[RANT] Are All Bug Lovers just Discount Fabre or Something Lesser? Reactive Subjectivity and Loss of Coherence in the Times of Narrative Fatigue
(Public Ver.)
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"Narrative Fatigue", the term I coined just now, is of no research value thus far, and pure mind-metabolic waste from my arty farty soul that's blocked from time to time. Suffered from that quietly but couldn't pinpoint it. And me thinks many adulting person gets this feeling, we have a trained eye on labels, stories, structured meaning sequences as stimuli and expected emotional responses to be triggered within limited range. We were trained to have an unspoken answer to everything: this guy loves weird unmarketable sentimental things and they have too much free time. Wise enough to deconstruct, not skilled enough to build, sensitive enough to experience pain.
Mass media and IOT intensified this fatigue and will continue to do so. I'm not an adolescent anymore, although I appear to be a younger person with too much stress written over my face, I am still pretty much unwise and impulsive, I just hide it well enough.
So when I published this "bumblebee comic" on REDDIT I'm suddenly just another bug dork who has an abnormal life-fetish and lowkey insane.
(Of course no one said that! It's me over thinking.)
When people said they "love bug lovers", I wanted to ask "in what sense?" In a sense of me, as a humanoid decoration that's exposed and slowly withering under digital-industrial elements, to the boring surroundings of numbing modernity before another global conflict? In a sense of me, as an overly empathetic human, because bugs are not important at all? Do people expect me to fit in the mold of Fabre, the long dead etymologist who somehow still has monopoly of categorized identity over all people who are drawn to land arthropods? Or people expect me to be the famous comic artist who mourn for the departure of all kinds of animals? Or am I just something lesser? Less fame, less luxury, less time less everything else. Therefore I have a lighter soul, the only thing heavy enough is the agony in my chest.
While facing dogs and cats and other domesticated mammals in front of fellow humans I felt uneasy, they expected me to pet the engineered species that's designed to contain human loneliness. But when I sit with them alone, I don't have a problem with these warm fur faces. I guess...that's why I like bugs. And sharks, venomous snakes, scorpions, spiders, these are all stigmatized cool creatures; no one loved them, no one expected someone to love them, so I love them. But in the fast changing cultural landscape, I witness people announce things and become what they weren't. All of a sudden bug lovers can be boxed into Fabre(s) tagged with "40% off FOR SALE".
So...narrative fatigue. Or symbolic demise. Or bastardized meaning. What was once special isn't anymore, the unique soil and the very quietness to grow and feel has been washed away by abusing technologies and the means of meaning production. It's so perverse. I need to get this outta my head.
Well then.
I have that answer already, just need to revisit and embody it. Perfectly delusional. Okay I flushed the toxic outta the system. Time to shut up and move on