![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerdflighterlately I've been thinking about my OC Felix, who is. well. kind of a mess. he's from my urban fantasy world, a place he exists in alongside his twin sister Fiona and a slew of other characters. he and his sister are both powerful witches - Fiona's magic comes from the weather: lightning magic, storm magic. Felix's magic comes from his ability to manipulate the world around him with his own blood as a medium.
i hesitate to write stories which feature plotlines like this - they're problematic in a different way. they're not just about people being wrong and fucked up by years of trauma coping the only way they can - it's also the narrative itself that frames it as a neutral thing. Felix has to self harm to access his magic. his magic saves lives. pain is the price he pays to be able to protect his friends.
possibly the whole situation would be better if he didn't want to self harm. if he didn't have a messed up relationship with pain, if he wasn't autistic in ways that made pain better for him than the alternatives. if he wasn't quite so mentally ill.
for most of the story, the people around him don't know he self harms. Fiona thinks he just has magic, the way she does (she pays little price except exhaustion). the first person to find out is the girl he's dating (who is being possessed by a demon - really not the best first person) who promptly uses it against him (see: being possessed). the next person to find out is Ryan, who loves Felix, but agrees to allow him to continue because Ryan knows the price of not using Felix's magic. the understanding and compassion that Ryan extends to him - not making him feel guilty about the things he has to do, and speaking kindly to him even when it would be easier not to - make Felix fall rather desperately in love with him.
mostly because Ryan is kinder to Felix than he is to anyone, and Felix really needs someone on his side. he needs to be treated with the love and respect he's constantly giving everyone around him. Ryan is good at those things, with Felix. but he's still allowing Felix to keep self harming. he's still enabling self destructive behavior because he weighed the costs and decided that this was the best way out. it doesn't mean he loves Felix less, but it does mean he's using Felix and Felix,,really doesn't deserve that. he gets it anyway, because the people around him are assholes. seriously. everyone in this world is just, a terrible fucking person. and Ryan is one of the worst - he's coldly ruthless and he doesn't care what he has to do to protect the people he cares about. and Felix, well, cares. he spends all his time caring about everyone except himself. when Ryan offers to murder people who hurt Felix, Felix feels bad. he feels responsible.
anyway. my point is that Felix is bad at being a survivor and bad at being a bad survivor. he's stuck without anything that describes the way he interacts with his trauma. and he's just stuck - he can never grow past self harming - to do so would be to give up his magic, and that's the only power and agency and control he has over his life. and even if he were to lose his magic because of other reasons, he's still self harm, because everyone needs a little control over their life, and it's all he has.
it's a whole storyline i feel really bad about writing, but it's not something i can give up either.
[this ramble was brought to you by this post]
no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 01:50 am (UTC)(I had a paragraph about a book rec here but I see I still haven't gotten my shit together to be able to press the 'post comment' button on my phone without losing the comment. Trying again: Carol Berg, 'Flesh and Spirit' I believe, deals with magical addiction in a really nuanced way that acknowledges the way addiction overlaps enormously with self-medication and the way in which that's there because it's necessary; also some great h/c and whump moments. I should re-read, it's been a while.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 06:24 pm (UTC)