A Foaming Mind

 [Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 11th, 2020.]   

 [Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 10th, 2020.]

  [ Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 9th, 2020.]

    [ Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 8th, 2020.]

    [ Ahead of an inevitably bumbling NaNoWriMo attempt, I'm writing a bunch of short stories to improve my fiction-writing efficiency. They're quickly written and largely unedited, so please leave vicious critique in the comments. This was written on October 7th, 2020.]

I think the way a lot of authors write fantasy villains speaks to a larger pattern about how we envision the origin of evil. I often find myself succumbing to a subtly engrained axiom that when bad people do bad things, it's because they are individually corrupted or broken. That there was some inevitability, some external force, that led to their decisions. This is a pattern all over popular media: The Mindflayer. A mysterious, often metaphysical force that infects people regardless of their societal context. Defeating this power allows the world to be righted without any significant restructuring of major societal systems or fundamental shifts in the status quo. When someone in these stories "turns bad," it's because they succumb to Sauron's power, or because Loki taps them on the forehead with his magic staff. The mysterious force appears from outer space, a forgotten cavern, the Upside Down, or is just there , and magically ensnares people into doing its biddi...

I started this blog back in 2012, when I was 15 years old. I wrote three things, stopped, and quicky left it to lay among the crowd of countless other stillborn blogs. The title is cringy, the posts were of 15-year-old-author quality, and the background was an eye-stabbing blue bubble array. But hey, it's 2020. I have things to say again. So I'm going to to dust the old page off and have another crack at it.  Let's see how long I keep with it this time. If you'd like to see the old version, and - god forbid - read the old posts, I saved it on The Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20200604102236/https://foamingmind.blogspot.com/