About Amnesia-fic

[bobthemole]

I tend to dislike amnesia-fic, especially if they are about reuniting a memory-less person with the other member of their OTP.

Characters are the products of their histories and if you take away the memories of those histories, how are they the same people? Unless the fic is an exploration of how much personality remains intact if you take away memory, but fics (outside the Dollhouse-verse) seldom explore that.

There's also the dynamic when one person in a pairing is an amnesiac and the other knows everything about them. If they two are teaming up to reconstruct the amnesiac's life, I think that's an interesting story because the memory loss is the primary "antagonist" and everyone's agreed on that.

But what I don't get is stories where A thinks B is dead and months later discovers a memory-less (and newly human) B working in a bar somewhere. The story then becomes about A convincing B that they belong together, although B would rather keep hir current simple bartending life and not be pursued by this creepy stranger, thank you. Inevitably, A devolves into a stalker who can't stay away from this stranger who bears a resemblance to hir lost (unrequited) love. And B is unusually content with hir memory-less life and has no curiosity about hir past. A eventually wears down B and they establish a new relationship. Sometimes B regains hir memories, precipitating another crisis, but conflicts are resolved and they embark on a happy paired life of whatever shenanigans (vampire slaying? demon hunting?) they were up to before they were separated.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on at a meta level, but it seems that the reestablishment of the pairing is prioritized over the will and happiness of the individual characters. And it's like amnesia is a shortcut for getting characters together without dealing with their mutual baggage - which I think is completely pointless and undermines everything that makes the pair interesting in the first place. What surprises me is the popularity of this trope - I'm sure I've read half a dozen spuffy fics with this plot, and now I'm finding them in Supernatural too.

There's probably a good reason Amnesia fic is so popular, and if I knew what it was I'd be able to appreciate it better. Does anyone have thoughts? Have you written or do you love reading this genre? What am I missing in my analysis?

Comments

[mergle.livejournal.com]

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.)

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

I looked thru Amnesia on TVtropes - there's a LOT of that stuff going around :)