Playing myself after all

Big blogging day. Basically I'm at a difficult point in my Unfolding Form application and can't be bothered wrestling with it.

Over in another post (Playing the role you don't want to live), I banged on about how Garan, my character in Vaxalon's Amber game, was a way for me to break type and basically play a barbarian.

It doesn't seem to have worked. In this particular game, characters can grant other characters "traits" based on their actions, which they can then use later in the game. The two traits Garan's received so far are "Intuitive Insight" and "Wisest Choice".

Looks like I'm a cleric at heart after all. Sigh.

(Though I did ask the other players specifically to help me put some ropes on this loose cannon. Perhaps this is their way of doing so.)

Authors and Names

Last night I dreamed that I had a pleasant, positive conversation with my brother Roger.

Could this be at all related to the fact that I'm rereading Roger Zelazny's Amber books, and yesterday evening read the part in The Hand of Oberon where Corwin has a positive conversation with Julian, who he never previously got on with? Probably. But it's part of a trend of dreamed positive conversations with people from my past who I've had conflict with. (One of them was another Roger, Roger Osbaldiston; another was Rachael, just the other night.)

The name Roger has cropped up a bit lately. It's the name of the guy who trained me as a hypnotherapist. It's also the name of an undisciplined child who contributed to Cityside's Easter service being very difficult for me (I was struggling at the time, ironically, with being "devoiced" by my family, so the fact that the child's parents were doing nothing to quiet him while he was speaking loudly across the people leading the litugy...)

And speaking of authors and names: In Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, the publisher of the Diskworld Almanack (and Nanny Ogg's suggestive cookbook, The Joye of Snackes) is a Mr Goatberger. I realized, of course, that this grasping, profiteering publisher was a satire directed against publishers Pratchett has had to deal with, but I only just got the name. Mumble it a bit. Put an extra "r" on the end. If you still haven't got it, reflect: The goat probably wishes it was a hedgehog. (And if you don't get that, read Maskerade - it's hilarious.)

Playing the role you don't want to live

My father was, in many ways, the inspiration for the character of the Innocent Man. Yet he loved to play villains on the operatic stage. As a bass-baritone, he often got the opportunity, though sadly he never fulfilled his ambition to play Mephistopheles in Faust, the ultimate villain.
Neighbours of ours once took their young sons to a production of The Mikado in which Dad was playing the title role, and Dad was highly amused by the question one of the boys (about 8 or 9 at the time, I think) asked his parents afterwards: "Now the play is over, can Mr McMillan go back to being a nice man?"

All of which as introduction to why I'm really enjoying playing Garan in Vaxalon's Amber wiki game.

Garan, I've come to realize, is like a stereotypical D&D character, only HARDCORE! (to use Jess Hammer's technical terminology). Not only does he want to kill Corwin and take his stuff, he wants to chop the corpse into small pieces and create a zombie Corwin army (which I suppose would make him Chaotic Evil, in D&D terms). He's also suggested killing Brand: "If the blood of Amber is so great, I'd like to see some."

The format of the game helps with being able to do stuff like this. Because it's a wiki, we can retcon and revise, and I can indicate either in the wiki or on the out-of-character email list we are using to coordinate in the background that I'm not seriously suggesting this (besides which, the scene is set within the existing Amber canon, so I know going in that the suggestion isn't going to be taken up). We're creating a shared fiction in which Garan is a particular kind of extreme character, who pushes things in a particular direction but isn't going to get his way most of the time. I'm loving that; I get to propose mayhem, with the knowledge that it won't get acted on.

In other words, it's a safe way to indulge my desire to be a complete loose cannon and sow mayhem and destruction - not something I actually want to do in real life, because unlike Garan I'm aware of consequences.

I remember years ago reading a Philip K. Dick story (the one with Lincoln in it, I think) and being struck by the term Maschenfreiheit, which means "maskfreedom". This is the freedom you have to act in what would normally be unacceptable ways, by virtue of wearing a mask. Garan is an instance of maskfreedom for me, just as the Mikado or Dick Deadeye were for my father.

EDIT: See my follow-up post.