#uh. sorta

oh yeah, I have all kinds of Feelings about how, like. it doesn't technically make a lot of sense for Xue Yang to have continued full use of his left hand, all things considered, but I'll give it to him (along with the chronic pain!) because he does textually have a, uh, noted heightened ability to deal with what would be disabling wounds on other people.

also a bunch of assorted vaguely formed headcanons about his early uses of demonic cultivation being instinctive around keeping himself alive and holding his body together in the immediate aftermath. but that's in my head.

more to the general point I have repeatedly in my writing of Xue Yang gone back to the ways in which the hand crushening - and, as others have noted in that post and in the tags, the surrounding beatings and ways in which it's likely symbolic of generalized indifference if not outright cruelty that a vulnerable child would suffer - underlies a lot of Xue Yang's subsequent worldview. it informs his perspective on power and what power means, the behavior that can be expected from people who have it against those who don't, on suffering, on deserved/undeserved treatment, the conviction that everyone is out for themselves and indifferent to others, even an introduction to disproportionate violence and unjustified punishment. like, even the flippant comment he makes in the Villainous Friends extra to the shopkeeper whose stall he destroys:

"There's no reason why. Lots of things in this world happen without rhyme or reason. This is called an unexpected disaster. Goodbye!"

it's funny but it's also like. yeah you would know wouldn't you.

like. is the way he responds and the person he grows into a reasonable or "justified" response to that trauma? is there such a thing as a "reasonable or justified response" to trauma? I don't personally really care especially in a fictional context.

but I do find it irksome when people understate the past trauma in order to underline or argue the idea that a character was, in particular, born evil, or to deliberately belittle the suffering of someone who went on to cause suffering themselves, as though the later actions justify the past injustice.

their doodle extras

she looks SO TIRED of my bullshit

so the problem karlson is addressing is, namely, why carter, uniquely of lovecraft’s protagonists, brushes up against the strange and otherworldly time and time again, and still gets a happy ending. that doesn’t happen in any other stories, for obvious reasons— for lovecraft everything outside the human purview is soul-shattering, so incomprehensible that even partial knowledge of it breaks us. why? because, if it is so fundamentally not meant for us, it is a marker of our own cosmic insignificance (excellent essay on this in the context of plato and classical philosophy). it is a proof of the fact that we are less epicurean atoms and void and more one single atom, infinitesimally small, and therefore our existence is meaningless. to understand, really and truly, such meaninglessness— that’s what it means to go mad. that’s what madness is, a comprehension of the truth. (it’s all very modernist; last year i wrote a mock conference paper on the correlations between lovecraft’s external, universal nihilism and joseph conrad’s internal, civilizational treatment of the same philosophy.)

ergo, even to brush up against the supernatural is to gain a fragment of that understanding, however small, and correspondingly to skirt along the edge of madness. lovecraft’s protagonists who experience this kind of thing, who come into contact with the other, they’re never the same— either they die horrible deaths, or they go entirely insane, or they live out the rest of their lives haunted, like marlow in heart of darkness or lockwood in wuthering heights, eternally set apart from the rest of humanity by the burden of the truth they know as a result of their experiences. 

but the thing is— excluding “through the gates of the silver key” on account of its status as work originated by another author & therefore closer to the derleth contributions than anything else (e. hoffman price you can publish your dream cycle fanfiction on ao3 like the rest of us schmucks)— randolph carter, lovecraft’s most frequently recurring human character, the person in the mythos who has brushes with the supernatural more frequently than anyone else— is the exception to that rule. he doesn’t go mad, he’s not killed, he— well, it wouldn’t be quite correct to say he isn’t set apart from the rest of society, but it isn’t in that specific, quintessentially gothic way. the worst that ultimately happens to him is that he has to suffer through a couple decades of ennui, and that’s due to his removal from contact with the supernatural, rather than the inverse. and! not only does he not suffer from his contact with the outside in the way every single one of lovecraft’s other protagonists does, he actively benefits from it! the dreamlands are a profoundly beautiful and wondrous place, an escape from the dull mundanity of the waking world; the silver key proves the ultimate solution to his ennui, though it produces the sort of time distortion lovecraft will later consider as a source of horror in stories like “the shadow out of time.” ruthanna emrys, in her write-up of the story for tor’s lovecraft reread series, calls the story (and, by extension, carter’s arc as a whole) “the flip side of cosmic horror,” and she’s right. here, the scales of fear and wonder tip to the latter side in a way they do precious few times in lovecraft; here, we see the supernatural as a source of awe and enlightenment, as an almost voltairean embrace of the vastness of the cosmos not as a thing to be feared, but as a thing to wonder at, and even be joyful of. 

(it’s a very enlightenment idea, this sense of the illumination of the infinite, but that’s a subject for another time.)

the question we have to ask, then, is why? why does it make sense for there to be an exception to the rule of truth-as-madness that permeates lovecraft’s work; why, in a universe that everyone characterizes— that lovecraft himself characterizes— as vast and cold and despairingly empty, soul-crushingly apathetic; why there, of all places, do we find this astronomically improbable happy ending? why should randolph carter get to become king of a dream-city, why should he get to wonder wholeheartedly at a cosmos that we’ve been told over and over again should instill fear and dread? (a secondary question: why him specifically?) why? where did the formula go wrong? what are we missing?

to be entirely honest, i don’t know. i don’t think most critics do, and the thesis that inspired this post doesn’t really seem sure of itself either. it’s not, i don’t think, about carter himself; as much as i like him (and i do like him a great deal) lovecraft was never very good with characters and carter is a protagonist off of the same basic template of most of his peers who find themselves with far worse fates: white male upper-class new-englander gentleman-scholar of financial means, a predilection for the occult, and a profound lack of genre savvy. (this type of protagonist didn’t originate with lovecraft, to be sure, but it’s the one he wrote almost exclusively.) in horror fiction, these are a dime-a-dozen. master dreamer though he is, it’s nothing— nothing specific about carter the character, that demands a happy ending. no, i think it’s something else, and i find myself coming back over and over again to this terry pratchett quote, from a slip of the keyboard:

Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.

lovecraft’s universe is— it is dark and hostile, immensely so. it is a place of ultimate chaos and despair and horror, wherein we are insignificant and meaningless. it is all of those things, profoundly. it is the most unlikely place in the world in which to find a happy ending. 

but we do.

we do, because we have to. we do, because we are human, and we very simply cannot abide stories in which there is no hope. stories in which we are told that we do live in vain, stories in which all is black and cold, form and void with no reason, no light— we recoil from those, because we do, to quote terry again, need fantasy to be human. even in the worst timeline! even when we live vulnerable to creatures that would like nothing more than to eat us for lunch, even when we spend our tiny ephemeral lives doing and experiencing awful things— even if humans are mean creatures in both senses of the word,, even when we cannot see the light, even then. even then, it has to be there— if not in the world around us, then in our stories. a universe where randolph carter died at the end of dream quest of unknown kadath or spent the rest of his life stuck in the waking world would be as deeply, unconscionably cruel as the universe in which james bond didn’t manage to disarm the nuclear bomb, or where the third brother wandered in the wood forever.

in my mind, the takeaway from the carter stories (one of many takeaways, really) is this: in the darkest of universes, there is that tiny glimmer of light. it is a grim, thin hope, but it is there, because it has to be. no matter what lovecraft says, no matter what the rule of his cosmos, it is there. and because it is there, we are not bound to horror— we can have a happy ending, we can push past fear and into wonder, we can find that arthurian sword in the most dim and unlikely of places, glowing faintly in the light of the sunset. 

Firstly, saying giving him the insomnia meds would’ve fixed him ignores the reason he has insomnia in the first place. He is so deeply upset by his place in society that he literally cannot sleep. Drugging him to sleep would not change that. That, of course, is the easy, quick response.

But with regard to therapy? The biggest flaw is that it ignores a central tenet of the book. Part of what tortures the narrator and drives him to invent Tyler is that his feelings about this collective, systemic issue are constantly reduced to a Just Him thing. His seatmates ask what his company is. He’s the only one upset at the office. He gets weird looks if he says the truth of what he does. People will do anything in their power to pretend he is the issue, as an individual, because it is far scarier to consider the full implications of the systemic issues implied by what he is saying. Everyone treats it as if the issue is him, so he goes insane. He does anything to get someone to say, holy shit, that’s fucked up, what you’re a part of is wrong. In an attempt to feel any sort of vague sympathy and catharsis, he goes to support groups to pretend to be dying, because then at least people don’t habitually blame him for his anguish. 

Saying therapy would fix him ignores that his problems are not individual. They are collective. It’s the reason the entire story resonates with people! Something deeply, unignorably wrong with society, where people would rather blame you for bringing it up than try and address it, because it feels impossible. I don’t blame people for this, really, because it IS scary. It’s terrifying to sit and feel like you’ve realized there’s something deeply, deeply wrong, but if you say something, people will get mad at you since it’s so baked into everything around you. Or, even if they agree, it’s easier to deal with the dissonance by pretending it’s individual.

And it’s not like that’s not the purpose therapy and medications largely serve, anyway. Getting into dangerous territory for this website, but ultimately, the reason the narrator was seeking medication was because it’s a bandaid. A very numbing bandaid. For these very large, dissonance causing problems, therapy does very little. Medications do what they always have, and distract you with numbness or side effects. It’s a false solution. He is seeking an individualized false solution because he has been browbeaten with the idea that this is an issue with him alone, when it's plainly clear it's not. 

Don't get me wrong. Obviously he has something wrong with him. But it's a product of his situation. It is a fictional exaggeration of a very real occurrence of mental illness provoked by deep unconscionable dissonance and anguish.  There is a clear correlation between what happens and his mental state and his job and how isolated he is. 

The thing is, even if he were chemically numbed, I do think he would’ve lost it regardless. Many people on meds find they don’t fix things. For reasons I’ll get into, but in this case because even if numbed or distracted, once you’ve learned about deep, far reaching corruption in society, it’s very hard to forget. Especially if, in his case, you literally serve as the acting hand of this particular variety. He’s crawling up the walls. 

So why do people say this?  Well, it's funny I guess. Maybe the first time or whatever. But also, often, they believe it, to a degree. Maybe they've just been told how effective therapy and meds are for mental illness, they believe wholeheartedly in The Disease Model of Mental Illness, maybe they themselves have engaged with either and have considered it successful. Maybe they or someone they know has been 'saved' by such treatments. 

But in all honesty.... What therapy can help with is mentality, it's how you approach problems. For issues on a smaller scale, not meaning they are easier to deal with my any degree, but ones that are not raw and direct from deep awareness of corruption; these are things that can be worked through if you get lucky and get an actually good therapist who helps build up your resiliency. But when your issue is concrete, something large and inescapable? It's useless. At best it can help you develop coping mechanisms, but there is a limit for that. There is a point where that fails. To develop the ability to handle something like this requires intense development of a comfort with ambiguity and dissonance and being isolated and a firm positioning of your purpose and values and and belief in wonder and all the other shit I ramble about. The things that the narrator lacks, which lead him to taking an ineffectual death knell anarchist self-destruction path. Therapy, where the narrator is, full of the knowledge of braces melted to seats and all the people that have to allow this to happen? It fails. 

And meds — meds are a fucking scam. We know the working mechanism of basically none of them, the serotonin receptor model was made up and paid its way into prominence. We have very little evidence they're any better than placebo, and they come with genuinely horrific side effects. Maybe you got lucky. I did, on some meds. On others? I don't remember 2018. The pharmaceutical industry is also known for rampant medical ghostwriting, and for creating 'off-label' uses for drugs that have gained too many protests in their original use, then creating a cult of use to then have 'grassroots' campaigns for it to be made a label use (ie, legitimize their ghostwritten articles with guided anecdotes). 

The DSM itself is basically a marketing segregation plot. It's an attempt to legitimize the disease model by isolating subgroups of symptoms to propose individualized treatments for subgroups that are not necessarily all that separate. But if the groups exist, you can prescribe more and different medications, no? Not to mention, if you use the disease model, you can propose that these diseases are permanent, or permanent until treated, considered more and more severe to offset and justify the horrific side effects of the medications. Do you know why male birth control doesn't really exist? Same reason. They can justify all the horrible side effects for women, because the other option is pregnancy. For men, it's nothing. 

And they're not bothering to invent new drugs without side effects. When they invent new drugs it's just because the last one got too bad of a name, or they can enter a new market. Modern drugs don't work any better than gen1 drugs. They still have horrific side effects. At best, the industry will shit out studies saying the old one was flawed (truth) so they can say this new gen will be better (lie). They're doing it with ssris right now. 

Fundamentally, the single proposed benefit of any of these drugs is that they numb you. To whatever is torturing you. It's harder to be depressed if you can't feel it, or if you just can't muster the same outrage. Of course, there is people who find that numbness to be helpful, or worth it. But often, it's stasis. For the people who have problems that can be worked on, it serves as a stopgap to not actually work on said problems. The natural outcome of the disease model is stagnation for those whose need is to develop skills and resiliency. It keeps them medicalized and dependent on the idea that they're diseased and incapable. Profitable. Stuck in the womb. 

I’ve been there. It’s easier, to wallow, and resist growth because it’s difficult and painful and unfair and cruel and you can think of five billion reasons to justify your languishing. But don’t listen to anyone who tells you you’re just permanently damaged, no matter how nicely they word it, no identity or novel pathologization, no matter how many benefits they promise, especially if they swear up and down some lovely expensive medications with little solid backing and plentiful off-label usage and side effects that’ll kill you. Some days it feels like they want us all stuck in pods, agoraphobic and addicted to the ads they feed us to isolate the markets for the drugs they’ve trained us to beg them to pump us with. Polarization making it as easy as flashing blue light for go, red like for stop, or vice versa. I worry about the kids, for fucks sake. That’s a bit dark and intense, and I apologize. But I want you (generic) to understand, there is a profit motive. Behind everything. And they do not mean well. They do not care about your mental health or your rights or your personhood or your growth. They care about how they can profit off of you.

For those struggling with immovable, society problems, like the narrator grappling with how his job fits into and is accepted by society while his rejection and horror in the face of it does not, it can work about as well as any other drug addiction. Your mileage may vary. From what I've seen, recovering from being on prozac for a long time can be worse than alcohol. They put kids on this shit. They keep campaigning for more. Off label, again. A pharmaceutical company’s favorite thing to do has to be to spread rumors of someone who knows someone who said an off label use of this drug helps with this little understood condition. Or, in the case of mental illness, questionably defined condition. And like, damn, I know I'm posting on the 'medicalization is my identity' website so no one will like all this and has probably stopped reading by now, but yall should be exposed to at least one person who doubts this stuff. Doesn't just trust it. Because I mean, that's the thing right?

It's so big. What would it mean, for this all to be true? Yeah, everyone says pharmaceutical companies are evil and predatory and ghostwriting, but to think about what that really entails. Coming back to the book, everyone knows the car lobby is huge and puts dangerous vehicles through that kill people. What does it mean if the car companies all hire people to calculate the cost of a recall and the cost of lawsuits? No one wants to think about the scale that means for people allowing it or the systems that have to be geared towards money, not safety like they say. Hell, even Chuck misses the beat and has the narrator threaten his boss with the Department of Transportation. And shit, man, if every company is doing this, you think Transportation doesn't know? That they give a fuck? You're better off mailing all the evidence to the news outlets and hoping they only character assassinate you a little bit as they release the news in a way that says it's all the fault of little workers like you, not the whole system. Something something, David McBride, any whistleblower you feel like, etc. 

So I don't blame you, if your reaction is "but but but, that can't be right, people wouldn't do it, they wouldn't allow it" or just an overwhelming feeling of dread that pushes you to deny all of this and avoid thinking about it. Just know, that's in the book. That's all the seatmates on the flights. That's all his fellow officemates. It's easier to pretend, I know.

But think about, how the response fits in with the themes of the book. The story, as a movie too. What drives the narrator’s mental breakdown? How would you handle being in his position? How would you handle being his seatmate? It’s easy to say you’d listen. But have you? Have you had any soul wrenching betrayals of how you thought society worked? How about a betrayal by the thing that promised to be the fix of the first? Can you honestly say you wouldn’t follow that gut instinct, saying follow what everyone says, that person must just be crazy, evil, rude, cruel, whatever it is that means you can set what they said aside?

For a lot of people, they can do that, I guess. Set it aside. Reaching that aforementioned state of managing to cope with the dissonance and ambiguity and despair is very hard. The narrator made the Big Realization, but he couldn’t cope. He self-destructed. Even when people don’t make the big realization consciously, they’re already self-destructing. It’s hard to escape it when it feels easier than continuing anyway. When it feels like the only option,

Would therapy fix the narrator of Fight Club? Would meds fix the narrator of Fight Club? No. He knows too much. All meds will do, by the time he’s in the psych ward, is spiritually neuter him. A silly phrase, but really. Take the wind out of his sails. 

Is he fixed if he doesn’t try to blow up town? If he just shuts up and settles in and stops costing money? If he still can’t cope with the things he’s unearthed? Do you see how this is a commentary in a commentary in a commentary?

Fight Club is an absolutely fascinating story because of this. The fact that it addresses the fallout of knowing. The isolation. The hopelessness. The spiral that results from a lack of hope. This is, I think, what resonates most with people, even if not consciously. Going insane because you’ve discovered something you wish you could unknow. It’s a classic horror story. Should our society be lovecraftian evil? I don’t think so. 

Do I think changing it will be easy? No. Lord knows a lot exists to push people who make these sorts of Realizations towards feelings of individuality and individualized solutions and denial and other distractions and coping methods. And to prevent people who make One realization from expanding on it and considering further ramifications. Fight Club itself gets into this; the isolation of men being a strict part of the role society shapes for their sex leaves them very vulnerable to death fetishes, in a sense, and generally towards self destructive violence. It helps funnel them away from substantial change and towards ineffectual change. Many things, misogyny, racism, serve to keep people isolated from one another, individualized, angry, and impossible to work with. Market segregation; god knows even appealing on those fronts has become such a classic ploy that companies do it now, the US military frames its plundering that way, etc. 

// Thirty, by the sound of it.

In DW he’s listed as being born in 162, which is the same year as Guan Yu, who is also thirty according to the wiki. Though that would make Xu Huang older than him, and Yu Jin is supposed to be the oldest of the Wei five so ?