I dreamed about a video game last night.
It was a puzzle visual novel game I reviewed in 2013 called "The Madness". The puzzles were creative and tricky, the atmosphere ominous, and the ending disturbed me so much that I still think about it from time to time.
Is it "good" - productive, useful, beneficial - to be disturbed by something? Obviously humans like it in some sense because we watch horror, we go to haunted houses, we write fiction that disturbs us. Apart from the obvious thrills, some part of us wants to be unsettled, to rethink what we think we know.
I think this affected me so much for two reasons - one is that the pain of making a mistake and having to live with that is one of the worst things to experience. Even though the mistakes I've made are tiny compared to those of villains and tortured anti-heroes, on some small level, I can still relate. In The Madness you try to recover your memories of having done something truly horrible. While I've never had that experience, my mom tells me I punched a kid in fifth grade... but I have no memory of it. Is it possible I've done other terrible things and simply blocked them out with pride and arrogance? What a fearful idea, indeed.
The other part that disturbs me is the idea that some people are irredeemable, that once you've done certain things you are literally better off dead. As a Christian whose faith centers on the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, this really makes me question how much I believe in forgiveness. It's easy to say "Anyone can repent" or "God loves everyone", but then I have to ask myself "What about someone who has done this horrible thing?" Is it possible to come back from that? Is it fair to the victims?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but if horror media jolts me off my prideful pedestal of placated self-satisfaction, or leads me to wrestle with the the hard questions of humanity and eternity, then I think that's a good thing.
