Separatists from an Empath World

[Jester85]

I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for here, I mostly just feel like I need to talk out loud (so to speak) and see if anybody else has any thoughts from an outside perspective.

So the character whose introductory chapter I am having an unanticipated amount of trouble is a member of an empathic, intensely gregarious culture who reserves exile for only the worst crime, murder, which is virtually unheard of on their homeworld. Exile is considered a fate worse than death because of how intensely communal and gregarious their people are. There have been only been a few exiles in their history, who went mad or died of loneliness after a short period of time on their own.

However, there is developing a small fringe group of separatists (the term I'm using for now until if/when I come up with a better one) who are attempting to live apart, believing the empathic communal mind-melding of their culture threatens to create a hive mind and remove individuality (for the record, I don't write this race as a hive mind, but that is the separatists' fear of where it could end up). They believe the exiles were so indoctrinated to believe you can't live apart from the people that they essentially laid down and died and didn't have the willpower to live. They believe you can find the will and mental/emotional self-sufficiency to live apart from the people with sufficient willpower and mental exercises.

Anyway, my character is the young son of two separatists who are more or less aimlessly wandering the galaxy on a ship with other expatriates and refugees. They are surviving thus far, but The Separateness has taken a toll on them and they are under a lot of internal stress and threatening to spiral into depression, albeit managing to at least do it more slowly. They're getting a bit ragged around the edges though.

I realize I'm kind of rambling here, but I think it's the characterizations of the parents I'm stuck on. I did have the father envisioned as "finding solace in the bottle", but I decided that was awfully cliched and considering the son will eventually become a villain, giving him a childhood with an alcoholic dad is awfully stereotypical. So I'm thinking of veering in a different direction. I'm just not sure where that is.

I also haven't yet figured out exactly why these two individuals are Separatists. It's easy to say "oh well, they feel like their culture is a hive mind", but while that might work for a socio-political movement, I feel it's flimsy motivation for actual individual people.

"Well, son, we feel like our people are getting a little too Vulcan, so we're gonna completely uproot our existence and wander the galaxy, subjecting us and you to immense emotional devastation and near-unbearable loneliness along the way".

Yea. They feel randomly motivated to me, and I haven't figured out what their deal is yet.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Can you put yourself in their shoes? Forget the trope, but act it out. If it were me:


I'd miss my friends and family
I'd be angry and wonder if I'd taken independent decisions - including my partner - or been forced
I'd hold onto whatever held me to what I'd previously been - so alcohol as a crutch only if it's part of the hive-mind ideal or so totally separate it's a statement in its own mind.

What I'm saying, maybe, is write as the character (even try a chapter or two in first to know them better) and don't worry about where it takes you?

My characters are always random, btw: they're often right, though...

 

[tinkerdan]

A lot is dependent on where you are going to and coming from with the term Empathy.

We all exhibit some forms of empathy-enough that autism is considered a condition where a person exhibits the least or practically no empathy.

Hyper empathy that would be turned on and on target all the time seems like it would be tiresome and make it difficult to know ones own feelings and then since it seems by empathy we mean understanding and expressing other's feeling on some basis, if we are flooded until our own feelings are saturated it would seem you would then have to rob from Peter to understand Paul because you no longer have a reliable basis built into yourself. A vast group of Empaths would saturate to a point where there would no longer be a sound basis for the empathy. I think they'd have to learn to shut it down.

That's not even counting the echo that would occur if there were a room of Empaths channeling each other constantly. The building wave of Empathy would eventually resonate with their personal feelings and shatter them into bits.

They might need to isolate themselves just to pick up the pieces.

 

[Laeraneth]

Here's a thought that comes to mind.

If you're from a race that's used to feeling emotion from all around, and are struggling with the separation from that, rather that doing something as cliché as disappearing into a bottle, they might start to act up to try and create more emotion and sensation in their life.
Ways that spring immediately to mind are by being threatening or frightening. Less obvious might be self-harm in some way to try and get a feeling of sympathy and compassion from the few others around them. In short, I would imagine they would seek to provoke the strongest emotion they can, because that's what they're lacking.

Inevitably, this is bound to ostracise people around them in the long term, but... I imagine that's your whole objective here

 

[Brian G Turner]

So I'm thinking of veering in a different direction. I'm just not sure where that is.

The father doesn't have to turn to a bottle - there are other forms of neglect he could force on the child.

For example, having lived longer in that society, depression from separation may hit the father hardest. He may become withdrawn, start ignoring his child, and his needs.

 

[hopewrites]

Or become suffocating in their over involvement. Hellicopter parents. Since to them it would seem normal, and to him, it would feel hypocritical.
Often our parents hypocrisies are more damaging than their neglect.

perhaps the society doles out assigned lives, and having been assigned an unsympathetic Life Assignment Officer in their youth, they were stuck with work they didnt enjoy or excel at. Thus they became dissidents.
Or they were part of an Emo-Crowd at school, found their parents ways unsatisfactory, or too restrictive (I imagin that going off world is discouraged not just because of the isolation factors. Other intelligent star-going beings would no doubt love to exploit a planet of empaths)