grieving
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The internet is making public grieving acceptable again
Grieving used to be a public affair, but it was gradually suppressed in the 20th century as psychology made those outward displays socially unacceptable. Death and loss were things you were supposed to deal with privately. Well, public mourning is back -- and you largely have the internet to thank for it. As The Atlantic notes, the deaths of David Bowie and other famous artists in recent months (including Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey and Scott Weiland) have shown that social networks are quickly becoming mainstays of the grieving process. Those profile pages, mentions and hashtags enable a sort of connected wake, a place where everyone can share their fond memories with fellow sympathizers.
Storyboard: Grieving in character
Grief is not the same as being sad. Being sad is something I've discussed before, and it's a temporary emotional state. Grief is a filter, something that colors your whole perception and pushes you into a holding pattern of regret and sorrow. Real grief colors even things you do that make you happy so that even as you're smiling and laughing there's a pall over what you do. It's the way you feel when you lose a parent. Or a lover. Or a nation. Or almost anything profoundly important that you can lose, that you weren't ready to lose, that you don't know how to exist without. The point is that it's a very important human emotion, one that is going to come up in roleplaying. But it's also a problematic one because you have to convey what is in large part an internal sensation externally. So how do you get the sense of grief across without just making your character into a constant font of moping?
