18 KiB
Recommending stories of protagonists with mental disorders
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Author: u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5av39k/recommending_stories_of_protagonists_with_mental/
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Score: 16
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Created: 2016-11-03T05:39:27
Post:
I found a very interesting story called See Noir Evil. It's a fanfiction of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it stars Xander who is not entirely sane. It's very well-written, but it involves him going crazy due to months of torture and while it's not overly gory, it doesn't shy away from describing his trauma and fears of never being sane again. It starts with him escaping from his captives and the first two or three chapters are a good measure of the worst the story will get with its descriptions.
Summary:
They say Xander killed them all. They say Xander’s crazy. Xander says he’s crazy too. It’s only Xander’s imaginary friend who says otherwise.
However, the really interesting part of this story is the fact that due to his madness, he's capable of performing magic. Basically Power Born of Madness or Insanity has Advantages.
Note that while I wouldn't label this story as rational, it's very well written and in my opinion worth recommending here (as long as you ignore the very last two chapters which seems to be meant as a very confusing sequel hook).
So I'm wondering if anyone here can recommend stories involving a crazy protagonist or or someone who is trying to function in spite of a mental disorder?
Comments:
u/MrCogmor [+6] (4 hours later)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(film)
http://www.scp-wiki.net/introductory-antimemetics
The genius the trangression rulebook has a few short stories https://sites.google.com/site/moochava/genius
u/trekie140 [+5] (10 hours later)
Steins;Gate doesn't outright explain the protagonist's eccentricity, but I think he is a high functioning schizophrenic. Whenever he's under stress, he pretends he's fighting against an evil conspiracy that he claims is real in the moment to excuse his behavior, but later admits it's imaginary. I have no idea if this is an accurate portrayal of schizophrenia, and he does have other quirks based around him acting like the over the top mad scientist he sees himself as, but I bought into him as a man trying to live a satisfying life outside of his delusions.
My recommendation for the show is only appended by the fact that while I positively adored the characters, some of whom also might have mental disorders, the plot is not very rational and the villains are just evil for the sake of it. It's really a drama about people's relationships with each other and the tough choices they make that effect them, with a sci-fi gadget to get the plot going and a threat to add tension. If you can enjoy a story just from its characters, then I say check it out.
u/clawclawbite [+4] (11 hours later)
This Alien Shore by C S Friedman.
A human from a colony where the damage from interstellar travel caused massive incidence of mental disorders travels to a neutral station to work on computer issues caused by a conspiracy around a girl who's mind was manipulated.
u/Escapement [+6] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (13 hours later)
The Northern Caves involves some altered mental states; Scott Alexander wrote an interesting interpretation of it based on several characters in the work sharing a particular mental disorder. It's a pretty good story IMO.
I REALLY like the madness depicted in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - the depictions of madness from Strange's POV are particularly interesting and horrifying (if not particularly realistic or based on modern medical practice/knowledge).
u/SimonSim211 [+3] (15 hours later)
A classic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote
u/TennisMaster2 [+3] (17 hours later)
There's a story where HP has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), written by someone with DID. Very illuminating. All links are to that person's content. /u/ToaKraka linked it in a recommendation thread.
u/OrzBrain [+1] Fingers to dance, hands to catch, arms to pull (a day later)
There's a story where HP has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), written by someone with DID. Very illuminating. All links are to that person's content. /u/ToaKraka linked it in a recommendation thread.
I read part of that, but then quit abruptly when it started having sexual content that, er, well, it wasn't graphic or anything, but it kinda triggered me. Sexual abuse with part of the abused apparently liking it and going back for more when there was no compulsion to do so and every opportunity to rat on the abuser with extremely high likelihood of bad consequences for said abuser. That, er, kind of does the opposite of floating my boat.
u/TennisMaster2 [+1] (a day later)
I stopped reading once I understood what DID is like, which was before that point. Might read it again if it finishes.
u/chaosmosis [+3] and with strange aeons, even death may die (22 hours later)
Best I've found is The Eyes, an HP fanfic. But the universe is Lovecraftian, and HP actually behaves in a remarkably sane way given that problem, so this may or may not fit.
u/whywhisperwhy [+1] (4 days later)
About a chapter in, wow.
Just out of curiosity, are you interested in the larger Cthulhu mythos or was this a one-off for you?
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (4 days later)
I'm interested in it, although there's a lot to it and so my familiarity with everything is not the best.
As an aside, I think a rationalist Lovecraft story would potentially be the ultimate pinnacle of the genre, and really want to see someone make that happen. I've got a couple specific ideas, but they probably won't ever go anywhere.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (5 days later)
Can you share your ideas with me? Maybe it can spark off a story or plot.
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (5 days later)
I wrote down a lot of notes on this, but recently moved into a different house, and have no clue where they've gotten to. Here are the highlights that I still remember from my two day brainstorming session about a year ago.
If you've read A Study In Emerald by Gaiman, I was implicitly imagining a scenario like that as the setting, though set in modern rather than Victorian times, and with the invasion having just taken place in the past couple years or so, or just starting to take place, or something around that time period. Go read that short story, if you haven't already.
The setting I had in mind was also somewhat more apocalyptic, less tamed. Earth would probably be destroyed in a few years. Geometry had gone to hell in some locations. Time was in flux.
Necessary lengthy digression: the metaphysics of all of this was motivated an odd phobia of mine, that I still have. I experience a kind of strong existential dread at the thought that the Many Worlds Hypothesis as it's popularly understood might be true. Most people imagine the MWH as implying that somewhere there is a universe in which they were born the opposite gender, or with an evil twin, etc. Those are all silly, fanciful ideas. But I imagine the MWH as implying that somewhere there is a universe in which I am being endlessly tortured. Somewhere there is a universe in which my current values are opposite my own. Somewhere there is a universe in which I am just a Boltzmann brain. And I can't guarantee that I'm not about to fall right into that universe. In fact, with one hundred percent probability, one version of myself is going to fall there.
(I know that some people have talked about how the relative density of universes in the multiverse might vary, such that for every universe in which something improbable happens there are many many more in which something probable happens instead. This is not actually reassuring to me. I don't care about the abstract multiversal density of my experiences. If there is a one hundred percent chance that at least one version of me will be tortured, I anticipate that torture just as strongly as if there were going to be 5 trillion of me tortured, because for the individual tortured me, the experience will feel indistinguishably the same. In fairness, I would also have a one hundred percent chance of falling into a universe where I would experience rapturous bliss. But the contrast between those anticipated experiences actually makes the effect worse, not better. If everything that can possibly happen, happens, everything's importance, good or bad, gets washed out into a terrifyingly powerful grey. And personally, I experience loss aversion, so the grey looks a lot closer to black than white.)
I imagine the popscience multiverse of the MWH as a sort of out of control, unconstrained, cancerous abomination of my values and any possible set of values. And if such a multiverse actually existed, I would want to figure out how to destroy it, or at least prune its branches so that meaningful exclusivity of possibilities could be created.
All of that seems to mesh fairly well with Lovecraft's weird universe. Many of his abominations look kind of like uncontrolled, cancerous growths or mutations. Magic could be interpreted as a kind of quantum pruning process that destroys all universes but the ones where the desired effect occurs - I stole this from EY. Power and survival of the fittest are all that seem to matter. Very Moloch. There's a post of Scott's somewhere where he talks about The God Of Life as being a God of Cancer - I had pretty much the exact same concept already sketched out in my notes. At that time, also, I was literally undergoing chemotherapy treatment, so it was more meaningful to me than just a throwaway metaphor.
For the rationalist type gimmicks, a lot of my inspiration came from reading the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG rulebook, which can be found easily online. You might look into that. Probably no good GM would allow very many of these tricks to work, of course.
One thing I noticed is that although adventurers are weak against horrors, there are many creatures with abilities that would be very useful against other creatures. And some of these abilities are properties of the creatures biology, that theoretically should persist after death. So, I had the inklings that it might be possible for a character to engage in a kind of trading up in power via tool use, taking the body parts of the first relatively weak creature they kill and using that to kill a slightly stronger creature, and so on. I don't remember many of the creatures' abilities. I think I remember the idea of connecting precommitment and the Hounds of Tindalos.
Another exploit I remember is that although casting spells drives people gradually insane, there's nothing preventing a character from having others do all the dirty work for them, especially as, due to this being an RPG, persuasion is a skill which can yield nearly guaranteed results. Alternatively, someone could use spells to buff their persuasive abilities, then never pick up a spellbook themselves again. There is no need to bite the insanity penalty if you're able to organize a counter cult.
One possible theme of the story would have been information management and uncertainty management, as applied to memetics. It is dangerous for any individual to know too much about the eldritch. But, similar to the above, a group of people working together can learn a lot, provided that information is kept properly compartmentalized.
Another possible theme would have been exploring lack of trust in oneself and future motivations in the face of evidence of cognitive deterioration. The final theme was finding hope and a reason to fight in a doomed universe. Cultists were going to be the majority of people left alive on earth, those who had given up, whether by deciding to serve the monsters in the hopes they would be eaten last, deciding to pursue hedonism, deciding to self-modify into a monster who would be able to fight on the new universe's own terms, or deciding that this was a good thing out of a misunderstood sense of internalized Darwinism.
Another trick I don't remember in detail, but in the book there were a lot of spells dealing with the manipulation of one's own flesh, and they could have had a tremendous amount of synergy if combined intelligently. Some manipulated your size, while others were easier or harder to cast based on your current size. Some made parts of your body immortal. Others allowed you to swap body parts with other people. I played with all sorts of weird overpowered combinations. Again, no good GM would have allowed anyone to obtain all these spells at once, but it was still fun to theorycraft.
The final thing I remember was realizing that, because most monsters impose their SAN penalty upon being seen, a character could potentially just stab out their own eyeballs and engage in almost costless summoning rituals or adventures. And this would actually have been a fairly viable strategy due to synergies with other spells. There was one specific spell that allowed a character to blind someone's eyes on and off at will. There were various healing spells. There was a Listen skill that could imaginably have been buffed beyond belief. All sorts of things like that.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it was doing Google searches related to that concept that lead me to the above excellent work of fanfiction.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 days later)
Oooo! I've been having a slightly odd day when it relates to my reading choices. First I was reading some of DataPacRat's works which usually involves some body horror, information compartmentalization, and dealing with alien intelligences. Then I was reading Sam's SCP Antimemetics stories which have the obvious relationships. And now I come to you.
Argh....I'm really interesting in writing a story about this now, but I'm busy trying to write a time-travel story first and to get that done as proof I can write a complete novel.
Now I have ideas buzzing in my head about the mind is perception and perception is the mind, so when you alter either one you necessarily change the other. So if the main character has to stay human when dealing with the monsters he needs to force them to fit his world view (blinding himself is a very good strategy). Another one is very Teggen Toppa in personality for the protagonists to always strive for a better future. The story would be amazing if it follows a Worm-style or Xianxia-style of escalation where the threats and stakes just raise exponentially throughout. First dipping ones toes into the eldritch, then foil a small cult, jump up to dealing with an organization where the ones in charge are one of the oldest living users of eldritch power, face off with an Old One directly, keeping pushing against an entire group to carve out a place for humanity, finally succeed or be utterly crushed by CthuluGod....
It can't be until December, but do you want to try writing a story or just coming up with a more fleshed out plot together about this together? I have ideas! I mostly just would like to keep talking about the mythos some more.
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (6 days later)
I would like bouncing ideas off each other in December, definitely.
u/None [+1] (16 hours later)
[If you want something unique.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Everything_(Ayreon_album))
u/Kishoto [+1] (a day later)
How much knowledge of Buffy would I need to enjoy this? I have a fairly good grasp on general supernatural tropes such as vampirism, werewolves, demons, angels, etc. but I know almost nothing about Buffy specifically other than that she is a vampire Slayer. Like as in she's chosen or w/e.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (5 days later)
Sorry for not responding before, but I didn't notice your comment.
For how much Buffy knowledge you need, I would say very little because I've never seen the TV show and it takes place after the end of the series so there are no canon events that occur during the story.
All you need to know is that Buffy is the barbarian warrior of the group, Willow is the wizard, and Xander is the heart of the group or the "normie" who is usually the sidekick. Which is why it's meant to be so horrifying that he is tortured. Note that he loses the eye during the series and that it wasn't lost in the story because of the torture.
There are a lot of references made to the show, and you might get a little confused at what some characters have to do with Xander, but I think it's worth a read anyway since it's so focused on Xander himself.
TL;DR - Not much background knowledge is needed, but you might get confused at how one or two characters know Xander (Spike and Illyria). I recommend just go to the wiki pages for each character name you're interested in and read the first paragraph summary they provide.