Amnesiac characters?

[Ireth]

I have a character in a RP who at a point in the near-ish future will undergo an accidental but life-saving transformation from a Fae to a human, and lose all memory of his Fae life as a result. Trouble is, I'm not sure how to realistically portray amnesia of any sort, magic notwithstanding. Aside from the fact that he won't remember his own name or who his friends and enemies are, there are other kinds of knowledge that I'm really not sure about, how they'd be affected and all. Can anyone give me some advice?

EDIT: If this is more suitable for the Research forum, would one of the mods please move it there? I wasn't entirely sure because of the magic issue, which steers it away from strictly real-life research. Thanks.

 

[ThinkerX]

I'm afraid I can't help you much here, unfortunately. You are talking about amnesia in a non-human species.

For a time in the past, though, I was a driver for a van service, which among other services, carted alzheimers (sp?) patients about - people who'd effectively lost all of their recent memories. In some cases this memory loss was really severe - as in not remembering who I was from minute to minute, but at other times they could recollect in great detail events from thirty years ago. The episode that stands out was the one spry old fellow who started ranting and raving about having to get a certain local politician out of office when we drove by a campaign sign. I'd never heard of the politico in question - but it turned out, that thirty years earlier this chap who'd lost most of his memory played a role in getting him out of office. Another time we drove past a building and he announced that someday he was going to buy that place - but it turned out he had bought it, and then sold it twenty years earlier. There was another one as well who was amazingly lucky at Bingo, of all things. (They played for toys rather than money, but he had large cardboard boxes full of them which he'd won.)

Memory be a tricky thing. Going way, way out on a limb...it is possible your character might never regain all his memories. Then again, if he is anything like the alzheimer patients I used to deal with, he might see something fairly trivial and have a flashback of sorts.

 

[ascanius]

There are actually two types of amnesia, Anterograde is which the inability to form new memories, and Retrograde which is the loss of existing memories. Also usually only one type of memory is affected, either automated memory or abstract/personal. So someone might forget who they are, name, friends, etc but walking, talking, languages, skills etc remain or the opposite can happen. So if your character has Retrograde Amnesia of the personal identity and experience then most likely that character will remember how do to everyday things and special skills.

I have a character who starts out with amnesia. The only thing I portrayed was an absence of any long term memories along with his name. I think your best bet would be to treat that character as if they were meeting people for the first time yet everyone else (friends and the lot) speaks to him with familiarity.

Another thing you might want to consider is the characters desire to know what it is they don't remember. My story starts out with a character trying to figure out who he is. I would think it would rankle someone to have a big whole where their past life should be.

 

[ascanius]

nice caught the double post before anyone else posted.

Quick question. When you say this character loses all memory of their fae life, what do you mean by all?

Also what is the nature of the transformation. Is it physical or psychological trauma or magic that causes it? If it's physical and depending on the severity and what happens I can give you a pretty good idea of what to expect. If it is magical then you can do whatever you wish, you can do the same with trauma too if you want I suppose.

 

[JCFarnham]

The first thing I would do Ireth is define the character's "Fae life". Are we talking his memory of past event involving him, or are we simply talking of the Fae themselves? Or both? If it's the memory kind then you can effectively cut him back to square one. He knows nothing (aside from the walking, talking, speaking that kind of stuff). If you want specifically Fae based memories his past will seem all the more patchy. Like.. He would remember he was somewhere, what he did there, but he wouldn't remember the details of it because the details are of the Fae. See what I mean?

The complete retrograde amnesia angle can work (and has... a lot), but I personally would be more inclined to make it more magically specific and include only Fae related memories. A swiss cheese memory scape would be quite fun to play around with I think. It would come out a lot more like alzheimer's and other related illnesses in the end. Knowing little bits, but no specifics would be more confusing. More chance for plot?

So. Summary: Define what you mean by Fae memories. Once you have a list of them, you can separate them from stuff that wouldn't get affected. Then you'll have some idea of how to play it. What he does know could be (should be?) more important than the fact he doesn't know everything else. But that's just my opinion, this is your character after all

Play with it, maybe write a couple a shorts of amnesiaics of varying types to see how it works. Knowing how each works might give you a better idea of how you want to play this Fae-turned-human.

We are talking RP character here (I've been there). If it were me I would feel like I could get away with more than if it were published in print. Are your fellow rpers going to worry? Anyway, from the perspective of where I am in life NOW I would undertake some exploratory writing before playing the character proper.

 

[Ireth]

ascanius: Thanks for the info about the types of amnesia. Couldn't quite remember the specifics about either of them.

I mean "all" of his Fae life in the sense that he wakes up post-transformation as a human, with no knowledge of who he is, where he came from (i.e. Faerie) or what he was before. He may or may not receive hints that he isn't what he's meant to be, like being harmed by iron like a Fae would be even though he's now human.

The transformation is purely magical -- the Fae is badly injured and close to death when a healer finds him and tries to help, but the healer's magic clashes with the Fae's Glamour, and what was meant to be a spell to bring the Fae back from the brink of death ends up binding him into a mortal body and erasing his memory of being a Fae (as well as healing the wound).

I should clarify that there are other instances of Fae becoming mortal in the backstory to this RP, but the circumstances are very different. The original two Fae-turned-human were bound into mortal bodies as a punishment for heinous crimes, and it took both Courts to perform the necessary magic; the victim were then set into a cycle of perpetually being born as humans, living out their lives, dying and then being reborn all over again, with no end in sight. They have currently been in the cycle for about a thousand years.

This instance of a healing gone awry is unique -- the Fae in question has no idea what's going on when it happens, nor can anyone really explain it to him afterwards for fear of freaking him out. The healer whose fault it (partially) is will be very torn up about this, since to a Fae, being mortal is a fate worse than death. And unlike the ones I described above, this Fae has no guarantee that he will be reborn after dying of old age. Since Fae have no souls, they have no afterlife, and death is (normally, see above) permanent and ends in oblivion.

JCFarnham: See above for definition of his "Fae life." Since he used to be a Fae, his memory of anything involving them would naturally extend to his own memories, and being over a thousand years old (and part of a people who date well back into pre-Christian history) means he has a lot of them to lose. I'm not sure how your "magically specific" idea would work in that instance, though as I said above, he might wind up getting hints about his previous life by one means or another. Much of the upcoming plot involving him will be geared toward him trying to find who and what he was, being torn between living with the non-Fae he calls friends and the Fae who try to draw him back to live among them in the woods of Faerie.

As for my RPing partner worrying, I don't think there's much of a chance of that happening. One of her characters is the younger of the first two Fae-turned-human I described in my reply to ascanius, and in any case, we do our best to discuss everything together as we go, so we'll work it out somehow. Exploratory writing sounds like a good idea though.

 

[JCFarnham]

Okay, so the plot you're going for is him re-discovering the past. Feel free to ignore my suggestions then. Those were more like "If I were doing this I would ..." admittedly that's not good feedback so I'll apologise for that.

When I rped (I focus more on my own writing for publication now), I played a couple of character with mental disorders. One had anti-social pd, mixed with general narcisistic sociopath-ness. The last thing I wanted to do was to get it wrong and alienate people with a dodgy portrayal, so I did, probably too much, research. I didn't explore as much as I should have, but in the end people responded well to that character. Much better in fact than the characters I didn't research.

It may just be rping at the end of the day, but it's about the experience isn't it. So, good luck with your character. I like the sound of itso far.

 

[Kit]

As pertains to all mental ailments, the brain (especially its off-the-rails apects) is still not very well understood- and the types of possible manifestations are legion.

It would probably be helpful for you to look up some case studies. But you will have decent leeway to tailor your character's particular affliction to what will make your story good.

 

[psychotick]

Hi, Actually you can google blogs of amnesiacs, I've read a few of them in the past as I was researching something similar. The one thing I would say is that they're all different. Some forget everything from before a certain point, some only forget bits and pieces. It probably depends more on how the amnesia was generated, psychological or physical trauma. Most remember their skills, so if they learnt to play the paino before, they still can. But some, a few very unfortunates forget even those, and are left as almost children.

Also often the memories are misfiled rather then lost, and some people reported not remebering things etc, but feeling a connection / familiarity to them. Some said they dreamed of things from the past as well, but they didn't make sense. And one thing that came across a lot was that people lied about it, a lot. They didn't want to admit to others that they didn't know them, so they became quite good at faking.

Most people with amnesia will get their memories back, but how they return and whether they return fully varies wildly.

As a sort of template, for a character who lost his memory and keeps losing it, I'd recommend reading Gene Wolfe's Soldier in the mist, and its sequal. Good reads.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Ireth]

Thanks for the advice, Kit and Greg. Dreaming of the past sounds like an interesting way to get the character's memories back little by little, and it could be fun to throw in bad memories along with good ones.