#steph characters

A fascinating example for you is from an article I read detailing an anthropologist’s extended stay with an indigenous village in... Southeast Asia, I want to say?

While the villagers obviously acknowledged time passing in terms of the sun moving and seasons changing, the anthropologist found many of them to give vague answers when asked “when will [villager] be done?” Many Westerners would have considered their responses rude or brushing them off, as if the villagers didn’t care about other people.

A villager left to forage for food and herbs on a long hike through the inland wilderness, and the anthropologist again asked when they would be back. Another villager answered, “when he gets back.”

Because ultimately, that would dictate when he gets back more than any clock or deadline would. If there wasn’t enough to forage, then ultimately, they were going to stay out there until they did have enough. No clock can make more herbs appear out of thin air and in the end, even if the forager gathered everything in the most efficient way possible, nature and wilderness and weather in the end will always have their say.

Another example is in Port Protection, a series streaming on hulu currently. Several inhabitants of the town, being so utterly isolated and distant from usual commodities, are subsistence hunters. This, however, means that if they do not hunt, or are not successful in hunting, then they will not have meat. Period. For some, this means starving.

Thus, for this man hunting deer, he has to stay out in the wilderness, until he bags a deer. Usually this takes a few days. This time it took him seven. There was no going home because... you can’t. Not without food. Not unless you want to starve. Ultimately, when he gets home is determined by the whim of nature.

In many circular or present-oriented time systems, what you’re doing is often of much greater importance than when you do so, as in most Western, linear systems.

And so to circle back to Ed after a lengthy tangent, what this means is that while Ed is absolutely aware of western, linear time, and very much grew up in a “two worlds” scenario experiencing both circular and linear time systems depending on which culture he was around in a given moment, Ed, after 58 years of life, has seen enough and been around the block enough to know that in the end...

Things’ll happen when they happen. They’ll move as they move. And in the end, no minute-hand will ever change the course of the day or the gale of a storm or the erosion of a rock by the sea or how many fish get caught on his hook or which mosquito bites his arm or even what will happen in traffic on the way home from work.

Very much so. 

In more compassionate moments, Momo is the kind of person who, say... y’know those situations where an Incident happened in the family, and the people involved will just not discuss said Incident, despite caring deeply for each other? To the point of causing continuous issues that will go unresolved until the Incident is discussed? Momo is the kind of person to trick those people into a room together, lock them in (within reason), and explicitly bring up the Incident, and the fact that they have to talk about it in order to be let out--whether this ends up as a good or bad thing, whether or not the relationship is saved or ended. In fact, Momo has done this! More than once! 

(If Momo cared more about his uncles, he’d probably do this with them and TB. In some settings where maybe they have some positive character growth, he might, at least about Estella, if not the three siblings’ relationship itself.)

On the flipside, Momo knows how to use this same sort of knowledge for maximum damage and maximum fallout, such as to spite Grandpa or to irreconcilably damage a relationship or group, sow distrust, or weaken an opponent.