charmianland because random is good enough for most

Really interesting blog post on “The Vanity Glitch.” The comments by the author actually explain his point better than the article itself, IMHO, so scroll down after you read it.

I do actually seek something similar to this in fiction, the encounter with the Other, and I am gathering his point is that this ‘glitch’ highlights and foregrounds this aspect of storytelling. (TBH one of my frustrations, perhaps, with fandom-storytelling was that it made the satisfyingly Other characters too familiar and predictable…) In a weird way I have recently been gaming in genres where you’re supposed to identify w/ the main character to the point of naming them whatever you want, yet in my favorite games in this genre the main character differentiates themselves from you fairly sharply. (A space anyone can put themselves into comfortably will remain unsatisfyingly formless, narratively?)