Terrified and alone, on the edge of the abyss
You struggle to find meaning in a mechanistic universe. Like sisyphus before you, you are chained to purposeless striving whose only release is death. The process the called "living".
One day you wake up in a magical land full of talking ponies. This makes essentially no difference.
"Pretentious" -DarthSonic66
Page generated in 0.145 seconds
Total duration
913 users online
1,458,875 hits today, 2,814,898 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Well this was pretentious.
4499078 Thanks for the feedback. I've added a pull quote from your comment to the long description; hopefully that will help people find content that they enjoy reading. Ta again.
Now I see why you liked "Displacement."
Actually what they mean is, "Fuckmefuckmefuckmefuckme." Remember that the next time you go walking in the springtime.
4499078 It's not pretentious if it's ironic. Don't you know the rules?
7613113
I'm not sure that "ironic" is the right word. I was certainly aware of the pretension; embraced it, took joy in it, revelled in it, even, but the emptiness of a life lived without meaning is real, even if I express it in stilted dialogue.
Sometimes the birdsong means "sod off! This bush is mine!", but "I am here" is both threat and invitation, and fits with my theme better :)
7617726 Have you read "A clean, well-lighted place"?
Now it's my turn to sound pretentious. I think the answer to that longing for meaning lies in fan-fiction.
I don't mean that you can find the meaning you're looking for in fan-fiction. I mean that literature (and now movies and songs) is where our culture stores and gets its ideas about life, and fan-fiction is one of the only places right now in which a literature that obviates that question can survive.
See, I don't think the search for "meaning" (or worse, "purpose") is legit. It's a Christian idea, a legacy of the Middle Ages. It comes from a mindset which says that life, love, meaning (in the linguistic sense), and reality itself all must not be material, and so must be injected into our reality from some transcendental realm, which the medievals called God. It isn't a legitimate search for meaning, which is all around us every day, but a hopeless quest for transcendental meaning--for a meaning which is validated by a spiritual reality, where spiritual is ultimately defined as "not real".
Ancient Greek art, literature, and philosophy, with its Platonism and rationality, were the original well of medieval ideas. Medieval thought crowded back into them as a safe hiding place while the Enlightenment swept the rest of human thought clean of such ignorance, and crept forth again from those areas to re-infect the world via romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism. Fan-fiction, however, grew up nearly independent of our 2,500-year-old Western literary tradition. It's more influenced by anime than by the ancient Greeks. I realized this when I read Fallout: Equestria and saw how different it is from Western fiction, in having cast off ideological blinders I hadn't even been aware of because they were so ubiquitous.
People will be free from the angst about meaning when they've grown up in a culture immersed in stories which don't have this ancient embedded assumption that reality is false and meaning must derive from somewhere unreal, such as an old bearded man above the clouds.
It's probably too late for you and me, though.
7618000
You may have found some sort of maximum limit to my pretension powers. Congratulations :)
I've read it now! Hemingway and his "iceberg theory" is like my authorial mirror-universe twin. It's possible I could learn from his approach, and skip some of the tedious detail of feeling that I've written, but I don't think I'd ever do it fully except as a style exercise; I do not normally reading Hemingway on purpose. I tried it once, but it was some of his White Hunter stuff, and all I got was a vague impression of rich white people sneering at Africa, and it rather put me off trying again.
The delay in this reply is because what you said about Christian/ western thought reminded me that I'd been meaning to read _Sickness unto Death_ - I'd say thanks for giving me the kick up the arse to get around to it, but I found like, one comprehensible (and frequently appalling) idea per chapter and then gave up somewhere around part 3Bb1i.
It takes a position that intersects interestingly with yours, explicitly stating that Christians, having confidence in the hereafter have deeper, more meaningful despair than non-Christians. I'm ... not impressed by the claim and it ties into some pretty repugnant things about non-Christians that he says later. Despite that, I'm not well read-enough to have an opinion on if Kierkegaard is just trying to re-brand existing existentialist thought to apply in a super-special way to his in-group, or if he's recognising the underling attitudes which gave rise to it.
Its not somewhere I was coming from consciously, but given that he basically wrote the challenge-to-Discord line in my story, I'm not going to say that I wasn't influenced by that way of thinking. "And the relation to himself a man cannot get rid of, any more than he can get rid of himself, which moreover is one and the same thing, since the self is the relationship to oneself."
I am much more willing to consider personal growth as important than he is- he took the idea of an eternal soul and decided that people couldn't change in meaningful ways, which is clearly super-wrong and based on a untrue assumption. Maybe one day I'll be able to fold birth and death in with my acceptance of personal change, but for now I will resent the time that passed and shall pass before and after my current continuity of experience. I mean - just think of all the cool stuff you have and will miss out on.
Fanfiction as the solution to cultural problems is not a new idea for me. Slant'sPartner is half way through a doctoral thesis which uses the idea that fandom communities form subaltern counter-publics where ideas contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the public sphere can be discussed and developed without being crushed by orthodoxy. Their interests are centred on consent and don't explicitly mention cross- pollination from other cultures, but I don't see why the idea can't be extended. Obviously there are a lot more fanworks which focus on relationships between people than there are which focus on people's relationship with their own finitude, but I like to think that that is implicit in everything.
To back off from the pretension for a moment, If you really enjoyed this one, can I suggest checking out my AO3-based efforts. The Futility is probably a place to start:
http://archiveofourown.org/series/64205