God of Marriage Saga: Intermission 6: Again From The Top
You guys just do not notice that we are gifted just for being Humans.
We are absolute predators.
We do not even have any enemies.
Maybe there are other animals watching us
And thinking that: "Someday, we will beat them down"
I grabbed myself a glass of absinthe for this one. Just the bottom of the bottle would have to do, to shut out thoughts of slicing, and dicing and chewing.
Or at least to ease the burden of those thoughts.
I was a skeptic of the occult. And someone who related their understanding of the world, to stories from within it. Figures, characters, scenarios.
Ultimately that wasn't sufficient to make sense of anything. Direct experience had as much to do with understanding, as the symbolic conflations.
"Yet, you are trying to understand a dangerous symbol." Tamura Reiko reminded me. An inkling of a memory of her did, anyway.
Was what she was that important to this whole conundrum, though? I had to take it from the top.
So I had this story of putting things back together--re-organizing tangled threads. Remarrying misconceived ideas.
Simpler. Less pretentious. A voice urged.
This wasn't just about how to get my mack on with my furry girlfriend. That was just self-disparagement talking.
"What impulse is it that drives you? Procreation? I have experienced that."
... right. Even the dangerous monster has attained this thing that you're in the process of disparaging yourself about, Me.
"Yet, you withhold this aim for a greater one, or so you think."
Empathy with other forms of life? Connection to those forms... mastery of self-transformation.
Tamura Reiko was a face-snatcher. A body-snatcher. A mouth-head monster. The mouth is the head.
Not sympathetic. Not supposed to have friendly dialogue with the dangerous species.
Even in a fantasy?
No. I simply had no motive as a character, did I? No normal human being would have. But here, I was talking circles around what fantasy even is.
So... to take it from the top... I'm in a story, about encounters with ideas from my head. The topics so far have been myth, marriage... creating bonds between people... reunions... things coming together. And then I relive an old trauma or anxiety, about a mad doctor's fixation. Things are coming together in a different way. A way that on the face of it, preserves two forms that would otherwise be lost. Preservation. Conservation. Aerith and Nanaki.
"But the union is taboo."
Right... the ape and the hound. Unwilling. Forced. This all goes back to wanting to procreate with something that looks human, but isn't. Acts human, but isn't. Reflects something in my world that isn't human at all, but is.
Anthropomorphism was such a 'weird' phenomenon. It wasn't even 'just' that I'd developed an attraction to an accidental symbol of a taboo union. I'd simultaneously developed a fixation for human bodies taking on the likeness of that sort of symbol, too. Transformation fetish/fixation/fantasy.
Werewolves were the crudest, simplest portal, into that world of understanding. You get bit by the doggy-man-person, your body starts to act like theirs, and to form like theirs. Nevermind the logistics, it was just something that happened.
"Procreation, then." the parasitoid spoke, through toothy lips and discombobulated eyes.
Horizontal transmission? Lycanthropy was a disease. Or could be. But symbolically, lycanthropy was a toy, for illustrating people from a different world. One where the rules were not bound together so tightly, and where the taboos were ambiguous.
So... simultaneously, furries were and weren't lycanthropes, or therianthropes of other varieties. It might be safe to say furries were inert were-creatures. Or at least, 'partially' inert. They didn't have the precise meaning of human taking on inhuman quality. No, it was rather, the semblance was discrete enough, and the probability likely enough, that things could go both ways. There didn't have to be a curse or a condition or even an abnormality of existence--for a 'furry' character, that was just their reality--being shaped the way they'd been. Human didn't even have to be an entity of concern. But it just as likely 'could' work that way, depending on the rules of the story. Both tribes could co-exist, one could be transformed into another.
It was like some kind of symbolic sleight-of-hand trick we'd performed. And I was trying to reverse-engineer it or diagnose it, or something.
And there was the phone, interrupting.
I cringed for a moment. I'd chosen to let my real life bleed through into the story, yet I was still telling a story. The setting was some strange, nebulous non-void of ideas that would come to the reader, as I assumed it would, sometimes, and not as I assumed it would, others. I just had to place my trust in the reader to derive some useful insight.
Occult writing? I guess. It was trying to get to the bottom of my feelings about something that just wouldn't ever be a concern, if I didn't in some respects want something to happen, because of it. The obvious, overt, crude interpretation, and the wrong one, was 'I'm looking for sex with another species' just on the face of it, because that could just as easily mean finding something that wanted to eat me. Humans didn't have a lot of those, but they had imagination aplenty to devise them with.
"Why is your initial aim so repugnant?" Tamura asked.
Right... it could just be that I was having such difficulty accepting the base notion, that I summoned some man-eater into mind as a punishment, instead.
Alright then, Haru. This ain't Beastars, and we're not going down that rabbit hole.
I snapped my fingers. I think I understood, finally. THAT was the 'wrongness' of the idea, baring its fangs. The idea that I do something innately harmful out of violation of a taboo. But the problem was, I was just the sort of person that was 'transfixed' with something strange and enchanting. So I wasn't going away from that taboo, any time soon. I was sort of stuck with it for better or for worse.
So... there was the fine line between falling in love, and falling in love with a potential predator. Or indeed, something that just wanted to bite me for a body-language faux pas. Indeed, the power dynamic could just as easily be the reverse--humans had power to devour as they pleased.
I felt like I was getting to the bottom of something that humans had disguised, hidden, blanketed over. The claws and fangs, beneath the pretty animal-people.
...
"Symbolically, that's me. To some extent, then." Tamura replied.