Lore Dump: Anxieties about JW
(transcribed from bsky thread)
JW is my oldest fully developed OC and he's so so important and precious to me but I have a lot of anxiety about when it comes time to share his full story due to a few things. Big Spoilers for the Hawksaw books but they wont see the sun for years anyway.
So JW has a few FUN FEATURES that I invented when I was young and didn't understand the gravity of including them. They've been retooled over the years because they are important to his story. So one of them is that he has a mental illness that I myself do not. He has schizophrenia.
It's got one hell of a stigma and care was LACKING even in the 70's and in 2007 where JW's story starts. People treat him shitty and it affects him greatly. It fucking sucks. There's also the element of an alternate Horizon in my setting known as the Mindscape which is a veiled realm populated by billions of individual inner worlds that reflect the emotions and psyche of every individual person ever. Due to magic shit that happened, JW's has a crack in it and allows it to leak into Earth Prime. So his inner voices (not alters) are the ones we PRIMARILY see. So I run the risk of folks thinking I'm saying THAT is what schizophrenia is and ITS NOT I KNOW ITS NOT IVE WRITTEN SCHOOL PAPERS ON IT DAMMIT. A hurtle I have is explaining this in the prose without making it look like unreliable narrator stuff or ham-fisted or unnecessary or insulting or WHATEVER.
To make things worse, JW has a cursed eye that allows him to see spirits on top of EVERYTHING ELSE. He's got a lot going on but honestly he handles it better than most would considering everything. He's like that. He doesn't have all these traits because I wanna see him suffer. He came out of the box like this.
Another event in his story is the Dead Girlfriend. I didn't know dead spouse angst was a whole GENRE when I wrote this into his story. During an episode in 1974, his girlfriend startles him and he freaks out and pushes her away and she falls down.
Unfortunately, something bad happens because of this and she ends up dead. He mourns her and feels horrible because she was also his best friend and the last leg of a friendgroup that was dissolving. this is also the event that sets off a natural disaster within his Mindscape which is then followed by him falling into a dimensional rift--the thing that causes the split between dimensions. The rift was not a natural one, so Some Shit happened on his way through. He goes to an in-between world where he loses 30 years of time but does not age and has an adventure he doesn't remember.
Then he gets spat out in 2007 in a ditch like ???????? and thats before his book even STARTS. It feels like so much, but I've been developing him for 20 years and shit builds up. Thanks for coming to my ted talk. if you have any thoughts or questions lemme know.
