i’ve decided to take a break from writing fanfiction until at least the end of may. in my rush to get all my thoughts out before deltarune chapter 5, i’ve been writing so much since september that i’m starting to feel like i’ve been neglecting my other interests. i figured this would be a good chance to focus more on the story i’ve been trying to create myself, especially now that i have a lot more experience writing a coherent narrative than i did when i first came up with the idea.
this probably won’t be very interesting to anyone, so sorry for breaking my habit of not cluttering my account with random posts — but i kind of want to ramble a bit about some of the concepts and ideas i’ve been thinking about.
i should mention that i don’t really create characters around specific traits. usually i just have certain “vibes” and disconnected ideas that come to me naturally, and then i try to piece them together into a single fictional person, which can involve a lot of trial and error. so i guess i should start with the character who’s always been central to the story, but who’s also gone through the most drastic changes while i tried to shape his identity into something that matched the ideas i had in my head — david.
one of the things that has always stayed consistent about david is that he was inspired by a 20-minute one-on-one conversation i once had with a semi-public figure. i don’t really want to name the guy because i think some of what i’m about to say could come across as a little mean, but he’s a hungarian “artist” (people who know will probably know who i mean, haha). the conversation itself honestly wasn’t anything especially remarkable. he didn’t say anything particularly strange or unexpected — if anything, he was actually nicer than i had anticipated. he asked me a surprising number of questions about my life and seemed genuinely interested in what i had to say, while also being really patient with me being a little nervous and starstruck at first.
what actually stuck with me was the way he spoke, and how perfectly it matched the impression i already had of him. or maybe i realized that his public persona wasn’t really a persona at all — it just genuinely seemed to be the way he naturally was. he carried himself in a way that felt very effortless and sincere. basically, i realized that he really was just as mysterious and funny up close as he seemed from a distance, and that kind of led me to the thought that there’s probably just a category of people who are like that — naturally weird. special, but not in a way that really matters in the grand scheme of things. sort of “touched”, if you will.
another aspect was this idea of a ruthless auteur who will do anything to bring their vision into reality, no matter the cost — even if that means resorting to extreme measures like violence or threats. this, too, was inspired by a real person who will remain unnamed and whom i admire to some extent, though not without reservations and certainly not because i condone the worst of their actions. i just find the idea of someone so completely devoted to realizing the world as they see it in their head fascinating. at what point does artistic vision or visionary thinking become something pathological or destructive? where is the line between dedication and obsession, between conviction and toxicity?
here, i can also briefly mention someone else i feel loosely ties into this idea, alongside a few others — serge gainsbourg. i genuinely think there are very few artists i find more revolting than him. not just because of some of his actions or messaging, but because of how undeniably good his music could be while the rest of him often came across as hollow and even rotten. he almost feels like the ultimate rage-baiter of that era, because so many of his worst moments seemed driven by this endless hunger for attention or “hype”, to put it in modern terms. and honestly, that almost feels worse than if all of it had been completely sincere. at the same time, though, i can’t help but notice how committed he was to his craft. and i genuinely don’t know what to do with that contradiction. is that dedication something admirable? i can’t tell.
if we take a person whom i don’t really have any personal negative feelings towards in order to illustrate an adjacent idea, i’d probably go with david bowie — definitely an auteur, and someone with a remarkable talent for crafting characters and narratives. overall, a much more palatable figure than serge gainsbourg, though still not entirely free of controversy himself.
another thing i think about a lot, though this is on a slightly separate note, is the idealized view people tend to have of celebrities from past decades, especially the so-called rockstars. i do genuinely love older music, though i usually avoid saying that because i don’t want to be associated with the weird superiority complex some people attach to it.
but i also overthink everything, so sometimes it seems to me that we view musicians from the 60s, 70s, and 80s through this lens of mythologization where they stop being people and instead become symbols of some genre, movement, or aesthetic. i really dislike how so many horrible things ended up condensed into the phrase “sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll”, because it reads like this thought-terminating cliché we’ve imposed onto the lives of actual human beings who made incredible art while also probably being in immense pain — and not even in a romanticized “tortured artist” way, but in a much uglier and more human sense.
my mom is a massive fan of the doors. i’m not, honestly — i don’t even fully know why. something about them just never really clicked with me, which is completely fine because art is subjective and one person’s opinion shouldn’t affect anyone else’s enjoyment of it. so when my mom decided to take me 1000 kilometers away from home to watch the 1991 film “the doors” in a theater where the tickets somehow cost 60 bucks (what the fuck?) i was basically just like, sure. the funniest part is that the movie was in english, and my mom doesn’t even speak english well enough to understand the movie.
but the film ended up leaving a really strong impression on me — probably not in the way she expected, though. when we left the theater, she asked if i thought it was cool. and i told her no, i thought it was overwhelmingly depressing. she asked why, and i told her that i genuinely couldn’t understand what was supposed to be so “cool” about watching a guy who is clearly in horrific mental anguish slowly kill himself in a way that becomes extremely unglamorous the moment you think about it for more than two seconds, while a crowd cheers him on and indulges his drug-fueled delusions of grandeur. and now that he’s dead, he can only exist as a legend, or a photograph, or some kind of martyr figure — not as an actual human being.
my mom basically told me i was lame for looking at it that way and said something like “you just don’t get it, that’s just sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”. and for some reason, at that particular moment, that expression made me irrationally angry. people use this blanket phrase to avoid examining anything beneath the surface-level aura that figures like jim morrison undeniably had.
this whole thing happened back in 2019, and ever since then i’ve rewatched the doors with my mom every year. and somehow, every single time, i still fail to understand what exactly is supposed to be so cool about it.
but the movie always ends up making me think about similar situations where society turns a real person into a symbol — usually someone brilliant, charismatic, and dead far too early. people like michael jackson, elvis presley, james dean, marilyn monroe, jimi hendrix, freddie mercury, kurt cobain, and so on. i could probably add less internationally famous figures too, like viktor tsoi, or even my personal darling daniel balavoine. the moment a celebrity dies prematurely — before what we consider the “natural” end of a life — they stop belonging to themselves and instead become public property, a part of the larger collective subconscious.
on one hand, this process preserves their artistic legacy and keeps people emotionally connected to their work long after they’re gone. but on the other hand, it can also become dehumanizing. because once someone dies, their actual humanity slowly disappears from public perception. what remains is this collage made up of their most recognizable traits, quotes, scandals, aesthetics, and performances, all rearranged into a simplified image that often has very little to do with the complexity of the real person. and in the worst cases, that image can eventually be stolen from them entirely, because they’re no longer alive to object to the ways they are being interpreted, commercialized, distorted, or exploited — which is something that unfortunately happened to marilyn monroe to a frankly disturbing extent.
another aspect of this that i find incredibly strange, though maybe less obvious, is the obsession people have with conspiracy theories surrounding celebrity deaths. the inability to accept that a tragic accident, an overdose, an illness, or suicide could simply be what happened. instead, people insist it must have secretly been murder — preferably politically motivated murder, if they want the theory to sound more dramatic — or that the celebrity somehow faked their death and now lives peacefully on an island somewhere far away from public life. and i don’t know, there’s just something deeply unsettling to me about how normalized this is. because when you strip away the mythology, this is not a normal way to talk about real people.
this whole idea kind of reminds me of the song “kitsch” from the austrian musical “elisabeth”. the song basically makes fun of the exploitation and commercialization of the image of a very complex real woman — in a musical that is itself exploiting the image of sisi, though obviously not in a malicious way.
now, i’m not trying to say that we shouldn’t have idols, or depict real people in art, or anything extreme like that; i’m not claiming that i am innocent of any of the dubious actions described above either, and i don’t even believe that this is all inherently bad — i just think we should maybe calm down with the mythologization a little and be more critical of how we view these “legendary” figures. but even that’s totally optional: do whatever you want, i’m not your daddy — i’m just a random guy on the internet.
coming back to david, he’s sort of a combination of all these ideas in one character. a naturally weird but troubled rockstar who ends up hurting himself and those around him, and who builds bizarre characters that partially fulfill his fantasies and delusions while also keeping him from honestly examining his own life for too long. it becomes a kind of carousel he’s trapped on, one that only keeps going faster and faster until it crashes. and david wishes he had died — or maybe, on some level, he has always wished that. but he doesn’t. instead, he finds what feels like the ultimate escape from himself and the consequences of his actions in this mystical dimension of the talt, which allows him to inhabit the skin of one of his characters — the emperor. but the problem is that even as the emperor he keeps repeating the same pattern as before because even literal magic cannot help him to run away from himself.
well, that’s probably all in regards to the ideas that inspired david. maybe i’ll talk about the rest of my characters like this. :D