Take apart the ugly days.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off for the past couple of days,
thinking hard, and I’m struggling because one of the motifs I love most
out of all fiction isn’t something I really know easy, preexisting words
for. Not even the concept of taking a crack idea and playing it as deadset serious as the canon allows, which happens to be one of my favorite things, because that’s easy enough to communicate.
What I love are the bad rats.
Bad rats aren’t spacetoasters,
though they’ve got some things in common, like the social alienation
and the tendency to stand apart from the rest of the group. Children and
animals tend to be easier to get along with. Hugs aren’t always
welcome. There’s a lot of trouble grasping emotion and intent, and research
is necessary to parse out social interactions. Research is sometimes
necessary to understand their own feelings. Both bad rats and spacetoasters skew more towards male characters than female ones.
But
where the spacetoaster gets their emotions beamed in from a space
station orbiting Jupiter, where everything needs to align in very specific
circumstances for a clear, steady broadcast, bad rats have them coming
in from the closest radio tower on whatever frequency’s available.
Spacetoasters have low signals, but a very good signal-to-noise ratio,
an almost enviable one, with almost no noise to speak of. Bad rats have
too much signal, and too much noise, and sometimes when both are coming
in at once there’s no way to distinguish between the two.
Julian
Bashir was one of my first and best bad rat loves, when I was starting
to figure out the concept. He’s got a surfeit of feelings and emotions
right from the start - and they’re not often the proper ones for the
given social interaction he’s participating in, but he can’t course-correct because he
doesn’t usually know what the correct one is supposed to be.
He takes refuge in his role as a doctor, wearing it as his armor against
the world and taking refuge in it as needed - and many times, takes
refuge from reality by immersing himself in fantasies and games. When it
comes to the people around him, whatever the species, there’s a steep learning curve that he can’t explain, that he can’t get rid of, that
exists for pretty much everyone he encounters. Even for his own species. He’ll believe almost anything, no matter how many times people
pull something over on him. He doesn’t know where social limits are
unless someone comes right out and tells him, and when it comes to
extrapolating certain concepts, it’s not that he won’t do that so
much as it is he doesn’t know how. But give him a problem, and he’ll
cut straight through it without thinking or blinking.
A surplus of feelings. Too many badly-connected wires inside the frame. Too much noise for the signal to be clear.
Spike, a recent introduction, someone who’s capable of being a deeply monstrous person,
who has the literary advantage of a metaphoric condition already built
in, and as monstrous as he is, was still capable of being a person.
Suzanne Warren, my darling, who was never seen as she was and never got
the chance to learn the words she had to use to get the help she
needed. Dan Rydell, who manages to be an incredibly stealthy bad rat, is
in major need of someone to mend his wiring. Geoffrey Tennant, perfectly aware of the limits of his sanity. Elsbeth Tascioni, possibly the best lawyer in Chicago, who isn’t faking anything and is too good at her job to have anyone call her on it.
At times, Castiel
straddles both categories, though I haven’t seen the show in several
years and can’t speak to its ongoing developments.
If anyone has
any recs or suggestions of bad rats in media, I’d love to hear them.
Because I’m fairly well sure there’s more out there that I’d love to
meet.
(Oddly enough, the first so-named bad rat
I ever met in media isn’t a bad rat as I think of them. But it was the
best phrase I’d ever seen to even come close to describing what I needed
to name.)
deepintheshadyglen