"It's your sense of alienation from self that provides, perhaps, the deepest terror. Where other meters measure how traumatized you are by thing that happen to you, Self measures how traumatized you are by your own reactions to those things. To put it another way, the only thing you can ever really be 100% sure of is "I think, therefore I am." The Self meter measures how uncertain you are about the "I" in that statement."
When a painful betrayal of one's self image, self-loathing, internal conflict, personal failing/flaw or guilt is
Played for Drama.
Can cover:
Related to
Psychological Horror.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- The origin of Spider-Man involves this, as Uncle Ben's death is indirectly caused by Peter's irresponsibility.
Film
- Taxi Driver is all about the protagonist projecting his self-loathing on others, where his antagonists are just placeholders for the things he hates about himself or wants for himself.
- In The Film of the Book of FourteenOhEight, the overall schtick of the titular hotel room seems to be dragging guests kicking and screaming through the darkest corners of their own subconscious and beating them over the head with their own doubts, fears, and regrets. Mike Enslin discovers this to his extreme detriment.
Literature
- This is what the horror of Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four is all about. Using your greatest fears to get you to betray the most important thing about yourself, to destroy your self-image by making you betray everything and anything that's left of what you valued before they arrested you.
Tabletop Games
