BLACKOUT open thread!

I love how you handled Shaun's imaginary Georgia toward the end. Up until then, she'd been this smart, snarky voice in Shaun's head. And I could accept that. Yes, he was crazy, but to quote an ER nurse: "We never deal with the crazy people who have voices in their head that tell them to buckle up and eat a healthy breakfast." He was crazy, but it was a perfectly functional crazy.

But then the cloned Georgia showed up. And that's when things got difficult. I love how you did that. There was no sudden line where Imaginary Georgia changed, but once Cloned Georgia showed up, she just got creepier and scarier, and eventually she's trying to get Shaun to kill himself. I found that the most disturbing part; way scarier than the zombies.

Oh, ghods, yes, the crazy trying to protect itself from the encroaching sanity. I've BEEN there, not with hallucinations like Shaun, but with depression, and Seanan had it so perfectly RIGHT.

ETA to correct a spelling error.

You know, I wonder about the difference with respect to hallucination.

Depression, in my experience, involves you telling yourself how much you suck. It's not even really a conscious thing, or at least it's not wholly conscious. THere's no other voice telling you how much you suck. It's just *you* - your thoughts, your decisions. Which is damned scary, because there's no way to protect yourself from it. You can't just say "Okay, I'm not going to do what I want me to do." It's on the inside and it changes the very way that you think. It changes your notion of rational, and makes the depressive way of thinking seem perfectly reasonable. And you do check it against your notion of rational - and it passes, because depression controls your idea of rational.

Shaun's crazy wasn't like that. His crazy had a different voice. It coudl talk to him, annoy him, distract him - but from his POV, it wasn't *him*. Is that easier or harder to handle, I wonder?