Finis: A Response to "Writing"

I've rewritten this blog post three times.
The first two were emotionally satisfying blog rants about my opinions. This post should hopefully be something else.
In latin, Finis means end, or in other words, finished.
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Writing is an art because it is a bitch. Say what you want about metaphorical you's making you slave and suffer,  (Not that there is anything wrong with that. It just doesn't work for me) but in my perspective, it is because you owe a debt to the words that it is a bitch.
It could be easy. It could be the rambling ugly posts that I put here often without editing. It could be self-satisfied rants and fantasies. That's what writing could be if we didn't owe it to ourselves and the words we love that we do better.
Writing isn't hard. Monkeys can type words into keyboards. It's crafting stories and universes out of sheer words that's difficult, of gently pushing ideas into one's mind without declaring your opinion too loudly that's hard.
That's all.
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*I would be totally lying if I said I got that great great word from something other than the end of two of my favorite manga series back in middle school (Both of which all of you should read because let's face it, these two series are more complex than 99% of any books I read), and like any other pretentious middle schooler, have kept it latched in my brain until a moment like this has arrived
**On that note, I highly highly recommend The Infernal Devices series, which contains the excellent quote "We live and breathe words" (It also helps that the main character and her love interest are both obsessed with books.) And no, I'm not over Clockwork Princess. But I do have a copy of the first book to lend if anyone wants to read it.

Safe Havens

When people ask me what Tumblr is, I tell them "It's like Narnia." I ripped that idea off an old Tumblr post talking about what Chicago would be like if it had an internet equivalent (Twitter) or what Facebook would be ( I actually forgot this one) and then for Tumblr, someone put down "Narnia". It stuck.
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I read alot. Or at least, I used to finish novels. Now, I don't have time and my mom isn't so permissive about it thanks to ACT season, so I live on Wikipedia and devour Amazon snippets of my favorite books or of books I want to read. This is probably a waste of time, and the reason why I'm only on book 18 for the Ultra-Reading Marathon (You're supposed to hit 44 books by April. That ain't happening)
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My favorite books aren't the best written ones, or my favorites to fangirl about. They aren't the literary classics I can rant about for six years or the ones that everybody else loves.
They are the books that make me feel at home.
I get them, and they get me. They tell stories about things I believe in and value with characters I can relate to and situations, however fantasylike or unrealistic, that I can relate to. They help me remember and believe the things I don't want to ever forget. Love is stronger than death, resistance is not futile, we are what we make ourselves regardless of biology and neuroscience, we are not alone. Lots of things.
These are the books I love.
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I need these reminders. I need these reminders because I live in a situation where I see shitty things happen to good people for complicated screwed up reasons. I don't know how to comfort these people without making it worse or alienating others, I don't know how to do the right thing.
When these things happen, bitterness and hatred overwhelm me and I want to scream at the world that these things are not right.
I need these things to remember the values that I'm scared of losing.
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One day, something terrible will happen directly to me, or to someone I love. Not the gradual assholeness that dissipates over time, but something Terrible. Someone might die or something I can't predict. I won't be able to control it.
That's the day I fear, when everything I believe in cracks and I start to believe in the lying biases in my head instead of the things I should believe in. I can't let that happen.
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So I scroll on Tumblr and read books when I'm sad. I read Quran and try to be a good Muslim too, but I would be lying if I didn't say that those two things comforted me just as much as the Quran did.
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Characters (This post is weird: warning)

Usually, I know what I'm doing when I write these, but having spent over an hour and a half writing this, I'm not sure with this one. Beware: Not alot makes sense.
When it comes to fiction, I will admit that I am a sadist. Persay, I don't enjoy the pain characters suffer, but I love the dynamics it causes.
From a writer's perspective, this is an all too common joke. The author is a sadist because she/he kills off that wonderful, hot character that we all grew attached to, ruining our lives along with those of the characters; the author is a sadist because she killed off the character we grew attached to. That's not what I really mean.
When I say a author can be a sadist, I mean when the author has a genuinely good and brave person go through miserable and undeniable hell for the sake of a plot arc.
Nobody would read a book about Susy Sunshine getting everything she wants in life by wishing for it. We want things to go wrong. We want fiction to mirror our own lives in that things go wrong and the people we love do us wrong and the bad guys are stronger than we'd like to admit. We want the stakes to be high so that it can mimic our perception of reality.
We want the main characters to go through hell because that's what we think qualifies one for success. And we're sorta right in that the best things in life require the most struggle, but if we keep working at it, we can get what we want. In our own lives, we go through ages and ages of miserable hell for no reason at all sometimes, and often times don't get what we want. Things aren't clear from the outset, there is no one true goal driving us that can be read on the back cover of our lives. There is no simplified hero's journey where our loved ones get kidnapped and we are drowned into a whole new world where things are different but we are powerful. That's not how the world works.  But it's how we like to read it.
Here is a general rule of fanfiction: The bigger the fan base, the shittier the fanfiction. Nobody will write about the characters accurately because that's not how they see it. People see themselves in their favorite characters, and thus, will write pieces of themselves into their fanfiction. The more appealing the character, the less accurate the reader's interpretation of them will be.
That's why all good characters are well-rounded, flawed people. If they weren't, they would be caricatures, easily forgotten in the large scheme of our minds and memories and plastered in along with the stereotypes at the back of our minds.
We put our characters through hell to make them human. To give them something to struggle against and to define them. To help us see them as more than effacing plot-roles and as people we would care about if they really did exist.
This post makes no sense. To be fair, it's 2:00 in the morning.
If you want my opinion, the best struggles in a narrative are when the main character's greatest struggle is to keep themselves whole while fighting towards their goal as the world (and villains) threatens to rip them apart with disease or loss or overwhelming odds or losing battles or whatever great things that  make up the fabric of who they are. That's more interesting than some empire. (And ultimately, what the empire as an idea is meant to symbolize)
I didn't mind in the Hunger Games (Spoilers for Mockingjay) when Peeta got hijacked. I wanted to see him fight against it, I wanted to see the real Peeta fight against what threatened to destroy his sanity and the girl he loved most after having murdered his entire family. I wanted to see him manage to hold himself together long enough to be fixed at the broken places, and to keep holding on to the values and things he holds most sacred despite the world and his own body trying to convince him not to. It's so much more interesting to watch a good and decent human being fight miserably against that inmesurable force. When you're fighting an 'empire' or a demon for your soul, you earn my sympathy.

All these clear cut struggles from novels mirror our own inner battles, the ones that take place over the span of years during Chem class and those boring lunches that make you want to poke your eyeball out and the back of your mind during those lonely times.
I should sleep.

Rich Kid Books

You know the ones I'm talking about.
Clique. Private. The A-List.
We're all familiar with them, or at least their trope.
A bunch of rich, beautiful people go to an esteemed private school. This private school is esteemed, destined to lead its attendees to the Ivy League and into a glamorous life. The main character is estranged, having arrived at this school out of sheer coincidence or scholarship, and finds herself enchanted and horrified by her peers, particularly THE Group.
There all always variations of this group, but their members always embody these characteristics: Wealthy, gorgeous, ambitious, and smart. The alpha (There is always one) is the epitome of these traits to her peers; to them, she is unstoppable and superior. Nobody can top her. The main character inevitably finds herself wanting to be a part of this group. She wants to prove to them that however badly they might regard or treat her, she is not inferior. Eventually, with persistence and manuevering, they get in, as the plot goes.
I hate these books.
But I still read them.
I have a long history with reading these kinds of books. (The Clique series comes to mind easily) but for a long time, I'd abandoned these almost-political books in high school. That was when I started reading about real people with real lives, and if not, then those about urban fantasies. That changed this year, mostly by accident.
I had owned a copy of The A-List for some time now, but I hadn't actually read it until I was perusing through my bookshelf in winterbreak, bored and wanting something completely new to read. I noticed it, and with a chuckle, I started reading it. I found myself sucked in, not in admiration, but out of sheer disgust at what these people are.
They are wealthy and self-assured in their wealth and beauty through expensive cosmetics and lucky birth. They are arrogant because their wealth and status has assured them that they are important. They are ambitious and ruthless to keep it that way. These people have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
It's easy for people born into these high-society bubbles to forget about the world around them. After all, it's undeniably hard to notice and act on the flaws of a society when its serving you well. At least for these people, the only thing standing in the way of their ambition and desires is their peers, not the faults in their stars. A Roman noble can easily say "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings," because the stars of his birth have not faulted him the way they fault so many others through disease and death and poverty.
There will always be an avid audience for these books because there will always be people who want to be like these people, however wrong and shaded they may be. Or rather, there will always be people who want what these people, despite their many faults, can hold on to.
Pride, and an ability to maintain it.
***This is my shaded way of highly highly recommending The Disreputable History of Frankie-Laudau Bank as a great book to read that intelligently subverts this trope with a highly-intelligent, ambitious girl turned renegade that ends up fighting against these ideals through clever pranks.

Two Quotes

These aren't my favorite quotes, but these are the ones that have stuck with me for a long time. I suggest you look up where they belong. (I claim no copyright to the following quotes, they belong to their respective authors) 

"Listen to me," He said. "Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being blasted to pieces from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People are being dragged from their house and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will still fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.

And even if you do avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about-lovers, children-will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will become lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death ones and beckons you into his darkness. The life you left behind is no life at all. Here , you can be king, and I will allow you to age with dignity and without pain, and when the time comes for you do die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awake in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven. All I ask in return is that you name the child in your house to me, that you may have company in this plan. Name him! Name him now before it's too late."

And 

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

They are from two very different contexts and books, but I thought they paralleled pretty well.