Looking after ourselves
I am a creative person and have been since I was young, though I only really started exploring it in my late teenage years. I've always enjoyed creating fictional worlds and characters to express myself, and even in the darkest depths of my depression (roughly 2012 through to 2016), I still utilised this ability of mine to express my emotion and my pain in fictional characters and the setting they lived in. This will probably be a huge wall of text, but I have pictures to go with it! It might serve for me to warn that the content is surreal and at times horrific in nature. Being in the depths of depression, I didn't shy away from violent imagery and language.
I have never gotten around to naming the particular world I created during those years: It's a surreal, post-apocalyptic vision of the world when the sheer excess of humanity's population caused a societal, spiritual and social collapse.
A panorama of locations from the world: The city is called the Twilit Gilt, which is shadowed from above by Galactic Guppy, the space fish. In the far distance is the Screaming Hinterlands, a craggy wasteland of wailing figures. In the foreground is the Graveyard Gardens, with two characters I'll introduce later.
In this fictional world, the Sun and the Moon are both living, anthropomorphised creatures who are best friends. They often absentmindedly abandon the world to an eternal twilight while they chase and play with each other, hence the near-universal grey colours I use. There is only one city left in the world, which is called the Twilit Gilt. It is bathed in constant darkness thanks to Galactic Guppy, the space fish, who is floating above it: Guppy is injured and cannot move. The Gilt takes its name from stagnant rivers of loose coinage, mainly pennies, that clog its streets: Now mostly useless.
There are a number of secondary areas surrounding the Gilt: To its north is the Graveyard Gardens, which are rolling hills of grass and the occasional tree, dotted with countless headstones. Further to the north is Cyclopean Highlands, a mountainous region that used to be home to a kingdom of cyclops creatures. Now all that remains there is ruins and the last witch queen of Cyclopea, Quetri, who plots revenge against the giant, infant creature, Spipsy, which destroyed her kingdom. To the east of the Gilt is the Crystalline Lowlands, a formerly subterranean area filled with large outcroppings of quartz. In the centre of the lowlands, a massive, fuming vortex of wind and fog swirls upwards, carrying the land that used to sit atop the quarts on top of it. This floating area of land used to be the coastline, and is covered with skeletons of fish and other sea creatures. Somewhere to the south, there is the Screaming Hinterlands, a place where ear protection is necessary. To the West, there is nothing.
A large part of my fictional world is Imbliss (purgatory, effectively), the land of the dead and spirits. Heaven and Hell either do not exist in this world or no longer exist. It's a surreal place composed of vast, underground car parks, tunnels made of lead with rivers of mercury, and pathways of white light surrounded by an all-consuming black void.
The universe in this fictional world is geocentric, meaning that the Earth is in the very centre of everything. Outside the physical world, which is the Earth and the space around it, is the ethereal realm of Imbliss.
Beyond that is the scattered demon worlds; in this fiction, demons are spirits that exist as a sentient, thinking area of space that can control the laws of the universe within themselves. To simplify this notion, imagine the demon as an amoeba: a shapeless, living blob that can alter its form by flowing like liquid. Within its 'body' it can appear as whatever is appropriate to its nature, such as a grassy plain with a house, and interact with its own self using a physical avatar that communicates its intent and personality. Similarly, demons can interact with the physical realm by pushing out an extension of their bubble until it 'pierces' the through both Imbliss and the physical world, which then allows them to manifest an avatar upon the Earth. This is strenuous, however.
I'm beginning to ramble a little here: Once I start writing, I find it hard to stop.
In my next post, I'm going to talk about the characters that inhabit the world, mortal or otherwise. I'm just going to have some food and rest my hands for a bit first!
On to characters, since they're easily where most of my expression went into.
Up first is Kipahsunah:
He is what I like to call my 'evolutionary dead end'. During my darker years of depression, a method of coping I used was to teach myself that my needs came after everyone else's and that I was worth less than the people around me. My logic was to make sure that I would always be nice to everyone, but I only made me hate myself. On top of that, I had a constant feeling whenever I was busy crying or moping that I was failing the world and the people I loved by being useless and doing nothing of worth. It created a feedback cycle of being sad because I was being sad.
Kipahsunah is the opposite. He feels like the world has failed him and that most, if not all other people are innately inferior to him, or do not deserve his love. He is anti-social and hateful and hides his inner pain by hurting others.
As for what he is physically, he's a floating mass of flesh with leathery skin, two eyes and a mouth that is capable of shaping his body to produce new limbs and other body parts when he needs them. The syringe on his body is the one thing about himself that he can't change. Contrary to what you might think, it's not a reference to drug abuse: I've always steered clear of alcohol and drugs, so they don't have much of a presence in my imagination. The syringe is instead an echo of sorts from my childhood. I've always been averse to needles and having my blood taken, but when I was a child, I would cry and scream and need to be held down. It didn't help that I needed lots of blood tests because of my disabilities. Because of that, needles are something I associate with intrusion and discomfort; having something taken without my consent.
Second is Lissie, the wasp:
She is the last remaining insect on the planet. All the others are dead. All of her family and friends are dead. She is one of the few remaining innocent creatures left. Since her family/hive is dead, she has no purpose any more. She only retains her will to live because the Sun has made friends with her and goes on adventures with her.
Third is the Noodle:
Noodle is a portly lizard fellow who lives in a cabin with his three birds, living peacefully except when the four go out for an adventure together. He is effectively a fictionalisation of a friend of mine, whose boundless optimism and love for just about everything (particularly birds) kept me going during my years of depression.
Fourth is Filly and the other Keepers (I'll do them in one entry):
This is a line-up of three of the Keepers: Spiritual manifestations of the excess of strong emotion produced by mankind over the years. The leftmost Keeper is Filly(Apathy), the middle one is Pathe(Empathy) and the one on the far right is Nayley(Failure).
Filly likes to style herself as a goddess. She is eccentric and obsessive in nature and justifies her behaviour through confusing paradoxes relating to pathos and caring. Pathe is anxious and in constant pain: She cares about literally everything and is being constantly crushed spiritually by every hardship that exists, even though a bare few are actually her own.
Nayley is obscure and quiet: When you look into her sad eyes your shortcomings are laid bare, but her forlorn half-smirk does not tell you whether she forgives you or not. She's that feeling of childish terror when your mother discovers someone stole a cookie from the jar, and it's only a matter of time before she finds you out.
Some other Keepers I don't have pictured are:
Creativity (no name), who manifests as a short, miserable reptilian creature with a metal chute protruding from the back of its cranium. Long, winding sheets of paper dangle from the heavens, leading into its chute and holding it aloft like a marionette's strings. It is constantly disgorging sheets of paper from its mouth, eyes and other orifices, now covered in drawings, writing and musical notation. Because of the constant flow of paper, its eyes are dangling from its sockets and its mouth and eye sockets are lacerated with paper cuts. It has a personality, but can barely express it, besides occasional fits of crying.
Love (no name) is a less well-defined Keeper as I've spent far less time on fleshing her out. The visual I currently have is of an emaciated, feminine figure clinging desperately to a frightened, sea urchin-like creature. The urchin is concerned and frightened and visibly attempting to escape while the woman clings on for dear life, piercing her own body with the urchin's spines in the process.
Ultimate Despair is another less-defined Keeper of mine. It appears as three females, conjoined at the waist, each with tangled, bedraggled hair. One has a wide, manic toothy grin and huge, blood-red eyes. One is constantly puking blood into her hands with an overwhelmed look on her face and the third has eyes shadowed by her hair and an emotionless mouth; inscrutable.
Finally, here is Mitty:
She is Filly's daughter and was created by her to remove the other Keepers (the goddess of Apathy can't be seen doing things like she cares about them, after all). Though Keepers can't die, they can be banished back to Imbliss by 'aggressively euthanising' their avatars in the living world.
Mitty, in her own words, is 'just along for the ride'. She resents her mother and her task, but has enough innate knowledge of the world she's been thrust into to get along well enough with its inhabitants. She is friends with Noodle and Kipahsunah. Her arms end in scythe-like blades, similar to a mantis, which causes her much frustration. Her body segments are held together by flimsy, exposed vertebrae and her feet are both composed of three small tentacles each. As a result, everything she does is very awkward to watch.
There are other less important characters who are more related to story than they are emotionally to me, but if people are interested, I'd love to talk more about my characters. (this is only one of my fictional worlds after all)
I also have yet to describe the various monsters which inhabit Kipahsunah's world too. Again, I'll wait for peoples' responses before I go writing up another huge post.
