Emergent behavior · 5:15am Oct 6th, 2020
Three-act Play is about a lot of things. It’s about depression and anxiety. It’s about self-harm and recovery, physical and psychological. It’s about love—in several forms—and about penance. It’s about Sunset and Rose as much as Wallflower; Rose, in fact, was the reason Scampy asked me to write the story.
It also is about something else, something I hadn’t considered when I set out on this strange, uncomfortable journey. It’s about burnout.
At the time of the story, Rose is forty-seven years old and has been working with troubled youth for more than ten years, possibly as long as fifteen. Before that she served multiple tours of duty in at least one combat zone. The astute reader might have noticed her T-shirt in “Suspended”, bearing the logo of the Army Corps of Engineers. She has seen and experienced a tremendous amount of trauma, her own and others’.
Now it’s coming home to roost. Her defense mechanisms, her scripts and logic trees and procedures—all of them are thin and brittle after more than a decade of wear, ground away by the endless sanding belt of difficult, dangerous cases.
But Wallflower is utterly unlike pretty much all her previous clients, even the Dazzlings. This thin, desperate, vulnerable girl is the straw that may break the camel’s back.
Rose just doesn’t know it yet.
This also retroactively adds another layer to Virga. In a wildly unlikely fashion Rose is able to return to her first love, military service. That much I understood right from the beginning, when I first asked the question “What did Sunset—and, in my own story-setting, Cook and Rose—do while Tempest Shadow was off chasing Twilight and company?”
For that matter, Rose still is in uniform by the time of The Campus. Once she was reactivated, I am certain, she never looked back. That’s not to say she doesn’t experience the occasional pang of guilt or regret at leaving behind a job helping people who needed it, of course, but she’s back home and she knows it.
It might take her a while longer to figure out Sunset probably saved her life, or at least her sanity.
It's always a treat when the characters provide insights you didn't expect, isn't it?
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It can be fascinating. Sometimes it can be troublesome. And those need not be mutually exclusive! In this case it will influence the future course of events, albeit probably in a subtle fashion.
I'm guessing this "Rose" isn't Roseluck, then, judging from that description. The only way she'd get in the military would be via "getting volunteered", and I definitely can't see her dispensing counselling (receiving it for her omniphobic neuroses, yes).
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Captain Rose Brass is one of the three major original characters I’ve created in the course of my storytelling, which has evolved into a sizable connected series, Twin Canterlots. Her first appearance is in Amphorae as the social worker assigned to deal with the homeless and bereft Dazzlings. She appears briefly in Lectern’s New and Used Books: Fall Semester and, as a much older colonel, is a member of the ensemble cast in The Campus, taking place fifteen years after HRH Princess Twilight Sparkle takes the throne of Equestria. She also co-stars in Virga, which takes place immediately after Three-act Play.
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Ah, I see. An Original Character who's seen a lot of active service, then (so to speak).
Wandered in mostly out of curiosity for the title "Emergent behavio(u)r" (pardon a Brit my sic tendencies). As in behaviours, processes, actions, or other qualities that only reveal themselves or "emerge" as a result of lower-level elements interacting in specific ways? Or to put it crudely, similar to the phenomenon of being "greater than the sum of the parts"... which, to be fair, is easier to grasp and a more interesting challenge to tackle so long as one remembers there's more to mathematics than elementary arithmetic.
The content of the blog itself wasn't what I'd expected - and to a naive newcomer such as myself, not immediately obvious in light of the title - but I've pulled on a thread and found a tapestry behind it. Colour me intrigued.