FANATICAL AGAIN
by perletwo
Dr. Hood shuffled his papers nervously as he made his way to the podium.
His palms were sweating. God, he hated public speaking. Wondered if one of his esteemed colleagues in the audience had found a cure for that.
Cleared his throat, turned and thanked the organizer for that kind introduction. Looked down at his notes, took a deep breath and launched his presentation.
"It's a truism of modern psychiatry that neurotics build castles in the air, and psychotics try to live in them. These days, with the rise of mass media, they don't even need to bother to do their own building. There's a glut of TV shows, movies, comics and role playing games to create elaborately detailed fantasy worlds for them," he said in measured tones.
"The case history I'd like to present to you today is an extreme case of media immersion turning into delusion..."
For the purposes of keeping things straight, we'll call my patient Iris - a synonym for her name in her fantasy world - although neither actually bears any resemblance to her real name.
In 1996, Iris, then age 12, began watching a new TV show called 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.' She taped all the episodes and continued to watch them during the hiatus between seasons.
At that time, however, her schoolwork remained at a consistently high caliber, she maintained activities and social relationships outside the home, and didn't talk about the show enough to concern her parents. Her relationship with this media vehicle seemed casual and quite typical at this point.
The nature of that relationship began to change slightly the following spring. This change coincided with four events critical to her mental state. These were her passage from age 12 to age 13, and with it the onset of puberty, which in Iris' case came on more like a lion than a lamb; the promotion to the next grade level, which took her out of her familiar school to a new middle school. At roughly the same time came the introduction of two new characters on the show, the vampire villains Spike and Drusilla, who even in their later absence from the show became key players in Iris' fantasies; and the purchase by Iris' parents of a computer and an Internet account.
The addition of the second, interactive media channel the Internet provided fed Iris' attachment to the show, and it grew to the next level. Iris began to take control of her fantasy world rather than passively receiving the images and ideas from the TV. Specifically, she began to write Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction.
I should add here that Iris is of above average intelligence and has an imagination that just misses the gifted-and-talented levels of the scale. Her stories were exceptionally vivid and well-written, and under her "screen name" she's still considered one of the leading lights of fiction writers in the Buffy fan world. I've often thought that if she could just have been grandfathered in to a gifted-and-talented school program at this stage of her life the outcome might have been very different...
We move on now to 1998, and season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
With the reappearance of Spike in an early season 3 episode, Iris' involvement in the show took on the quality of an obsession. Her grades dropped off, her conversation revolved around Buffy, and she abandoned her real-world friendships, choosing to associate strictly with her online acquaintances in the Buffy fandom.
Included in her obsessiveness were strong elements of repression and denial. The quality of the show was beginning to slip noticeably. One of the actors' popularity had shot far beyond that of the others; when it began polling higher than the popularity of the show itself, the network created a spinoff series for him in mid-season 3. At least two of the lead actors were grumbling about their schedules preventing them from accepting film roles.
The series Iris loved was in trouble, and she redoubled her identification with it in hopes of somehow shoring up its popularity single-handedly. At this stage her state of mind was roughly equivalent to those sports fans who feel themselves to some degree personally responsible to the success or failure of their favorite teams. She became an online cheerleader for the show, organizing letter-writing campaigns and similar shows of support, in addition to her fiction writing.
Adding further stress to Iris' state of mind was the visible deterioration of her parents' marriage throughout this year. Rather than facing the situation head-on or finding an escape from the house in the real world - taking shelter at a friend's, at the movies or the library - she escaped into her TV show and into cyberspace.
Things were only going to get worse for Iris on both fronts.
1998 gave way to 1999. To take the more pleasant of two evils, we'll start with the TV front.
Season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer got off to a shaky start. The characters were progressing from high school to college, always a rough transition for a teen-based TV show to make. Ratings for Buffy were eroding while the spinoff's ratings soared.
One of the supporting actors left abruptly in midseason; movies the two disgruntled stars had made on hiatus the year before came out to moderate success, enough to make them both even more antsy and discontented, ready to move on to film careers.
The new love interest for Buffy, a virtual clone of the guy who'd shot to stardom the season before, fell flat with audiences. The season's overarching plotline - a covert military operation based under Sunnydale and using vampires and demons for medical experiments - fizzled with both audiences and critics, who declared the whole season too derivative of "X-Files" for their tastes.
In the real world, the deterioration of Iris' parents' marriage had progressed to physical violence, against each other, against their property and - once - against Iris herself.
Things seemed to even out for Iris halfway through the year. Spike was added to the cast as a replacement for the departing supporting actor. They even wrote a screwball-comedy episode in which Buffy and Spike briefly got engaged; this thrilled Iris, who had long promoted the idea of romantic/sexual chemistry between the two characters, and reinforced her devotion to this fantasy world.
Her parents, after separating briefly, made a halfhearted try at reconciliation around this time. Iris' mania settled down to a maintenance level, her grades and demeanor improved, and the violence-charged atmosphere in her house had defused considerably.
Someone more seasoned would've recognized that as the resignation that precedes disengaging from a relationship - in this case, a marriage - but Iris allowed herself to hope.
That was a mistake.
Late in 1999, Iris' house of cards collapsed. The WB Network announced it had canceled "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And her parents got a quick, uncontested divorce.
The millennium turned, and Iris' life settled into a sort of normalcy. She spent two weeks with one parent and two weeks with the other. She went to school, where her grades were acceptable but lackluster. She still didn't socialize, her conversations were monosyllabic, and she presented all the symptoms of a low-grade depression.
School counselors got involved at this point, the parents' divorce providing them with a red flag. But Iris snubbed them and couldn't be coaxed into spending a second longer at school than she had to.
That would be because she had a new project at home - homes. She was writing an online continuation of the Buffy series, her 'virtual season 5' she called it, which was absorbing all her time and attention.
Her first story, "Buffy Vs. Dracula," was a fairly conventional effort, and not too dissonant from the tone of the real show. But there was one confusing element: the addition, at the end of a mysterious little sister for Buffy. Dawn, age 14. Iris' age.
From here it gets to be rough sailing, I'm afraid. Dawn quickly took on the qualities of what fanfiction writers call a "Mary Sue" character - a substitute for the writer, preternaturally wise and perfect and slavishly adored by the actual characters, to the point of distorting the warp and woof of the fiction.
In this case, Dawn quickly began holding the Buffy characters' fictional lives hostage. She became the central element of the fic series, and as a result the writing grew darker and darker, mirroring Iris' inner life. It's interesting to note that Buffy's previously amiable but responsible non-custodial parent, Hank Summers, was broadly painted in Iris' fiction as a 'deadbeat dad' who abandoned his wife and daughters. And that while Buffy's mother was built up into an icon of motherly love in the fic series, Iris for no clear reason decided to kill her off about two-thirds of the way through. Much of her sublimated anger toward her own parents seemed to be festering just below the surface of her writing.
She had graduated from making her fellow Buffy fans her social circle, providing positive reinforcement, to entering the fantasy world and making the *characters* her social circle. But her need for positive reinforcement from the characters grew, fed by Iris' real-life insecurities. At the end of her series arc, she found it necessary to have Buffy sacrifice her own life to save Dawn's.
This tallied with notes in the school counselor's files. Several teachers had reported Iris' behavior had taken a turn that was not quite self-destructive, but showed a reckless disregard for personal safety - walking out in front of traffic on the parking lot, for example. References to and observations about death were working their way into her English papers a little too often for the teacher's tastes.
Among the few personal remarks the counselor wormed out of the girl were a few that seemed to indicate to her that Iris blamed herself for her parents' divorce. Putting together the red flags the school staff was seeing with the dark turn her virtual s5 series was taking, it seems clear that at this point Iris was toying with the idea of taking herself out of the equation with a view toward a possible reconciliation for her parents. In her story, 'Dawn' was prepared to die to save the world, but 'Buffy' stepped in first, saving the world *and* Dawn in the ultimate act of unconditional love.
At this point - with Buffy 'dead' and the virtual s5 written into a corner - Iris' break from reality began. Buffy references began appearing in her school writing, and she began speaking of Buffy episodes as if they were actual history. She kept writing fiction, recycling situations from past seasons to keep herself afloat - these stories have a quality of nostalgia about them that's almost sweet.
Shuffling back and forth between two homes enabled her to conceal the cracks in her perception of reality for a long time. She began hiding her online activities from her parents, keeping her files on a Web server, keeping some notes locked up at one house, some locked up at the other. Communication between the two parents was virtually nil, so she knew as long as she could keep up a facade of normalcy, they'd never compare notes if she slipped.
Bolstered by positive feedback from online Buffy fans, Iris began writing a second series, her 'virtual season 6.'
The first problem, of course, was to 'resurrect' Buffy, which she managed to do. But that was such a major stretch of credulity she had to spend the rest of the series trying to shore it up. This lent a desperate quality to the writing that made old fans of her fic a bit leery.
Her stated intention was to explore Buffy in a sexual relationship with Spike, the show's vampire character. But the contradictions in that were so mind-bending that the relationship became darker and more violent than the show's cartoon violence, mirroring her parents' relationship.
Iris was using the characters to try adult relationships on for size, and the results were clearly disturbed, culminating in a beating near to death - female on male - in one story and a rape attempt shortly thereafter.
One story, subtitled 'As You Were,' is an interesting exhibit. In it, Iris begins to show signs of dissociation from both the real world and her fictional world. The characters move and act and speak surreally. The story has the basic form of a personal-growth story - setup, action, reaction, epiphany, resolution - but it's hollow. There's no substance to the epiphany.
The series ends with two main characters - the two played by the actors who wanted to jump ship for movie stardom, ironically - trying to kill each other, and one trying to destroy the world. This seemed to be a cry for unconditional love, which in the fic was given by a third character in time to avert armageddon once again.
No such personal validation arrived in the real world in time to save Iris' father's new house. Iris burned it down in a fit of pique when she learned her father was to remarry, and he intended to try for full custody of her. Declaring the fiancee a demon, she stabbed her through the midsection. The wound wasn't fatal, but it did bring her into full-time psychiatric care.
Iris' break from reality is near-complete. She now believes she *is* Dawn Summers. She's trapped in a fully formed delusional world based on the Buffy series. She's remarkably resistant to antipsychotics, and so far we've had no luck with engaging her in psychotherapy on any level other than as Dawn.
Frankly, I'm open to suggestion as to what to do with her..."
On the lockdown ward, a ceiling-mounted closed circuit TV set was broadcasting snow into a sealed room.
A tall, painfully thin teenage girl with long brown hair threw herself repeatedly into the steel door, emitting unearthly shrieks between each slam of her body onto the metal.
At last the snow snapped to a black screen, and an early episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" cued up. The girl's cries subsided and melted into the familiar screaming-guitar intro music.
She dropped to the floor and lay silent, mesmerized by the screen.