into the dark, hopeless chasm that is Harry Potter fanfic and it truly got scary. It started as a bit of innocent fun with a friend where we would email each other the good stories we found and I read more and more until finally my friend emailed saying, 'uhm, you can stop sending me stories I don't read fanfic anymore', but I couldn't give it up. It honestly was an addiction, I spent hours and hours scrolling through potential stories trying to find some of the gems, or the ones with my favourite themes(Severitus ftw!) or ships. Then hours reading the stories, and then if I couldn't find anything that fit what I wanted perfectly then I would lay in bed making up my own stories. My mom would occasionally ask me if I was depressed because she didn't like that I would lay in my bed alone all the time. When she would ask what I was doing she wasn't content with my typical response of 'thinking', I mean how could I tell her I was making up my own fantasy stories? My school work suffered because I just couldn't care about it when I could be reading fanfic instead. One of the worst things about this obsession though was that I stopped reading anything else. I have always been a voracious reader and while I was technically reading it really isn't the same. When I finally did break out of the habit (a lot of it had to do with the fact that the authors of two of my favourite rather huge stories- I mean they each wrote books worth of material- either went on hiatus or were taking so long to update that it drove me crazy)it took a long time for me to be able to read new material again. I couldn't even handle epic fantasy, I had to start off rather simple with the Drizzt Do'Urden books and got obsessed with those until I was able to guess everything Drizzt would do before he did it and I got bored (no offense to R.A. Salvatore fans but they're rather simplistic).
So yes, occasionally I get obsessed with characters or worlds and it can take up a lot of time. My recent obsession is this man:


Well I should say character. It's John Pope from Falling Skies. I think it's a testament to Colin Cunningham's acting (which is great!) that I'm not obsessed with him, just this character he plays. The show's writers have given him an interesting back story that I'm interested in seeing more about when the show continues next year. Though there is some stuff with Maggie that I'm not quite sure they realize how incredibly sketchy the road they're going down is. Anyway, I digress. I've watched the show through twice now, I've also gone through and just watched the parts with Pope in them. His hold on me is loosening now so I think I can return to my regularly scheduled life but I just needed to comment on this because it has been a number of years since a character/story has consumed me so entirely.
Now if only I could make myself because so obsessed the characters I've created I may actually write something of my own.

tl;dr





1 comment:

  1. I have a similar thing, with 'original' characters in my head that have existed since I was in my early teens. The characters are based off obsessions I've had with fictional characters too, with alterations that have occurred steadily over the years. So you're definitely not alone in the 'living in your head' part!

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