#114, Fears from Fiction: Thalassophobia (But Not Really)
Originally posted here on July 2, 2024.
Do you have any fears or aversions in this life that you attribute to your fictomere?
So, yes, kind of. An aversion, for sure, but not a fear so much, which is kind of interesting given that two other people in the DWW's "host collective" (our original host and main protector) are thalassophobic as fuck but I'm not even though
I'm the dick with a reason to be.Putting this under a cut for a mixture of length and content reasons. Content warning for, um, my dad trying to kill me when I was a kid, drowning, the ocean, salt water, the works. I AM OKAY NOW and he did a very bad job.
I was born back in 767 in what is now France, and even back then, some parents were really, really shitty, and didn't know how to be parents, and weren't ready for it, and sometimes they'd snap and do bad things. In my biological family, I was an only child, kind of an "oops." My dad didn't want kids, my mom was ambivalent about it, and I was kind of a difficult child to deal with due to my high energy and insatiable curiosity. So, when I was 6, my dad finally snapped and took me down to the ocean on a "father-son trip" and then tried to drown me.
Yeah, sorry to start with the attempted child drowning, but that's kind of the beginning of the explanation!
Obviously, he didn't succeed--instead, I Awakened, basically meaning I unlocked my wizard powers. My Avatar (the part of my soul that lets me do magic) manifested (unusual) in the form of a dragon (most unusual) and hauled my father off of me and pulled me out of the water (not how Avatars are supposed to work but I'm special). My dad obviously booked it, and that was the last I saw of either of my biological parents. I went on to get adopted by another mage who I came to call my mother, Guorna, along with my new older brother Tytalus and, later, my younger sister Pralix. It worked out for me in the end, and she was a better parent than both of my biological ones combined.
Anyway, see, here's the thing about mages: a lot of our powers, strengths, and weaknesses are very symbolic. The things that happen to us and shape us, before, during, and after Awakening affect us throughout our lives and reflect themselves in our magic and the way that our bodies become supernatural. Sometimes, we develop flaws or weaknesses, things that hurt us more, like werewolves and silver except I'm not a werewolf and for me it was salt water. After my Awakening, salt water burned like fire. For those familiar with World of Darkness games, touching salt water in any great amount deals an aggravated damage to me. For everyone else, that's called "really bad" and is basically a really severe burn that takes a lot of time or a lot of magic to heal and can scar pretty badly.
So, yeah, I developed a pretty strong aversion to the ocean. I wasn't a big fan of vast expanses of water that would kill me if I fell in, and I wasn't too keen on anyone finding out about my weakness--after all, that kind of thing could get me killed by my many, many magical rivals that I ended up with in adulthood. Unfortunately, it's not just ocean water--it's all salt water, meaning that crying was, uh.... a real endeavor, let me put it that way. So I also developed a pretty strong "don't cry" reflex, which ultimately was probably bad for my emotional state, but what else was I supposed to do, realistically?
So, I'm scared of the ocean, right?
Right?
No <3 I love ocean visuals. I love looking at boats. I think it's neat. Maybe it's because I never got to know it very well, and it's a sort of "you want what you can't have" thing. If you plopped me in-source down next to the ocean I'd probably be afraid--not in the way of a phobia, but in a way of "there's millions of gallons of LAVA right there," you know? I think I'm now just pretty cautious about the whole thing, mostly because, well.... Tanix and Raphyel.
They are both terrified of the ocean, Raphyel more than Tanix. Raphyel's is also a more general phobia, while Tanix's focuses mostly on the deep and the dark, the inability to see or hear a possible Ocean Beast That Could Kill You coming, as well as the crushing pressure of the depths near the bottom. Both get freaked out even going into the ocean in video games, and while Tanix is usually fine in a boat on the surface, Raphyel can get pretty flighty about even that. Between the two of them, Tanix especially since he's been around in the system for an extremely long time, the body's been trained to have a fear response to facing down the ocean a lot of the time. Pictures of colorful reefs or individual creatures are usually fine, documentaries are usually fine, but portrayals in video games or certain shots showing the ocean going down, down, down, darkening and hiding the bottom, tend to freak us out a little. Add to the fact that we're almost never without one or both of them in the front, and it means the ocean kind of freaks out the whole system a little bit.
I mean, come on. I had a healthy aversion and now that salt water won't fucking kill me, my headmates are too scared to go near it! What's with that? Oh well. Some things just weren't For Me, I guess, like the ocean, or crying (Until now! It's not all it's cracked up to be), or, I don't know, anything between 1133 and 2009, for me. (I had a Big Vampire Nap, long story.)
In conclusion, don't try to drown kids because then they get burned by salt water and are pretty annoyed about it for, like, 1300 years. Thanks for reading!