LNH/META: A Meme
Drew Perron
pwerdna at gmail.com
Sat Jan 27 18:26:58 PST 2018
As you may know, I've been creating book-themed characters for a long time.
Library Lad first appeared in a post from me at Christmas in 1995 (and then I
didn't post another LNH story for almost seven years). But something made me
think, recently, about a character who was used even less; a Super Sentai-style
hero I created a couple years later for a pseudo-RP-by-post (a la the early LNH)
that existed on rec.arts.anime.misc.
And way back in the late '90s, I was trying to get in on one on rec.arts.anime
misc. I was already very much into the tokusatsu tropes, even if I didn't
actually know the word yet, so I was making a Super Sentai-style character, and
through the same impulses that lead to Library Lad, decided to make him
book-themed. But I was at a very early level in the development of my ability to
make characters who weren't stock archetypes, so his book theming added up to...
literally just summoning books and hitting people with them. (This was a big
reason why I never did anything with him.)
I've been thinking a lot about how my approach to characters has changed over
the years, how it's moved from a character like that, to Kid Enthusiastic, to
the many variations on Kid E, to someone like Writer's Block Person. I think I
can sum it all up in a classic Tumblr/Twitter meme, a la
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/expanding-brain :
Small brain: Book-themed character hits people with books
Big brain: Book-themed character summons letters and punctuation
Glowing brain: Book-themed character summons characters from books to fight
Expanding brain: Book-themed character manipulates the structure of fiction
around them, using the trope of "the hero always wins" to win fights
Exploding brain: Book-themed character fights the forces that demand such
limiting tropes as "the hero always wins", breaking through the shackles of
traditional storytelling with sheer metafictional transcendence
Galaxy brain: Book-themed character is a literal instantiation of the author
in the fictional world, delivering the messages the author wants to convey in a
way that acknowledges that the real-world author is themselves a character,
created by the deeper, subconscious self interacting with the narrative of
society, and that one can take control of one's own narrative only by
acknowledging one's flaws, and instead of simply forcing oneself out of the
shared narrative to transcendence, taking the narrative and raising it up,
allowing everyone to transcend
God brain: The instantiated self of the author avatar hits people with
books, because dammit, stories should be fun and silly
Drew "so yeah" Perron
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