"Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over...it became a butterfly"
One of my favorite ways to destress is to read, watch television shows, or watch movies about other worlds, either in the realm of fantasy or science fiction. What can I say - I am a complete geek. :) When the world around me seems to make no global sense, I like to change worlds for awhile and immerse myself in one that I am not supposed to really recognize. In other words, I change the expectations. While world-jumping may not seem like a big deal, I wonder sometimes if it is always healthy. After all, isn't that what the patients in the mental wards do? They are often depicted as being immersed in their own worlds, outside this reality. And maybe that's what scares me. That tomorrow I won't wake up (as I would like) in the world the way it used to be to find the things in my life that are so painful have really been a dream. Instead, I will wake up to find myself strapped to a white bed surrounded by white walls and men and women in white coats staring down at me asking me if I can hear them.
Or maybe I've just watched too many movies and television shows...
The thing is world-building is a time-honored tradition amongst great fantasy and science fiction writers. Such writers are reknowned for it - take J.R.R. Tolkein, J.K. Rowling, Gene Roddenberry, Cassandra Clare, Stephenie Meyer, Diane Duane, etc etc...I could so truly keep going. This is my favorite sub-genre, crossing both those lands of fantasy and science fiction that are so often (and wrongly in my humble, meaningless opinion) separated. I'm a Doctor Who fan myself, which means I honor both genres and all the cross-overs in between which touch on alternative history (like those wonderful ideas of "If the South had Won the Civil War" ilk). I find comforting the very idea that, somewhere out there, the things that have happened in my life have never happened and some alternative me lived out an alternative life withouth having to go through the pains I experienced. When I was 17 and my mother died, I remember believing so strongly that it wasn't how it was scripted to go down. And the books I was feeding into my brain throughout my adolescence told me that maybe somewhere out there it hadn't gone down that way. Let the mental health professionals decide if that is or isn't healthy. As far as coping mechanisms go, I know it wasn't very effective, but it did keep me from completely slipping over the edge.
Books have been my "other worlds" since I was old enough to realize that my life was not the same as what I was reading. The first book that I remember obsessing about was some story about a pet monster that the kid in the story dressed up in a diaper and put in his crib. I LOVED that book, but to this day what I just described is about all I remember, aside from a sort of sketchy picture and the strange feeling I got thinking about it. I just remember going somewhere else in my mind when I read it. I felt "transported" and disoriented coming back to my own world.
Fast forward 30-odd years and is it any wonder my favorite stories now frequently involve physical transportation to other galaxies? What I love about today's science fiction/fantasy stories are that they so often delve deeper into the character of the people involved in these situations, too. The stories, like real life, are often character-driven as well as action-oriented. How else are you going to suspend disbelief that magic is a part of daily life, except by believing that the characters have never had any doubt that it was? What makes the evil wizard evil? After all, even in worlds of magic (or technology so advanced as to seem like magic), people do not exist in a vacuum.
My newest obsession is a show that was, unfortunately, already off the air when I discovered it. Stargate Atlantis, an offshoot of the show Stargate SG-1, which was, in turn, an offshoot of one of my ALL-TIME FAVORITE movies - Stargate. One thing I have to pick at is the whole "everyone speaks English" thing. This is actually a pet peeve of mine overall. Not that I don't appreciate not having to read subtitles, but it's not very realistic to my mind. In the original movie, they couldn't understand each other at first. I think that was a good touch. And it proved one sociological point that I found out when I was young and interacted with others from non-English speaking cultures. You don't have to speak the same language to communicate and understand one another on a basic level. In the end, language evolved to communicate complicated ideas, but if we set it aside, sometimes we can communicate even better our basic similarities.
I do have to say that I LOVE the characters on Stargate Atlantis. They are complicated from the get-go and they are heroic and loyal. And they seem to all speak Geek beautifully.
I have been noticing (and I'm up to almost the end of season 3 now) very frequent obvious references to Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, etc. And there are some central characters who are non-terrestrial, so explanations make it even funnier. The chief medical officer got referred to as "as bad as McCoy" in his response to going through the stargate (referencing Dr. Leonard McCoy's dislike of transporters), which necessitated the explanation that it was "a television character that Dr. Beckett plays in real life".
So, folks, this is where the blog chose to cut off my first draft. I had many brilliant thoughts here on character and relationships and how they related to real life, including many entertaining anecdotes describing the various characters of Stargate Atlantis. Amongst them, my favorite, unexpectedly, Dr. McKay.
Since I can't retreive that text, I have to start from scratch. Now I have go reformulate that hour's plus worth of work. I'll try to post the rest as soon as possible, but it will have to wait until after I have some sleep.
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