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spilledbloodlinesSsssssso after writing my reply to Claude's call for nightmare descriptions, I decided what I really need to do with my time was right a (much) longer version of it. Also serves as a kind of primer on what Spear's current headspace is like, I guess, and is thus a good way for me to errr figure out where to go from here after being hiatused for so long. THAT'S MY STORY AND I'M STICKING TO IT!
...In any case, let me start out by first describing a major source of imagery in Spear's nightmares -- Tsukuyomi. This is a superpowerful genjutsu (illusion technique) of Itachi's which Spear has seen himself use once, in his third memory where Itachi used it as a means of mentally torturing Sasuke. Tsukuyomi doesn't really have many limits in terms of what the user can force the victim to experience, save the user's skill, but in this particular instance Itachi used Tsukuyomi to force Sasuke to experience a very specific scenario.
First off is the color change -- making everything flatten into black, white, and a really pale shade of grey, which you could call a variant on white, more or less. In addition to the monochrome, everything was inverted -- negative monochrome. The sky isn't colored in the manga, obviously, but the anime colors the sky and moon red. A very stark, harsh, iconic color scheme, and the loads of red plus violent content of Tsukuyomi so far naturally creates associations with blood, blood, and more blood (see also: username).
As for what Itachi did in Tsukuyomi... the first time he used it on Kakashi, he did some fairly abstract stuff -- Kakashi bound to a cross, surrounded by thousands of sword-wielding Itachis, who all stabbed him continuously for seventy-two straight hours. The second time he used it was on Sasuke, and what he did was put Sasuke in the setting of the clan's compound (some details: crumbling buildings, random blood pools, scattered and bloodstained weapons, torn lanterns, banners, flags, etc.), and then make Sasuke watch as a thirteen-year-old Itachi killed their parents, over and over again, for twenty-four hours.
The point of explaining all of this is that while it's never explicitly stated anywhere, given the nature of genjutsu in Naruto, Itachi was observing all of this happening in Sasuke's mind as it was happening -- in some sense, he was present and witnessing what he was doing. And since Itachi was, so was Spear. Now, Itachi's use of Tsukuyomi on Sasuke really horrified Spear and made a huge, huge, negative impression on him; even just the knowledge of it would have been terrible. Just after taking his third memory was when Spear's self-opinion was at its lowest. When he fell sick with Sabraplague, he started associating Tsukuyomi imagery with what he saw himself doing in that memory, and that combination was the fuel for the bulk of his nightmares over the past in-game week.
Reposting part of my original comment:
The first sentence is self-explanatory and mostly his status quo from pre-plague; he'd thought through and mostly dealt with nearly drowning so it wasn't quite so big a deal -- and he survived it anyway, so some of his drowning dreams are just replays of the incident including Syaoran swooping in to save him at the end. *shrug* Relatively speaking, not a huge deal for him; he'd filed it away and thought it over and thought it through and was mostly over it.
But he starts getting genuine nightmares during the plague, partly because he's feverish, partly because he hadn't had time to really process the memory, and partly because he was napping and sleeping a lot -- so his emotional response to the memory took precedence of his intellectual one, and there were a lot of opportunities for his subconscious to go into overtime and bring the horrible (the few, brief times he had his eyes open, he probably hallucinated that everything around him was drifting in and out of Tsukuyomi-colors). The nightmares take the particular form that they do, however, due to Spear's feelings towards his past self.
At this point, Spear really doesn't get Itachi's head space. It's as if Itachi has this whole mental gymnastics routine he uses to justify his assault on Sasuke, but Spear is only present for the end bit where Itachi flings himself off the pommel horse and does the little victory post with his hands in the air -- there's SOME kind of elaborate thought process going on, but without context and the how of it, Spear is just getting this extremely alien and terrible result.
The doppelgangers I mention usually take on one of three forms, depending on the specific content of the dream -- thirteen-year-old Itachi as he appears in Tsukuyomi to Sasuke, eighteen-year-old Itachi as he appears in Tsukuyomi to Kakashi, or Spear himself. These doppelgangers are always impenetrable, emotionless -- robotic, even, like automatons. They are alien and foreign and terrible in their relentless, endless killing; they are always in Tsukuyomi's color scheme and their appearance precipitates the dreams' shift from technicolor to Tsukuyomi colors. They represent Spear's hate/distrust/fear of his past self and of who he was; this individual that does things he doesn't understand for reasons he doesn't understand.
The actions of the doppelgangers in these dreams are an extension of that fear, though sort of segueing now into Spear's fear that he will become the same as his past self, who he suspects and is mostly sure killed his clan (which Spear translates as "team, but on a much larger scale and maybe not quite as close knit"). Somewhere in him is this fear that he might have the same potential for that betrayal inside him, and he doesn't want for that potential to be actualized. You could see it as Spear being afraid that his past self will override the person he is now, which is...well, they're the same person technically, but Spear as a person is definitely branching away from the person Itachi was. He recognizes that they are continuous with each other, but he's not happy with what that implies about what he might become or be capable of in the future. The differing color schemes also reflect that; two worlds, two visions.
The addition of Lyvus to his dream fodder happens just under halfway through the week -- when he's still fairly sick, but occasionally conscious enough to realize that Lyvus is taking care of him. I mentioned how he equates "clan" with "team on a larger scale, etc.", and this is just the natural extension of that with his brain started to sllllowly plug in Lyvus for his pre-Sabra family. He loves Sasuke and cares for his parents, as much as he remembers them (and most of his memories of them as positive; Sasuke might've hated him, but Spear is mostly sure that his past self deserved it) but his relationships with Lyvus are a lot more immediate... Honestly, Lyvus showing up in his nightmares probably cemented his outpouring of warm feelings for the Lyvus members that he knows personally (again, sorry new kids -- you all get the general positive-neutral attitude he has towards stranger blanks in general, with a little extra positive for being Lyvus), which I guess is weird since he was also watching himself kill them. But there was no way he could go through those dreams without realizing that yes, he cares about the individual members of Lyvus that he knows and is more determined than ever to not be who he was and contribute as a member of the team, etc. I've said this stuff already. So pretty straightforward in the end, I guess.
On to the examples!
This is a really mix-and-match thing, to be honest; as long as it follows the same basic theme of "ordinary event interrupted by Tsukuyomi doppelganger" it's good. Maybe he was playing hide-and-seek with Sasuke first! Walking around with Kisame when Sasuke's corpse falls out of the sky and lands in front of him! Hunting perderpes with someone when the lake starts turning into blood oh shit. Generally his pre-Sabra memories and Sabra experiences don't mix; it's either-or, one or the other. The settings and identities are too separate -- the dreams set pre-Sabra are more about his anxiety and apprehension over who he was and what he did; the dreams set during Sabra are more about what he is or will become.
And maybe just once there was a mishmash of these sorts of dreams with drowning, where all the corpses were just bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and the blood formed a pool and the ground disappears beneath Spear's feet and his doppelganger just calmly watches as Spear drowns in this horrible red stuff while bodies float all around him. Maybe Syaoran shows up to save him from drowning again! ...and gets shanked in the back before he can whoops.
In any case, now that Spear's no longer plagued, nightmares will definitely start to recede as he determinedly works through his memories and wears down his visceral, emotional reaction to them in favor of a calmer, more rational and intellectual reaction. Unless events conspire to make it not so.
Also the chance of him ever speaking about this was anyone of his own free will is basically zero. He doesn't really want to share this stuff with anyone, partly because of the content, but partly because for all that Spear is more social than Itachi, they are both ultimately quiet, private people.
...In any case, let me start out by first describing a major source of imagery in Spear's nightmares -- Tsukuyomi. This is a superpowerful genjutsu (illusion technique) of Itachi's which Spear has seen himself use once, in his third memory where Itachi used it as a means of mentally torturing Sasuke. Tsukuyomi doesn't really have many limits in terms of what the user can force the victim to experience, save the user's skill, but in this particular instance Itachi used Tsukuyomi to force Sasuke to experience a very specific scenario.
First off is the color change -- making everything flatten into black, white, and a really pale shade of grey, which you could call a variant on white, more or less. In addition to the monochrome, everything was inverted -- negative monochrome. The sky isn't colored in the manga, obviously, but the anime colors the sky and moon red. A very stark, harsh, iconic color scheme, and the loads of red plus violent content of Tsukuyomi so far naturally creates associations with blood, blood, and more blood (see also: username).
As for what Itachi did in Tsukuyomi... the first time he used it on Kakashi, he did some fairly abstract stuff -- Kakashi bound to a cross, surrounded by thousands of sword-wielding Itachis, who all stabbed him continuously for seventy-two straight hours. The second time he used it was on Sasuke, and what he did was put Sasuke in the setting of the clan's compound (some details: crumbling buildings, random blood pools, scattered and bloodstained weapons, torn lanterns, banners, flags, etc.), and then make Sasuke watch as a thirteen-year-old Itachi killed their parents, over and over again, for twenty-four hours.
The point of explaining all of this is that while it's never explicitly stated anywhere, given the nature of genjutsu in Naruto, Itachi was observing all of this happening in Sasuke's mind as it was happening -- in some sense, he was present and witnessing what he was doing. And since Itachi was, so was Spear. Now, Itachi's use of Tsukuyomi on Sasuke really horrified Spear and made a huge, huge, negative impression on him; even just the knowledge of it would have been terrible. Just after taking his third memory was when Spear's self-opinion was at its lowest. When he fell sick with Sabraplague, he started associating Tsukuyomi imagery with what he saw himself doing in that memory, and that combination was the fuel for the bulk of his nightmares over the past in-game week.
Reposting part of my original comment:
Prior to Sabraplague, Spear didn't have any nightmares -- maybe once or twice he had a brief horrible dream about nearly drowning, but that's it. But then he got sick before he could process the bad memory he got from the Kid's game and...well. Most of the nightmares he got while he was sick with the plague mostly followed the same pattern: starting out with some ordinary, pleasant scenario that gets interrupted by his doppelganger shanking someone around him and everything going Tsukuyomi-colored (which is to say, negative monochrome beneath a blood-red sky) while his doppelganger kills people from the first half of his dream over and over and Spear can't do anything to stop him. In the beginning it was his pre-Sabra memories that dominated, but as he slowly recovered and became more aware of Lyvus taking care of him they started to feature in a few as well.
The first sentence is self-explanatory and mostly his status quo from pre-plague; he'd thought through and mostly dealt with nearly drowning so it wasn't quite so big a deal -- and he survived it anyway, so some of his drowning dreams are just replays of the incident including Syaoran swooping in to save him at the end. *shrug* Relatively speaking, not a huge deal for him; he'd filed it away and thought it over and thought it through and was mostly over it.
But he starts getting genuine nightmares during the plague, partly because he's feverish, partly because he hadn't had time to really process the memory, and partly because he was napping and sleeping a lot -- so his emotional response to the memory took precedence of his intellectual one, and there were a lot of opportunities for his subconscious to go into overtime and bring the horrible (the few, brief times he had his eyes open, he probably hallucinated that everything around him was drifting in and out of Tsukuyomi-colors). The nightmares take the particular form that they do, however, due to Spear's feelings towards his past self.
At this point, Spear really doesn't get Itachi's head space. It's as if Itachi has this whole mental gymnastics routine he uses to justify his assault on Sasuke, but Spear is only present for the end bit where Itachi flings himself off the pommel horse and does the little victory post with his hands in the air -- there's SOME kind of elaborate thought process going on, but without context and the how of it, Spear is just getting this extremely alien and terrible result.
The doppelgangers I mention usually take on one of three forms, depending on the specific content of the dream -- thirteen-year-old Itachi as he appears in Tsukuyomi to Sasuke, eighteen-year-old Itachi as he appears in Tsukuyomi to Kakashi, or Spear himself. These doppelgangers are always impenetrable, emotionless -- robotic, even, like automatons. They are alien and foreign and terrible in their relentless, endless killing; they are always in Tsukuyomi's color scheme and their appearance precipitates the dreams' shift from technicolor to Tsukuyomi colors. They represent Spear's hate/distrust/fear of his past self and of who he was; this individual that does things he doesn't understand for reasons he doesn't understand.
The actions of the doppelgangers in these dreams are an extension of that fear, though sort of segueing now into Spear's fear that he will become the same as his past self, who he suspects and is mostly sure killed his clan (which Spear translates as "team, but on a much larger scale and maybe not quite as close knit"). Somewhere in him is this fear that he might have the same potential for that betrayal inside him, and he doesn't want for that potential to be actualized. You could see it as Spear being afraid that his past self will override the person he is now, which is...well, they're the same person technically, but Spear as a person is definitely branching away from the person Itachi was. He recognizes that they are continuous with each other, but he's not happy with what that implies about what he might become or be capable of in the future. The differing color schemes also reflect that; two worlds, two visions.
The addition of Lyvus to his dream fodder happens just under halfway through the week -- when he's still fairly sick, but occasionally conscious enough to realize that Lyvus is taking care of him. I mentioned how he equates "clan" with "team on a larger scale, etc.", and this is just the natural extension of that with his brain started to sllllowly plug in Lyvus for his pre-Sabra family. He loves Sasuke and cares for his parents, as much as he remembers them (and most of his memories of them as positive; Sasuke might've hated him, but Spear is mostly sure that his past self deserved it) but his relationships with Lyvus are a lot more immediate... Honestly, Lyvus showing up in his nightmares probably cemented his outpouring of warm feelings for the Lyvus members that he knows personally (again, sorry new kids -- you all get the general positive-neutral attitude he has towards stranger blanks in general, with a little extra positive for being Lyvus), which I guess is weird since he was also watching himself kill them. But there was no way he could go through those dreams without realizing that yes, he cares about the individual members of Lyvus that he knows and is more determined than ever to not be who he was and contribute as a member of the team, etc. I've said this stuff already. So pretty straightforward in the end, I guess.
On to the examples!
EXAMPLE 1: Spear is a child getting ready to eat dinner with his family, and his mother is setting a dish on the table when suddenly!! she falls down, bleeding from where her back was hacked into, and above her stands young-Itachi with a katana raised. Color change happens as the doppelganger kills Spear's parents and Sasuke over and over again and Spear can't do anything because he's a tiny and also maybe getting buried under the corpses um.
EXAMPLE 2: Spear is in Sabra, helping set the table for dinner. He turns his back on Royal to lay out dishes, only to hear a horrible gurgling sound from behind; when he turns around, he finds his doppelganger with his knife dripping blood and Royal on floor bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and then the blood starts seeping into the walls and initiating the color change while the ceiling crumbles to reveal the red sky. Meanwhile doppelSpear is killing members of Lyvus over and over again and when Spear asks why, why are you doing this, why would you do such a thing, doppelSpear replies that he already knows the reason why.
This is a really mix-and-match thing, to be honest; as long as it follows the same basic theme of "ordinary event interrupted by Tsukuyomi doppelganger" it's good. Maybe he was playing hide-and-seek with Sasuke first! Walking around with Kisame when Sasuke's corpse falls out of the sky and lands in front of him! Hunting perderpes with someone when the lake starts turning into blood oh shit. Generally his pre-Sabra memories and Sabra experiences don't mix; it's either-or, one or the other. The settings and identities are too separate -- the dreams set pre-Sabra are more about his anxiety and apprehension over who he was and what he did; the dreams set during Sabra are more about what he is or will become.
And maybe just once there was a mishmash of these sorts of dreams with drowning, where all the corpses were just bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and the blood formed a pool and the ground disappears beneath Spear's feet and his doppelganger just calmly watches as Spear drowns in this horrible red stuff while bodies float all around him. Maybe Syaoran shows up to save him from drowning again! ...and gets shanked in the back before he can whoops.
In any case, now that Spear's no longer plagued, nightmares will definitely start to recede as he determinedly works through his memories and wears down his visceral, emotional reaction to them in favor of a calmer, more rational and intellectual reaction. Unless events conspire to make it not so.
Also the chance of him ever speaking about this was anyone of his own free will is basically zero. He doesn't really want to share this stuff with anyone, partly because of the content, but partly because for all that Spear is more social than Itachi, they are both ultimately quiet, private people.
