On Adventurers
From the private notes of Diotima Erthrea
Adventurers are weird. Like not necessarily deviant weird, though that happens, but just like... weird. Okay, look, see... it takes a certain kind of person to say 'hey I know I could just live my life and be safe and coast along until I dunno, I can stop working and settle down or whatever but I think instead I'm going to go risk my life and do crazy shiz and maybe actually probably die young after collecting all of the trauma and mental illness.' Right? So yeah, they... we, whatever... they're all weird people.
But okay, I'm not sure whether they're... okay fine, we're... weird because we're adventurers or we're adventurers because they don't fit in. Both, probably, it's kind of an I dunno, feedback loop of someone who doesn't fit in finding a thing that suits them and collecting more weirdness along the way. Or maybe we're just different. I dunno. I guess I can only speak for myself. For me, it's just... I need to be doing something that matters, I want to feel like -I- matter, and maybe risking my life is not the most healthy way to do it but it's, you know, my way. So you know, I ride the trauma train and pretend the... everything... doesn't bother me and I sort of just do my thing and if I'm strange, well, whatever, you know?
And... yeah so the term adventurer, I sort of love and hate it. Like I'm not adventuring, I'm working, this is sort of what I do, it's not special so why we need a term for it. But I prefer it to “hero” or “heroine” or whatever, there are heroes and I am definitely not one of them. How pretentious would that be, calling myself 'hero.' Don;t trust anyone calling themselves a hero, that is a fact.
Anyway...
Vul tells me that I should not feel responsible for everyone ever, that 'saving the world' (not even sure what that means) isn't my job but I think she knows that's a losing fight. I do feel responsible, not like I'm equipped to fix everything but I can try to fix what I can. River gives me a look when I say stuff like that, like... 'and you think you're not a hero' but I'm actually not, I'm terrible, I just... don't like to see things broken. I don't like suffering. And yeah I guess hubris, I think maybe I can make a difference and if I can, then I don't have a choice... I have to try.
Oh fuck me, I do sound like a fucking hero. Still not one though. I'm not a great person, okay, this is compensating for that, balancing the scales I guess.
Ugh. We were taking about weird. Weird, let's go.
So yeah. My sex life is 'its complicated' if we are being real, I'm not afraid of physical danger, not really, and I crave conflict not for its own sake but because it gives me something to fix. And you know, I'm an emotionally repressed ball of rage and whatever, though TBH I mostly hide that pretty well.
And other 'adventurers' are not the same weird but they're weird. Like okay, real talk? Even the most cowardly of adventurers I have met have been braver than most 'regular' brave people I've met. And they all have quirks because tbh this like is trauma camp sometimes.
I'm just word vomming now. One more thing tho. Okay, so like... friendship between adventuers is so much more... meaningful. Like regular people, they see friendship as sort of a convenient form of entertainment, right? Like hey, let's get some ale and whatever. But adventurers, we see it as a pact, kind of. Like... we know that we might be in the shiz and we might have to risk dying together and we like, care about each other so we're like 'I would die to protect you' (but no one says that tbh we just know it) and it's just this other level that regular people never know and...
...I dunno. I sort of suspect this is why I don't 'do' friendship, because my standards are so high and I expect that out of people who aren't like us. So I just reject friendship out of hand because to be real, why am I gonna waste my time on shallow fucking nonsense.
And with that utterly bitchy comment, I'm gonna go study.