Adversity builds character

I've been inspired recently by a new correspondance to dig up some out-of-print blog entries from my Yahoo 360 days and re-post them. These are, oh, maybe 5 years old in some cases. They're so old, don't think of them as re-runs. They're encore presentations! Who knows how old this first one is. I am guessing 2007.

Adversity builds (villainous) character
Hollywood and fictionmongers in general often make a hash when called upon to make a back story for villains. The horrible Hannibal Lecter prequel is just the worst of a bad lot. The hash (in my view) made of the bildung of Darth Vader is another example of how not to do it.
Even the back story to such a “my kind of guy” villain as Magneto in the X-men movies (I have no idea how true it is to the comics) really let me down in its over-simplification. And really, the setting of the Magneto story is so resonant for me and the character (at least Sir Ian McKellen’s rendering of it) is so close to my personality in a lot of scary ways) that if you can’t sell me on that story hook line and sinker, you’ve messed something up badly.
It might make good drama to have a few key pivotal events force a moral choice on a villain, but the reality is, I think, more subtle. Villainy is not a trauma or a wound, it is an integral part of one’s personality, and it originates not in choices, but observations. Ever noticed that people lie? Ever noticed your so called betters are fools? Ever noticed things aren’t fair? Ever noticed more mischief occurs out of character weakness than strength? Well, how should I handle that? Villains have logical, if sociopathic answers.

I can give you some of the moments in my experience growing up that, looking back now, I believe contributed not just to my villainous persona online, but to my RL character, good or bad. I think this may show (again, probably to my detriment) the degree to which my villainous persona is not really an alter ego, but a distortion, or amplification, of what I am really like.

Camping with cretins

Like a lot of kids, I was sent to summer camp. It was a pretty good one, but I still hated it, except for the brief real camping part, where to earn your spurs they sent groups of 10 year olds with some pot-addled teenage councillor thug on 1-3 day canoe trips. Well, on the first and supposedly easiest such trip, we take compass readings about half way through the expedition and everyone’s compass reads a different direction. Not a little different, but a lot. North is everywhere. I am thinking lodestone, but the none-too-bright councillor “leading” us decided that, since his compass said north was that-a-way, that was indeed where north was.

I insisted that navigating by the sun in July for such a short distance with such clear markers as cliffs and swamps could hardly be inferior to just picking the tallest guy’s compass. I went unheeded; my fellow campers were either dolts, or obsequious, or both.. Sure enough, within an hour we were climbing down 500 ft cliffs – with no safety gear –- into horrid, mosquito-dominated marshes. I was lucky to get back alive, but mostly I was outraged that we missed Friday supper, which was usually the best meal of the week.

I won’t even bring up my bout of dysentery, and the recommendation (in July) – that I might stop drinking water as the local water must have caused it – save to say that my parents thought I was something out of a concentration camp when they saw me a fortnight later.

I realized during the hike that this was how the world worked – chain of command more important that the right answer, even at risk of life and limb. I have in general held authority in contempt ever since and have seldom been proven wrong.

Nearly killed by a dog and learning to like them

When I was about 11 or 12, I was walking late at night past a church when a large dog came racing across the lawn, barking and snarling at me. At the time I was a little frightened of large dogs. I backed up away from the animal, between two parked cars. I must have backed out too far into the street because I felt the swish of car brush against my backside as it sped past in the dark. One more step back and I would have been killed, in all likelihood.

Well, that peeved me. I looked at the dog, and all I wanted to do at that moment was to kick its butt, regardless of how much damage it could inflict on me. I was on a mission to teach the cur a lesson, I hoped a terminal one. The dog sensed my anger and as I moved toward it in a blind rage, it started to cower, finally turning tail and running.

I came to understand a lot about the use and exercise of power and violence in that episode. The lessons, I have found, are even more applicable to people than they are to animals, who seldom deserve to have their butts kicked.

I have no longstanding dread of dogs, as it happens. The funny thing is, this episode was a first step on the road to learning when and how to command, and if anything I am grateful that a dog, of all things, started me on that road. I actually started to like dogs, because I started to understand them – and no, I don’t mean as dispensers and recipients of violence, but their reactions and dare I say “thought processes.” I naturally understood cats a lot earlier, for cats’ solitary nature is closer to my own.

Although the second episode could be called traumatic, I would hardly say that the traumatic aspects of it were what made me “think like a villain.” Instead, the lesson that episode taught me in a roundabout way about socialization made it even easier to have the sort of engaged/detached mindset that separates what I would consider a villain from, say, just a bully, or just a hermit.

First post in a long time, I know. I have been busy, but really I just haven't had anything new to say, and others (Babygothgirl, for example) are doing a far better job posting videos and photos than I ever could.

But I just want to acknowledge that, for the first time in a very long time, someone responded to the blog wanting to RP -- this someone comes across as intelligent, sane, and courteous. So, I guess the blog is not useless after all...