profbutters

So I'm working away, and among other things, I am preparing to teach Milton's Paradise Lost next week. And I really enjoyed Jamie's post about Aria and you-know-who. Which means you are going to get some Cecil meta.

This is probably only spoiler-y if you haven't read the latest chapter (2/14/09).

If you did read the latest chapter, some of you may have been surprised by Cecil's, um, "employees." But the suggestions have been there at least since last year. The Big Reveal of chapter on Cecilia's parentage began with:

Yet not for those. . . do I repent or change,
Though changed in outward luster, that fixed mind
And high disdain, from sense of injured merit. . . .
All is not lost; the unconquerable will . . .
And courage never to submit or yield;
And what is else not to be overcome?

The attribution on the cover page is "Milton, Paradise Lost," but it doesn't say more than that. Some people recognized it anyway: those lines are spoken by Satan. Yes, I have partly modeled Cecil on Satan. Milton's Satan, anyhow. There he is--"fixed mind, high disdain" and "injured merit," "injured merit" being the big one. Cecil, like Satan, is a WHINER. He feels hard done by. He deserved to be given the job. He earned it. As Cecil says repeatedly, "this is unjust," or less impressively, "it isn't faaaaair."

Some people got a bit pissed off with him in the last couple of chapters, when he didn't Plead for Max, but hey--he wouldn't:

To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee. . . that were low indeed.

Cecil Does Not Beg. Period. He's proud. And by golly, the guy is miserable:

So spake the Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, yet racked with deep despair.

Cecil's referred to himself several times as being "in exile," but when you get right down to it, it's his own fault. It's not as though his family didn't want to have anything to do with him. The visuals I've always had going with him --single person chess, the organ, and the telescope--are those of a loner. And in the big bumper wedding chapter where his sister and virtually everybody else got married, I underlined that:

He's not totally like Satan. I left out "study of revenge, immortal hate." Cecil's not all that interested in revenge or hate. He would consider it a waste of time. And you're not going to catch him saying "Evil, be thou my good." He IS Good. He is the Best Goodytwoshoes of them all, he thinks. But he has a lot in common with Milton's Satan. He never sleeps, he's got dreams of Empire, he's a total, utter, narcissist, and he even has a baby with himself.

This gets into some squicky territory, BTW, and before I mention it, I want to clarify that Cecil's relationship with Cecilia may be too close, in a way, and even unhealthy, but it's not ikky or perverted. It is not squicky at all. Blech.

Here's what happens in PL: Satan, when he's still in Heaven, has a spectacularly enraged and narcissistic thought and develops a literally splitting headache. His daughter, Sin, springs fully armed from his head. So that's one reason I don't have any pictures of Cecilia's birth. In some ways he got Mortimer to help him, but in some ways, Cecil just *thought* Cecilia into existence.

After that, (in Paradise Lost, of course, not SC), Satan falls in love with Sin because, by golly, she reminds him so much of him, and Sin in turn gives birth to Death. The actual bit is not something you want to read if you're at all sensitive about this sort of thing. There is a bit, though, when Satan is trying to get out of Hell and asks his daughter Sin to let him out. She isn't supposed to, but she does, because when Satan has taken over, she will reign at his right hand, "thy daughter, and thy darling, without end." So the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) is mirrored by the Unholy Trinity (Satan, Sin, Death.)

To the extent that they parallel Milton, that's the way Cecil's family goes, too: Satan-Sin-Death = Cecil-Cecilia-Max. And why do you think Max is obsessed by death? Hey, he IS Death. You'll notice that my sims aren't quite this bad, and partly that's not their fault: they just can't live up (or down) to the demonic level. And that is mostly Cecilia's fault.

Cecil's Achilles heel is Cecilia. She was not in The Plan. When he cloned himself, he assumed that Cecilia would BE a little female version of him. He's not alone. A lot of parents think that way. The problem is that your children are not you. They are themselves. Some of this came from observing Cecil and Cecilia. Stacilee has seen this in action, too; they are an exceptionally loving little family. And unlike Sin, Cecilia wasn't a fully armored goddess. She was a helpless, affectionate little girl who worshipped her papa, and Cecil had to raise her on his own. To the extent that Cecil has fallen in love with anyone or anything, he fell in love with this quiet little girl, who wanted nothing more than to please her Papa and make him happy. And that has derailed everything for him. Love hurts for Cecil. He hates it. He wants nothing to do with it, but you can't jam the milk back in the carton.

Because she was capable of loving her Papa, Cecilia was capable of loving Secundus. And therefore Max got a tiny hint of having parents who loved him and who loved each other. Like his Grandpapa, Max has learned that Love Hurts. He doesn't have a lot of use for it either, which is why Achilles was right when he told Cass, "he's not good relationship material."

They're all terribly screwed up, and they're tragic in a lot of ways, and their family has no natural births in it at all, but they aren't quite demons. Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy that, and I hope I didn't wind up revealing where this is going to go. I always think that, and then it turns out not to have been true.

PB