Characters

Feature: RENTON “Ren” SAULNIER

Male

Age 20

5′5″, 120lbs

Hair colour: Light brown

Eye colour: Dark brown

Date of Birth: March 18

Education: 3rd year photography student in college

Strongest Traits: His will to succeed by himself

Weakest Traits: His inability to take critisism or advice, and his emotional instability

Interests and Hobbies: Walking around his neighborhood in Victorian clothes photographing.  He also likes plastic dinosaurs that grow in water.  He takes pictures of each stage, and puts them all together in an animation on his computer.

Current Situation:  He left his rich family when he began college, seeking a life of his own beyond the expectations of his parents for him to take over the family business, Saulnier Electrics Inc. He lives alone in a student apartment building a short walk from the school campus. He lives on instant noodles and strong coffee.

This is a look at Ren, the main character of THE REALITY FILTER. Seems pretty normal, doesn’t he? The problem with Ren is that he’s so mixed up, he appears emotionless and uncaring, which when coupled with the information that he’s actually a murderer, doesn’t really make for a likable character. My challenge was exposing his weaknesses so that he looked pathetic and forlorn, unaware of how much the events of his life had really injured his emotional stability, and therefore make the audience feel bad for him. You can’t care about a story if you don’t care about the person that story is happening to, and I intentionally made this challenge for myself to create a monster of a main character that no one could like. The good thing about this is that there is always secondary characters.

 

Feature: Seishin

Novel: TEATHERED ROMANCE

B.J Note: Figures Seishin would be the first feature here, because I LOVE Seishin. Out of all the novels that I’ve written and all the characters/muses I’ve written with, Seishin has so far remained my favourite. For a bit of background info on him: I started working with him about three years ago now and his story is finished but in the editing stage, and currently on hold. He is probably the most articulate character I’ve worked with in that he says so much about me as an author as well as having a voice that is completely his own. I mean, even I didn’t know some of the things I would write with him, and I would find myself going, “Oh wow where did that come from!” sometimes at revelations. He was always very much an experimental character, but was excellent for exploring and expanding the diversity of my points of view and writing in general. Sure, he’s a fucked up guy but he’s had a rough life, can you blame him? We love him because he’s pathetic and stubborn, and true, and pure all at once; as if he’s every part of the human life cycle at once.

 

THIS IS SEISHIN (Warning – there may be some spoilers in here, I just want to point it out so no one ruins anything for themselves)

Seishin’s Holier-Than-Thou complex

 

Seishin’s ideas about religion are all derrived from the fact that he watched his sister commit suicide and then had it blamed on him.  He had always believed that he and his sister, although they were not related by blood, had been born from the same evil intending angel and cast away from Heaven for no reason at all except to suffer.  When his sister died, he tried to save her soul by burning incense in the doorway to her room, but his mother stopped him from doing it, she explained, so that the devil would find his sister’s soul and punish her for committing suicide.

 

He knows that they both have a monster inside of them, he refers to it as a monster because when he feels it swell, he knows that it’s something different, and it’s not the real him.  What he feels is his ego from vanity.  When he feels he is beautiful, when he feels loved, the “other” him comes out; he makes believe there are two of him.  One is pure, and one is a monster that lives within him.  When he feels that swell of ego, he believes he has separated from the pure him, which is why when Sugai left and he went to chase him, he said he left his purity behind in Japan.  He was prepared to do anything to have Sugai returned to him, if it meant abandoning his righteousness, so he became the monster, and locked the pureness away so no one could touch it.  He hoped to return to it once the monster had been satisfied.

 

Seishin is extremely religious.  He believes that the gods are always watching, yet he understands that the shrines built in Japan where people go to pray to them are where they reside.  They do not wander freely throughout the towns, and they do not enter houses.  Because of this, Seishin knows that the gods can’t see the sins he commits, like adultery and fornication, if he is inside his room.  When Seishin goes to England, he sees Charlotte praying knelt at her bedside and understands that in England, the gods are everywhere, they see everything.  Once he sleeps with Charlotte in his room in the house, Seishin knows that the gods have seen it, they judge him, and no matter how careful he is now, he won’t earn his right to return to Heaven.  This ultimately drives him to commit murder on more than one occasion, not caring anymore because he knows his soul is already damned.

 

Seishin’s sense of location

 

Seishin’s sense of location is completely flawed.  There are two places he has been, Japan and England. He understands that because he had to travel for many hours by boat to England, it is a different place. However, since he doesn’t really have any sense of time, he just figures because a lot of time passed as he was traveling, there was some way that he traveled to a different world as well.  While in England, he wonders where else there are portals to different worlds and times, and when he finds the lake that he likes to sit in the grass beside, he assumes that because it is so far away from the house, it must also be in a different time.  

 

This reasoning causes him to think of the different places he has been as according to the events that happened within them.  He saw Charlotte praying in her room, therefore this location to him is associated with the gods’ judgement.  No one ever finds him while he is sitting at the lake, therefore this location is a sanctuary to him.  In Japan, the bridge where he and Sugai often trained and danced is associated with where his love for Sugai is kept.  His bedroom is where he commits his sins, and so he is not there unless he feels judgement or if he is sinning.

 

Seishin’s sense of time

 

In relation to his sense of location, time does not concern Seishin.  The place where he lived in Japan was poor compared to the surrounding areas and so the people lived as if the technology the surrounding areas use had not been invented yet.  They keep extremely traditional with every method in which they live their daily lives.  Having not been exposed to such luxuries, Seishin’s sense of time is based on the events that have happened and the events that he looks forward to.  A day passes when the sun sets, and when the sun sets, he is to make a preformace.  

 

Seishin’s assassination

 

Had his mother not helped him escape from the village, Seishin would have been assassinated as punishment for murder.  A ritual would have taken place, much like a sacrifice to the gods that protect the village, and Seishin would have been drowned.  He often thinks about the ritual that would have been preformed when he is in the bath, or sitting next to the lake, knowing that even if he was naked, his long and unruly hair would have made it the perfect and most painful way he could die.  He knows that the more the sacrifice suffers at the point of death, the greater the reward given by the gods.  

 

Once he reaches his breaking point and his care not to sin dissolves, he does everything in his power to keep his life safe before he returns to Japan to reunite with his purity and he can sacrifice himself to save his own soul and return to Heaven so that he does not meet the same fate as his sister.  He thinks that if he drowns himself, it will not count as suicide, but sacrifice.  This is the only way that he knows he must die, and when he is thrown in jail, his hope is lost that he will become a sacrifice, and so he is ridden with grief that he must have the same fate as his sister.

 

Angels 

 

Before Seishin commits more sins, he believes that there are angels here and there which are searching for him, to collect him and bring him back to Heaven before he is too soiled to be brought back.  Seishin believe that Charlotte is one of those angels sent from Heaven to collect his soul.  When he saw her at the dock upon landing in England, she was alone, and as the people around him seemed to avoid him, they seemed to avoid her too.  In this way, he reasoned that it must mean there was something about her that caused those people to avoid her, something about her that wasn’t human itself, as he saw the sins that he made.  He wanted to love her, and yet he couldn’t.  He wanted to love her because he thought that this meant she would save him.  

 

Charlotte does actually fall in love with Seishin, because she herself is a girl of many complexities, but I don’t know her well enough to explain them. Seishin is seduced by her over and over because he wants to give in to her. He wants to be close to her, so much that, as he said, he can melt together with her, she can crawl inside him and under his skin. But he doesn’t want to touch her.  He doesn’t want to give her his sin in any way.  He doesn’t want to leave marks on her, or blacken her wings because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he feels something for her.  He thinks that if he does, it’s cheating on Sugai.  She controls him completely.

 

Once Seishin loses his patience, however, all he wants is to push her off her cloud, so to speak. He gives up being controlled and loved, and his endeavor is to take her place, to force his way into Heaven under her cover. He never loved her anyway.

 

Love

 

Seishin sense of love is complicated. It’s something that he has thrown around and has had thrown around carelessly, and so while it should mean very little to him, it means a great deal of everything. He says to Charlotte, a kiss is a form affection, sharing a bed is trust, and everything else he has become numb to.  

 

The fact that Seishin was not allowed to fall in love due to his profession put it in his head that love is a terrible thing, and that by feeling it, he will commit the greatest sin there ever was, on his path to righteousness. He begins to try to love only himself, with leads to his insane vanity and double of himself (the one that is pure).  The fact that he was raped on his 17th birthday, and his Mistress, thinking that it was completely consensual, told him not to fall in love, Seishin’s values of love were greatly warped.

 

The love Seishin feels for both Sugai and Charlotte separately are very different.  For Charlotte, Seishin wants to be good for her, so that she’ll save him.  He wants her to own him, he wants to hear demands and he wants to meet them.  He doesn’t love her in the sense that he is attracted to her, and in fact that he bends to her wishes when it comes to things like sex is only his way  of providing – in hopes that she will take her fill and when she has no more use for him, she will bring him to Heaven.  For Seishin, 

 

With Sugai, Seishin wants to control, and yet be dominated. To Seishin, his relationship with Sugai is completely equal, that is, he not only loves Sugai but respects him. They both havej something to gain from each other. Sugai is a swordsman training Seishin, when he knows that Seishin is above him in skill. In turn, Seishin is so consumed with the price there is to pay for Sugai’s lessons that he thinks the right way is for Sugai to overpower him in every aspect of their relationship.  To Seishin, this love for Sugai is a constant battle, and it is shown in the way Seishin is desperate toward him.  When he has Sugai’s love and tenderness, Seishin thinks it is wrong and so he pushes Sugai away.  However, when Sugai is evil towards him, Seishin becomes desperate and pleads with him, begging for the love he will ultimately push away.  To Seishin, every relationship is a battle.  

 

Seishin’s relationship with himself is also a battle between good and evil.  Seishin knows that just by living, he is sinning every moment with every breath he takes, because his existence is damned by a monster within him he never recognizes as Vanity.  To end the battle, he makes believe he can separate himself into this monster which lives in the world because it is marred already, and the pure part which he locks away in his room beneath his reflection (and later releases into a temple when he goes to england).  This separation, however, also becomes a battle of love when it is real to him, and can best be explained as Seishin wanting to neglect the purity in himself lest he waste it, yet not willing to do so because he doesn’t want to neglect himself and his health.  This sense of self-nuture gives him a false sense of love for himself, fueled by the vanity in him, which in turn causes him to picture dancing with himself, or masturbating thinking he is making love to himself.  

 

The purity that Seishin imagines while he thinks he’s having sex with himself is a direct result of his being raped.  Seishin sees purity, and wants to be the one to own it, to cleanse himself, even though essentially, it is himself.  He became jealous of life, and the world, for robbing him of his purity before he could lose it for himself (which generally has nothing to do with him begin raped, but him creating sins).  With a pureness that is separate from himself, he can be the only one to know it exists, it can be only for him, and he can take that purity away at his will.  He has complete control over it.

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