Discussion Prompt #7

[meganehaven]

Have they ever had a near-death experience? If not, have they ever lost someone they were close to?
How do they feel after the fact? Did it change them, for better or for worse?

comment below your thoughts! <3

Comments

[arimamary]

Something I like to write for all of my main OCs experiencing at least once is a metaphorical death. They lose part of themselves and never get it back. Usually, it's learning something about the world that deeply changes how they perceive and behave.

For Kiyoshi and Keima is pretty well-established and I'm not really interested in describing it rn. Instead, I wanna write about Yuu.

Yuu mourns the death of her past self(ves). There are at least two moments in which her life has changed drastically, when her mother passed away and when she got into an accident. For the former, I haven't decided if that happens when she's nine or twelve. The accident for sure happens when she's thirteen.

When Yuu loses her mother, she also moves homes (I think). Her environment changes and she doesn't know how to handle it. When she wakes up from the accident, she spends half a year in the hospital before attending correspondence/online school. It's very stressful because she forgot her first year of middle school so her most recent memories are about elementary school.

Yuu feels like she lost many things, many which she doesn't know. For plot reasons, none of the friends in middle school visit her so she has few ways to know what happened. The main way she can connect to the past she forgot is a series of journals her past self wrote.

Yuu devours this information, partially to fill a whole in her chest. Still thinking how negligent her household should be while it being high-income but also ableist 🤔. Anyways, there's also this gizmo in her world that she was exposed to years ago that could take the appearance of her former self and be a character in the story. Still considering whether add a form of plurality to her character but I'm still learning about it. I always enjoyed the idea of characters who are haunted by their past to the point of hallucination 🤔. Not sure if that's an ableist trope which I want to be cautious about.

[meganehaven]

imo it would make sense for her to hallucinate from all the trauma and stress shes been through! anyone and everyone on earth is capable of hallucinating / developing psychosis under the "right" amount of stress. i would recommend researching psychosis and how it works to help avoid any ableist tropes.
(source: im schizoaffective and have experienced such for almost 15 years. im not usually open about that, but who cares its dreamwidth and it sounds like u needed the feedback! (: )

i love the plot point of Yuu having to learn about the part of her past she forgot about through her own journals! i can def imagine the extreme stress shed be under during that time, esp considering her household is ableist as well. ty for sharing!! :D

[arimamary]

Thank you for the advice! Definitely need to read more about psychosis and other experiences for her character.

I read about psychology a lot but I recently noticed that what's written by scientists is hard to... sympathise with perhaps? So I think what I want to look for is personal annecdotes.

[meganehaven]

ofc! :3

no yea i get that, imo its good to read both to have a clinical understanding AND see how it personally affects people in different ways. tho sometimes doctors and scientists will write about psychosis / psychotic disorders while holding prejudice themselves, so thats something to be cautious about. but yea i agree that itd be great to read personal annecdotes!! (: