Curiosities of Hisoka's brain

[branchandroot]

Hisoka went for years without remembering being assaulted. Once he's dead he understands that it was not of natural causes, but he still doesn't remember being raped and cursed.

And then it gets dumped into his head; the clear memory; the clear, much younger memory.

I think this makes his general lack of specific trauma over it much more understandable, because I can only think that it would feel alien. False. Perhaps as if it were a story he heard. Hisoka is not a victim sort of person, and I can see him dealing with the dissonance by simply rejecting it and treating it as if it were, say, a horror movie. Vivid and upsetting, but not his in the same way that his abuse at the hands of his family, and his empathy, are, because he's been processing them right along.

This is the only reason I can come up with for how he acts toward Muraki during King of Swords. Hisoka is a fighter; if he'd internalized the memory, he should have been at Muraki's throat.

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Not only do I agree with this, but in the YnM Universe as it exists in my brain, if you sit down with Muraki under the right conditions, he'll tell you that there's good science on this, predicting precisely this result. And then he'll tell you about the clinical value of memory management in certain classes of trauma, and add ruefully that it's a pity he can only publish the otherwise-excellent paper about it in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

[branchandroot]

*laughing*

I detest Muraki thoroughly, but this is the kind of complication that keeps me from dismissing him as just another creepy psychopath like Nakago of Fushigi Yuugi or Sakugun from Saiunkoku Monogatari. He /is/ a creepy psychopath, of course, but he does in in a different way than usual and it sets me wondering why. He seems... a bit more subtle about the whole thing than your average serial killer.

Which may be why a tiny, evil corner of my brain is seriously considering an after-story about how Muraki becomes a shikigami and Hisoka masters him. Especially since I think, if you take the need for control far enough, and if you assume that it's rooted in a desire to avoid uncertainty, then, eventually, the very best way to not allow uncertainity is to give control to someone else.

Which I suspect is something else we may agree on, given some of the ways you have written Muraki and Hisoak. *grins*

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

He /is/ a creepy psychopath, of course, but he does in in a different way than usual and it sets me wondering why.

Well, I'm terribly fond of him; but I freely admit that I get there by cherrypicking canon liek whoa, and that even then my reading's almost certainly partly a result of not having had previous experience with manga psychopaths. This is yet another of the reasons that I find myself needing to fix the Kyoto Arc, or else to veer off well before we'd get there; he strikes me as a completely different character in his earlier appearances, and I'm not so interested in the vengeance-obsessed, destiny-ridden angsty version.

One of the things that caught me about that earlier Muraki is that air he has of conspiratorial delight, as if his whole pursuit of Tsuzuki and Hisoka is not only a glorious game, but a game he expects them to love too. The expectation is insane, but there's a weird lack of malevolence about his approach. And when you combine that with the business about his private war with death and decay, things get really complicated and interesting, because what kind of a serial killer is driven by an unrelenting personal hatred of death, not only his own but everyone else's too?

But anyway. Now, as you might have predicted, I'm going to agitate for the shikigami story too. I'm not sure your analysis of that relationship is playing off the same dynamics that I see between them, for all that it's heading toward similar outcomes -- but that, of course, only makes it more intriguing. After all, I already know how I see it; the prospect of an entirely new perspective on that relationship is more enticing than simple agreement could ever be.

[branchandroot]

*dryly* YnM just about mandates picking and choosing, if you want to wring any kind of consistency out of it. It's true, though, rape, and especially gratuitious rape, is one of my red flags in manga and anime. It's invariably a sign that the story is going to go places I won't like, and that the author has that hideously common Japanese take on sexuality and gender and violence that makes me cringe. Sometimes I can over-write it and revise canon in my head, but all too often not. The more you start noticing the pattern... well, the more you notice it.

I'm very tempted by the shiki story. Of course, I also have fic ADD in the worst way, these days, and who knows when I'll be working on what. *wry*