Episode #324: How To Respectfully Write A Hot Button Topic {2}

A classic waterfall pic from the 2010s to brighten up your Monday.

Welcome back my friends, to the blogger that doesn't ends (18 years and counting). Last week's post featured an in depth look at how I chose to make the Aztec culture/society a medium sized part of my story with two of my characters.

This week's post will touch upon Heaven, Hell, Limbo & Purgatory and how they were integrated into the story in various capacities.

For starters, I chose to turn that group of three into a hybrid business corporation/recruitment complex. Again, I was always fascinated by the "what ifs" scenarios that are often explored in other mediums, like literature and celluloid. So I took inspiration from that Albert Brooks movie, and created my own version of those four.

I created Limbo to be a universal clearing house for the other three conglomos. A recruitment center if you will, or to be more specific, a family run recruitment center, where your soul goes to be judges on where you should be moved onto next.

I called the overlord of this vast realm, Lord Visigoth, because reading/listening about early worlds history confined me that thew Visigoth's were bad-asses, and what would be more interesting than a proverbial badass who had a family that he deeply loved and cherished.

In addition to the overlord of Limbo being an empathetic badass, I added a healthy dose of realism to his family: his wife is deceased and appears as a semi-solid apparition. I never hinted at precisely what the illness was that caused her death, and I would like to think that her death influenced the humanity in Lord Visigoth.

I wrote Lord Visigoth as a complex man. One who, even though is physically is a man's man (muscular, tall etc); is quite self-conscious about his looks; has a lifelong friendship with one of the character's mother, yet never flaunts it or crosses the personal boundaries that his family has; is awkwardly trying to stretch his emotional experience beyond any synonym for the word "angry".

In addition to Limbo being a clearing house for the recently deceased, as all religions might have. I also touch upon the very real concept of reincarnation. Some religion's tenets have reincarnation as a theme, and since I had created a a whole other species/culture called "sentients" that are deeply involved, so it was a no-brainer to show how one might become a sentient.

Another oddity in this story, is that Limbo isn't actually mentioned outright. It is called "The Realm" once or twice, but otherwise, it's either implied or inferred depending on a given situation.

I think that, overall, I wanted Limbo to be as nuanced entity that everyone could understand and appreciated. By "nuanced" I mean it's a blend between a conglomo and a proverbial mom & pop store, in that everyone should be treated with dignity and compassion, and not as a particular unit to be shuffled around.

So in a nutshell, this is my personal take on Limbo. I always felt that Limbo as an entity always fell somewhere in between what Hollywood portrays and what the various world religion's portray it to be.

Strangely enough, this is the only concept of the afterlife in which I feel this way. I'm not quite sure how definite my feelings are for the remaining three concepts that I'd mentioned in the beginning, but that is something I should definitely explore in the future.

Happy Monday to one and all.

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