Act 2 (A)musings, part 1
K, that was fun, but nao onto longer and meatier stuff, methinkies.
Tryin' to keep movin' forward with the narrative, especially after a couple of days off, but my meandering brainstorms have watered a lot of Supposies that aren't really fitting in to the page-by-page commentary, so if y'all don't mind I'm gonna kick back in my lawn chair and excogitate on the Matter of Terra Devastata for a bit, see if I can slowly lure in some these wild skittish thoughts.
(It’s on my lawn, I can sit on it, it’s a lawn chair.)
What do I think of the kids so far?
I'm probably overusing the word "adorable" — they are adorable in the literal sense, of being someone I can adore even on brief acquaintance, but the word has a whole baggage cart of connotations: of young childhood innocence; of being patronized; of being called adorable not just despite what you don't know, but often because of it. Maybe I even mean it that way to a small degree [omg pretending to be an adult was never supposed to lead me to that!!!] — these kids are so much more complex than young children, with rich inner lives and emerging strengths and passionate interests and psychological disadvantages based on their upbringing, and… they are still kids. Impulsive, dramatic, imaginative, dismissive, earnest, self-absorbed, ambitious, pretentious, sarcastic, short-attention span kids, just as they're supposed to be at that age. Capable of much, and still ignorant of much, but they are waking to the alarm clock of sudden challenges, and finding that they are strong. Lacking experience and perspective does not hamper their good hearts or their ability to apply skills learned in play to situations of deadly import.
I identify with them, I empathize with them, and I admit I do find it adorable to watch them put foot in mouth (or cake in yard, or car in chasm) because of what they do not know. If that's a tad patronizing, then perhaps it's tempered by my eagerness to watch them grow and learn and master. I want to watch these uncertain, easily embarrassed saplings begin to add layers of experience to their trunks, to send roots seeking deep after wisdom, to spread branches in new directions, to fill up time and space with the leaves of new skills...without ever losing hold of the place of their birth, or the immutable central shape of their first stretch into sunlight, or the consistent colors of their snarky wits and whimsies.
What do I think of John?
John seems very straightforward to me, the happiest and most normal of the kids I've met so far — as our first gateway and gauge of just how weird this universe is, it's important that he himself be fairly easy to understand. "Most normal" doesn't exactly mean normal, of course — he still has geekish enthusiasms that aren't average for a young teen (so he's easy for an outsider like me to identify with), but he seems to accept who he is, in the context we're given. At the school he theoretically attends he might present himself differently, but online he's very comfortable with his friends knowing his bizarre movie obsessions and his attempts at programming and so on. John's relationship with his dad is odd but loving (I'll get to that more in a bit), and he doesn't seem to have any big strains in his life or worries for the future beyond avoiding a pie to the face and clumsiness with his sylladex.
John fundamentally believes that with practice he can get better at things. Is he good at programming? No. Does he admit this? Freely — he doesn't pretend to be a master of it like Dave does with his mixing and rapping. Does being bad at it bother him? Only in the sense of being exasperated at himself for not putting enough work into it. But his tinkering with it is play — it's self-motivated and not on a class schedule or deadline; when he tinkers it's because he wants to learn it, wants to get better at it. Of course it's easy to get distracted by things like playing video games, that are more channeled and therefore less frustrating and more rewarding, in the short term. But there are multiple programming language books on John's shelf, and multiple experiments on his desktop — he keeps coming back to it. Maybe he's attracted to the logic and the puzzle of it, or the open-endedness of it, or maybe even by the frustration of it because it's solvable but not easy, so when he finally gets it right he gains proof that he actually has gotten better at things, and gains experience and confidence at the same time.
I also mentioned before that I think Dave likes John because he is both straightforward and happy; I think Rose is probably similar. John is not particularly trying to be anything — he is not calculating how to be cool, he is not trying to impress with his vocabulary and education, he is not trying to "grow up" in his father's or anyone else's eyes. By contrast, John is trying to do things — to enjoy himself with games and movies, to learn magic tricks, to study programming and data structures, to make his friends laugh, to evade his father's pranks or outprank him in return. Of course I'm not saying that he's anything close to perfect or consistent about this, or that he has any sort of plan to be this way; he gets embarrassed about things, he wants to be liked, sometimes wishes he was cool...and he's more or less bumbling his way through my list of the Things He Do, without pouring deep energy into any one of them. But he has a baseline sense of security that the other two seem to lack, and therefore doesn't have a perpetual haunting need to prove himself, to earn attention or gratitude or love. I think Dave and Rose both gravitate to that sense of security, and to his unhindered enjoyment of things that they feel the need to act detached or defensive about.
Up next...attempting to lure feral thoughts about Dave, Rose, and the kids’ guardians into my pen.