Annotated 49-42
(No FB.)
Best’s multi-body trick is intriguing, but it doesn’t really change anything if it’s a permanent ability of his or not. This shift, though, is more dramatic: Byron and the Berserker fighting as one. I think it challenges a lot of what we’ve said about the berserker virus on one level, and I’d have argued out the story implications with Flo if I’d thought we’d have to spend a lot of time unpacking them.
As it is, this scene of Flo’s is clearly about transcending old ways of thinking and trying to accept all of yourself, even the messy parts you’d like to strike from the record. The worthiness of that message makes it worth it if the message gets a little messy, itself.
I previously asked for yalls contact info so I could talk about this, but I wanted to see how it ended first so I COULD talk about it aptly, and I think I’ll say it here now.
Thank you so much for Byron as a character.
I grew up with Bipolar Disorder. It’s pretty uncommon for someone to grow up with it, usually, they get diagnosed because it manifests in adulthood, and usually in adulthood it manifests and weeks or months of mania or depression. as a kid, it’s common to have rapid mood swings, where you flip between mania, depression, and in my case violent rage episodes over the course of minutes and hours. I’m fine now, I’m also a case of someone who has been successfully medicated and developed coping skills enough to not have such episodes anymore, but it was something i had to deal with all through childhood and my teens.
Naturally, i grew up with a lot of fantasy media that featured berserkers and evil alter egos and any number of other elements that were all I had to compare myself to, but often were coloured in a negative light or handwaved away as fantasy elements that could be solved by breaking a curse or some such and never seen again. often such characters were brutes or just plain assholes, and more often than not, villains.
Byron is not. he’s a person, who despite the supernatural origins of his berserking, remains a fairly grounded character with a personality and role outside of it, and real conflicts about it. I was skeptical reading the archive at first, but as soon as he went through the arc where he effectively sought out medication and help for it, and all the conflicts there were with Bandit over it…. and then the bit where Gravedust finds him in the afterlife dreamworld? it was all an incredibly on-point exploration of what mental illness and overcoming it is like, but from an angle, I never saw as a kid to symptoms I had as a kid. and now it ending with “embrace all parts of yourself even if they’re messy?” oh heck yeah, that’s great. love that. kind of logistically weird but I love that as an angle, as I’m someone who prefers to be open about my experiences and how they shaped me.
I’m grown up now, I haven’t had a rage episode or really drastic mood swing in a long time, and I talk at colleges about my experience with mental illness from time to time, plus have been a part of several advocacy campaigns on behalf of mental health awareness, but if child or even teen me had a character like this they probably would have lost several levels of insecurity. It brought me so much life to see a character like this in any fiction. Thank you.
Thank YOU, Erynn… This kind of comment is the sort of experience one hopes for as a writer.
I know he’ll be fine, but this page really had me worried about Byron setting the berzerker free again, to potentially great effect, but setting himself up for yet another berzerker catastrophe. And seeing how each of those “accidents” in the story was successively worse, this one might well end with his final undoing.
“oh, I’ll do it just this one time and contain it when I need to” is one of those thoughts that can end really badly for humans IRL. That doesn’t mean it was never okay. The difference is whether you have a _good_ reason to be confident that you’ll be able to deal with it. Byron has walked into traps several times, with casual confidence, and it was never a good idea. I’d love to have some detail to the story here which indicated why releasing the berzerker is okay now when it was never okay before. Something to convince me that his optimism is warranted.
Yeah, fair.