Most fictional amnesia has a Dramatic Recovery where boom, all of the memories come back at once. I generally take that to mean that the memories are still there (and hence all of the neural patterns, connections, etc), it's just that their recall is impaired. That's why they still remember things like language, how to tie their shoes, and what physical sensations mean they need to seek a bathroom if they don't want to soil themselves. And so, I tend to take this to mean that the character's personality is largely intact (although possibly not completely) because their brains are pretty much the same except for the impaired recall. This is probably why TVTropes calls this laser-guided amnesia. =P
I liked amnesia tropes better when I was a kid, because then my heroes and heroines could Dramatically forget their past and then Dramatically remember it and reveal it to everyone. It had pretty much the same sort of appeal as Destined Heroes and Prophecies and so forth -- it made characters Special. Now, I generally consider myself to have grown out of that, and I find the trope tedious most of the time.
I've seen it used acceptably by some authors. Lois McMaster Bujold has a sci-fi 'verse where medical technology for bringing people back from the dead tends to involve varying amounts of memory loss, some temporary, some permanent, and it freaks the hell out of the one viewpoint character who we see go through the whole process.
It's part of the Rules of the Haibane Renmei world, that people who wake up in the walled town as Haibane have lost specific memory of their pasts, although some of them have vague memories of a type of event from their past (one character comes to realize that she pushed someone away who was trying to help her, and hurt them, in her past, but nothing more specific than that). They tend to lose their curiosity about their past quickly, but that could be put down to rules of the universe, same as what makes them sprout wings.
I think amnesia fic is a bit like Drunken Hookup Fic -- something many writers resort to because they can't see how else to get their OTPs to overcome their personal hurdles and start sleeping together, or simply because it's easier than trying to have them overcome their personal hurdles.
(That said, I think Drunken Hookup Fic is a much less grievous sin, because it _can_ be realistic and reasonable, depending on characters and canon setting.)
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Date: 2011-11-14 03:55 am (UTC)I liked amnesia tropes better when I was a kid, because then my heroes and heroines could Dramatically forget their past and then Dramatically remember it and reveal it to everyone. It had pretty much the same sort of appeal as Destined Heroes and Prophecies and so forth -- it made characters Special. Now, I generally consider myself to have grown out of that, and I find the trope tedious most of the time.
I've seen it used acceptably by some authors. Lois McMaster Bujold has a sci-fi 'verse where medical technology for bringing people back from the dead tends to involve varying amounts of memory loss, some temporary, some permanent, and it freaks the hell out of the one viewpoint character who we see go through the whole process.
It's part of the Rules of the Haibane Renmei world, that people who wake up in the walled town as Haibane have lost specific memory of their pasts, although some of them have vague memories of a type of event from their past (one character comes to realize that she pushed someone away who was trying to help her, and hurt them, in her past, but nothing more specific than that). They tend to lose their curiosity about their past quickly, but that could be put down to rules of the universe, same as what makes them sprout wings.
I think amnesia fic is a bit like Drunken Hookup Fic -- something many writers resort to because they can't see how else to get their OTPs to overcome their personal hurdles and start sleeping together, or simply because it's easier than trying to have them overcome their personal hurdles.
(That said, I think Drunken Hookup Fic is a much less grievous sin, because it _can_ be realistic and reasonable, depending on characters and canon setting.)