oh so when BARBIE wants to stop being a doll and interact with the real world as a real person, it’s fine and fun and great, but when I, charles “chucky” lee ray,
I mean they did arrest barbie. that’s a pretty significant thing that happened. like I understand where you’re coming from but they did very much arrest barbie
Does the butterfly have the same soul as the caterpillar?
Can someone answer me I’m literally having an existential crisis
there’s multiple answers, depending on how you view identity.
the butterfly is made up of the liquified remains of the caterpillar, including memories. There’s a reason the butterfly is our metaphor for metamorphosis, and perhaps we wouldn’t have such a complete concept of metamorphosis if it weren’t for the caterpillar embodying it so completely, undergoing such a drastic change that turns out to be infinitely beautiful and complex as we stare more at it.
we can reasonably call the caterpillar/butterfly as two species, intertwined, caterpillars producing butterflys and butterflys producing caterpillars, if we really want. if some day, someone were to tell me that under rare circumstances, two butterflies can burst forth from one cocoon, my only surprise would be how we managed to capture the event and prove that it happens.
so now, what is a soul? if a soul is an immortal object sent to heaven or hell, I am not qualified to answer about the soul of the metamorphosis.
if a soul is an infinitely plastic, fluid thing, capable of flitting between forms, then I can say with confidence that the butterfly and the caterpillar share one soul. (I am, however, uncertain whether or not all mammals share a soul with their mothers in that case).
if a soul is identified not by continuity of constituency, (in the same way we recognize our bodies not by their atoms), but by the patterns it makes, then I feel it is likely that we have several souls across our lifetime as we change, and the caterpillar and butterfly definitely have different souls, for surely the metamorphosis is no less complete. When we reinvent ourselves, by ego, by spirit, and by body, I feel there is a threshold crossed at some point by which the soul of some marked point in the past and the soul of the now are the souls of different people, connected more by continuity than how much they differ from each other and from the other souls around.
But there is a continuity of physical existence. The caterpillar’s body is not destroyed before the butterfly’s body begins to grow. The majority of the caterpillar’s tissue is liquified, but things like breathing tissue remain as they are.
If you want to question the soul of a life form that doesn’t have continuity of physical existence, then you should be looking at mint spreading through people’s gardens no matter how many times you kill it.
imagine being the first blue-eyes white dragon bitch in your deck to like get your body done like ass shots titties done and like beat face contoured… and then you walked into like the duel arena or whatever yugioh players have and everyone dropped their Duel Disk and was shookedt?
Didn’t realize we were plumbing the depths of Kaiba’s hard drive for card art
That post about 30 year old coming of age stories?
I’ve been thinking about it all morning. What would the plot points be for that? What makes a 30 year old coming of age story?
Old folks sound off in the comments
This article about a woman who went on a life changing lesbian cruise.
Rather than beginnings like teenage coming of age stories, a 30’s coming of age is about change.
The thing about turning 30 is that you know yourself better, and you are usually just starting to have the means to seek what you want. You have enough life experience to know what you like and don’t like. You may have a little disposable income, freedom from family, or finally be treating something like depression.
It isn’t like being a teenager where the coming of age is new experiences; it’s coming of age in knowing what you want and changing your circumstances. You look around and think, “I want and deserve better than this, and I can do it,” and you make the change.
Getting a new job. Going back to school. Dating someone new. Moving somewhere else. Going on a long trip. Trying a new hobby. Or even just dressing differently! There’s so many ways this coming of age can occur.
But there are layers to this. Unlike a teenage growing up story where you’re writing on a blank slate, a 30’s coming of age is turning the page. You might have to do something painful. Quit your job. Break up with someone. Say goodbye to your hometown. There’s change. And with that, comes apprehension for the future and grief over the past, but you work through that anyway to seek something better for yourself.
To quote the article above, one of my favorite quotes of all time: “There’s something so deliriously pleasurable in the idea of trusting myself enough to know exactly what I want.”
Oh and by the way. This doesn’t just have to be the plot of a book or fic. This can be your life, too. You can always do better.
Getting older isn’t bad. Turning 30 isn’t the end of your life. Things can be better once you know yourself more and know what you want. Embrace it.
The thing about coming of age stories is that, we are always becoming ourselves. There is no endgoal or final stage to any part of human development. Learning new things will always change your internal philosophy.
And there is always a fulcrum for which any person, or any character, can be tossed into a completely unfamiliar situation. Whether you’re expressing the social pressures on a teenager through a vampire biker gang, or having someone come to terms with living in a senior home, (lack of independence, having their judgment by diminished by others, needing to live on a schedule and with other people, etc.), by having them hunt down a ghost only they can see, the expression of the, in this case I’ve selected a supernatural fulcrum, can mirror the expression of the coming of age component while allowing you to place it in a particular genre, (be that vampire romance or a detective novel).
The experience of a coming of age story is watching people become more comfortable with their surroundings and themselves, and as a natural result, the denouement can often be an exhibition of how they’ve become familiar enough with their mundane/everyday surroundings/self to use all of those elements against the not-so-everyday, whether that’s winning a talent competition, surviving supernatural peer pressure, synthesizing a vaccine, or exorcising a ghost.
So you can have a nurse who worked at senior’s homes all her life being put into a seniors home herself, and actually completely know what to expect. But still make a coming of age story about coming to terms with it all, and bringing out her otherwise-would-be-hidden discomfort with the lifestyle change by necessitating her breaking the rules to exorcise a ghost. She can even have planned ahead for how she would live in a senior’s home, maybe criticizing seniors in her workplaces for how they failed to adapt, and then in that situation herself, find those methods … not terribly good, but good enough, until she sees the ghost.
So in terms of construction, my advice is: choose your coming of age change, and then choose a fulcrum that places you as a writer in familiar writing territory and also exposes any discomfort or weakness that your main character would otherwise experience over a longer time period, or just brush off.
Genre is dialogue with other works in the same “genre”. The more you focus on the underlying concept of change and growth, the more you wander away from coming of age and into other stories. Less a problem of being too old to have an adventure or whatever and more a problem of how exactly do adult stories exist in dialogue with kid stories.
I think the answer is actually very simple. Coming of age stories are already written by adults, they are about kids and for kids but written from that adult perspective and with that adult understanding of who kids are.
Coming of age stories are often more love letters to the author’s own childhood rather than actually relevant narratives of modern childhood.
But that’s the dialogue, isn’t it? The child recognising themself through someone else’s childhood. The adult talking to the child through their own child self. The mutual awareness and understanding of how much has changed and how much is the same.
So if you want to write that into the fiction itself, then I think the easiest way is to simply have an adult character who themself remembers being a child, and look at the relationship between the child and adult character.
A specific example of this, there’s this manga I love called Different Country Diary. It features a young teen girl whose parents die in an accident. She has to go live with her auntie. And with these two together, we see each of them work through trauma of losing a family member, and of working through unresolved past conflicts, and processing both sad and happy memories.
Each character gets their own flashbacks, including the older auntie character remembering being the same age as the niece character, we see her own coming of age but also the ways that informs who she is in the present and how that informs her interactions with the niece character.
I personally found this more moving than any narrative of people my age or older being inserted into tropes and storytelling conventions typically reserved for child or younger characters. And stories about older people undergoing change and growth are just stories. Just drama. Not really coming of age I don’t think.
