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Voices and Masks
Mar. 19th, 2016 12:01 pmYou think you would've done any better? Sure, we were naïve, but we're young, brainwashed by movies and video games. You know how romantic comedies get people stuck in broken relationships? It was the same for us, just we thought we were heroes.
Someone shows you a secret world, gives you mystic powers, tells you to fight the darkness, what would you think? You might doubt it at first, question being the chosen ones. But you wouldn't let yourself be convinced?
We didn't think of it as selfish. We were fighting monsters, doing what we were told was necessary. Sure, it felt good to get stronger, build your power. We thought that's just how practice, how victory worked. It never crossed our minds that it was a reward system being doled out, that we were being manipulated. That what we thought was conformation we were doing the right thing was coming from them, too. That they had designed the images we saw of the monsters we fought.
In the end, it was like a drug. Could we have stopped? It's easy to say that we should've. But we weren't questioning, taking a step back, thinking logically. We were just spending our days waiting for the next hit of our power fantasy.
But it's not just our school, any more. Our enthusiasm for killing the monsters they showed us reached to the highest levels of government. And there's no power of love that's going to fix things now. No mystical concoction that will restore things to sanity.
Just us, watching them and the world we created.
Someone shows you a secret world, gives you mystic powers, tells you to fight the darkness, what would you think? You might doubt it at first, question being the chosen ones. But you wouldn't let yourself be convinced?
We didn't think of it as selfish. We were fighting monsters, doing what we were told was necessary. Sure, it felt good to get stronger, build your power. We thought that's just how practice, how victory worked. It never crossed our minds that it was a reward system being doled out, that we were being manipulated. That what we thought was conformation we were doing the right thing was coming from them, too. That they had designed the images we saw of the monsters we fought.
In the end, it was like a drug. Could we have stopped? It's easy to say that we should've. But we weren't questioning, taking a step back, thinking logically. We were just spending our days waiting for the next hit of our power fantasy.
But it's not just our school, any more. Our enthusiasm for killing the monsters they showed us reached to the highest levels of government. And there's no power of love that's going to fix things now. No mystical concoction that will restore things to sanity.
Just us, watching them and the world we created.
