So today, a few mins after dinner, I ended up depressing myself. Now this may not be familiar to those of you who don’t sit down at a family dinner every night like I do, but there are times when you just don’t feel like eating what’s in front of you, no matter how hungry you are. It sounds like I’m taking food for granted, and I’ll admit I do, but seriously, don’t go throwing your “starving children in third-world countries” arguement at me my similarly well fed American readers. It’s not like I’m throwing the food away, it just turns into tomorrows leftovers, but that’s not the point.
After eating, I went pacing about in my living room, which I often do to think about stories. At the moment, I have a kind of multiverse thing going on here, Paradios, which is Latin for paradise. I’m using the name Paradios as an umbrella for stories that take place in a “large world that even after eons of human life, the planet hasn’t been fully explored.” The stories I have cooking are even placed into a time of Paradios history, a time period called Union of Heroes, which focuses on the interaction of the major landmasses and people of Paradios. I have yet to commit to any particualr story, but I do have codenames for the various, brainstormed chapters. “Paradios: Legend of…” Negative Magic Core, Edge Ninja, The Dead and The Poisoned, Shiokenstar, Prince of Demon’s Thunder, King of Pain and Queen of Death, and Silver Empress. In reality, most of these stories are ideas I came up with before and never used, the only new ones being: Negative Magic Core, Edge Ninja, and The Dead and The Poisoned. I even recycled another old idea, Echelon’s Vault, which now has its place a thosand years after the events of Union of Heroes.
Now bear with me a moment as i still need to get you up to speed. The plan goes as this: Echelon’s Vault details the adventures of a historian who is trying to discover any remnents of a thousand year blank in Paradios’s history, these thousand years being the ‘Union of Heroes’ time. The ‘Union of Heroes’ is heavily steeped in magic and fantasy whereas in Echelon’s Vault there isn’t any traces of anything supernatural at all. I decided to test my thinking abilities by putting this restriction on post-’Union of Heroes’ time and creating the ‘Age of Reconstruction’, which is now the time that Echelon’s Vault is in. The calamity that marks the end of ‘Union of Heroes’ leaves the world in ruin, which what little people are left to struggle.
Now, like I said earlier, I want to test my brainstorming talents by creating not another battle power or abilitiy, but this time with an emotional story. After dinner, I got to thinking, “What can I use? What jerks people’s hearts the most?” Then I felt the hunger in my stomach. I got to thinking about other anime/fictional deaths and decided to create a tragedy with hunger as the main downer. Here’s where I got to worrying about my own levels of depression haha. I came up with a rather gritty story. A story that, had I not been the one thinking of it, I doubt I would ever read it through. The ideas started off a bit depressing, but I kept pacing and kept digging deeper for the stuff that really, really hurts the chest. I eventually stopped and realized, “Holy hell, I just thought myself into depression.”
From the end of dinner, which I finished around 7:40, for until about 8:50, when I was in the middle of writing this post, I was really depressed haha. I’m not sure if the depression-inducing ideas will survive the trip from abstract thought, through my word choice, the Internet, and the nuances that readers have that change impacts, but here goes.
The land is war-torn and there is hardly enough to survive. What little towns people have scrapped together aren’t based near water supplies, since they are now quite rare, or even any food scources; rather, they live where the remnants of civilization have remained the strongest. People flock to the familiar, not to the best places for living. In a large ruined metropolis lives the protagonist. The town is coming to life, slowly but surely, since the surplus of usable material causes lots of traders to go by. However, the protagonist is poor, even by the town’s standards as his parents just aren’t suited for labor. “
“I remember winters being the best months for my family. During winter, we could eat our stomachs full of snow and pretend we had food to eat. At any other time of the year, there was just hunger. That primal sense of desire, the cramping pains of the stomach. That was far worse than anything else the world could have thrown at us. Even admist it all, we prayed for anything else. Anything to take our minds of the hunger that was as much a part of us as death is a part of life.”
“What I remember most of all of childhood though, is not the hunger. That lasted me my entire life. What I remember most was when I was five years old. After an entire day of no food, by parents brought home a small hunk of meat, no larger than the palm of his small hand. From the way my dad acted, I could tell he had stolen it from one of the luckier people in town, but I didn’t care. We had food. My mom cooked it just barely, so the meat would reduce as little as possible. I remember drooling from the smell. The aromas masked the taste of poverty in the air, and my constant stream of drool washed my mouth and body of any dirt, so that I could fully enjoy the feast. I watched like a child possessed as my mother finsihed up her cooking. Putting the unused firewood away. Taking the meat off the flat hunk of metal it was cooked on. Putting the metal back on its designated place on the floor. Putting the meat on the plate. Getting out a knife to cut the meat. And placing the meat, completely entact, right in front of me. I looked at my parents in silence, and they calmly said, ‘A growing boy needs this more than we do.’
I stood in disbelief. They looked at me, with all the love they had. My heart pained with memories of them constantly giving the larger portions of food to me. I remembered my dad singing for almost an hour straight so that the growling of my own stomach wouldn’t keep me awake. I remembered everything they had done for me, and resolved that this would be their last kindness for me. After this blessed meal, I would be the one eating less for them. I took the knife, stabbed the meat just barely, as if it was going to run away if I hurt it, and placed it all in my mouth at once.
I chewed slowly, considerately, the way my parents tought me to. The meat was the most divine thing I had ever tasted. I don’t know how long I stood their chewing, but I chewed and chewed until the texture became disgusting. When I swallowed, there was silence. A moment passed, and I could feel tears streaming down my face. My parents ran over to me, hugged me, assuring me that they weren’t mad at me. My dad make some jokes about tears of happiness. But I wasn’t crying because of that. The tears fell from my face not becuase I was sad my parents had nothing to eat. Not because I remembered all of the sacrifices they made for me.
But because it wasn’t enough. I cried, because on that day, after eating the culmination of my parents hard work and devotion to me, the pain hadn’t left at all. I was still hungry.”
The story follows the protagonist’s life from 5 years old to as he gets older into his late teens, his life basically turning to sh*t while the other kids in town are succeeding and overcoming their own problems. His love interest, Christine, is born with an unknown disease. Whether it is old or new to the world, there is no known way of treating it. The protagonist is drawn to her because she is seemingly worse off then he is, but she manages to overcome the disease through her willpower, which causes immense pain for the protagonist as he realizes that he cannot overcome something as simple as hunger. Ultimately, the protagonist reconciles with Christine who has managed to live a stable life. She invites him to the town she has moved to where she promises him a homecooked dinner. On the way there, the consequences of his methods of survival come back and kill him before he can reach Christine. The tragedy is, even though he had gotten his hands on some food, he had purposely not eaten before going to Christine’s in order to eat her meal fully. He dies not of hunger, but hungry, food both in his pockets and a few houses away.
Let me know your thoughts on this one guys, it really effected me, at least for a while, so I want to know how, if at all, it effects others.
Timestamp – 10:26PM
