The Hypocrite: Into Insanity is an in-progress horror story to be written by Astral_Extremity
, also known as Black Faith Star.
Told from the perspective of a teenage girl with a long-time curiosity in internal conflict, Alias takes a deliberate path to insanity for the experience of it, writing the process in chapters which alternate between written forms, semi-formal and poetic. Despite however she may try to rationalize this endeavor to herself, this path to madness and the imaginary company she keeps carry extreme consequences.
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This story provides examples of:
- Black-and-White Insanity: Alias fashioned her mental company, Muna and Fiq, from her good ("optimism") and bad ("pessimism") thoughts respectfully, to comment on matters to help her see both sides of a situation. After going corrupt from Alias' psychological self-harm, they become heavily infatuated in their respective outlooks that they even lie to themselves to convince, making Alias more indecisive than ever.
- Crazy Sane: One of Alias' reasons to rationalise her "self-experiment" to drive herself insane is to make herself more durable against the madness of the world to come. This mentality doesn't bode well for her, as she ends up blindly damaging herself more than she'd consider worth it.The madness inside should make more sense than the nonsense out there...
- First-Person Perspective: This story is written from Alias' point of view.
- I Just Want to Be Special: Alias is determined to prove her uniqueness to herself, but this thinking is what worsens her arrogance, as she aspires to be incomparable to others by rejecting labels as much as possible.
- Innocence Lost: Alias poetically laments the loss of her innocence at the hands of the Internet, and personally blames Sam for introducing the online rabbit hole to her.
- Mad Hatter: Zigzagged. Alias enjoys the kick she gets out of acting mad, but as she contemplates the subject, she knows that one can't truly relish insanity if they're not broken enough to not know that they're crazy. Later on, she realises that despite the high the mindset of madness gives, it ultimately betrays human nature and kills you on the inside.
- Meaningful Name:
- The protagonist calls herself Alias. For one, it foreshadows that it's not her true name, as it's an alias in of itself. In Latin, "alias" means "elsewhere", befitting her habit of being elsewhere in her own head.
- Muna and Fiq are personifications of Alias' optimism and pessimism, and Muna means desire, reflecting her more emotional inclination in decision-making, starkly contrasting the pragmatic Fiq. Muna and Fiq's names combined make "Munafiq", which means hypocrite, the story's title.
- Unreliable Narrator: A story told by one who wishes insanity upon herself may already raise an eyebrow, and it doesn't help that Alias can't provide all the details, sometimes skirting around them with poetry. Additionally, she heavily implies that she's aware of her narrow-eyed view on people and that they might not actually be as bad as she thinks they are, but refuses do anything about it. She's selective of what to tell to not expose overly personal details that could connect her to murdering Sam. In the end, Alias accepts that people may not believe this story anyway.
