To spice up the otherwise dry concept of marketing personas, I thought it would be fun to steal a page from crime thrillers, and pretend this was an exercise in criminal profiling. Pathologizing completely benign reading preferences was a fun gimmick... right until I realized that my first set of essays was going to pivot around an actual personality disorder.
Pop culture already does a brutally effective job of demonizing mental health issues, so I'm not piling on. I just took a handful of my favorite stories and, like any detective, followed the clues.
... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
To spice up the otherwise dry concept of marketing personas, I thought it would be fun to steal a page from airport crime thrillers, and pretend this was an exercise in criminal profiling. Pathologizing completely benign reading preferences was a fun gimmick... right until I realized that my first set of essays was going to pivot around an actual personality disorder.
Pop culture already does a brutally effective job of demonizing mental health issues, so I'm not piling on. I just took a handful of my favorite stories and, like any detective, followed the clues.