Banned
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2023
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- 3,114
I don't understand the compulsion to compare this to mental illness. She has brain damage. Her mental faculties are otherwise intact. She's not schizophrenic, she just fails the mirror test. The story itself is telling us that she's catching reflections every time she sees "the girl". The girl isn't just appearing out of nowhere, she actually exists. The only issue is that physical injury to the brain has FMC drawing the wrong conclusion about what she's seeing.Gotta be honest, I enjoyed it. I get that knowing someone with delusions caused by mental illness isn't that common, but I'm surprised that people feel so strongly that this twist is totally unreasonable. Like, obviously it's fiction so it's depicting a very extreme version of the situation, but some delusions really are extraordinarily strong. The experience of talking with someone who has a strong delusion will very quickly rid you of the idea that "obvious" factual inconsistencies are enough to get them to break free of the world they've constructed in their head--if you can even get them to confront the inconsistencies directly.
Right!! I know someone dealing with schizophrenia who has been medicated for years, and even with medication they talk about how sometimes they just can't get over the belief that their auditory hallucinations are real. They understand intellectually that the delusion is not real, they're not acting on them anymore, but even with the aid of medication the emotional belief that the hallucination is real has not faded.
The reader can forgive a little inconsistency here and there for the sake of the story, but asking us to believe that there are reflections in absurd places like right in the middle of the street, at night, is ridiculous. If the author wants us to believe that this is an actual, full-on hallucination, then he should have avoided giving us the whole "reflection" excuse in the first place.
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