Thoughts on The Other

[julieandrews]

Here'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.

Comments

[notadoor.livejournal.com]

Adolescence is the time when people are first consciously figuring out who they are -- partially because of the cultural weight on it, and partly because the freedoms you get during adolescence (less parental restrictions, more opportunities in terms of travel/extracurric activities) are the first opportunities to explore things you haven't already been exposed to in your childhood.

Dig what you're saying -- and I think people are also so entrenched in their own way of viewing the world that another way of living is incomprehensible at times, and therefore fascinating.

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Which also explains why SF has such a problem with cultural appropriation. Instead of contemplating new ways of doing/being in order to better understand and respect the people doing/being them, the reader is constantly searching for something to *take*.