Commisioned by Fidel Jiron Jr.
A few years back, when I was a freshman in college, I wrote a short story. It’s not that good, all things considered. It’s a bit too crap to actually share with you, but it’s thematically relevant. It was a second person story about someone writing a short story. They were lacking any ideas as to what they were writing, when suddenly someone came into their room. (I think I wrote the story with the assumption that the “you” was a guy, but I never actually provided any pronouns or gendered language to “you.”) After a brief conversation, they proceed to have sex. (Again, Freshman in high school.) After having non-descript sex for many hours, “you” comes to the realization that “you’re” still typing. When you read what you’ve been typing, you notice that that what you’re typing is the words being read in the short story. At first, you laugh it off. But then you look at the person (woman, let me be honest) you had sex with, only to see that you have no idea what they actually look like. Because you (I) didn’t give them any physical descriptions, not even a name. At first, you try to come up with some character designs and names, but you screwed up in the worst way possible (no, I’m not saying how. It was awful and I regret everything about it) and try to revise the description to be less horrible.
But then, the implications dawn on you about creating a fictional real person who exists just to have sex with you. Who has no choice but to have sex with you. Who is forced to have sex with you. And then, all the other implications hit me: what about all the other people in the world? Who are they and what lives do they live? What right did I have to dictate their lives, their stories? So, I broke down and called for my mother. Suddenly, your mother appeared as a comfort to you. And then, a dreadful thought came into our minds: what is our mother’s name? All she says of herself is that she’s our mother, but we can call her mommy. Mortified by the lack of imagination on the part of the writer, you try to figure a way out (just as you look at a conveniently placed mirror and realize that you don’t look like anything at all. Just a vague set of body parts). The ultimate solution I came up to escape: “And then, you woke up from this weird dream.”
SSSS.Gridman is, in many ways, a better expression of this existential dread. If one finds oneself the god of a fictional world, the writer to use the honest phrase, why make nothing bad happen? After all, stories tend to involve some conflict, be it friends moving, people you love dying, or giant monsters attacking the city. If nothing bad happened to people, then the story would be boring. But you’re the writer, so if people actually died, if there was actual damage, then you could simply reset the world and move those deaths to a point prior to the story so none of the characters feel bad. The horror of a monster of the week show with negative continuity writ large.
For that matter, why have empathy for characters who don’t work within the narrative? Those Scrappy Doos, those Wesley Crushers, those bad characters whose stories just aren’t working. Or, for that matter, the characters whose stories feel like they need to end in their deaths. Not because you hate them or anything, but because it’s the right way to go for the story. This isn’t a concern of SSSS.Gridman, but it is on my mind since I read Satoshi Kon’s Opus recently, which also deals in these themes. The point is, aren’t fictional characters, especially the ones we interact with, real. Not in the sense of you or I, but they still have an impact on lives, on other people’s stories. More people know who Spider-Man or Scott Free are than they will Sean Dillon.
SSSS.Gridman is about growing a sense of empathy towards the characters we create. Even the Scrappies. It might seem better to have a story without the characters we don’t like, but it wouldn’t be the story we liked if they weren’t there at all. They’re as much a part of the story as the ones we do like, the quiet scenes of character drama, and the rip-roaring action of Kaiju fights. The world would be something different without the queers, the weirdoes, and me. After all, though it may be a dream to Akane Shinjō, but it’s real to everyone else.
Many writers, myself included, come to the dilemma of what to do when we have empathy for our characters. It becomes hard to do horrible, awful things to them. To have them fight monsters or even create monsters. Of course, what does that say about the writer of our world. Our evil mastermind behind the scenes, the wicked puppeteer who pulls our strings and makes us dance. Who can live with all the horrible things that happen in our world.
The answer, of course is that it’s not real for them. It’s just a story. More than likely, I’m some minor character in the background of someone else’s story. But when Akane was in the dream, they were real in the sense of you or I and not fictional like she is to us. Writers forget that detail when we write ourselves into the narrative. We can forget to have empathy for the people around us and think them as much fictional characters with ticks and repeated tropes as the characters we create.
That’s the metaphor for being a writer in one’s own story after all: how do we treat other people, even the ones we don’t like? Do we see them as not being people, thus acceptable to murder? Do we see them as tools, as a means to an end? Or do we see them as people? Broken people, angry people, cruel people, kind people, happy people, but people nonetheless. We are full of multitudes, even the worst of us. And we can’t stop those who don’t see others as people if we don’t see them as people in the first place. (I mean, you can, but you'd just be treating symptoms rather than the disease.)
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