BoM/TWS Message Forum

Okay, first of all, this is not an idea I got from AI, this is just something I noticed AI referring to in passing while analyzing some of my other stories, and which I realized is EXTREMELY pertinent to BoM: the relationship between "performance" and "identity."

(Briefly, Chat noted that the main characters in most of my (non-TF) stories are playing on the relationship between "being a particular person" and "performing as a particular person," not because there is a magical disguise but because the protagonist's inner life and outer life are in tension: they are called upon be someone with other people when that is not the kind of person they feel they are on the inside.

(Briefly briefly, I wonder if this is why I am drawn to TF fiction, because I am especially sensitive to this dichotomy and so am drawn to literary explorations of it, including HIGHLY EXPLICIT explorations of it.))

Subtextually—barely subtextually; a rowboat would go around on the subtext—BoM is about a teenager who feels undefined, and who is trying on different identities. The identities, though, are always of people who are already locked into a "performance": they know who they are and so they "perform" as that person confidently and effortlessly, and Will is borrowing that identity (at least subconsciously) to find out what it is like to be a confident performer of that type. I assume that is why the most satisfying impersonations (for him and the reader) are those as confident people: as Chelsea, Patterson, Kelsey, maybe a few others who are don't get impersonated very often. Impersonations as people who are NOT comfortable as themselves yet seem less successful -- which may be why I can't think of any off the top of my head, there being so few and so short in duration.

I don't have a question here, unless maybe it's this: Performance as a settled identity is the norm in BoM, and very few branches (and never for long) explore the "created personas," particularly without memory strips, that masks are capable of -- the kind where Will would only have his own resources to draw on and in which he would have to be performing out of his own head a "new character" that is not someone who already exists. Do people feel that as a consistently missed opportunity? Or is identity-theft (or -borrowing) the real draw here?