What is it to not be real? To be a fictional version of yourself? We do it a lot when we play RPGs, making our own faces in facsimile and sending them loose, pasted onto impossibly contoured, impervious bodies into a wilderness within which they can fuck and kill without remorse. There’s something necromantic about these bodies, dredged up from code or dice math, given power by the hard resolution of probabilities; increasing entropy. Each roll of the RNG breaking down the universe a tiny step at a time, herding it towards heat death.
Elric wasn’t the first fictional me, but he was one of the hardest hitting. He sat at that perfect point between Conan and the Naggarothi of the Warhammer world, a lurid fantasy whose vibrancy was drenched always in the darkness of his failure. Elric could never succeed, and that felt just about right. He was a lost prince who came from pain, who was destined to destroy that which he loved, but also that which he had been borne from and thus hated. I could relate - my grandfather’s insistence in our family’s lost nobility had turned my father into a broken, violent, addicted wreck. My father had named me after a character in his favourite book and freighted me with the weight of German responsibility for the holocaust, a violence that he felt he had no answer for other than to proclaim his own guilt. Elric was cruel, but his cruelty was turned inwards, his mission to rid the world of the cruelty that he was part of.
Including himself.
I have always been drawn to postmodernism, to stories that fictionalise aspects of the real, that take the author and the players and place versions of them into the action. I don’t know if this is escape or punishment though. To be placed into a fictional world must be a sentence of death surely? For when the story ends then so do the characters. They don’t continue after everyone else has turned away, unlike me. Alone and cold and hidden from view, but still there. Still shivering with life as the darkness pulses over me.
The monsters always want to escape from the pages of the book though. They want to break through the mirror, not close it back down, so why do we place ourselves in their realm? During my early twenties I was friends with a moderately famous cult author. I thought he was amazing, until he betrayed his partner who I also dearly loved to run off with a woman half his age. Just before he disappeared he sent me a text about how we would all record a song together (me, my partner, him and his partner) and in doing so would live forever. He put himself into every one of his books.
Except it was weird, because it wasn’t always him, or it wasn’t only him. His heroes were always fictionalised versions of who he had wanted to be when he was younger, but given the names and faces of his own younger fans and friends. He was a ghost, haunting the pages and hungry for flesh to inhabit. This is the fictional me that never was; I was, I can admit to myself now, desperate to be included in one of his stories; to have a new and simple and understandable life in his world that was miles away from the incomprehensible horror of my own. I probably could have too, I was invited to his wedding after he came back from running away. I could have stayed friends and thrown his partner under the bus, pretended her hurt didn’t matter compared to the dazzling gleam of unreality. I’m still in touch with her, I haven’t seen him since, except awkwardly, in the street, ‘we must catch up’.
If a monster creates a fiction, but that fiction is not monstrous, how do we process it? What does it mean to be soothed by the mindscapes of the terrible? I find myself never wanting to know the people who create because the act of creation is one of violence itself, tearing the stuff of the world from its path of gentle decay. The conservation of energy means that the act of creation hastens the rate of entropy. It is a supreme arrogance to believe that you have something to say, and yet I am grateful, pathetically so, to those who say something anyway. Who provide fantastic spaces for me to hide parts of myself in, squirreling them away like a lich's phylactery so that even as I feel I can no longer be part of the world, there will be a nugget of my reality alive in the undying fictional landscapes.
The Gmork is a fictional monster who destroys fiction. He was another fictional me. His existence, bound to do the work of the Nothing and end the Neverending Story, was anathema to itself, and yet he persisted. Persistence doesn't seem to count for much these days though. He failed, which left him alive but trapped still in the fake. It was the Luck Dragon that made it out into the real world, free to monster some bully boys. Even our heroes are locations of violence and anger and pain.
I write for an audience when I write things like this, which means it's hard to remember how much is true and how much is for effect. It's not confessional if it is all an act, but it isn't fictional if it is real life. The moments are true, but presented in the wrong order. Sometimes a feeling becomes an action and sometimes an action is elided into a nothing. When we play games with ourselves as protagonist our lives become a jigsaw. Maybe I should only write for myself but I find the shared storytelling of the tabletop a hard drug to refuse. I would be a better person if I was more contained in my own corporeal vessel.
The real fictional me is the one that is really real. Fiction makes sense because you can understand why someone might have done something, even if the answer is because that's what the plot needed to happen. Real life doesn't have a plot. It isn't like you can fuck and kill to your heart’s content and the binding teleology will still wrap you close and tight and present you to the final boss anyway. No matter how often I put my own skin onto the pre-rendered flesh life keeps ticking away. Fiction may be a monster factory, but it is out here that they truly reside.
