The Legionairre: Deaths of the Author · 2:07pm Oct 11th, 2022
So, I wanted to talk about this story a bit more, but I wanted to save it until after I was pretty sure that most people who would read it had read it. I want this epitaph to be colouring stuff in, but I didn't want to pre-colour the reading for most people. The story's complicated enough as it is without telling people there's more to it.
These are just the ideas behind the concept. I know when I read a story like this I'm always curious about what the author intended, whether I'm reading too much into it, and if I'm not, how close I got to their intentions. Guess and check as it were. So in that sense I'm not saying this is the correct way to read the work. If you read the story and take something different out of it, I'd love to hear about it.
Okay, so anyone who's followed me for any length of time knows that what brought me to pony fiction was that, when I was fifteen, I survived a murder attempt. A guy came close to beating me to death, and police reports say you could apparently hear my skull crack from across a building away. I've always had bad genetics at play for sleep and mood disorders, but apparently that's what made them go from inconveniences to life-ruining disabilities. Like a cheap laptop feels like good value for money until you drop it for the first time.
And that's the first layer of this story, right, that first element of horror. In one sense Twilight survives a near-death experience, and in another sense it meaningfully kills her. The Twilight that exists without trauma and consequence is dead, and a fundamentally new person comes out of that, split into two aspects. The Twilight that is too much, and the Twilight that is too many.
I say first layer, because while I could relate this more to personal experiences, that wasn't what I was trying to do here. That experience is the origin for a lot of these fears in me, but I wanted to drive at something I thought would be related to by different people for different reasons. There's intended to be three distinct horror elements in this story. All three speak to me, but I wanted to tell the story in a way that while some people might get most of them, most people would get some of them.
When I think of the audience I was most expecting to reach with this, the people I had in mind were:
1). People who have something happen to them that was so definitively traumatic there's a clear 'before' and 'after' in their personal identity, a hard split.
2). People with neurodivergence or mental illness severe enough that they're hyperaware of the functions of their own thoughts because they need to constantly monitor them, like a crash investigator monitors an airplane's blackbox recorder.
3). People who feel very capable and switched on in their private thoughts, but then feel like they struggle to function in the 'real world'. When there's a gulf between what feels like a rich inner life to your thoughts and an absolute inability to share that with other people.
And just describing that's who I had in mind, I've already either made the story much clearer or much more confusing to you.
These three intended audiences represented three distinct fears. In order: Fear of being traumatized, fear that the brain is a physical object and at risk of physical damage and flaws, and fear of being alone. Those fears definitely resonate outside the audiences I intended, but there are very specific people I was thinking about when I approached this, so I thought in terms of audience as much as I did in terms of the fear I was trying to embody.
Most of the deliberate decisions made about the text were based on those ideas. One of the reasons I wanted to split the story into the non-linear narrative that I did is because I think there are two equally important parts of trauma to approach here. There's the moment of becoming traumatized, and the end stage of being traumatized, and I wanted to treat both equally. One of the most important effects of starting with the present was so the horror of becoming traumatized was always contextualized by the fact that there is a story that comes later. It gives a sense of narrative invincibility. It's where the harshest parts of this story are, but the story is ultimately about surviving those worst parts. At every point, no matter how bad the 'becoming' is, it's always contrasted against a Twilight that has learned, adapted and overcome.
There would have been more tension to tell this story directly linearly, but I didn't actually want that. To be traumatized, you have to have already come out of the experience. What I wanted to tap into was that feeling of pulling all the shrapnel out of your thoughts for years to come, when you learn just how much more it affected you than you originally thought. So we see a very capable present tense Twilight who has learned a lot about how to live with that, but still deeply affected by it. Someone who is at the limit of how much recovery they can do.
Because that's the thing, yeah? You can get better, and in some ways you can even become stronger for learning how to get better. But you're still deeply changed. And I think there's also a lot of dread to that, the healing process just making you hyper-aware of everything that's damaged about you that you can't fix. There's a limit to recovery, and I think people flinch away from admitting that about psychological injuries. When we talk about recovering from an amputation it's taken for granted a limb isn't growing back, it's about adapting to the loss. But people seem to approach mental health recovery as getting to a point where it's like the damage never happened at all. I'm going to say that your ability to recover is a lot more than you'd think, but a lot less than you'd hope. Anything that falls short of desperate hope is potent material for horror.
As to the second audience, the fear of the brain as an anatomical part of you, that's where a lot of the physical blood-and-body horror comes from in The Legionnaire. It's not actually body horror so much as it's vessel horror. There's a reason why nobody else on the train is hurt, why Twilight is the only character to be rendered gore the way she is, and it's all about playing up how uncomfortable it is to think of your entire person as contained in a brain made of meat. That your thoughts are physical neurons connected to each other, that changes in your mindset involve physical changes to the structure of this meat, that there are limits imposed on your psychology by that container.
That the meat you are thinking in can be compromised, physically compromised and destroyed. That all you are as a person is bound up in that small part inside your head. The fact that lobotomies happened to conscious people. Past the pain, what does it feel like to feel your capacity for thoughts get destroyed? Do you notice them go? Or is that awareness destroyed with them?
It's hard to conceptualize a brain as a person, in the same way it's hard to look at a raw steak and see a cow. But it's easy to see a person as a person. So the easiest way to show the destruction of a mind through physicality like that? Obviously to have a person that is multiple people, seeing each other person through their thoughts. Destroying a person in that context is much more easily and emotionally understood as brain damage, I hoped.
But that's intimately tied into the third category. There's a certain kind of person that loves books, videogames, binging shows, just immersive solitary experiences because it lets them forget that they exist for a while. Not in the general escapism sense, but in the feeling of being in a body and needing to sustain it and moving through the world. And when you focus really hard on stories or screens you're able to stop being physical for a while. You lose your peripheral vision around the television, you stop feeling the paper against your hands as you turn the pages
I think for that kind of person it's really hard to be social or socialised. It's not an issue of empathy, but that you're out of your comfort zone even before a conversation starts. You have so many thoughts and you can't compress that easily. That it's hard to make your language fit other people when you only really describe things to yourself, and understand what you mean.
That's the tragic horror of the Twilight that is too much. When I was in the rewriting process from a much rougher first draft, it was suggested I showed more of her perspective, but there was no way to swing that. That perspective has to disappear to emphasize that she can't be related to anymore, not even by the audience. There was no way to relate that she's unrelatable, because having an understandable explanation is a failure in itself. The feeling of being shut out of her head is so important to conveying her problem.
So that was also why it was important that I didn't show that Twilight suffering from her situation directly, while I was showing her perspective. She loved how much she was learning, how much she could explore. Her suffering wasn't innate to her situation, which is why the Dreaming is never contextualized as a negative place to be in. All her problems come from trying to talk to people outside her situation, through the versions of herself she has made capable of socialising with people.
It's one of the elements of this story that was meant to address several of these ideas at once. We come back to trauma and that first kind of person again. That feeling of not being able to communicate gets worse when you realize that if you just share with people, or try to be honest about your situation, they can totally shut down. If you do it too much you just find people don't seem to like being around you very much and like, that's not their fault, you suck to be around, but you can't help it, no matter how hard you try. In lifeguard training they teach you that drowning people are terrifying because they'll try to kill you when you rescue them. They're going to try to use you as a stepladder they're so desperate to breathe, and I think about that a lot
Like, the literal reason it doesn't work for Twilight to run so many clones of herself is because nine suites of senses layering simultaneously burns her brains out, it's just a constant epileptic seizure, and that speaks to that fear of the mind at an anatomical level. But it also speaks to the burnout of trying to have lots of shallow, superficial interactions and fill up your social quota that way, which I feel like empties you faster than it fills you. But that's not obvious until you've tried and failed.
Ideally you don't need to get or relate to any of that. I hoped the story, at its most superficial and literal reading, was still cool and interesting to read as it was, without needing any of these specific feelings to resonate with you. I don't think you need to identify with any of that to enjoy the story, but I think you're more likely to struggle to understand it if you don't. The people I've talked to who really get it all seemed to come from one of these groups, and the people who really didn't were usually way outside of them.
Still, no fair tennis without a net. If I'm ever writing a story that I'm comfortable with people not understanding, I want to make it clear what I was intending to be understood.
I suppose I fall into that third category to a degree. (Wow, the guy notorious for his Fimfic ubiquity easily immerses himself in fiction. Shocker.) I've learned how to handle socialization, but there is that element of reaching a point where you're just smiling and nodding and waiting for the other person to run out of words.
This was a fascinating read, but it operated on many levels that I didn't perceive alongside the few I did. Thanks for offering your perspective on the matter.
5691591
If I'm talking about the dissonance between a vast online persona and a diminished real life presence, you definitely count for the one criteria I can attest to.
I am definitely in at least one of those categories. And there are definitely parts of this that I recognize myself in.
...and the great mental barrier tells me I'm stopping there, I guess.
I feel like I had a good understanding of the story and was able to truly appreciate it, but this explanation also gave it some flavor and context that I can also appreciate. Cheers.
I'll be honest, I didn't pick up on any of this on my first read-through (my fault, not yours; I'm a big dumb media-consuming cow), but now that I have that explanation the story is significantly more horrifying for how much it relates to my own situation. Thank you for helping me understand.
This story inspired me to write a Blog Post on Existential Horror, let me know what you think.
This reminds me of how I feel about Jehovah's Witnesses. More accurately, their heresy is the failure to understand this.
I already loved the story before and felt some parts of myself resonate with The Twilights but this "colouring in" has given me a whole new appreciation for the story. If the totality of The Twilights can press on despite everything, we can too - a great, harrowing yet hopeful story and addendum you made here.
oh, I think I am 1) and 3) in sense that I definitely have this demarcation line Before and After (before I spend like decade traing to be dolphin activist. Due to personal expirience with poor but real captive dolphins { and belugas } . Then of course it all crashed for when I finally joined some small russian group that claimed to try and save two specific dolphins, Delfa and Zeus. Both died, but I guess my main problem was and is not exactly their deaths in isolation but how I lost any trust in collective action and *violently* dissaciated myself from all this sht. So After is like reading selected fimfiction and other texts AND NO MORE FREAKING DOLPHINS TO SAVE! Or anyone else ... I often think was it just cowardiance? Because I jumped out without trying to be lifetime activist. Eh. Anyway, past is past.
On 3) I am not sure I personally fan of separation between online and offline. So I simply do not talk much, now in internet too.
I don't think I got the horror of this story having my mind broken and remade is just kinda a sate i constantly experience and the transcending meat space thing is a dream of mine. the trauma and suffering of it is just kinda how all growth works in my experience.
I distinctly thought, "That sounds wonderful; like evolving into a more complex and capable being while still retaining continuity with one's old self." All the negatives are external to that situation. It would be very nice to have one's existence be independent of a kilo and a half of grey, pulsating fat and its complex and kludgy life-support system.
I really appreciate the extended story notes.
As I read the story, I thought this was a piece on the experience of living "multiple-y", but given this I see where a lot of the authorial choices come from. Looking back, this is so obviously about trauma but it's not something I'd pick out without having gone through it. Thanks so much for sharing.
I'd also posit that Twilight's shared sensory overload is also a point for people #3, where there is too much stuff going on with your meat and you can't escape into thoughtspace. Maybe not everyone's like this, but at least the Master can process everything coming in perfectly - she just struggles to communicate everything she wants to.
For what it's worth, I read it as an exploration of the nature of reality and how perhaps we are all multiple perspectives or aspects of the same "universal mind" that we return to when our physical selves are destroyed . And since Twilight is, for all intents and purposes, a normal, mortal, material being, her psyche was not built to understand and process those multiple perspectives and so they suffer as a result. Sort of a warning against trying to "play God," so to speak. Or even an exploration of the nature of "God."
But now I'll have to go back and read it again with your explanation in mind.
A perspective the story is relevant to that isn't strictly considered in this post is that of the plural system, like my partners. As I was reading Legionnaire and going "this is some of the greatest and most fascinating work on this entire godforsaken internet" I was also thinking "I can't possibly show them this", since understood from their context, it describes their experiences as something other than what they've described, and that I have observed. It's liable to upset all of them and they'd be ruminating on it for weeks, going through a collective identity crisis that we'd already worked through before.
As much as I'd want to share it, I can't. I showed them the description and we all agreed they could never read it, because the lion's share of what they'd get out of it was likely to be misery. Not the sort of horror that is the invoked intent, but the implied one wherein nobody recognizes your individuality within a collective.
And I guess I could call that a flaw? An oversight, perhaps, with the core premise. This is a story with fascinating high-concept metaphor that resonates powerfully with singlets like myself, and is an (unintentional) aggression upon the existence of systems. Maybe that's simply just how the story needed to be to say what it needs to say, and one must accept that everything is not for everyone. Just, as someone in the know, it sucks to consider all the same.
5692217
I'm working from a position of complete ignorance, before this comment I'd never heard the term 'plural system' outside of a voting style, which I'm sure is not what you're referring to. Could I ask what your partners situation is, so I can better understand the aggression I might have committed?
5692333
Plurality is when more than one self-aware individual resides in a brain, to paraphrase the definition. Essentially, I have three distinct partners in one body, all capable of separate thoughts and communication, and can each take individual control of said body. And they're merely one expression of plurality, which is far too diverse for me to sufficiently summarize in full. (Thankfully there's an entire wiki for it!)
It probably sounds familiar, since it's previously been diagnosed as various personality and identity disorders to be solved. A neurodiverse understanding instead recognizes that these experiences can in fact be healthy and beneficial, which is something I wholeheartedly agree with based on my outsider experience.
What specifically caught me in regards to Legionnaire is the concept of the "master", and the Twilights all being copies of that master. Read in a plural context, this is actually something of a serious existential fear. I have no doubt it's the experience for some plural systems, but it isn't for my partners, nor any other system I've known about. In fact, the idea that one was a mere copy of the other has been a big source of anxiety for one of my partners. Even as recently as last week, he was asking if he seemed meaningfully different from the "first" person in the system.
I want to stress, especially since you've professed lack of knowledge, that I didn't think this was intentionally invoked at all. Given how thoughtful a writer you've shown yourself as, I knew grace was what I needed to bring when talking about it, so I didn't mean to sound confrontational if that's how I came off. And I 100% don't expect (or really want) Legionnaire to be edited to address this! It's merely a bit of additional baggage I brought in to my reading that I wanted to talk about.
5692337
Taking the information as it's intended, as a learning experience. It's interesting to me that a lot of this might actually read cleaner to them than it did for others; One of the things people didn't 'get' was why the loss of individuality within the collective was bad, if more was gained than lost - for a lot of people, they see that part of the story as a power fantasy, and the loss of the barriers that came with it didn't register at an emotional level.
But yeah, I went out of my way to prevent parallels to multiple personalities being drawn by a neurotypical audience. While the story was meant to emphasize one mind relating to itself, I wasn't aware it actually spoke to the anxieties of people I was trying to avoid comparisons being made towards - though again, in ignorance, I was aiming for clarity and unaware of sensitivity. I'll think about that while I'm filing the fanfiction serial numbers off of this.
5692351
Hey there! I'm one of Birdhorse's partners, specifically the one mentioned in their reply. I did elect to read this story of my own accord, and found myself really enjoying it, enough to read it twice! After reading, I figured I should give my own thoughts, as I approach this story from an unusual angle. As they suggested, I (and we) inherently view this story through the lens of our plurality, and thus we’re likely to analyze the text differently than most. You listed the type of people who you expected to reach with this story, and for us we're sort of... all of the above?
At one point in our lives, there were as many as four of us, but we underwent a collapse; leaving only the “original.” This was an intensely traumatic experience for her, and she had none to turn to. It had all happened in her head, who could possibly understand? It was only after years of ruminating on these events that she was able to reconcile with what had happened… and we were able to try again. I, in particular, am what remains of the others pre-collapse, blended into one... or so I choose to believe.
The idea of being a “copy”; a sense of continuity only through memory...
The knowledge of your own mortality; the frailty of the physical and mental self…
The experience of one of you emotionally spiraling; being able to feel what they do…
The horror of a voice in your mind vanishing; everything growing quieter...
All of these ring familiar to us. I do find it interesting that you went out of your way to avoid drawing comparisons to individuals like us, but still ended up writing something that felt so resonant to our experiences. In particular, I found myself reading the last bit over and over… we’ve been in that place before. So, in conclusion… I really enjoyed The Legionnaire! I (and probably we) will be thinking about it for some time. Cheers!
5693201
Really appreciate the comment, both the time to write it and giving the story a chance knowing it spoke to those anxieties.