#WILL MADE HANNIBAL FEEL HUMAN AND NOW HE DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO REACT

[animangalover-writes]

KILL ME I LOVE EDITS LIKE THIS

I mean if we're sharing edits, this was my true inspiration for this post:

I saw a post, I was inspired.

[copperbadge]

Supposedly, people with Anphantasia don't get scared reading scary stories, or at least not much. Is that true with you if you ever read Horror?

You know, I'd never thought about it, but I suppose it is. To an extent, anyway.

Follows a discussion of my relationship to horror prose and media; if you don't know what aphantasia is, as many people coming to this tumblr don't, I have a tag for it here that may help -- it's basically the lack of a "mind's eye", a visual imagination, so I hear/read things and don't see an image of them in my mind. If you are scoffing right now that nobody actually has a mind's eye, congratulations, you may also have aphantasia. The articles linked in the tag will be useful to you.

I have definitely been scared by prose before but it's very rare, and not much since I was a child, when the stories I found scary were preying on fears I already had. I loved the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books, and I think it's not unusual that I found the illustrations more frightening than the prose, but the only story that ever scared me was the one about the vampire who kept trying to grab a kid through a window -- because I had a window over my bed in my childhood bedroom and I was terrified I'd look up to see someone looking down at me through it. Likewise, as an adult, the only content in horror I find scary is what I think of as "mind horror" -- the loss of faculty or the loss of awareness of faculty (think the end scene of the novel Hannibal with the brain). Which is one of my biggest fears.

I don't read much horror because generally I get bored, which has in the past made me feel faintly appalled at myself, but which now makes more sense. Certainly I have no interest in slasher-style gore in prose, because I find it uninteresting and it goes on a really long time, while I don't watch it in movies/TV because the visual is upsetting -- so if I was getting the visual from the prose I might react more emotionally. I am a fan of Stephen King but mostly his early work where he was shorter on suspense, and I was reading it because I liked the ideas and the characters. Carrie is super interesting because of the personalities involved, not because of the violence or the horror aspects. But I've never seen a movie adaptation and I can imagine I would be deeply unsettled if not distraught by certain scenes if depicted visually. Although I didn't find the Hannibal TV series super upsetting (I mostly was put off by how bad I imagined Will smelled) so perhaps body horror just doesn't do it for me.

This may also explain my hard-no on zombie media, because I'm not scared at all of zombies, I just find them boring and gross, and that leaves the post-apocalyptic humans. My hard-no on post-apocalypse anything is an aversion to imagining the end of my world, though, which isn't visual, it's conceptual, and not scary, just upsetting.

Like, people kept suggesting Zombies Run! to me when I was taking up running and -- well, one, I needed the music to keep my pace, I didn't want it interrupted. But two, I didn't see why a bunch of random groaning noises would make me run faster. If you could see zombies chasing you in your head, yeah, that'd probably be more motivating.

It kind of explains too why I haven't written much horror. I used to be very curious about how people worked out what's "scary" in horror prose and I guess part of the curiosity came from not experiencing it myself. It's tough to know how to write a scary story when stories don't scare you.

To be clear, I definitely experience fear. Reading Stephen King's "It" didn't really scare me, but there were scary moments in the film adaptations. I startle at jumpscares. There's plenty of stuff in real life that I'm scared of. And even podcasts -- I don't get mental images during podcasts like apparently most people do, but Magnus Archives got me with the "digging into your pre-existing fears" thing once or twice, and while I didn't finish The Left Right Game (I just got bored) the hitchhiker scene definitely got me. But I think, unless it's playing on something conceptual that already existed, yeah, I don't find prose particularly frightening.

Huh. This feels like the kind of thing that could have a significant impact on my creative output if I could crowbar my way into it. Knowing that I as an aphantic don't need descriptions that other people do has already, I think, impacted my editing process, but this feels like it maybe would somehow have an effect on the whole thing -- the fact that I don't experience emotions when reading in the same way other people do because I don't get the visuals is something to meditate on.

How the fuck did I ever even become a writer. Like what's up with that.

(Ironically it was X-Files fanfic. X-Files, a show that very much did scare me, for which I wrote and read a lot of fanfic, none of which did...yikes. Well, that's something to meditate on for the weekend.)