Friday Lunchtime Ponderings…
…I think I have covered, or at least started to cover, this topic before… But I possibly got distracted and danced off on another train of thought before I could put finger tips to keys and pull the words out my brain…
Disclaimer: I’m not clever, I don’t understand psychology, nor pretend to, I can not include any intelligent quotes (because I’m not sure what they mean) nor do I have any answers… Sorry my friends, all you get here will be some mad ramblings…
Rambling Commencing: Isn’t it just delicious how we, as normal every day mortal folk, can find ourselves in love with the imaginary. The characters that grace books, screen, cartoons, comics, games, movies and so on… The lovable rogue, the bumbling fool, the anti-hero, the stone cold killer, the gunslinger or the sheriff… No matter what genre of fiction we embrace, we will find these archetypes and we embrace them, we follow them through their ‘lives’ we may visualize them differently from authors descriptions, artists representations or actors, er… acting…
Fandoms are born from people sharing the same passion for certain characters or series of adventures, it expands, morphs into Comic-Cons, beyond that to entire theme parks, events, studio tours… Where we the mundane can step into the world of Fantasy, Fiction or Sci-Fi etc… We dress as our favorite characters, we have lightsaber battles with Jedi when we’re dressed as Sith… Wand duel with a Slytherin while taking a selfie and sharing it on social media… These things bring total strangers together, we can talk about the ridiculous without actually sounding ridiculous, because the stranger we’re chatting too understands perfectly the made up jargon you’re talking about…
It makes me (personally) feel like I am part of a huge family, I am a cosplayer, I admire the creativity the dedication and perfection of come costumes. I’ve never tried LARPing, but this could prove to be the ultimate step (for me) as a (non)writer, to become your own character, to act as they would act and put yourself in their shoes…
This whole concept is so expansive and so inclusive, I don’t think I’ve really scratched the surface here and could express myself further, include more examples, genres or characters… Good or Bad, Love them or Hate them… None of this ‘world within a world’ would even begin to exist if people hadn’t sat down, picked up a pen and wrote about the imaginary people inside their heads, by doing so, they crafted life, love and a whole realm where nothing is impossible in a world where we are restricted to reality, sometimes the incredible can be tangible.
Yet none of it would be so if there was never a ‘Once Upon a Time’ …
I’m going to get back to my own writings shortly and I’m going to leave you with a passage from Michael Moorcock, introducing one of his most chaotic anti-heroes… This is where I fell in love with the imaginary…
“It is the color of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the color of bone. “
Anne Harrison 17.02.17
Tatterhood 