beccaelizabeth | Immortality and personality

I've been pondering some Highlander with the serial numbers filed off ideas.

That means thinking which are the good bits to my mind, and what mechanisms I could use to port them without keeping the whole world.

When the TV magazines screwed up describing it (which was often) they usually called it a time travel show, which, I guess you could think if you had two line descriptions of the then and now nature of any given episode. But the then is all memory, Immortals only time travel the slow way, one day at a time.

So one way to file the numbers would be to do time travel by scooping people out of the past, and then you get this whole range of versions of Normal to compare contrast with the here now. Lots of interesting bits. Plenty of room to be really novel just by looking at people who are not white guys. Room to assemble an adventure party made of every cliche and then pull the cliches to pieces. Many possibilities. And it resolves the time travel rules by saying you can't change the past, you can't travel back, you can just grab missing people and travel them forwards. Then instead of now being judgey and superior at the past you get the past being judgey and superior at us. Class.

But.

Highlander was also about interesting stuff about how the way we're raised shapes us but doesn't define us. Like, Duncan kept some stuff, like his strong sense of clan, and dumped a lot of other stuff, like the idea you'd have to be born in it. ... summarising a centuries old guy with a five season tv show makes me want to yeah but myself. ANYway, Duncan's life had distinct eras and he acted slightly differently in each, but kept a common core of values. And because he was the hero protagonist there wasn't huge variation in those values, under the assumption he'd mostly been getting it right. He was Our Noble Hero all along, more or less. Which is why Methos is more interesting. But you have to sell the audience on the idea people can change that much. It's like they're free willed beings or something.

So these really old guys, they have so many lifetimes, some of them bother with different names, they change and grow so much, that's the interesting stuff.

But you can combine that with reincarnation.

Because then you have a tension between a core that is somehow somewhat continuous, and the way being raised in each era shapes them. Like, if they arrive in infancy with all their memories then they're just going to be very grouchy babies who have to learn a new language again, and you get problems that are basically like child sized Immortals or that episode where O'Neill got cloned teenage or like any child vampire ever, they look tiny but the entire story is about how they're secretly an adult. And very rapidly that gets creepy, because any line that says oh wow they're so mature is just... no. Nope. That can be used so poorly.

So they get reborn and they *don't* remember, and they're just a kid again, in the then there. And then they start to remember. Like Kendra and Carter, the Hawks, on Legends of Tomorrow and the Flash. Except the show did very little with that, being so busy. But Kendra struggled to integrate the people she had been and the person she was in that life, whereas Carter was just... kind of the same jerk always? I don't know. Very sketched in, he was.

But like, Methos has been a slave, and a slave owner, we're pretty sure, he's seen that as a punishment and as an economic system, he's had time to have his opinion shaped by a changing world. It's interesting.

But if someone reincarnated, they'd be a slave owner who grew up to *remember* being a slave, or possibly a slave who remembered being an owner. And they'd have to put the lives together in their head somehow. And that conversation civilisations have, the one where we remember all the bad things but can't reach the past to do anything about them, the one where part of the argue is how responsible now is for that past? They'd have to have in one brain. And it seems like there's a lot of mileage in that.

Or a lot of ways to go wrong, obviously.

But like, for Immortals there's a triggering event that changes them, for Kendra there's a trigger that wakes up her old lives, so you could have a bunch of regular people wandering around until they start remembering their before lives.

But it would get interesting because eventually it would be like Highlander in that they'd start to get to know each other. There'd be places to meet each other, life after life. There'd be societies made up of reawakened people.

And there'd be people like Carter and Kendra, who had one kind of relationship before. But there's no particular reason for them to have it again, no magical pressure or anything, just like memory and emotion like everyone.

Only then you get the story, Kendra loses Carter, and then meets another one of him that was born later. But if you take the time travel out of that story, twenty year old Kendra meets twenty year old Carter, he gets killed where she survives, so then *forty* year old Kendra meets twenty year old not-Carter. Only not even that, because first time around he'd remembered and was trying to wake her up, so he could be older and have lost her before. And... you get a relationship as a relay race, where they remember who they have been, but look right past who they are now. I mean they picked up the future incarnation of Prince Khufu and started calling him Carter and ignored the entire idea that he'd ever had a life before he met her. It's creepy. I am creeped. There is story in that.

But then there's the creepy stories where they don't meet at twenty, they meet at 15, but they remember being... we don't even know.

Or one of them is thirty and they've waited fifteen years for the other one to come back and why wait any longer? When they can remember four thousand years, what does it matter?

And I feel it matters and I do not want to support the creepiest corners of that configuration.

But then there's the reincarnation stories where someone knows it is possible to be soulmates - to have traveled together before - and to not necessarily wake up and know it. And they meet someone and they just click, despite the age gap. And they do some math and it's possible this person they lost is back by now. But they don't know. So what do they do?

I like the kind of soulmate stories that decide it really doesn't matter what fate or karma says, they get along because they get along.

But if reincarnation is a thing, it's a Thing.

And then there's just the basic alteration to problem solving if you've taken death out of the equation. Sure, it might take them decades to respawn, but you've been playing for centuries, so what's twenty years here or there? And, okay, it's a lot, but it means killing someone is not a solution, it's a pause button. You cannot kill them, they're immortal, just slowly. So then how does that alter your whole approach to the world? What do you do about people when you simply cannot get rid of them?

And what do you do when there's only a handful of people who know what it is to live life like you do, but you kind of hate a lot of them a lot?

So much story in it.

I guess unfortunate versions are in the edges of a bazillion setups.

One of the guys at the science fiction group at the pub thinks time travellers wife is creepy because visiting wife as a young woman is like grooming. I have no knowledge of the source text, I dont know what he meant in specific, but in general he thought it was just creepy to be nice to a young version of his wife, because young. Which, yeah, but, I'm imagining meeting someone I want to spend my whole life with, and then, like, with a time machine you could? Even the bits you didn't yet? And obviously that would go weird because you'd be such different people at different phases of your life, but. I feel like, if I sent my person back in time to tell teenage me I am going to meet that person and it'll all be okay, then that's a nice shiny thing. But, it would be an older person talking to a teenage person, and that can read creepy. But in my head the difference is I send them? Like I pick that one and decide they should go visit a few days in my past. It feels different if they pick me and then go visit to give themselves a pre introduction.

I read a Legends of Tomorrow fic that made Rip really creepy simply by sending him to make a subconsciously good impression with the people he wanted to do stuff for him later. Like, he'd turn up at moments they wouldn't remember, but do small nice things for them, so they'd think well of him when he turns up to introduce himself later. And it's like, if he goes back to do small nice things for his friends, red bike when you were twelve, then that's nice. But if he does it first so they'll change their behaviour towards him, that's not nice.

And yet as far as time's concerned he always did it first?

Time doesn't care about motives.

People care though.

So. Highlander. To get different bits of it, maybe do time travel, maybe do reincarnation.

Or, possibly just have people who don't die. But if they don't play the Game and don't do the lightning thing when they cut heads off, that's a big enough change. There's more than one immortal in the world.

The Quickening is another huge thing though. Like, they absorb a whole life and experience, and sometimes it might change their behaviour, like Richie falling for that woman when he'd killed her husband. But I don't think I'd keep that bit in a new story because it makes such a creepy setup, I wouldn't want to make a world where you get that much out of killing someone.

But it effectively was one of the reasons I found Eobard Thawne as Harrison Wells interesting, because we didn't know how much he'd got out of him, with the high tech body swap. Did it include his quickening? And if so, how much did it change him?

... later events say no and not, but, boring now.

But what if reincarnation, if you meet someone and feel that connection that says you'll know them if you just remember how, if you find them magnetic and fascinating, and... they remember what kind of evil they were a lifetime or three ago.

Just, how long until you could let things go?

A death sentence would be a twenty year... holiday in some respects, probably not though, there's a lot of the world that's not nice to grow up in.

And what if it was someone you HAD executed, last life around, but you are still mad about whatever they did?

See to my mind it matters what people do now and next, but that... that doesn't seem to apply like five minutes after they did a Bad Thing. The whole crime and punishment thing goes in first.

So would it matter if they'd gone to prison last lifetime around?

What even would punishment be like for immortals? Like, if they're not going to die and they're not going to get old, does prison really feel like a Thing? I mean probably, because they had stuff to do and now cannot do it, but. What's a proportionate response when immortals are involved? You'd have to go back to the point of prison and punishment, where it's supposed to change their behaviour, but others say it's supposed to punish them just as if that's the thing itself. But how do you change an immortal's behaviour if they're just that used to being themselves?

Reincarnation temporarily messing with memory would give them a whole early lifetime of being someone else. How different depends on the story, but still, someone else. Might be done just to hope you rolled a nicer incarnation next.

Like the Doctor is always the Doctor? Or hoping the Master becomes the Doctor? Becomes Yana anyway.

Too many variables, tweak too many settings and you can argue any version.

But some of the interesting stuff is history, civilisations, if and how ethics change over time. If your guy generally does the right thing, how has he been judging that. Stuff like that.

To do that you could use time travel.

But some of it is person stuff, how environment shapes behaviour, shapes self. To what extent are we a unique self, not a product of our experiences? And then you'd get long lives with lots of changes to make contrasts, or reincarnation to see what they people have in common when they've forgotten everything. Or Dark Matter, with the mindwipes that still leave someone in place.

I haven't finished watching season two. I could go do that.

But, lots of different stories to possibly tell.

... would really help to pick one and tell it...

Immortality and personality

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