I'm proposing a character, Virginia Remnant, the historian of psychoanalysis. She knows about history of psychoanalysis in the world. People will be able to consult her. She is interested in phenomena that exist barely, subconsciously or liminally. Things in this category include dreams, altered states of consciousness, the tip of the tongue phenomena, memory, nostalgia and things that are vestigial.
Although she sees herself as an academic, taking herself too seriously, she's currently employed as a reporter on the news to do investigative reporting. Her character would also be appropriate to be the Webmistress for the world, if it seems like we need a character to fit that role. Right now she is interested in Imaline's problems and how she fits into the history of the world. She is having trouble getting an interview.
Virginia is conducting her research through lucid dreaming, which she has cultivated as a research method. Virginia comes on after Imaline and asks if anyone has seen her.
There is a shot of her in the mirror looking for Imaline. Three possible ways to represent Virginia: 1. Still frames flash by, narration over it. 2. as a Web only character, to welcome folks to the site and provide a little backstory bidding them good luck as they fall down the rabbit hole or whatever. She could also be the character to explain to people how to submit their dreams on the dream submission page. In this representation she could just be a cartoon with a bubble. 3. We could show her whole body, talking with a notebook. She could be small and against a white background. First, she shows up at the top left then blips any time we want to put a cut in down to the middle bottom for example.
Here is some dialog for Virginia: Four more books have to be written! The problem with being a historian, as I see it is that not much really ever happens. Most scholars busy themselves reconstructing past events. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this isn't useful. I just think it's more indicative of what's happening in Dreamworld, the subconscious. So I've decided to go directly to the source. This Fulbright grant I've got gives me one year to complete the work, interviewing by lucid dreaming. It's all very simple and difficult. Basic but complex.
Virginia is reporterish. She crushes mysteries into small pulverized bits. She drops lots of pieces of events which structure life. She sees everything as very structured and structurable. A direction she might go in the way of character development is she could develop some inconsistencies in her thinking via her research.
"A skeuomorph is a design feature, no longer functional in itself, that refers back to an avatar that was functional at an earlier time. The dashboard of my Toyota Camry, for example, is covered by vinyl molded to simulate stitching; the simulated stitching alludes back to a fabric that was in fact stitched, although it no longer serves that function in my car. Skeuomorphs visibly testify to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication" (16). Hayles, Katherine. "Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics" in Virtual Realities and Their Discontents ed. Robert Markley. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
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