Pulling the Strings
May. 20th, 2019 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ernestTitle: Pulling the Strings
Fandom: Hamlet
Characters: Guildenstern, the Player
Summary: Predestination or manipulation, it hardly matters, except when it does.
Word Count: 200
The Player pulls the strings, but even he has been written to do so. Sometimes Guildenstern finds it a comfort to think that he’s not writing them into a corner so much as he’s read an act ahead and just knows how these things go. Sometimes that’s worse.
If someone had asked him back in his Wittenberg days he would have said without hesitation that of course manipulation is a worse fate than predestination. Now he’s tasted both — at least he’s fervently believed at various points that he was experiencing one of the other, and isn’t belief a central aspect of one’s personal reality? More and more he thinks he’d rather have someone push his actions to their own ends. He’d have a choice then, wouldn’t he? Even if the puppetmaster in question has studied him thoroughly enough to say with reasonable certainty that he’d respond one way, it doesn’t mean they know. It is a terrifying prospect, to be known, and he’s not sure that his closest friends who understand him best really know him. This impenetrability could feel absolutely isolating if he were a different man, but the distance between souls is as natural as that between electrons.
Fandom: Hamlet
Characters: Guildenstern, the Player
Summary: Predestination or manipulation, it hardly matters, except when it does.
Word Count: 200
The Player pulls the strings, but even he has been written to do so. Sometimes Guildenstern finds it a comfort to think that he’s not writing them into a corner so much as he’s read an act ahead and just knows how these things go. Sometimes that’s worse.
If someone had asked him back in his Wittenberg days he would have said without hesitation that of course manipulation is a worse fate than predestination. Now he’s tasted both — at least he’s fervently believed at various points that he was experiencing one of the other, and isn’t belief a central aspect of one’s personal reality? More and more he thinks he’d rather have someone push his actions to their own ends. He’d have a choice then, wouldn’t he? Even if the puppetmaster in question has studied him thoroughly enough to say with reasonable certainty that he’d respond one way, it doesn’t mean they know. It is a terrifying prospect, to be known, and he’s not sure that his closest friends who understand him best really know him. This impenetrability could feel absolutely isolating if he were a different man, but the distance between souls is as natural as that between electrons.