Ozzie Fitch
About
Ozzie Fitch is a tale of hope, of struggle, of friendship through the trials of life, but mostly about pain. The pain we carry, the pain we share, and the pain that could cripple us if we are not careful.
Some hide their pain, turn from it in an attempt to maintain their veneer of adulthood. Some succumb to it, turning bitter and cynical as they see any joy or passion for life as a morbid lie. Some turn their pain into power. Some call it magic. And some feel their pain is the only thing that makes them worthwhile.
Ozzie Fitch, gutter-wizard and proud iconoclast, believes something far more dangerous: he believes that other people’s pain is the only thing that makes them special.
This story is my take on Catcher in the Rye. No, not really; more it’s my take on The Magicians, a brilliant book in two very specific ways, and horrible in every other. (them’s my opinions)
After noting what I saw as failures of the book, I decided I would focus on one specific idea: Magicians are children. They can’t mature, because part of maturity is recognizing that you can’t get everything you want, and magic is all about getting everything you want.
Inspired too by the FATE SRD and it’s handling of street magic, Ozzie Fitch became a character who embodied every foul aspect of grievance politics. While Ozzie’s anger at the system is valid and significant, he wrongly believes that it is the suffering that is valuable and gives people power. He thinks he is challenging “the system,” while instead is actually recreating the self-same abuses that the system perpetuates. He doesn’t actually have a problem with the system, it’s that he doesn’t have power in it. He is a gatekeeper more focused on his own pains than on collaboration and mutual aid. While he truly wants a Utopian world for all, he believes cynicism and nihilism is a viable method of resistance.
He is wrong.
My greatest fear with this work is the “evil-is-cool” effect, which results in people thinking Joker, Natural Born Killers, and Taxi Driver are stories about heroes, rather than cautionary tales for people to learn from.
My solution? Tap into Brechtian theory and force people to translate Ozzie’s mindset through a made up street-speak, a slang created by the magicians of the city. I am still uncertain if it works, but it certainly was interesting to experiment with.