Vorarephilia and the Single Girl

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I don’t believe in flawless protagonists. I find them boring and without dimension because you always know they will make the right decisions and then celebrate victory with ice cream and a chaste kiss for the wife.

When you enter into situations with clean hands, you may be tempted to do the Bad Thing, but things like guilt, remorse and conscience get in the way. *yawn*

Today’s subject is vorarephilia, and not one but two of the characters in Never are vore. One of them is an institutionalized child. The other is the psychologist that tries treating her without sympathizing so completely, they trade hints like well-adjusted girlfriends trade nail polish.

(and right there I’ve just pissed of a bunch of current and potential readers)

This sort of thing, even in the context of fantasy, is difficult to write, which is why I know it has to be written. If it doesn’t bother me, I’m sleepwalking through my craft, and if I’m just going to phone it in, why should I expect you to read it?

Several weeks back, I was having a conversation with a bar regular (we’ll call him John because that’s his name) who was adamant that my use of children in The Caretaker was fundamentally evil. Killing children was wrong, he insisted, and I couldn’t disagree,but I argued that over-fertilizing potted mums just didn’t have the same impact.

I don’t write fiction you can read to your kids. I can’t. There are other people that do it better, and we’ll leave them to it. When I began writing Never a few years back, I got as far as Chapter 4. I’d actually begun 5 (getting in the character’s head, pushing buttons to see what would light up) and I’d started writing a scene that was hinted upon in Chapter 2. The words flowed as they usually do when I can see it spooling out and then I had to stop cold because the images I was writing about were so completely devoid of humanity I was shaken.

I saved my document, closed Word, and didn’t touch the story for almost a year.

However, with a story like that, with those kinds of characters – you have to know how it ends. I do anyway, so I’m back to writing about it, armed with knowledge I didn’t have about my characters, their conditions, and the stressors that trigger these kinds of fantasies. My characters are more than the sums of their parts and they are like the people we meet everyday. Everyone keeps secrets, even the professional people who ride the trains and treat your wounds and administer your courts.

Ultimately, that is what Never is about – the secrets we keep and how our happy thoughts can destroy others by simply existing in our brains.

Interested?