Things That Were Made By Human Hands

TW: talk of mutilation, eye squick death, serial killers, though all in a fictional setting

When I first thought up Lus and his story - originally from an off the cuff RP with a friend on Gaia during one of the Hallowe’en events - he was the main, sympathetic character. He was a bit off, sociopathic, and all over wrong, but he was sympathetic in the way I wrote him. He still has a lot of the traits I gave him to make him sympathetic, but… 

For those who don’t know, Lus is a character of mine based on my own fears and my interest in serial killers. He attacks his victims, usually a night, overpowers them for just long enough to cut their eyes out, and then delivers them to the hospital. It’s pretty close to being a perfect crime, because while they can describe him - young, white, male, red hair - they can’t identify him, or say whether a sketch artist is at all close. Originally, he left his victims alive as one of my tokens towards making him sympathetic - see he’s not really a bad guy! He leaves them alive! - but now, more and more, as I slowly work on writing his story (which is a screenplay at the moment), I’m figuring that he doesn’t do it out of compassion, but out of a lack of compassion: he doesn’t care how hard their lives will be after this, he doesn’t care how he’s ruining their lives in a way that killing them never could. 

Another thing that I intentionally included as a means of making him sympathetic was that he doesn’t attack people who have ‘imperfect’ eyes - wear glasses, mismatched eyes, that sort of thing - but that’s also in this story, taking on another aspect: he sees people who are imperfect (at least in his eyes) as less than human, not good enough for him to take their eyes. 

The reason I’m realising all this, I think, is because Lus isn’t the main character anymore. We see the world through his eyes, at moments, to give the audience a glimpse into what it is that drives him, but the main characters are Abbott and Laurens, the two detectives who’re working the case. They’re the ones through whose eyes we see Lus’ attacks, for the most part. They’re the ones who give us a lot of the exposition. I didn’t originally intend to write it that way, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that they’re the ones who need to be telling this story. 

Anyway, I’m just rambling.