“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” · 1:33am Mar 17th, 2014
It’s hard to watch a character making the mistakes you’ve made, knowing the price he’ll have to pay. It’s hard to watch a character avoiding the mistakes you’ve made, knowing the price he’ll have to pay for that.
I have a tropism for intelligent, creative, passionate women and sadly many of the type are mad. I don’t mean “bipolar,” “obsessive-compulsive” or “clinically depressed.” These are medical conditions deserving of understanding and compassion. I mean needlessly, randomly abusive and dishonest to those around them in ways that somehow avoid immediate sanction but over time…well, these people often have to start over again in a new town or a new fandom, because they’ve poisoned the well.
One such person (speaking of her mother) called it "toxic personality," which I guess will become a medical condition deserving of understanding and compassion once we’ve discovered a marketable treatment.
I’ve read two stories lately in which the protagonist falls for this type of woman, er, mare…
***HERE BE SPOILERS!***
…one is Keeping it Simple by Ivory Piano, and the other is “The Magician and the Detective” by Bad Horse, both of which you should read as they’re very good.
Towards the end of Keeping it Simple Big Mac falls, or seems to be falling, for Octavia. This is after variously finessing the various overtures of each of Applejack’s Mane Six friends (a story itself remarkable for a fine and sympathetic portrayal of Rarity). It’s all too perfect except for one thing.
Octavia’s a psycho.
Oh, not an axe-murderess. More of a high-functioning sociopath. Like Trixi without the third-person grandiosity. It’s all depicted as ha-ha-hijinks but she’s gratuitously, eerily cruel: she insults people without provocation and picks needless fights from behind the guileless façade of a flat affect. She even stiffs waiters fer chrissake and she encourages Mac to join her in it.
Relationships with people like this end in tears or worse. I can see Octavia ramping up her cruelty, turning it on Mac more and more often, presenting it as a test of strength: are you strong enough to love me no matter how much I hurt you? And Mac can’t resist a test of strength.
He can’t see this coming. It’s not an easy thing to see coming even with a lot of experience and Mac has none. But he can see Octavia’s cruelty and dishonesty in the present moment. He must know something’s wrong with her—right? He’s not stupid: Ivory Piano’s spent thirteen chapters explaining just that.
My guess is he sees it but he argues against it: yeah, but she has so much to offer—she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s beautiful and she creates beauty, and she likes me. Or maybe: I can fix it—maybe she’s had some bad breaks and I can be the good one that makes up for it. Or maybe just: she’s a lot better than I deserve and I’ll never do as well if I let her go.
I’ve made all those arguments myself. They’re bullshit—hell, I knew they were bullshit even as I was making them—but knowing and feeling are two different things and when you’re in love, feeling is stronger than knowing.
Except when it isn’t. In “The Detective and the Magician” Fetlock Holmes aborts a relationship with Trixie before it begins, despite their strong and obvious feelings for one another. It’s the intelligent choice, and believable in a character who is so overpoweringly intelligent. But it’s still very, very hard. He offers up a racialist excuse for his decision—something about not sullying such a powerful unicorn’s genome with common earth-pony alleles—and it seems, from his interviews, that Bad Horse meant this explanation to be taken at face value.
But I just can’t see it. Partly from my no doubt sentimental aversion to seeing a sympathetic protagonist—one based on a literary hero of reason—shaded with pseudoscientific bigotry (I’m not saying Bad Horse is wrong to write the character this way, just that this is the reaction I have to it). But also partly from experience. Because when knowing finally overcomes feeling (much later in the day in my case than in Fetlock’s), when even thy right arm offendeth and you have to cut it off, you have to stop the heart’s blood flowing to the wound. This is quickest done with the cincture called hate.
When a recent relationship blew up in spectacular fashion and I chose to end it, I was surprised at how devastated I felt. It seemed that I was bleeding out: if I don’t stop this I’m gonna die. I immediately regretted my decision and desperately wanted to undo it despite knowing what I would be going back to. Despite psychological problems, a badly broken family dynamic, verbal and physical abuse…
…it is very, very hard to un-love the woman who rendered Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in stained glass for a friend’s wedding.
That’s why I was also surprised by how much better I felt when I found she’d subsequently gotten engaged to a truck driver. Well there ya go I said, as the long guns of class hatred swung round and spoke, I guess she just needed to find her own level.
THE LONG GUNS OF CLASS HATRED: The Reader's Digest under fire from the main batteries of the Atlantic Monthly. Note the flashes of wit in the distance.
Nasty stuff (and if I’m capable of such nastiness then I know any failure in a relationship must be at least partly mine). Yet I can’t deny it helped. C.S. Lewis observed that anger “…does men good, it fumes away their grief.” And I was smoking a big ol’ calabash of the stuff.
So with Fetlock Holmes—or at least I think so. He knows Trixi is beautiful, brilliant and creative in ways few but the two of them understand. But he also knows she’s mad. And he knows what happens when madness and love cross paths (come on, he’s a detective—how many times has he seen this?) So he knows that what he feels for her must die.
Love is hard to kill. But hate is swift to aid. Call in old bigotries to wield the knife, if your own nerves are too weak. So Fetlock takes refuge in his racialist claptrap—only you could say his hate is better than mine was, as its object is himself rather than the other person.
So they go their separate ways, each lonely and sad—what, you didn’t realize it hurts the other person, too? Oh, that’s the worst of it: there are a few crazy people who don’t feel human emotions but in most cases just being mad, bad and dangerous to know, doesn’t insulate a person from love, or loneliness, or sorrow. And who bears the most responsibility for the hurt they cause: the one with all the nice sane brains in their head, or the crazy one?
“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” These stories aren’t mine to write, so I can’t say. I hope some magic (because that’s what it seems like it’ll take) cures Octavia’s illness and allows her and Big Mac to be together, or at least remain friends. I suspect Trixi, spurned as she feels she was, will become Holmes’ arch-nemesis in future stories (“The Great and Powerful Trixie specifically said SHARKS—with frickin’ LASER BEAMS attached to their heads!”) perhaps joining forces with him now and then against some overarching threat to Equestria.
In real life—well, that’s where things get really weird.
The truth is this: time heals. Not in all cases, and not completely, but chances are you and crazy person will get to a better place in your lives and be able to regard each other with equanimity. Crazy person may get better—sometimes because their symptoms diminish with age, sometimes because they get better treatment, but usually because they just learn better coping mechanisms. For that last reason you’ll get better too. And time will work its usual magic on memory, dulling and softening remembered pain (if it didn’t, no one would ever have a second child or a second marriage).
Weird, isn’t it?
But weirder things have happened. Soldiers who tried to kill each other in World War II have bellied up to the bar long since. So unless you and crazy person have engaged in gun-blazing dogfights across the war-torn skies of Europe —and actually, not even then—you have no reason not to get together later for drinks.
Have one for me. And one for my crazy person. Because I love her.
I should be writing sympathy right about now, offering the digital equivalent of a shoulder to cry on, and possibly a glass of something fortifying to ease away the pain[1], but all that's running through my short-sighted silly little[2] head is this:
"Is there a class you can take to write as well as you? Do you have to sell your soul? If so, to whom?"
Because, sir, you are a wordsmith.
That all aside, a few notes (I'm supposed to get up for work in 90 minutes which will be hard to do if I don't sleep at all):
1. Your interpretation of "The Magician and the Detective[3]" is now my head-canon.
2. Joking aside, all the sympathy for your woes, old and new. Would that our woes made all of us as poetic and wise as you.
3. Do you think that toxicity of personality really correlates with a certain type of creativity and intelligence?
4. "The Long Guns of Class Hatred" is one of my favorite phrases of all time now. I'd say "Band Name" but that would be squandering its magnificence[4].
[1] Walnut brandy. For complex emotions, I can only suggest that most complex of tastes. The fact that it looks like distilled midnight helps.
[2] Blatant lie. I've a vast shaggy head of Chestertonian proportions (though, alas, only on the outside)
[3] First Bad Horse story I ever pre-read, actually. Ah, memories.
[4] Mind, it would be a killer name for a 'The Clash' tribute band.
I honestly am not sure what to say to this, though you've very eloquently stated some things I'm sure many of us have experienced.
I could say a lot, based on my own experience, but clearly this is more something of yourself that I don't think I want to intrude to far into, even if you have posted it here on FF. I do hope, though, that you both find the healing you need.
I...um...well...
1932474
1932492
1932712
Thanks folks. The relationship I'm talking about here ended two years ago (two years this week, so it's something of an anniversary) and I'm much better now. I'm involved in a new and quite lovely relationship, and that's helped enormously.
Crazy person and I are even Facebook friends again. I wish I could say I feel happy when I see her being happy with her new fiancee, but I suppose that will come later.
For now, we're both in good places and we're trying to be friends. She has kids so that's one very strong impetus to do so.
I'm very grateful for the love I have, and the love I have had in my life. Other people have deserved more and gotten less. I shall try to do justice to my share.
1932474
I'm not Jedi Master Ed, nor I play him on the internet, but...
I think that certain sorts of toxicity do go hand in hand with creativity and intelligence, yes. Any callous clod or clingy twit can be toxic through sheer volume or length of exposure, but those are not the only type. You need sheer smarts, and a functioning if mis-used empathy, and a clever imagination, to really stab another person into their moral weaknesses, or to pour emotional acid on the raw spots of their soul.
1932762
While it is (very) good to hear that you are now in a good place, and in a relationship which makes you happy, (very, very good) the fact that you took the time to pour so much effort into this post, and on the 2 year anniversary (of sorts) definitely indicates that there are some strong emotions still floating around.
So...good luck, I guess, and here is hoping you spend the next two years (give or take a few decades) happy and content, and that you never lack for wonderful company.
1932474 JME's interpretation of Magician & Detective is a good one, maybe a better one, but I would've written the story differently if I'd had that in mind to suggest that interpretation. Holmes' situation and personality is peculiar. He's no easy person himself, and it's hard to argue that he's better off without even trying at his only opportunity.
Re. the larger issue, I call this "beautiful woman syndrome". My theory is that giving compassion, consideration, and love priority over self-centered desire is a learned behavior, and people only learn what they have to. Beautiful women don't have to learn much at all, because people treat them better, both men and women; and there are always people willing to put up with them, at least for a while. They sometimes live in a fantasy world which they have never had to question.
1932474
You are as usual very kind, but what you so generously refer to as wisdom is actually a lovely bit of sausage which you'll appreciate better for not knowing how it's made.
1933034
Too kind, and thank you
Quite understood. Stories are shaped to fit inside the author's head but sometimes they don't quite fit inside the readers'. This is only bothersome if the reader wants to internalize the story which, in the case of "The Detective and the Magician," I wanted to (had to, really, given the themes and elements involved).
So I spent some time sanding down the bumps and ridges until it fit in my own skull (which it seems is rather narrower--don't tell). People around here say "this story hit me right in the feels," but yours hit me right in the thinks. Yew barstid.