Madness, okay - that's not so bad. In some case, good even. It's fun to dissect things and try to figure out why he is insane. It bothered me that I couldn't figure out what was wrong with Gerald, because he comes off very controlled and disciplined and maybe just a little high-strung for his own good? But I knew there was something there I had no words, like being able to sense a fault-line, understanding it's there, without knowing anything about geology. All you can say is you know there's something wrong with the ground at a certain point.

Bloodlust clearly has it's iffy points for me... and nightmare, I don't know... I think the underlying thing that bothers me is the helplessness, and it wouldn't matter what form that came in so long as I could buy the person not being able to get out. Rats communicated that very well, and I use communicated as in a disease. >.< Everything happened so fast, it was like the central guy was just caught in a rip-tide and pulled without ever quite being aware of what had happened to him. *shudder*

Something else I've noticed bothers me, is just heat. I remember talking with you about the Masho and their armors, and you calling Rajura a 'dark summer' and it threw me. Like, I had such a set notion of summer as being heat/sweat/pain/decay/bad that it hadn't really occured to me that other people might not see it that way? ^^; Oh, and nevermind his Spiderness and there are more of those in summer too - and the way heat makes me sooo freaking sleepy all the time and just >.<

I have never been that afraid of Others, though - of Monsters, yes, and here I think I define more as a being or person so lacking in some as-yet-undefined thing that I cannot empathize with them? At all? Worst one I've ever read was in Tad Williams' Otherland books - and there I could see where it ought to be possible to empathize with him, but no. If I'd met him in real life I would shoot him, no question of it. And there, while he scared the crud out of me? It wasn't on the same visercal level as with Rats, I suppose because there are heroes in Otherland. A collection of heroes that have been scattered rather like certain Digimon crews, but they were there, they eventually learned he existed, my biggest fear for them was not that they couldn't stop him so much as they weren't going to be able to reach him in time to do anything. XD It's funny, dealing with Otherness in various guises is one of the underlying themes in the book, but That Bastard was the only one who freaked me at all.

I think, if I were to choose an archtype - I would have to be a Seeker. A rather cautious one, maybe, but that was my thing as a little kid - that song of Bilbo and Frodo's in Tolkein, about going out traveling? That, I wanted - or for a path to Someplace Else to magically appear in my yard. That would've been nice.

Possibly another part of what gave me such a bad turn with that was the protagnonist (I cannot call him a hero - the ancestor who left the Accursed Ancestral Dwelling after killing all his Evil Kin, he would qualify. Sortof. But not this guy)the guy finds or is called by an Other that is defintely a Monster - so far as I've yet seen, all Lovecraft's Others are. But then the humans for the most part are just as bad - the nasty inbred backwater humans. Chiefly. I have a feeling I haven't gotten far enough to meet any intellectual badguys? Although there is always the fact of the Necronomicron, which did not write itself. <<

Will have to come back to all of this, shower calls! ^^