Setsuled's Journal

I'm stupid. Maleficent laid the trap to catch the guy her raven overheard Aurora saying would meet her at the cottage that night. For some reason I didn't connect this with Maleficent's need to prevent true love's kiss from reaching sleeping Aurora. Maybe I didn't think of it because I didn't compute the guy Aurora had met once as being her true love. I didn't have a problem with it when I was a kid--he was the only handsome guy in the world and she was the only beautiful girl in the world. Of course they're meant for each other. This adds to my sympathy for Maleficent, whose idea of letting Philip go when he's an old man seems a delightfully wicked strategy for sabotaging a very superficial system.

Of course, Maleficent doesn't have to worry about King Stefan's army laying siege to her castle since the good fairies put them all to sleep. That's a real what the fuck moment.

I was thinking to-day about the noir comic I abandoned early in the year. It was necessary after I'd been working on it a couple weeks because I'd completely lost touch with the original motive behind its creation, and I knew from the beginning it was a danger. I'd done something with it I normally don't allow myself to do with any of my writing--I chose to use it as an outlet for my feeling about and towards specific people and rationalisations I'd constructed based on those feelings. I doubt I could explain it sufficiently, but I believe that when creating characters they all ought to be aspects of yourself. I think one can draw inspiration from the actions of others, but only after you've put yourself in the other person's shoes and you're satisfied you can imagine behaving in exactly the same way yourself. The moment you think of someone else as unlike you on a quite fundamental level, you can't possibly know them.

I'm not saying people can't be different from one another on fundamental levels. But I think it's impossible to write characters you can't empathise with. You can continue writing characters based on erroneous apprehensions of the persons who inspired them so long as you recognise that your original inferences are inevitably reflections of your own personality. It's dangerous for characters to be irrevocably tied to hot feelings about someone else for this reason. Sooner or later, characters have to function independently of anyone who inspired them, aside from the writer him or herself.