Caged

Sometimes the ones we love hurt us without thinking.

Short fic attempting to capture a certain experience that is difficult to put into words.

Image created by me, edited from traced show vectors.

Chapters (1)

Comments ( 7 )

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Moonlight_Mist

Moonlight_Mist #1 · Jul 3rd, 2022 · · ·

I don't have claustrophobia, but I feel like I can intimately understand what they go through after reading this.

Starlight Nova

Starlight Nova #2 · Jul 4th, 2022 · · ·

Image created by me, edited from traced show vectors.

OK, but why did you make it so difficult to make out? For most of the time I thought the scared Gallus picture was just a black square!

Scyphi

Scyphi #3 · Jul 4th, 2022 · · ·

11290006
How visible it may appear probably depends on the screen the viewer is looking at it through--if the screen's contrast or brightness are set in such a way, I can see how the details of the cover art would just vanish away completely.

And I say this because it's perfectly visible to me on my screen, so...

Tirimsil

Tirimsil #4 · Jul 4th, 2022 · · ·

11290006

When I started writing, I wasn't sure how obvious I wanted it to be that it was Gallus before he is let back out. My intent was for the image to show there was somebody there but not necessarily be identifiable as Gallus. For me the image is quite clear, especially since I of course knew it was Gallus. And of course, the panic thought storm is fairly intuitively from him right from the jump, so I changed from tagging Young Six to tagging Gallus.

I use the dark theme on all web sites with the option and have a habit of not particularly facilitating light theme users. If you wanted to be able to see you wouldn't be using light theme. Still, I can imagine that being blinded like you opened the door to Kingdom Hearts would make it much harder to see any details of such a dark image... I can probably just raise all the colors into the mid range instead of "literally between #000 and #111" like it is right now.

EDIT: I switched back to the light theme and can still make out the image. Either you guys need to adjust your contrast, or, if you're on like mobile or something, phones need to stop sucking!

Tirimsil

Tirimsil #5 · Jul 4th, 2022 · · ·

Oh dammit, I forgot to actually make my "MAKING OF" comment like I was gonna do.

This is one of them experimental stories. In the show, Gallus is claustrophobic. I suffer from occasional panic attacks and wanted to find a way to represent this in writing. After trying to write it the normal way for a few minutes, I realized that wouldn't work because it was coherent. It read like some mad doctor clinically describing the status of their obviously-suffering patient, and not the account of the patient per se. People freaking out don't stop and notice details and ponder things.

So I sighed and resigned myself to what I saw in so much celebrated prose and poetry in English class and write like a caveman. I took the concept of stream-of-consciousness to its primal extreme. I find this much better matches the repetitive and rapidfire nature of panic-thoughts. However, I soon found that manually writing out a "panic stream" was tedious and too much work given that most people would simply gloss over it.

Soooo I wrote a quick PHP script that is basically a panic attack generator. I plugged in tons of pieces until it wasn't too obviously repetitive. Like a caged chicken in an egg farm, I industrialized Gallus's agony.

I manually edited it to remove specific over-represented thoughts and put in unique ones spliced here and there (roughly evenly spaced over the stream.) While it does not repeat the same piece twice in a row, it can put two similar pieces one after the other, and I edited or removed the more egregious ones that I found.

I also trimmed it down to try to get around 1500 words because that number is my fetish apparently, but perhaps I should have gone down to 1200 or even lower, since I doubt the typical reader appreciates a word wall regardless of the ~artistrie~.

Fujimi200SX