My suffering question mainly referred to the fact that in some of your stories it’s not just a temporary state the characters go through during their transformations, but rather perpetual they stay in, completely aware of their new grotesque images, not ever growing to accept them.

(Here is the second addenda to my metawriting entry on suffering.)

So, the original anonymous has a follow up. So, the question, originally stated, asked why it is so important that my characters suffer? Now, we can amend that question to be, “Why is it so important that my characters suffer perpetually?”

I can answer this question, but we have to take a bit of a detour through some Classical Literature first. People have been asking me about my various inspirations, and it occurred to me as I was writing that last metawriting journal that there is one big influence I have forgotten to mention, and that is Dante Alighieri, the author of The Divine Comedy, of which the first book, Inferno, is the most widely read. I don’t know how many were curious enough to click through the link when I mentioned contrapasso, but it is a term which came out of Inferno, and means, essentially, the situation whereby someone who has committed a wrong suffers some form of punishment which fits the original crime. In each of the nine circles of hell, the damned are punished in a variety of ways, such that their sins, in life, are reflected in their eternal punishments. This had…a profound impact on me, and my writing, I think, especially upon those stories which use the revenge justification, though I’m certainly not the first person to include it in an MC/TF story–contrapasso is a pretty prevalent theme.

So, why do my characters suffer perpetually? Well, focusing on the revenge stories first, it is a way of sending characters to hell. Their original identities die, by means of radically altering their personas and bodies, and they are then subjugated to some form of contrapasso. The crudest rendering of this, by me, was in “Sinful Revenge,” where the sins of various college students come back to haunt them in various altered realities.

Now, here’s the funny thing about Dante–he was a firm believer in forgiveness and repentance. The people in Hell aren’t the only sinners around–in Purgatory, there are plenty of other sinners, but the difference is that, in Purgatory the sinners are repentant, and in  Hell the sinners are unrepentant. I generally try to give my characters an equal chance. Most of the time, they have a way out, i.e. they could not be horrible people, but because they are generally unrepentant, they doom themselves to perpetual torment. 

Of course, that’s just for revenge stories. I can’t say how many of my stories, which use the other two forms of justification (Sadism and Masochism), also contain perpetual suffering. I would say Masochism stories, by definition, don’t, because the main character usually wants the suffering to be inflicted upon them, even if it is only at the subconscious level. That said, I’m sure that in some Sadistic stories, the person has been inflicted with permanent suffering that they didn’t deserve, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Sucks to be them, I suppose.