@JKRsBarmyBooks This is a biggie. The central theme of TIBH is sickness. At the (dark) heart is anomie, a sickness of disconnection, the kind of amoral nihilism you find in people who find no place for themselves in any of the sustaining things that keep human beings grounded –
@JKRsBarmyBooks real life friends, family, sense of purpose, meaningful work and so on. Then you’ve got obsession, which when extreme can become mental illness. In the mods of the game, we have a group of individuals who’ve latched on to TIBH and whose obsession becomes central to their lives.
@JKRsBarmyBooks Most were looking for those things that keep anomie at bay - community, friendship, a hobby – and there’s nothing ignoble about wanting those things, we all need them. Yet things have become toxic inside the game: they thought they’d found an escape from the real world
@JKRsBarmyBooks but there was a sickness in the online refuge they found, too. And then you've got the more literal illnesses and disabilities in the book, people struggling with the daily reality of chronic illness, pain and so on, not least Strike.
@JKRsBarmyBooks He reaches a crisis in this book and is forced up against some hard facts: change your lifestyle, or your career’s over. And his health crisis mirrors his emotional crisis. He’s voluntarily lived in denial about his feelings for Robin and change is forced upon him there, too.
@JKRsBarmyBooks And this brought me back to the Victorian romanticisation of sickness and death, which in a very strange way connected to some of what I saw on Tumblr. I saw definite parallels between Victorian attitudes and modern ones.
@JKRsBarmyBooks I was reading so many Victorian female poets to put me in the mindset and I joked to a friend of mine they had only 3 subjects: 'Lo, behold the bumble bee,' 'Woe is me, the baby's dead' and 'God, thou art stern but will save us.'
Loading suggestions...