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Pop Quiz #2
Say, for the sake of argument, that you’ve had a very difficult life indeed.
For one, you were adopted. And not only that, but the circumstances of your adoption are, for most of your life, a mystery — your parents (that is, your adoptive parents) either don’t know the details or refuse to tell you. And while millions of adopted children end up having healthy, fulfilling childhoods full of love and happiness, this is, unfortunately, not so in your case. You could probably attribute some of this to your parents, who are not what you might call “kind” or “supportive”, and whose actions these days probably qualify as abuse. Neglect, at the very least.
This abuse/neglect is born partially from the poor overall emotional skills of your parents and partially from the fact that they also happen to be superheroes. In fact, your whole family is comprised of superheroes. And not superheroes who work for the government or for a comic-book-style “league”. No — they’re self-employed. And, for a sort of opaque moral/political reason, they refuse to hide their true identity, and so there is little to no separation between their cape lives and their home lives, which, as one might expect, leads to some pretty disastrous interpersonal problems.
All this is only the secondary cause of your life’s difficulty, though, and is in the end just a backdrop to the true source of your life’s misery: your sister, whose name, for the sake of argument, is Victoria. Her penchant for misery-causing, though, isn’t due to her cruelty or neglectfulness or any negative quality at all — no, it is in fact her total perfection that ends up causing you so much anguish.
It’s her kindness that does it. After all, where are you, the adoptee, the perennial second choice, supposed to receive affection? You go to your perfect, perfect, adoptive sister, of course, who is your age, and who is kind and patient and beautiful beyond belief, and who never treats as anything other than equal, and who is always willing to listen. And as such, you and Victoria become very close, closer even than biological sisters, and you can’t imagine what life would be like without her. The relationship is what gets you through the abuse/neglect from your adoptive parents and the doubt surrounding your true origins and the general stress of growing up. It’s what keeps you going.
But, of course, it can’t stay that way forever, and, sure enough, when you and Victoria are reaching the peak of your respective adolescences, the penny drops and wham — suddenly both of you are superheroes. Victoria’s powers are very conventional, like your mother’s and father’s, force fields and super strength and so on. But yours, typically, are not so easy to understand. You tell people you’ve gained the ability to heal people with a touch, but that doesn’t tell the whole story, not even close. No, what you’ve inherited is a devil on your shoulder who whispers in your year and tells you to act on all those subdued impulses and intrusive thoughts, tells you to take, steal what you’ve always wanted.
And what have you always wanted? Well, Victoria, of course.
See, during this pubescent period which immediately follows the advent of your power, your transition into womanhood, as it were, you’ve also developed what you can’t help but feel are some pretty unhealthy ideas vis a vis Victoria. At first, they’re a more intense expression of the love you’ve always felt for her, which makes sense — all your feelings are more intense at this stage of your life. But this newfound passion escalates, without your control or knowledge, into, well, there’s no getting around it, a romantic/sexual obsession. The word obsession being a bit of an understatement in this instance. It becomes your life .
And so with the constant urging from your newfound power and with all the time alone with your thoughts you’re getting because of your responsibilities at the hospital (which is a whole other source of psychic distress there isn’t time to get into in this Pop Quiz) your mind escapes into a cryptic fantasy where you and Victoria are together all the time. You live in this fantasy more than you live in the “real world”. It’s excruciating.
You know that these are disgusting things to be thinking, and so, despite the odds being stacked against, you try a variety of things to get rid of them. You take on a rigorous schedule of masturbation, you take SSRIs someone at school sells to you, all to try and get your libido to leave you alone, because, after all, it’s destroying the one source of happiness you’ve ever had. But it’s all in vain. The thoughts always creep back in.
Question: In this situation, is the morally correct course of action a) to tell Victoria about your predicament, or b) to keep her in the dark?
Pop Quiz #3
Say, for the sake of argument, that you’re the same person as in PQ#1, and that, through a series of unfortunate events, you’ve altered the biology of your sister (whose name is still, for the sake of argument, Victoria) so that she reciprocates your romantic/sexual obsession. Whether you’ve done this on purpose or not is a little unclear.
Say also that you’ve been running from someone who wants to murder your for upwards of seventy-two hours and that you’ve been awake all that time. The reasons this person wants to murder you isn’t relevant to this Pop Quiz. What matters is that you’re exhausted, physically and emotionally.
Say also that, perhaps because of your alteration of Victoria (which, by the way, you really regret and would like to undo), she’s wound up mortally wounded. The extent to which your actions caused her injury is also a little unclear. Despite her wounds, though, she doesn’t want you to heal her — the love/lust you’ve made her feel is at this point manifesting as anger, which is, to you, totally understandable. But with your extraordinary knowledge of medicine and anatomy, you know for certain that if you don’t heal her, she will die.
Question One: Do you heal her?
Question Two: If you do heal her, and you have in that moment total control of her biology, will you be able to stop yourself from altering it further?
Pop Quiz #5
Say, for the sake of argument, that you (the same you as in PQ#1-4) are in prison, namely because you wanted to be. It isn’t the worst thing in the world, prison life. Your father, your biological father, is here, for one, and he’s nice to you and protects you, and it’s pleasant to be with him, even if it’s a little eerie sometimes how similar you two are.
It’s lonely in prison, though. There are so many things you want to say, but can’t because you have no one to tell them to, things that you might’ve told your sister before, but that’s obviously out of the question now.
And it’s boring, too. Very few books to read, nothing but shit on TV. To be fair, the boredom was what you wanted — you thought it would be easy to keep your mind blank if there was nothing to stimulate it. But it turns out the opposite is true. Memories, bad ones, sometimes good ones, which are worse, flood your vision night and day. And, although you recognize you probably deserve it, it’s somewhat depressing to think that this life is yours forever. Your sentence is indefinite.
You go through the motions. Get tattoos. Try not to indulge the thoughts of suicide because it’s your duty to be a lifelong penitent now, and death would be cheating. Those events described in PQ#4 pop up in your dreams frequently, and so you avoid sleep as much as possible, which is difficult because caffeine rations here are pretty negligible. You bathe only when your father reminds you to.
One day, under the showerhead, whose water is always the same temperature (which is never hot or cold enough), you receive some company, which, although the showers are communal, is a rare occasion — people are a little scared of you here because of your father, who’s pretty high up in the prison hierarchy and who has a reputation for cruelty. Your company is a woman who looks a couple years older than you. She’s short and has black hair and skin the color of sand and a body that stirs you out of your malaise somewhat, which is no mean feat. You swallow and try not to look at her.
And, “You too,” slips from your mouth, and you turn the water off and run away.
You encounter the same woman in the cafeteria later that day, and after you both finish eating, you stand in one of long hallways that run through the prison like intestines, facing one another, and she leans forward and kisses you abruptly, and it’s your first kiss excluding, of course, those events described in PQ#4, and you kiss her back, and she tastes like salt. Things happen quicker on the “inside”.
When you withdraw, she tells you her name, which is, for the sake of argument, Samantha or Sam, and you tell her yours, and you make a promise to meet again.
At your next rendezvous, you lie to her about why you’ve been put away, and she, ostensibly, tells you the truth about why she was (for a string of robberies — total bullshit). And you make out for a while, and, although neither of you are very experienced, the act sends all sorts of electric shocks through your stomach and down toward your sex, and, as you explore the contours of her insides with your power, you feel desire akin to those other desires described in previous PQs, and you grow slippery and swollen, and this fact nauseates you. You tell Sam that you feel sick, and she asks what she did wrong. What’s wrong is something you can’t tell her, of course, so you stand and return to your own cell and cry until you pass out.
She visits you the next day and shows true and genuine concern, which is very endearing. Sam is very pretty. Near-perfect. Soon enough, you’re in her arms again, relieved to be in anyone’s arms at all, and that pesky, indefatigable libido of yours is soon poking through all the guilt and shame, and you tell Sam that you would, more than anything, like to continue what you’d started the day before. You’re able to control the nausea this time. You experience real, true intimacy. You come again and again.
And steadily, throughout the following days and months, which blend together to the point of inseparability, your relationship with Sam continues, progresses. But, although you’re happier than you were at the beginning of your imprisonment, you still feel that hole in your heart — perhaps you always will. The loneliness isn’t gone, only easier to forget. A part of you can’t help but feel that what you have with Sam is only a grotesque facsimile of what you really want.
Question: When the world ends, do you hope Sam lives or dies?
Pop Quiz #7
Say, for the sake of argument, that you are a writer of web-fiction-serials, and that, against all odds, they end up being fairly successful. Your first (and best) serial is a sort of de- / reconstruction of the superhero genre, and although it’s definitely amateurish, it is, in the end, compelling enough that a statistically anomalous number of people make it through over a million words of it.
A subplot of this first serial involves events similar to those described in the first several PQs. It’s maybe the most interesting subplot, of which there are several. It outlines a complex sort of superhero-induced moral ambiguity in a vivid, affecting way, which is really your whole goal with the project, theme-wise.
Ambiguity is a key word here — the events in the earlier PQs are not so detailed in your version, maybe because the story’s already very dark, and transgressive/obscene/vulgar stuff like that, especially when it’s on the periphery, could be construed as gratuitous. Then again, other parts of the narrative are pretty gratuitous already.
Whatever the reason, though, your audience only has what you give them, and, as such, there’s some room for doubt vis a vis what exactly happened in those off-screen moments, as it were — you’ve only given them the broad strokes. Whether you, the author, know the facts of the matter or not is a little unclear. When asked directly, you give vague answers, pointing closer to but never exactly at the truth.
Of course, truth is subjective, especially in fiction. Depending on the presentation of the events, the perspective from which they’re portrayed, etc. you can create a virtually infinite number of potential responses in the reader. Picking which one you want is the skill of writing, theoretically.
Now say, for the sake of argument, that the way your readership reacts, in general, at least initially, to the events described in the earlier PQs, is primarily sympathetic to the character who, in the PQs, is referred to as “you”. Which seems to you, the author, pretty fair, all things considered. After all, the “you” of the earlier PQs got dealt a fairly rough hand, even by the standards of your fictional world, which are high, in that regard, to say the least.
Still, you can’t help but wonder if your vagueness gave your audience an inaccurate view of the events, which involve touchy subjects and should therefore have garnered a more polarized response, right? And so you gradually give more and more direct hints, which you have an excuse to do now, because you’re writing a sequel to that first serial, by the way, which is (the sequel is) also released online in a serialized format, and which features that same “you” as a semi-prominent character, and which is narrated from the perspective of their sister.
When people (eventually) catch on to the true nature of things, though, perceptions are quick to change, which you suppose isn’t surprising, even if the truth was always there to be divined through subtext. And the subsequent criticism directed at “you” (not you, the author, but the “you” of previous PQs) is probably deserved, and you, the author, certainly aren’t going to redeem them through your characterization of them in your sequel (which, it’s worth mentioning, is kind of an ambitious project [the sequel is] for you, theme-wise, and which is probably not as “good” as the source material, especially since your work schedule precludes you from doing a lot of editing/refining, which it probably needs, and which you say you’ll get around to doing at some point, although who knows whether that’s true or not).
The particulars of your decisions vis a vis characterization of the previous “you” have to do with thematic ideas you’re trying to express in your sequel, which include questions of redemption, recovery from trauma, forgiveness, and that kind of thing. The antagonists are presented as not having changed from their former (read: worse) selves, whereas the protagonists are portrayed as having changed/evolved/apologized, and are therefore presented as capital-G Good. The previous “you” refuses to admit wrongdoing in your sequel, and is therefore presented as unequivocally capital-B Bad, which might’ve been inevitable given the nature of the narrator’s relationship (for lack of a better word) with them.
This view of morality is a pretty big departure from the original, whose plot was characterized by increasingly ambiguous decisions, ethics-wise, on the protagonist’s part. So what’s the artistic impetus for making a change like this? Is it a function of the narrator and their inherent first-person unreliability? Is it a change that’s necessary from a thematic perspective? Is it just that your view of human nature has changed, i.e., have you gone from thinking that morality is subjective and that what’s “right” is never clear-cut to thinking that in the real world there are good guys and bad guys and that life (especially aspects of life involving trauma/forgiveness) can be understood as a conflict between these two groups?
Whatever the reason, the impact is the same: some characters have to be changed to fit this new world order, the “you” of previous PQs being a primary example. Though they are, ostensibly, the same person, their function in the story is way, way different. What their actions could be interpreted to “mean” in you sequel, what they indicate about the character and therefore about the theme, are, in a lot of ways, contradictory to their actions in the original.
Question: Is this change valid from an artistic perspective?
Pop Quiz #8
Say, for the sake of argument, that you are, unfortunately, a fanfiction writer, and that for whatever reason, you decided to write a series of belletristic vignette things that each have at the end a question or questions posed to the reader, which is an idea stolen pretty much whole-cloth from David Foster Wallace’s “Octet” (which is really a fantastic short story that everyone should read). Even the idea of having the final quiz be about you, the writer, is stolen. Which is maybe a little pretentious — this is fanfiction, after all, not a medium known for its challenges to the form, or for high-concept “literary” fiction.
But you thought this would be the best way to get across what you wanted to about this character (the character who’s referred to as “you” in PQs #1-6) who you’ve been obsessed with ever since you first encountered them. You thought the direct engagement with the reader created by the pop quiz format would be the best way to drive home ideas you’ve had for awhile now regarding the aforementioned character. About readers’ relationships with fictional characters, namely.
Needless to say, you weren’t very successful.
The reasons for your lack of success are numerous. For one, examining the life of the aforementioned character through pop quizzes is a doomed endeavour from the very beginning. Turns out they (the character) are difficult to talk about with the objectivity required for your plan of “direct engagement”, which requires that the reader have the minimum amount of preconceptions about the scenario described in the pop quizzes possible. And with as few preconceptions as possible (preconceptions are going to be there no matter what — the key is in minimizing them) the reader will be forced to grapple with the scenarios in (ideally) a new way, and maybe even react differently. But, yes, it’s difficult to talk about this fictional life objectively, especially to an audience who, presumably, already has a lot of background knowledge on the issue. There’s just too much complicated, emotionally charged bullshit surrounding it all.
The other issue is that a lot of the scenarios you write pop quizzes about only serve to illustrate a point that you’ve already gotten to in previous PQs, and so you cut them out of the larger collection. For example, you wrote one about the aforementioned character’s brief conversation with their sister in the post-apocalyptic setting of the sequel mentioned in PQ#7 that didn’t really say anything that PQ#3 didn’t.
Others, like PQ#4, got excised simply because they were too graphic. PQ#4 involved a very, very graphic description of just what the aforementioned character did to their sister exactly, which could really only serve to affect the reader on a physiological/gross-out sort of level, and which you couldn’t really think of a question for that was really even worth asking (e.g., “Is rape ever justified?”).
But still, you thought the ideas were important enough to keep writing about, because, as stated earlier, you’ve been obsessed with this character for a long time now, and it seemed necessary for you to analyze exactly why you have an obsession. After all, there aren’t even very many material similarities between you, the fanfiction writer, and the aforementioned character. But you can’t help but find their plight sympathetic, even empathetic. And their whole situation evokes an emotional response in you that can’t be named. Which, again, it’s basically impossible to describe the reason for.
And this unnameable feeling continues even as the aforementioned sequel reveals further and further that the aforementioned character is evil through to their core — at least, that seems to be the implication, or, if not the implication, the reaction most readers have. Which has caused you, the fanfiction writer, to think a lot about the interplay between character, author, and reader. That was the idea behind including PQ#7, by the way — you can’t understand a character or the readers’ reaction to the character without thinking about the author’s role.
And so the only way you can think of to express these ideas while also still acknowledging your failures is to be very up-front and honest with your readership, which is maybe a move that’s a little played out by this point, this hiding behind a wall of metafiction to disguise the real failures of the writing itself. But that’s not what you’re trying to do. Not at all. In the end, all you, the fanfiction writer, really want is to get people to understand where you’re coming from, maybe even to try and justify your position, too.
And that’s kind of a scary process for you, the fanfiction writer. It would need to involve coming before the audience not in person, but in text, which is (literally) black and white and rigid and is almost impossible to write without creating room for different interpretations, misunderstandings, etc. In that form, you’re not really you. But that’s the only way you can see to say what you need to say — it’s the only thing you’re capable of doing. Those who read it will have to decide whether you’ve succeeded in your aim. That’s true of anything.
So decide.