Stephen's actually not pulling an "I can't tell you people apart" here -- he's noticing that these two men have specific features in common. At this point, he knows his Jonathan's face well enough that he wouldn't mistake him for his own twin brother.
I'm going to have to look up the Tales of Hoffmann now, because it sounds fascinating. And, yeah, Stephen processes reality in strange ways -- he can't always separate the facts from his own filters.
The 2005 one is depressing in ways I don't like to deal with much, which is why it's so much shorter than it could be ^_^;
The paragraph that "sounds exactly like the stuff he was saying" was, to be fair, adapted almost directly from the stuff he was saying. Not a whole lot of challenge there....
A fugue state involves severe amnesia, usually brought on by some sort of mental trauma. The basic idea is that something happens which is so horrible that you can't stand to be yourself anymore, so your mind hits the "off" switch and decides to be someone else for a while. When you come back "on", you generally don't remember the time in between, and you might not remember the initial trauma, either. Sometimes the "off" state only lasts days, but for some people it's gone on for years.
In this case, my thinking is that Stephen could only walk his mental tightrope (over pits of religiously- and parentally-induced self-loathing, if I may stretch a metaphor) as long as he and Jonathan weren't Officially Married For Real. He was aware of this on some level, thus the years of stalling. When it came time to say "I do", the rope snapped, and he switched into the selfish angry fact-hating homophobe we all know and love. At first he reframed the entire relationship (as a Cunning Plot to Protect Marriage), but by the time he got back to South Carolina he had wiped the whole relationship from his memory (and his family was more than willing to not speak its name).
Ever since then, though, he still subconsciously knows that something's wrong. Which is why he spends so much energy reinforcing his identity (splashing the name "Colbert" on everything in reach), and why he's so hostile to questions and facts and unaltered truth in general.
You can tell he's scraping the bottom of the mental-defenses barrel when "Jonathan didn't have a beard!" is the most sophisticated strategy he has left XD
I'm gonna have to cartoon something about this, I know that much....
You flatter me, but I am very glad you liked this :D
Re: long-winded complimentary babbling and drooling
Stephen's actually not pulling an "I can't tell you people apart" here -- he's noticing that these two men have specific features in common. At this point, he knows his Jonathan's face well enough that he wouldn't mistake him for his own twin brother.
I'm going to have to look up the Tales of Hoffmann now, because it sounds fascinating. And, yeah, Stephen processes reality in strange ways -- he can't always separate the facts from his own filters.
The 2005 one is depressing in ways I don't like to deal with much, which is why it's so much shorter than it could be ^_^;
The paragraph that "sounds exactly like the stuff he was saying" was, to be fair, adapted almost directly from the stuff he was saying. Not a whole lot of challenge there....
A fugue state involves severe amnesia, usually brought on by some sort of mental trauma. The basic idea is that something happens which is so horrible that you can't stand to be yourself anymore, so your mind hits the "off" switch and decides to be someone else for a while. When you come back "on", you generally don't remember the time in between, and you might not remember the initial trauma, either. Sometimes the "off" state only lasts days, but for some people it's gone on for years.
In this case, my thinking is that Stephen could only walk his mental tightrope (over pits of religiously- and parentally-induced self-loathing, if I may stretch a metaphor) as long as he and Jonathan weren't Officially Married For Real. He was aware of this on some level, thus the years of stalling. When it came time to say "I do", the rope snapped, and he switched into the selfish angry fact-hating homophobe we all know and love. At first he reframed the entire relationship (as a Cunning Plot to Protect Marriage), but by the time he got back to South Carolina he had wiped the whole relationship from his memory (and his family was more than willing to not speak its name).
Ever since then, though, he still subconsciously knows that something's wrong. Which is why he spends so much energy reinforcing his identity (splashing the name "Colbert" on everything in reach), and why he's so hostile to questions and facts and unaltered truth in general.
You can tell he's scraping the bottom of the mental-defenses barrel when "Jonathan didn't have a beard!" is the most sophisticated strategy he has left XD
I'm gonna have to cartoon something about this, I know that much....
You flatter me, but I am very glad you liked this :D