Walden

Story by spacewastrel on SoFurry

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This rabbit will pull you out of a hat, what do you think of that?

(old description from 2010, elaborated into Jackie since then)


Walden's mission in life is to deconstruct the many ways in which magic has been appropriated to serve the interests of the power structure at the expense of the general population - to use magic himself in ways that re-appropriate it while questioning their use of it - as well as to pick apart the ways in which traditional magic has both been watered down to the extent of becoming degenerate prestidigitation, on the one hand, and can be improved on by subverting its tropes in new and unexpected ways, on the other. The rabbit believes that corporations are demonic entities that possess people to force them to put their demonic interests above the very survival of their species because they feed on humanoid flesh, and that they have to be exorcised for people to return to their own natural inclinations. He believes that advertisements are really compulsion spells that are being cast by corporations by manipulating meaning through symbols with which they bombard the population's sensory input channels. He points out that while most people will look at trinkets in New Age shops and say things like "I can't believe people will pay this much money for trinkets like these just because someone's slapped a fancy label on them", they will not similarly look at the substitution of the money spent on them itself for the virtuous labor that it's supposed to accurately represent as an even larger and more successfully executed substitution hoax.

Walden can whimsically enter a room by pulling himself out of a hat by his own ears or leave it by diving into one. People come down through the grassy dandelion field above him into his lair, the Rabbit Hole, because they hear rumors that he owns many powerful magic items that they want to steal from him so that they can use them to further their own interests. He tells all those who enter that they will find nothing in his lair that anyone would ever be able to use to exert dominion over others, but they don't believe him because they think that he's only saying that so that he can keep all of his powerful magic items to himself. When they push him too far, they're the ones who end up being pulled out of a hat upside-down by their legs by him, without being able to tell whether it's a giant rabbit and hat or if they're the ones who have been shrunk down, as he asks them "Is this still as funny now that it's happening to you, little man?"

He's always hated the "woman sawed in half" trick, because he thinks that people should examine their excitement at the thought of other people getting hurt and the risks it entails more carefully, not to mention the implicit gender roles it portrays, and he wonders whether or not people would pay as much to watch a magician put two halves of one man back together instead. He thinks that people's disappointment in finding out how magic tricks work is at least as disappointing as that itself, because as far as he's concerned, seeing through illusions to the reality behind them should be everyone's goal rather than something that they try to avoid doing, considering the other social mechanisms that exploit that avoidant tendency. He can split himself into two independently functioning parts himself, whether his front and back, left side and right side, or upper and lower bodies, which opponents tend to find quite disconcerting, although not as much as when he detaches arms, legs or his head to have them fly around on their own. He can make it appear as though he's altering time to slow it down or speed it up by playing with his pocket-watch, but he actually can't alter time itself at all, only people's perception of it, which comes in handy on its own more often than you'd think.

Walden keeps a rabbit skull with its overgrown front teeth curved inward all the way up through its top, as a reminder that teeth which don't gnaw on anything will just keep growing to destroy the one they belong to, and by extension that if people stop themselves from doing things they're good at and that they enjoy doing even though the harm they can cause them or others is minimal, they'll cause themselves greater harm by denying themselves the exercise of their own funktionlust in the end. He's an asexual, and resents the assumptions that everyone makes about rabbits simply because they've been used as fertility symbols all over the world throughout the ages, also in part because it's often where people stop his line of reasoning about funktionlust without extending it further to everything else in their lives. He usually keeps an understated, noncommittal expression on his face, his little red eyes seeming as though they can see right through whatever or whoever they're looking at at the time. Walden is almost a pure carnivore who can't stand the taste of carrots.

When he looks into his crystal ball, what it shows him are the ways in which people who pretend to predict the future are really furthering the interests served by people's belief in determinism, how they tend to either bring about the unhappy futures they predict or prevent the happy futures they predict from occurring specifically because of the ways in which people's reactions to their predictions will affect the way their conclusions are brought about themselves. His Rabbit Hole is a mirror maze with curtains covering some mirrors, some of them glass windows, revolving mirrors, sliding mirror panels or funhouse mirrors, and smoke that rises up from as well as trapdoors that lead down under the chessboard-tiled floor. He wants to come up with his own alternate version of Easter that he hopes would counter the assumptions that the existing version of it pushes rather than questions. His fighting style makes him appear light as feather as he uses dives, sweeps, flips, aerial cartwheels, rolls, butterfly twists, ground kicks and crouching mad dashes without changing his carefully evaluating expression and without breaking a sweat. He's always prepared to run away from a fight at a moment's notice, and answers accusations of cowardice with "No, I'm just rubbing in your face the fact that I'm a lot faster than you, slowpoke." Those who have caught him after having chased him into a corner have all been made to realize just what a terrible idea it was for them to have done so, but too late for them to have been able to do anything about it by then.

What the eye sees, the mind believes.