I've been working on a fantasy setting, originally just as something to play the backdrop to some mechanical ideas I've been kicking around for a new RPG project.
The core gist was basically a kind of "Reincarnation Groundhog Day".
The heroes and villains both are the same handful of souls, reincarnated again and again to play out a cycle of near-calamity, throughout history. The tales of heroes and villains throughout time are, by and large, merely these same souls, playing slightly different roles each time but always to the same conclusion.
The obvious question being "why?" Why was this cycle set in motion, to what end?
Because Gods require sacrifice. Their food is our suffering, and the lives lost in their name grease the wheels of this eternal cycle and feed them for another generation.
The "heroes" aren't here even to stop it ... they were created by the "good" god to merely moderate the threat posed by each new villain or calamity. A little mercy, in the face of eternal torment. Keep the bloodshed down without stopping the flow.
The only true solution is for the heroes and villains to realize the cycle is happening and band together to break it and tear down the old gods.
It's all very obvious metaphor for cycles of suffering and violence under colonial capitalism, and from a certain perspective I'm sure a lot of people might consider it potentially a good story. Certainly previous discussions in my design discord generated a lot of enthusiasm for it.
The trouble is I keep struggling to actually start writing, and have even bounced back and forth between different mediums as to where I even want to use it, and while part of that is that my mental health is a wreck, another part of that is just ...
I think I fucking hate it.
The question I asked myself this morning is "who is this for?"
It's fucking depressing. Who the hell wants to play out the cycle of capitalist hell like this? Even if we have a positive end goal in mind, the middle part of our mythic wheel is still "mankind's bones are ground in the mill of suffering that our elites may feast on our entrails" and just, jesus fuck that's bleak.
I don't wanna write this, hell I struggled even to summarize it in this post, because my brain doesn't wanna live in that world long enough to write about it in any depth. It's just our world with magic sprinkles. I'm already there every day, and I hate it.
That's also where the idea comes from in the first place, of course. I'm inundated constantly with the message on every fucking media platform that everything is hopeless, we're all irreversibly fucked, and I'll be lucky to not end up in a gas chamber within the year.
It's the depression talking.
But like a friend says, catharsis isn't real. Wallowing in doom begets only more hopelessness and doom. Why in fuck would I want to watch that, or play that, or read that, or listen to that from my fiction? Worse, to create more doom?
I feel like it's almost been overstated at this point, but the idea of pain being the best muse, that suffering makes great art is just ... it's crap, and this is why. It can, I suppose, if you've the right frame of mind in the face of it to process it into something healthy ... but it can also just be a kind of emotional self-harm, a self-fulfilling cycle of miserable creator makes miserable works that no one wants to read which makes creator more miserable.
But what do I know? Clearly I'm wrong, because stories about how everyone is evil and everything is miserable and good things aren't possible sure have been having a hell of a moment in media since at least Battlestar fucking Galactica, to the point it's a struggle to find new shows that don't make me want to walk into the sea.
For a hot minute, the internet was awash in discourse at the audacity of all these cartoons suddenly being hot news, and how this was proof of the moral childishness of our generation etc. etc. As if it was an affront to creation that we got a fucking break from the grimdark, and nobody ever seeming to question that adults were watching cartoons because cartoons are the only ones that still believe in hope.
I want to believe in hope too. I don't know if I do anymore, I don't even know if I can, but I have to try, because without it I don't know how I can survive much longer.
At the very least I should be writing worlds that do. I feel like that's doing a lot more to help than just another world where morality is a cruel joke.