Thoughts on The Other
Apr. 30th, 2009 07:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julieandrewsHere's one of those thoughts you wake up with, with your half-awake brain. And probably not the best thing to do with those thoughts is to immediately write them up in an lj entry and post it, but that's what I'm going to do.
People like reading about The Other, because they want to discover these different ways of being, of thinking, of feeling, of acting. They want to see how well they work for the person in the story. Then maybe try them on for a time, find out if some of those aspects work for themselves. If they can take parts of that Other and use them in their own lives, their own identity.
Which is perhaps why science fiction and fantasy is really big with adolescents. That's the time, or it's always said that's the time, when people are figuring out who they are. I think that's a lifelong thing, personally, but I suppose that is the time when the brain's still forming.
So, in a way, it's like shopping for parts of an identity. Even if you know a particular pair of pants won't fit you, or that you wouldn't look like who you want to be in them, you can still appreciate looking at them, still like them, maybe even suggest them to someone else you know. So The Other isn't necessarily something weird, foreign, strange, alien, exotic, romantic. It's just something NEW. Something new we might want to incorporate into our own lives. After we've learned a bit more about it.
I can't believe my 5-minutes awake brain just wrote a freaking shopping analogy. But there you go. Now I'm off to shower and thence to work.
People like reading about The Other, because they want to discover these different ways of being, of thinking, of feeling, of acting. They want to see how well they work for the person in the story. Then maybe try them on for a time, find out if some of those aspects work for themselves. If they can take parts of that Other and use them in their own lives, their own identity.
Which is perhaps why science fiction and fantasy is really big with adolescents. That's the time, or it's always said that's the time, when people are figuring out who they are. I think that's a lifelong thing, personally, but I suppose that is the time when the brain's still forming.
So, in a way, it's like shopping for parts of an identity. Even if you know a particular pair of pants won't fit you, or that you wouldn't look like who you want to be in them, you can still appreciate looking at them, still like them, maybe even suggest them to someone else you know. So The Other isn't necessarily something weird, foreign, strange, alien, exotic, romantic. It's just something NEW. Something new we might want to incorporate into our own lives. After we've learned a bit more about it.
I can't believe my 5-minutes awake brain just wrote a freaking shopping analogy. But there you go. Now I'm off to shower and thence to work.