A Slice Of Life In Hell

Hell no! Didn't you read what they do to Atheists in Hell in the last page? Cessation of Existence is infinitely preferable to eternal torture.

Sparklingdude: Believe it or not, that actually makes sense to me. I'm not an atheist (I don't really want to get into my beliefs in detail because I actually have a sort of Internalized Categorism thing going on sometimes with them - as the depression-bouts make me have with almost everything in my life), but in thinking about it, sometimes, I think "existing is infinitely better than non-existing" - because nonexistance is a static-state. If "all is blackness," The Nothing After Death , that could be more maddening than run of the mill suffering, and if it's a true Cessation Of Existance, how in the world can your very last moment you're aware of anything *not* be your (subjective) eternity? (I actually read an article on Psychology Today's website by someone proposing this who was an atheist, just so nobody gets offended at a stupid person like me bringing it up... it was kind of a "function of the mind" sort of thing).

Either way, I see both as royally sucking because you cannot learn and cannot grow. It's kind of the way some people see Heaven because they assume it to be Fluffy Cloud Heaven where nothing ever happens. A lot of people don't like the idea of Reincarnation because, even though "it's different" - traditionally, it is a form of eternal suffering. Actually think any way you slice it, any given eternity is a bitch if you think about it for too long because our temporal minds just aren't made to process it. It's like asking a cat to do calculus.

Which brings back to the ideas for the possible story. I really like the idea of this, but, perpetually, I find my mind being brought back to the idea of "choosing to accept pain and deal with it in a noble fashion." In other words, to quote my favorite character in all of fiction, Vash the Stampede of Trigun : "Let us live today. Let us live tommorrow - even if it means living in eternal pain." And if you've seen his series you know he MEANS it. He's a biologically-immortal being who's lived over a hundred years and has seen many of his friends die, often violently because he lives in a Crapsack World .

The premise also almost reminds me of Puella Magi Madoka Magica - That anime was a slog through utter bleakness, a complete deconstruction of common ideals. It wound up having hope in the end. Literally. And yet, despite the potential Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy , it held great interest for me because of the the bit of glimmer and because of exploration of nobility - Madoka's utter idealism, Horuma's utter grim determination...

That's how "eternal pain" stories work out for me - having the characters, just when they want to give it all up and curl into a ball of "please make the hurting stop" they just go Determinator because it's really the only thing they can do.

After all, on a more mundane level, that is how I am holding onto life now.

edited 30th Mar '14 10:53:37 AM by Shadsie

There can be no nobility, no composure, no kind of defiance in the face of pain this brutal. There are no words, no room for thought; the pain crowds everything else out. There's only one thing you can do under these circumstances, and it's to scream.

Aw... Hmmm... I wonder how you are going to make this work as far as rooting for the protagonists of your story if what goes on is only going to make the audience cry for them — and then put down the work because they cannot take crying anymore.

I'm also thinking... yes, my current stance semi-agnostic quasi-Christian Universalism is good for my mind, yes! (Yet, now that I've shared it, I live in fear of the pain of ridicule. So far, the one thing it has not done is change me).

I've never read the Qu'ran, myself. I've considered it because I think knowledge is good, but laziness (I've read the Bible all the way through, at least), plus the fear of getting on some kind of list for checking it out from anywhere because, you know, I live in America in a paranoid age and am already a known mental illness sufferer, so I'm probably already on a list somewhere...

The last bit, about suicides suffering the method of their suicide all over again is especially interesting to me. On some level, I almost feel like "I wouldn't mind it." I mean, if one of my impulses catch up to me one day, and I find myself in an afterlife realizing that I'd just done something really horrible to the people who loved me, I'm going to feel like I do whenever I make horrible mistakes: horribly repentant. I tend to *invite* suffering on myself when I feel I've done something wrong - I feel a need fix the problem or to punish myself/to be punished if I can't. I know I just sounded really kinky there... I wonder if anyone who's ever "been on the brink" as I have (yes, I made an attempt once) also feels this way... It's like, "it would hurt, but if you feel like you completely deserve it, you might accept it." I don't know.

No, I know exactly what you feel. Took me a lot of Nietzsche to outgrow that part of my masochism. Now it exists exclusively as a very mild kink, but I've stopped all the self-blaming and self-beating.

I grew up in absolute horror of ending up in the Hell described above, and the casual carelessness with which people led their lives and were more or less observant, more or less pious, baffled me, given what was at stake. I suppose this was a useful impusle in my upbringing, because it made me passionately interested in how to figure out what the right thing to do is... although eventually it clashed with said description of Hell; I've come to believe that that cannot possibly be fair, not in the long term.

But I can't possibly make that into a story, because there's no story at all, it's too extreme even for Torture Porn.

But know that nothing bad's going to happen to you just for reading a Qur'an. One billion and a third of humans consult it regularly, without doing much about it, let alone anything worth surveiling. Here.

edited 30th Mar '14 11:40:05 AM by TheHandle

Definitely certain balances need to be struck to tell a compelling story... I just came out of the "What is wrong with Christian fiction?" question on this same sub-forum. I started a mini-rant about the "Left Behind" book series, one of my rants being how the "heroes" who were certitude-sure they had a ticket to Heaven no matter what they did felt pretty much justified in everything they did and did not do for and how they *used* the "others" in their world whom they were pretty sure were just a lost, Hellbound cause, no matter how nobly they acted. (Then again, the Left Behind series serves as a fine example of How Not To Write Books). Profitable for a niche' market? Yes. Art? No.

Maybe that's why I like doing a lot of "asking of questions" rather than giving answers in my own fiction.

Well if you can't write any change or any growth, then it's all a pointless exercise, isn't it? Nobody would want to read it and you have done nothing but waste time.

Again, not true. Lots of short stories don't have the time for character growth or for changing the status quo; they're about establishing or discovering pre-existent characters and environments.