Bugs Bunny and the Fourth Walking Way

I've been reading /u/BrynjarIsenbana's description of the various walking ways and when I got to the Fourth one ... I had an odd idea. A couple of them really. Let's see if I can lay this out so it doesn't sound too crazy.

Walk like them until they walk like you. This always reminds me of a story about Aleister Crowley. Apparently he would sometimes pick a random pedestrian on the street and fall into step behind them. He'd match their pace, their gait, their posture until he was mimicking them perfectly. Then, once he had the walk down, he'd suddenly jump in the air, or stop and shuffle his feet, and the person ahead of him would fall over. Given that there's a fair Crowleian influence on the Sermons already, this seems like it might be relevant.

And in fact, it's not a purely Crowleian idea. Neuro-Linguistic Programming calls this "pacing" or "pace and lead". You sync up with someone to gain rapport and then by changing what you do, you can induce them to follow suit. Supposedly there was a hypnotherapist called Milton Erikson who was so good at this that he could hypnotise people by matching their breathing. Spooky stuff.

I'll get back to that. I expect you're wondering what Bugs Bunny has to do with anything. Well, it's like this...

Years ago I read an article by someone who had worked as a writer at Warner Bros and ended up writing for Bugs Bunny. The comment that stuck in my mind (paraphrasing from memory) was "you very quickly learn that Bugs has a mind of his own. There are some things you just can't make him do"

Now you're free to take that as a comment on the detailed style guides employed by Warner, or on the level of editorial contol exercised. But for our purposes, I'm going to invite you to consider it in terms of Bugs Bunny The God. After all, Bugs is unquestionably a mythic figure, a Trickster archetype who can trace his lineage through Br'er Rabbit to Anansi, the Spider God of Africa.

So if Bugs won't let you write him out of character, then the only way to write for him is to get into his character. In a sense, you have to walk like him until he walks like you. Then, and only then, you can tell him what to do, because in that state of mind you're not going to tell him to do anything that would be out of character.

And so, drifting reluctantly back on topic, perhaps something similar is at play in the Fourth Walking Way. Perhaps to mantle Lorkhan, you need to get yourself so deeply into character that you'll only do things that Lorkhan might have done.

That's not to say you have no free will of your own of course. Like our hypothetical Bugs Bunny writer you have considerable latitude in what you can do. And you can put a degree of your own personal spin on the thing. It's just that you can't depart from the Style Guide.

But of course, there is one major difference between a writer mantling Bugs in our world and and an adventurer mantling a god in Tamriel. In our world you can step back out of character when you've finished.