Monsters. What are they? Where are they? People who have never looked into them call people monsters without even knowing what identifies them as monsters. But there’s a dichotomy of monsters and we’ll be looking at the differences between the monsters and understanding how they work.
Monsters are generally powerful. They have a combination of strength, speed, and/or intelligence that makes them dangerous to deal with. In regards to well written villains they are monstrous because they do horrible things while maintaining a level of familiarity that we can identify or identify with.
People fear monsters because they make them feel weak and helpless. The danger they represent is too much for them to deal with and their ability to function is reduced to an uncontrolled fight or flight response.
This means you are not in control of yourself, your basic programming is in control and if someone knows how that programming works they have more control over you than you do. However if you learn about yourself and how you and your basic programming work you take back control of yourself.
Once you begin to look into what you are capable of you’ll find that everyone has the potential to become a monster. The ferocity, sometimes the cunning, and the ability are all deep within ever single individual. But people generally don’t want to look at that part of themselves while it skitters around at the back of their mind. Those who want to take advantage of others will use that self imposed blindness to make people believe they have no power what so ever. That the mental tools they need to endure and oppose the monsters they face are not inside them.
Sometimes monsters are necessary. And we’ll look into why right after we look at an example.
So since I have not been able to write for several days due to an internet outage I have a backlog of stories and blog posts to catch up on. This particular features the second to last D&D session I had before the internet decided it was not going to work.
The party was making progress toward forging the weapon that we needed to defeat the major antagonist of the story arc. We had acquired items representing the four elements and a heavenly relic but we needed one more thing, a representative of darkness or evil. This took the form of a heart of a vampire.
We had traveled down into the catacombs beneath the Dwarven city and I used my character’s abilities to find a vampire. We managed defeat him rather quickly and retrieve his heart, but the fight showed a strange paradox. Now for those of you who don’t know I play a full Orc Paladin in 3.5 D&D. Orcs are general considered to be near monstrous and you’ll find more Half-Orcs than Orcs in a given game. Because of this, my character has some odd quirks. One of which is gruesome trophy collecting. He predominately takes teeth and thumbs, eventually making jewelry out of them, but one item he has is particularly gruesome. He possess an Orcish shotput. Pretty much it is a skull filled with metal designed to be tossed like a pumpkin from the headless horseman.
So we have a holy Paladin who just happens to be a monster fighting a monster for a piece of that monster in order to save untold amounts of people. We had the two types of monsters facing off. One only killed and attacked others to feed itself (the vampire) while the other just used its abilities to achieve a goal and a task it was assigned for the benefit of others.
The two types of monsters are those out for themselves and those out for their and their loved ones’ survival. The firs type is what people normally think of as monsters. Abusive individuals who will sacrifice anyone and everything to get what they want while preying on the weak.
The second type is actually much more dangerous, because while both sets of monsters want to survive the other has a vested interest in preserving others which means it will go to much greater lengths to destroy a threat.
These two types of monsters fight each other continually. I advocate that you become the second type of monster because it means that you have harnessed the dark parts of you, realized they were there, and then made the effort to make sure they didn’t try to run you. The reason this is good is because sometimes you need the raw aggression and power that comes from the internal monster. The more you try to ignore that it is there the more likely you are to fall prey to it influencing you to make bad decisions. Much like a hazardous area you need to know the boundaries of your internal monster that way you can recognize when you’re starting to walk down the dark path, but first you need to know the dark path exists.
To those who prey on the weak, there is nothing more terrifying than something that has the intelligence and the ability to confront and stop them. In one of my earlier posts (I have become Fear itself) I dealt with the concept of know what people are afraid of and becoming what they are afraid of.
This fear generally comes from their not understanding where your strength comes from, whether religious, etc. and they don’t know how to combat it. Since they have generally come to grips with the concept that they have no power they cannot understand why you have power.
Recognizing and harnessing your monstrous side can help you deal with tough situations. This mans you can be more capable and survive a lot more than everyone else whether in business or life at large.
Sometimes you’ll be the monster you need other times you’ll be the monster others need.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
gentlemansuniversityofmanliness 