Turning your own nostalgic memories into sparks / prompts / fiction stuff
Some time ago I've started to read one of Santinos posts, in which he was musing about nostalgia. Sadly he deleted the post, before I was able to read it in full, but the theme stuck with me for a while now.
Sometimes I also feel big waves of nostalgia. There is this ... longing for moments changed by memories. At times it's even only the sudden re-experiencing of half-forgotten emotional impulses. But I digress.
Important: I don't believe that "everything was better in the good old days". And I don't think that the emotional state of nostalgia really revolves around this statement nor that it should revolve around it. You can learn from the past, but you shouldn't try to live in the past.
Nostalgia as a whole has more likely to do with how our memory works and how we experience and process emotions in retrospective.
I think it was in a review of Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year that I've read the statement that children have a natural talent for magic realism. And I think there is something to that idea.
Maybe, and that's just a random, unproven thought of mine, this magic realism has something to do with the fact that kids experience fictional elements in a huge variety of forms.
Let me give you an example with my personal relationship with the Digimon franchise. I really like Digimon, but I'm nowhere near to being a big Digimon fan or collector of digimon-related items or something. And yet, some of my nostalgic memories are highly correlated with Digimon.
In order to get closer to the core of that correlation let's take a look at how I've experienced Digimon as a kid:
- At the time when the Digimon franchise made it's way to Germany I've had my first encounter with it through the form of an audio cassette, which my mother brought from the library one day. Audio-Dramas for kids are quite a big thing here, so that was kinda fitting. But I also think that it'd laid the ground for a very specific type of fictional connection for my later contacts with the franchise. Maybe that is a special charateristic of Audio-Dramas, but that's something for another post.
- With the cassetes my mother also brought us the official character guide of Digimon Adventure 01. I've flipped through the book many times, before I even had the slightest bit of context for what I was looking at.
- When the series started as a television show, one of my siblings and I watched every episode that we could. I watched Digimon Adventure 01 and 02, as well as Digimon Tamers and Digimon Frontier in there entirety in my youth and drifted away from it afterwards. Some of the episodes in there had a huge emotional impact on me as a kid.
- I don't remember if I've watched the first Digimon movie (which was actually the first three digimon movies cut together) around here in a cinema or not. But I still know the feeling that some scenes of it invoked in me.
- My sibling and I had some burned digimon games for the playstation 1. They were horribly broken, but that didn't kept us from playing them.
- One day my mother brought home some small Digimon action figures that someone had lost at her workplace. I kept them like magical relics.
All that different forms of input related to Digimon made it a very special part of my live back then. And they had a profound effect on my associative memory.
Everytime when I see an old rusty fence in an alley now, a not so small part of me expects Wendigomon to suddenly appear behind it and scream "Go back!".
What am I getting at?
Children experience the world in some kind of secret magic realism. And in the retrospective, or let's say the nostalgic restrospective the fictional elements or our memory get remembered with the same value as the ones based in reality.
Now combine that with the fact that every human builds very specific and individual associations (e.g. my association of the noise of circular saws with late summer evenings) and we get an entire tapestry of exiting ideas and magic pseudo-memories. All of that grown over the course of years and finely tuned to your very own life experiences. And all of that hidden in your skull for far too long.
To hell if we wouldn't at least try to bring that treasure to good use!
But in order to make that process as little strenuous as possible we will fall back to two methods I've found very helpfull in the past:
Modularity and Recombination.
That means we will pick preferably small, compact memories and associations out of our own nostalgic memo-carpet and wildly combine them with each other to get new interesting ideas.
It's kinda like spark-tables, but with phrases instead of single words.
Let's try this for a location, a character and a possible encounter.
The Location
One nostalgic association that comes up very often in my head, is a connection between the Naga and the tropical island maps of Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne and the local outdoor swimming pool area of my hometown.
The connection between those two things is tied so closely that at some sommerdays it feels like remembering a time way back when I actually was a Naga myself.
Alright, we got those two fragments. To get to three (because three fragments might create more ideas than just two or one) I'll also throw the pine forests of my homeregion in there.
So, here we go:
- The Naga / Island maps of Frozen Throne
- Summer days in the local outdoor pool
- extensive pine forests
Alright, when you've picked three fragments, let them brew in your skull cauldron for a moment. Your brain already had prebuilt associations to all three fragments, some based in reality, some based in fiction. Now the recombination will lead your brain to create new ideas out of that associative background. It's not a problem if the result strays away from the original three fragments. They only serve as a starting point for your creative process.
Ping!
The Old Pool
- A myth between the kids of the town: a secret swimming pool hidden somewhere in the pine forests
- If you dive down into the swimming pool and touch the ground, you'll end up at the shores of a tropical archipelago when you resurface.
- Once the kids of an entire generation of your town went there and never came back. Time has turned them into reptile sea-creatures that bath in the water and the sun. Legend has it they are rich with gold beyond believe.
Well, I kinda like it. Though it is a bit heavy on the High fantasy side. Maybe I'd place it directly next to a place resembling my hometown to embrace the fiction / reality contrast.
In general I think, that these nostalgia creations work best in a story or roleplaying session, if you frame them with some of the real places and experiences that you made in your life (e.g. a location where you lived once, a job that you had once, your former school, buying stuff at a gas station, etc.). A lot of "grown up" people have problems with wildly mashing different or genre-contradicting ideas together, without automatically making it gonzo. The reason why kids can pull that off so effortlessly, might be that they automatically frame their playing and imagination with their real life experience. The natural talent of magic realism. Kids can decide to view the memory of eating dinner with the family with the same amount of realism as the day when they were Metal Seadramon, teaming up with Barbie to steal the Kanohi Kraakhan from Action Man. Grown ups need a lot of effort to re-learn that way of perception.
And don't shy away from pairing weird settings with real emotions. Digimon was so good, because it tackled just that. You could have kids teaming up with crack-angels made of digital data and still take your time to meditate on topics like loneliness. And that made it so relatable. Because it explored a lot of feelings that I had as a kid / teenager and still managed to be delightfully over the top.
But I digress again.
The Character
I always was a big fan of the whole "Master and Apprentice" thingy of the Jedi / Sith. Especially in Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords. So let's take that for starters.
To make it a bit more wild, let's add a the memory of scrap collectors that were regularly driving through our hometown to collect old washing machienes, scrap metal, and such stuff. They always shouted "ALT-EISEN" to get attention, which translates as old iron and means scrap metal. Because of that they were collectively called the "Alteisenmann", which means old iron man.
And than I'll also throw in a shitty mini job at the local supermarket, because why not.
Here we go again:
- Kotor 2; Jedi Master / Apprentice
- Scrap collector; Old-Iron-Man
- Shitty job at supermarket
Same procedure as above. Let your brain play around with the parts and wait what it spits out in return.
Don't stress yourself. If you're not happy with the current result, just write down what you have at the moment, go for a walk of drink some tea and come back to it later.
And ...
Dimitri Aleigor
- Has been trained in 12 of the 13 nails of Iron-Magic by the old Jotte Schüchter. An ancient lady that lives on the junkyard two villages away from here.
- Thin and very pale teenager. Always a little dirty. Nimble, and looks a bit weak, but his bones are made of metal.
- Works in the local supermarket. Hates the Job from the bottom of his heart. In search for gold to finally be able to quit.
Nice! I'm happy with that one.
Let's turn him into a 24XX character:
Dimitri Aleigor
- Skills: Ironmagic (d10), Nimble (d8)
- Bones made of metal
- Inventory: 12 magic nails, employee-ID for the supermarket
- Goal: Find enough money to finally quit the job.
Yes! That works! I can already imagine him eating cheap noodles for dinner, or secretly drinking at a abandoned bus stop with his only friend, or invoking the pentacle of inner rust.
Onwards!
The Encounter
Let's make it quick with that one.
The Fragments:
- Teenagers, that secretly smoke cigarettes with their friends
- Road underpasses (I have a strange obsession with those. Ossulgarnen is actually the name of a fictional region beyond the underpasses, I've came up with some time ago. But that's for a different blog post)
- The fact that the "Trojan" was the first kind of malware that my family ever had heard about, and that it kind of became a moniker for all kinds of potential computer viruses at home.
After a little time and a relaxing walk those three turned into ...
Cigarette-Eyes
- Demons that lurk in the underpasses
- They disguise themselves as smoking teenagers in the shadow. But the glow of the cigarettes are actually their eyes.
- Want to create the Trojan Messiah. They are willing to share their extensive knowledge with you, if you use a cursed flash drive to infect a computer with a virus in return.
Ha!
Weird!
Well that whole mission worked out well, I guess. I can already see how Dimitri tries to find the Old Pool in order to steal the Serpent-Kid treasure and get out of his job. But before he can do that he has to make a deal with the Cigarette-Eyes to find out how to get there.
I don't know if I would want to use that process all the time, when I have to get an idea. But this time it definitely was a lot of fun.
So, kids! Try it out, if you want to!
Dig around in your weird and valuable heads. Search for the nostalgic ideas and associations that only you can have. Combine them into new strangeness!
Happy tinkering, crickets!