Sense of Self
This is the story of how I met Aelfrida Smithson.
Again -
"Meet" isn't literal, because Aelf does not actually exist. But I did come up with her, once, and set her loose upon a setting to see what she did, and then squinted and rearranged her into a different setting. And then I killed her, or at least her representation in Replay Value AU.
I rarely think about her now. Myra and Epi tend to crowd her out; both have far louder personalities.
But that doesn't mean she didn't exist in the first place. I may not have pingponged her back and forth to refine the archetype like I did with Myra, so this will be a looser interpretation, but I did write her and I want to understand why I wrote her, specifically, and not someone else.
Aelfrida Smithson was not very happy, not in Replay Value AU. She had a blog, where she presented research and gamebreaking, but this blog was essentially taken for granted. She was involved with the emotionally abusive Seer Network. She was a Mind native who just kept breaking and breaking and breaking, and felt guilty about what she'd done to survive.
(Well, properly speaking, there was rather more than that, but I'm dismissing my original conception of [Endless Climb] as an attempt to special-snowflake my characters. You will note that in RV Chuubo's there is absolutely no mention of, you know, what Endless Climb was originally for.)
Aelfrida Smithson did not have friends so much as bizarre and emotionally lopsided arrangements. Her home IRC stuck by her, sure, because IRCs are like that. She was one of ventricularPipefitter's proteges, because they'd rolled together in a session once and he was impressed by her. Zeimah Dalyce was loyal to her but Aelfrida felt she would've ruined that relationship sooner or later. Sometimes I suspect her of having complex PTSD, or borderline personality disorder.
Aelfrida Smithson was, however, very, very smart. She had the patience to participate in the kind of Game research that requires doing something a hundred times over with only slight variations each time. Furthermore, she could communicate her findings clearly, in writing, and in fact was tapped for this by other gamebreakers.
This kind of personality does not arise in a vacuum.
Aelfrida Smithson's formative experience was her second session. Her first session cleared easily enough, Aelfrida Smithson being a post-scratch Sylph of Mind, she came to her second session, rolled Prince of Light, and began that methodical deconstruction of Sburb that we now know as gamebreaking.
In her second session there was also a Bard of Heart. He saw her. He knew that she was extremely intelligent. But he also knew that she was at risk of burning so bright that she might attempt something hubristic and bring doom upon her head. Aelfrida Smithson could've been Jack Rutherford (or his RV Classic equivalent), if she'd been allowed to grow unchecked, and that would unquestionably get her killed.
So the Bard of Heart broke her to make her last longer.
A mind like that, he reasoned, is only useful when it's producing research at a rate that other people can process it, where it's inching the state of the art forwards little by little; if she were to overreach and try to break into Sburb itself with her bare hands, she would throw her life away and probably hurt other people in the process.
The Bard of Heart in Aelfrida Smithson's second session destroyed her ability to believe that her research could ever truly change the status quo; and so she continued on, doing her research regardless of what anyone else said, slogging through the unpleasant parts of being a Gamebreaker. But just because it made her life more valuable, in the end, doesn't necessarily mean that what the Bard of Heart did was right.
In the process of breaking her, the Bard of Heart broke the mechanism that keeps most people's self-integrity intact, the thing that makes shinies grow back, the thing where people's self-concepts and their behavior intermesh and affect each other. Aelfrida Smithson no longer knew who she was, and did not believe she could change. Her shiny was made malleable, made to accept the Bard of Heart's machinations, by the Bard of Heart taking away her sense of stable identity.
The funny thing is, complex PTSD/borderline personality disorder has a lack of stable sense of self as one of its symptoms, and I didn't find that out until far later.
By this point you probably already know about my own history. I've written more than enough on the subject. And Aelfrida Smithson, as with many of my characters, was constructed from the pieces of who I could've been.
I could've been a prodigy, a genius. I could've changed things. But instead, my parents only wanted me to be just successful enough to get a good job and make good money. And they overshot the process of "teaching" me to go along with that.
Aelfrida Smithson, too, was broken too far; and when Aelfrida Smithson found Replayer networks, she ended up with the Seer Network, who saw how smart and malleable she was and twisted her further to serve their purposes.
I guess the difference is that I've learned to fix myself, and I've had many people with which to test my own assumptions, and Aelf didn't. I don't know why I found emotionally stable relationships and not revictimization, when I found the Internet. I know that Aelfrida's an avenue I could've gone down, and I still don't really understand why I didn't end up that way.
I think I should be thankful. But all I can think is, why me?