#world peace

I love body horror.  I love it.  I don’t care if it’s gory, or weird, or surreal, or just plain unusual, I love it.  My favorite thing in any fantasy or sci-fi is the moment when someone says aloud, maybe to their changing reflection in a mirror, maybe to some dark-suited government official, the words “What’s happening to me?”
I also love it’s more direct counterpart, “What did you do to me?”
It’s not always horror.  Some very cool powers have come from these questions.  It was asked word for word in Iron Man, by Tony Stark to Yensin, who had saved his life with a car battery surgically attached to the chest.  Scary at the moment, devastating even, this part of yourself gone so far from anything you thought could ever happen to you, and it will never go back to the way it was.  Even if the power is gone–the arc reactor is removed, the radioactive spider bite fades, the lycanthropy has an antidote–the memory will always be there, of the time when it was still there.
The character’s pain, their confusion, the most absolutely fundamental truth about their world being suddenly ripped away, that is my favorite thing.  It’s easy to torture a character.  Kill them, torture them, hurt them in the heart.  All of those things happen in abundance, but deep down, they still know that at the core of it all, their heartbeat still goes lub-dub, and their bones are the ones they have had from birth.
But if that’s not true, then what else can change?  Can the universe rewrite itself?  Can time flow in a different direction?  Are physics still laws, or are they merely a belief system?
Even better is when it does not happen all at once, but over a long time, maybe days or weeks.  A character can learn to live with whatever weirdness is changing, because humans are marvelously adaptable, but if it continues to change, there’s no time to adapt.  A man gets bitten by a wild dog one night, and over the next week, his beard gets very thick, his senses heighten to an almost painful level, he crushes doorknobs just by turning them.  Arguably all improvements, but they aren’t him.  None of this is him, this is someone else, a body that he can use but is no more his than anyone else’s.  That in itself is terrifying, and we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.
The best part, from my ghoulish and wicked perspective, is the moment of freak-out where the character panics entirely, runs off into the night in the hopes of running away from themself, screaming at the sky for an answer that will not come.
“WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?”
Maybe there’s tears, or something is broken in their rage, but all around, it’s a very emotional time.  I think I love this because in that moment, they are at their most raw, the most human, and I want to hold them close, rock a little and whisper sweet reassurances to them, remind them that they are not a freak, not a monster.  A person can be born without a kidney, and nobody calls them a monster.  Nobody should say that of a person who brushes against a cursed amulet and begins to hear the thoughts of others.  It’s nobody’s fault, and that fear is natural.  Not terribly productive, but understandable.
That other end of things, the “What did you do to me?” is far more sinister, because it’s now about two people, the person who doesn’t understand and the person who does.  It’s never done for a positive reason, so far as I can tell; Tony Stark got lucky, because he was able to extend the battery into something he could use, but in the beginning, it was only a week’s mercy that Yensin had given him.  After that, the execution stay would expire, and he would be just as dead as if he had been left alone.

Good damn question, son.

The other thing to love about the second phrase is that the mood of it is so much quieter, no less filled with emotions of all sorts, but quieter.  It’s spoken, not screamed, in the direction of the person who knows, not out into the universe because only God can explain.  This is not the work of God, it’s the work of a person, for an intended purpose and without consent.  You can fear something that was just a chance of fate; there’s less fear and far more anger when fate has no part in it at all.
So here’s what I’m asking.  When you have the opportunity for such a flexible and effective storytelling technique, why isn’t it used more?  I have to dig for these stories, and dig deep, and for all my efforts I can count maybe fifteen instances where I got to hear my beloved phrase shrieked into the wind, or whispered in a choked voice into the bathroom mirror.  Two of those instances were from the same story, by different characters under very different mindsets.  See, that’s what I want more of.  I want the market of books and movies and everything else to be flooded with this.  I want it to become a cliche.  I want to be so inundated with relating to these people, these souls who have something so terrible happen to them, that I stop thinking of them as characters, and have life imitate art.  I want others to follow uit, so that all we ever do is give each other little pats and murmur that everything will be okay, we’ll get through this together, change happens.
And then world peace will come, and it will be something one nearsighted little goblin called for on her blog.
Yes.
You’re welcome.