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.